It seems like the _quality_ of the jobs (or median job) may have gone down, but the _quantity_ of jobs relative to population has remained roughly steady, right?

I don't mean the quality is bad, it's just that most jobs in the first world seem to be redundant or abstracted from the keys of power.

I think David Graeber wrote a book about it. Here is a guy talking about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo