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Are we all going to work fake jobs?
Thoughts on Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy
I
Imagine you are appointed the colonial governor of a faraway land. Your own country has a small population but is technologically advanced and largely automated. The land you are taking over has a vast population but little development. The natives neither love nor hate you, they are ambivalent. At trivial cost, you establish a largely automated domestic economy using your advanced technology; food production, infrastructure, consumer goods, all are now produced and distributed locally at negligible marginal cost, by machine. The native cut (determined by your own democracy’s moral value system, which has also determined that you have a duty to look after the locals and facilitate to some extent their self actualization) of some colonial extractive resource mining easily covers the imports required. Self driving cars are maintained by automated workshops, houses are built in prefab factories and assembled by humanoid drones maintained in automated warehouses, that kind of thing.
You find yourself faced, now, with the choice of how to distribute the food, water, houses, clothes, electronic goods and so on that your society produces. Complete abundance is, after all, impossible even with advanced automation; you are still constrained by space, electricity, material resources. Some inequality is probably inevitable, too, even if it can be reduced; someone is going to live in the house with the nice view, although you could probably turn it into a ‘people’s timeshare’ where every family gets a day every ten years, or something like that. And a ‘basic income’ is feasible. You can hand out resource credits or dollars and give everyone the same amount, a socialism without labor.
But do you want to?
II
A central reason for capitalism’s success is its relatively positive alignment of incentives (phrased in a variety of ways). The provision of useful and in-demand goods and services begets the provider status and resources, which alongside a robust market economy drives innovation blah blah blah. The point is that, generally speaking, a large amount of prosocial behavior is implicitly incentivized by a capitalist system. You want money for a vacation, or your kids’ college, or to retire, so you want a good job, so you work hard, so you pay attention in class, so you don’t assault a police officer or commit a crime that will go on your record.
None of these are perfect, but broadly they work. It’s why “bail reform” (eliminating cash bail), so beloved of the left, quickly became a disaster: it turns out that the ability to raise a few thousand dollars at short notice is strongly predictive of someone who is less likely to commit crimes while on bail.
III
Those of us who regularly travel the far reaches of the third world will be familiar with the distinct form of overstaffing common everywhere from Belize to Bali. You will walk into, for example, a convenience store, a bodega, in Thailand and there will be 7 people working there. African restaurants are perhaps the most iconic example, a few customers a day and yet twenty members of staff, some uniformed.
It’s tempting to see this through the lens of that Dalrymple narration, but it’s not purely an east- (or south-) of-Hajnal-line thing. The Philippine store owner runs a profitable business (grocery margins are much higher in the third world, for a variety of reasons) and that has an extraordinary, universal tendency to result in expanding employment, regardless of necessity. The same thing is true in America, just replace 7/11 with Google. Google increased headcount by 20x during a period in which its core product responsible for almost all profitability remained search ads. Most of the new hires were not working on search. The company grew because it made more money, more than because ‘it’ wanted to do more things. Managers built up their fiefs. The point is that job creation has always been divorced from economic efficiency, even without state incentives.
IV
If you read about how white collar work was conducted before modern computers, the extraordinary amount of paperwork, the millions of clerks and secretaries, the vacuum systems to move papers around a building, the memos and the people who circulated them, the manual research that took so many hours to do what takes seconds today seems extraordinary. Then consider how many more women are in the labor market than shortly after the baby boom. Consider the relative decline in manufacturing employment. Consider that many of the sectors with the largest growth in employment have been precisely those - like law and finance and insurance and healthcare administration - that have seen previously unbelievable efficiency gains because of even basic software like spreadsheets and databases and email. Think about the internet, which people correctly predicted in the 1990s would destroy huge numbers of jobs, reduce opportunities for arbitrage, kill large sectors funded by paper advertising, etc. It did all of those things and yet employment remained steady.
Economists will tell you that technological unemployment always creates new jobs. Productivity rises, goods become cheaper, people can buy more, demand creates larger markets, drives demand, drives new employment. I think they are right about the consequence but wrong, as of late, about the process.
V
I have a conspiracy theory, one shared in part by the late David Graeber. Starting in the late 1970s, rich world governments - often without anyone even really explicitly acknowledging what is going on - began deliberately creating tens of millions of private and public sector jobs, both directly through specific lending and indirectly through regulation and other government activity. This, in combination with the inevitable tendency of profitable private enterprise to overemploy, and a certain residual aversion to leisure in some cultures, has preserved, arguably unnaturally, full employment.
