If the COVID-19 lockdown has taught us anything, it's that probably a full third of our economy is bullshit jobs. We're at best self-perpetuating economic 'nice-to-haves', at worst parasitic rent seekers, probably somewhere in between, whose real role is simply to distribute GDP more widely, while pretending to add value to society.
Bullshit jobs are ones that could disappear and the impact would unnoticeable or minimal for an organisation's output. Nice-to-have (for society?) professions still have value, otherwise they wouldn't be nice - if all the musicians disappeared people would definitely notice.
I'd also contest the idea that cultural labour is unnecessary. Lots of people in lockdown have depended on all kinds of music, TV, film, etc to maintain their mental health. This seems to go beyond preference, even if not everyone needs the same or as much cultural produce to survive healthily.
If COVID-19 has taught us nothing else, it's that (as Adams warned us) "telephone sanitizers" are absolutely essential.
There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial, make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.
Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective.
When we look at e.g. higher education, for a place that's particularly guilty of this:
Administrative costs have grown to be approximately equal to instructional costs at universities, from about a quarter of expenditures in 1980.
In essence, our desire to prevent waste and to ensure that money is spent the way we'd like has created an ever-ballooning set of administrative work. It might be better to tolerate a somewhat greater share of instructional and research expenditures being wasted or spent in non-ideal ways.
Any time there's a small bit of waste or money spent in ways we don't approve of, the impulse is to create rules and administrative procedures to prevent it from happening again. But this effectively creates a perpetual overhead for what may have been a one-time, very minor problem.
I usually say, there are two ways to deal with productivity increases (from automation and industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4 day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc).
I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so everyone is still "working" 40+ hours a week without actually doing anything.
On the one side we have supply constraints on necessities. If there isn't enough good housing for everyone and we're not allowed to build more then people will have to work 40 hours so they can outbid other people on the good housing and not get stuck in the bad housing. We could solve this by building more good housing, but only if we actually do that.
On the other side it's a question of where the surplus goes. You have a company that makes billions of dollars -- far more than it needs to operate. What happens to the rest of the money? If the managers get to use it for empire building, you get bullshit jobs. That happens a lot.
Ideally we'd solve both, but even just one would be progress.
If you don't have to work 40 hours to afford necessities then you're not going to choose a 40 hour bullshit job. You're either going to choose a real job or a job with lower hours so that you can spend more of your time doing something you want to do, which might very well itself be a real job (i.e. starting your own business).
Whereas if we can figure out how to transfer more wealth away from organizations and into the hands of real people, that gets rid of bullshit jobs too, because most of them come from the principal-agent problem and the misalignment between managers and owners/taxpayers. Transferring the money to any person or entity without middle management would be a net improvement.
If people's basic needs were met, I think you'd see a lot of labor shift to work that is valuable, but currently not compensated for.
Also, you have to adjust constraints to deal with legacy systems: the Federal Reserve works to maximize employment through monetary policy. This is suboptimal, when work will expand to consume the time allowed for it [1]. You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever.
The feasibility of this (in the US) is strongly dependent on health insurance not being tied to having a full-time job (often defined as just under 40 hours a week).
Plenty of employers have demonstrated that they can be organized to use mostly part-time labor, but their incentive to do this has been avoiding the obligation and expense of contributing to health insurance and other benefits, rather than giving employees a productivity dividend.
Systems have inertia, stuff continues working until it hits a wall. The unemployment systems written in COBOL kept churning until now, for example.
I think the cuts in jobs might give the impression that "we never needed them in the first place," and maybe that's true in some cases, but it's hard to distinguish right now from the effects that take years to surface.
Not that I disagree that some jobs are for expensive seat warmers to ensure warm fuzzies
The existence of those leisure jobs and the venues they operates certainly adds value to my life.
In my working life my experience has been the opposite. I have spent my career in large corporate environments. Often the top management are removed from reality as an example I once had a CIO who thought he could replace a 20 year old database that had several thousand tables and countless stored procedures. First step of such a plan is a POC and guess who gets to implement the POC whilst making sure the application actually bringing in the money keeps working, it is the middle manager. Consultants are brought in but they end up taking up the middle manager's time because middle manager has to explain current application to consultants. Millions later the project is scrapped.
Kinda. Top managers tend to have a much shorter time preference than shareholders. The incentives are aligned only when all shareholders are of the active trading kind (if that ever happens on any company).
For example, Elsevier has this monopoly on publishing so they need to hire staff to manage everything. Those staff do real jobs- accounting, sales, IT, etc- but there is not value created. So I might call that bullshit.
Layer of layer of real functions and interdependencies of people and groups all costing and resulting in salaries. But if you entirely removed every Elsevier job from existence it could be replaced by scihub with minimal disruption.
Poof all the jobs could disappear. I think of meaningful jobs as those that create some objective value.
Often times it feels like a way for creatives and engineers who make the product to express some (rightful) resentment towards the folks who manage people and business.
This is caused by managers' and middle-managers' performance metrics being tied to the wrong outcomes.
The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome. The bottom layer's (the worker) target is also clear, it's to do whatever their manager says to do.
In the middle is where it often breaks down; their objectives are short-sighted and while it works out for their own career, it rarely benefits the top level target. At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here) and at worst it goes completely against the target set at the top level.
Imagine it as an eventually-consistent system. If you don't change anything and give the system enough time it will eventually achieve its goal. The problem is that the "time" we're talking about is measured in years if not decades and during that period the system is stuck in a contradictory state. Endless restructurings and other external factors often reset this "timer" so the system is even more likely to stay in the contradictory state forever (some other "systems" depend on this system staying in the contradictory state), despite theoretically advancing towards the end-goal.