I think this is real to a certain extent; think of it as bureaucratic 'cruft'. However, it's also hard to spot exactly which jobs are bullshit; if it was easy, you won't have this problem of dead weight positions in big companies. There are almost certainly jobs that look bullshit but aren't, and vice versa.
....unless of course most of those jobs can be done effectively remotely.
If we'd instead had all the people now WFH not work at all the economy would look a bit different today, even if you'd kept sending them paychecks.
Your argument made sense up to this point, I agree we should have implemented WFH and Online classes years ago in order to lower traffic congestion and reduce our carbon footprint as inter-connectivity increased.
What I think you're missing is the critical flaw when we saw a massive hit in the Supply Chain, the Value systems within them responded in kind. I'd argue the Supply Chains remarkably broke down (specifically in food, gym equipment and toiletry). Distribution becomes an impossibility when demand far outweighs production and you have nothing to ship for weeks to months, or you have no one to harvest and it rots in fields.
> The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.
Consumer based economies have this baked into the system, and is actually one of my gripes with this Crony-Capitalist system we've been operating under, but it has it's limitations: this year's black Friday which was a monumental failure by most economists metrics, but was actually a reversion to the mean wherein people have lost significant amounts of expendable income they spend this time of year (which is really debt driven) and overproduction was met with large price reductions that will likely remain. Target, one of the largest online retailers, had a month long 'black Friday' sale as did New Egg and these are the affects of supply forecasting done several quarters ago, perhaps some even from 2019. Unfortunately politicians make giving them bailouts a priority and the model never really seems to undergo the correction that needs to happen to reduce overall consumption to sustainable levels.
For someone who did Supply Chain and Logistics in the Auto Industry and is now returning back into it after a 4 year hiatus, its a Brave New World with immense challenges. Some things still remain, but it's definitely not the same animal at all.
This is nonsense. You’re saying Amazon should keep paying wages so people can use those wages to shop at Amazon. When put that way you can see it makes no sense.
The only thing that matters is that as we increase productivity the benefits are relatively evenly shared. If a 4 or 3 day week becomes normal for everyone and we still output the same or even more, that’s great.
This is exactly the idea behind UBI so the economy doesn't collapse under the pressure of millions of unemployed and unemployable.
There’s no way any company would pay wages to employees under the premise that it will keep their company afloat because they’ll spend the money they just gave them on their goods. Why not just not give them the money in the first place.
Mass unemployment would get accompanied by mass loss of disposable income, so that would actually be bad for Amazon. Automating the supply kind of automates away some of the demand.
The notion of bullshit jobs is basically about people doing busy work without actually doing or producing anything of real value. The industrial revolution produced a lot of that already. There's going to be more of it. Easy to predict, because there already is a lot of it.
IMHO the lockdown kind of revealed just how pointless some of our jobs really are. Masses of people suddenly worked from home and it did not really disrupt a lot of the supply chains or economy. Instead of being useless in some cubicle, people now got to be useless at home. Technically that should have been a huge productivity hit; except a lot of these people were never really that productive to begin with. The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.