>If the job is going unfilled, it isn't paying enough (either for conditions or to meet worker needs at some level), simple as that.

For an individual Role, yes. for an economy, no, because you run into supply limitations.

But anyways, that isnt the question. The question is which jobs add value and how to structure an organization so that it is efficient and effective.

If your organization is crappy enough, you might not be able to get net value out of roles, even if you fill them.

>900+ US school districts have moved to a four day week to retain teachers [1] [2], for example, because they have no other choice.

From what I have seen in California Schools, there is more than enough money for teacher salary, but the grift and organization is the problem. State funding is ~ 23k per student, you have 30 students per class, or $700k/class. The average salary of public school teachers in 2021–22 for the State of California was $88,508.

Bullshit jobs and productive jobs that do not pay enough to outbid bullshit jobs is the same problem - misallocation of resources.

The market is allocating; to allocate more efficiently, move towards central planning where you can allocate more intelligently. Otherwise, this is the economy you've got.

Big fan of Graeber, agree there's lots of bullshit jobs.

> move towards central planning where you can allocate more intelligently

My understanding is that there's a lot of historical evidence to suggest that central planning would do the opposite of better allocating resources. Besides, with US government spending at around a third of the GDP[0] now, plenty of that is going on, already.

[0]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP

Are you suggesting the government does not have bullshit jobs? Surely there are bullshit white collar government jobs while at the same time the government is not paying teachers and bus drivers enough.

No, bullshit jobs are everywhere (gov, private industry, etc). I'm suggesting that the metrics we have currently to evaluate if a job is bullshit or not are insufficient to capture the true value of a job and its outcomes, leading to the inefficiencies of bullshit jobs.

Central planning is likely the wrong phrase, I just don't have something better cooked up at the moment to describe, "Should this job really exist? Is it creating value in some way? Or is it just existing for some other suboptimal purpose?" Clearly, the market itself is not allocating efficiently if bullshit jobs exist in such great number. What is the solution? I don't know.