What's so laughably silly about it?
""" "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s)."
I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy? How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring, and if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions? """
What do you think the American Enterprise Institute is for? Cato? Chambers of Commerce? The multitude of other business umbrella lobby groups? What did you think they did other than come together to form a united front to represent their interests (conspire)?
>I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy?
I don't see why one would conclude that at all.
>How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring
Via a labor market which they try to mold using government policy to fit their interests.
>if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions
Periodic cullings help keep the rest of the employees suitably terrorized.
We're talking about a conspiracy to hire people for no other reason than to keep them busy so they don't revolt. This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a company owner, gain by adhering to this conspiracy? What I lose is obvious: huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish nothing. This conspiracy does not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge artificial externality with no apparent free-riding.
No, we're talking about hiring people for this reason, among others.
>This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a company owner, gain by adhering to this conspiracy?
You mean a share holder? Nothing. You seem to be laughably under the impression that the company is run for your personal benefit. It isn't.
>What I lose is obvious: huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish nothing.
You explain why companies hire based upon headcount instead of pure cost. It doesn't make intrinsic sense, but that's how it happens.
>This conspiracy does not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge artificial externality with no apparent free-riding.
Congratulations, you just assumed away the principal-agent dilemma.
Now it's the opposite. Anyone in the west can easily be idle and afford an OK standard of living. It's having a "professional" job that marks you as elite, because there aren't nearly enough such jobs for those who are capable.
So you get large numbers of people hustling to land and hold various sorts of dumb office jobs. Mostly because the job is a coveted status marker.
How?
My conclusion is that it is the complexity. It is that people don't understand why they do something - this makes their work meaningless for them. And accidentally there is a big chance that their job is useless in an objective way - it is just that the people that direct them also don't understand the system fully.
And the complexity grows in many ways. One is that our lives are much more regulated than they used to be - we have more laws about everything. In one way it makes lives more fair - but the complexity from the entangling of different laws grows quickly. Another is that we actually have less cultural regulations. For example - take noise from parties, in the past it was that there were just some dates when everyone was partying - because everyone had the same religion etc.
By they way - in 'User Innovation' there is this notion of 'advanced analog field' https://books.google.pl/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&pg=PA134&lpg=P... - an area where there is a much stronger need for something then anywhere else. It is often that the innovation happens in that 'advanced analog field' and later it is adopted in all other areas. Like abs was invented first for airplane breaks - but later it was adopted by the car industry. I think that maybe we should treat software development as a kind of 'advanced analogue field' for law.