Lower birth rates mean a greater proportion of the public are old and not working. Mass college attendance means many people start working at full time at 21 or 22, rather than 16 or 17. College loans and regulations, including title ix created reams of bullshit jobs in the universities. Social security, medicare, medicaid, endless charity donations by the state and the rich, homeless outreach, awareness, infinity startups funded by ZIRP money, regulations that have tripled compliance, KYC and regulatory employment in finance since 2009, environmental legislation that mandates hiring people to write reports and fill forms, to sign off on emissions statements. The legal, consulting, accounting and professional services sectors where a combination of circular outsourcing and demand created by regulation have seen employment skyrocket despite tasks that took an accountant in 1960 days taking minutes now.
There is often a supply of jobs when the demand is in many cases employment rather than its product.
VI
Was this wrong?
I remember realizing as a child that pretty much everyone who worked at the DMV (at least in New York) was an overweight black woman. Some would say the DMV itself is a jobs creation program for these women, many of whom support children. Is this a bad thing? It may be better that someone works than that they don’t, even if that employment is unnecessary, maybe even if it is mildly inconvenient. If anything, one of the central achievements of Protestant modernity was a work ethic that saw labor not necessarily as an end but as a means of accomplishing more than just production.
There are three categories of medium-term AGI scenario:
Extinction (whether fully autonomously or at human direction; “fifty rich guys starve everyone else” also falls into this category btw)
Abundance (of the heaven on earth, all material limits quickly fall away, it’ll happen faster than you possibly expect) AGI 2027 school, each of us can have our own solar system, The Culture, whatever
A system in which scarce resources and goods continue to be divided among humans even though non-negligible amounts of human labor is no longer materially necessary for the production of goods and most services, and in which prosocial behavior continues to have a substantial impact on society’s wider quality of life.
The first two scenarios are mostly uninteresting in their grand scale and absolute finality. The third is in my opinion more likely, but definitely more interesting. Mass unemployment is destabilizing, which is bad for owners of capital. Muahahaha evil aside, the rich lack the coordination to somehow blanket eliminate the poor and abolish democracy at exactly the moment the robots take everyone’s job, these things aren’t so neat, not to mention much of their own net worth would be caught up in a near total economic and debt crisis caused by falling demand and mass deflation.
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary. New Jersey has banned pumping your own gas since 1929. You can ban self-driving cars. You can require that companies of x revenue employ y human auditors for z hours, that a human radiologist has to review each x ray for y minutes before it’s allowed to inform any medical decision or be handed over to a patient. This is just the overt stuff. You can pay millions of people to be the even less useful AI-monitoring equivalents of night time security guards at a non-target; once in a hundred of their lifetimes, something unusual might happen. The rest of the time they get played to sit and play Switch. And that still might be better, and smarter than not doing it.
If the only line you can’t cross is something that sends you to jail, will you behave the same? Will most people? The threat of a lost job, of lost opportunity, the reward of a financially successful life, all these things drive a lot of prosocial behavior. It may be better to simulate them than to do without them entirely.
I must confess that I'm confused by the apparently broad overlap between people who believe:
Everything you just laid out is a nearly fully generalizable argument in favor of turbo-DEI. If you're paying people to stay out of jail, pay the people who disproportionately go to jail.
There are at least two ways to reconcile these two beliefs.
In the first case, we can make the economy much more dynamic and worthwhile by reducing DEI.
In the second case, the economy is unsustainable and any "solution" would fundamentally change the nature of the economy. Even fake and gay jobs can inculcate leadership and administrative skills that will be invaluable during such an upheaval. Society would benefit from putting the best and brightest into these positions to better prepare itself for the transition.
In the first case, the jobs aren't fake and gay, people are just bad at them. You're arguing that people could be creating value for the company, but the slots taken up by women and black men are wasted.
Perhaps my experience is colored by being in STEM (as I suspect OP's is colored by being in finance), but my department of 100 something people has literally zero black employees. Maybe HR is majority female? Most other departments are fairly evenly split along gender lines and overwhelmingly white/east asian/Indian. Are these jobs all fake and gay? And if so, they are overwhelmingly held by white men and women - couldn't they easily be balanced to reflect the general population?
OP's entire point is that the economy is unsustainable, and fake and gay jobs are the path to sustainability. Our society produces a huge excess of wealth, but increasingly less-talented individuals can't productively contribute to the economy. Again, I see no problem with DEI.
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It's important to distinguish between entry level affirmative action, in colleges or pathway jobs, and leadership level DEI efforts.
A lot of entry level DEI works out fine, because the requirements were fake and gay to begin with. Fine grained LSAT and uGPA distinctions are fake and gay so law school admissions are only lightly impacted by diversity efforts, the black kid with a 165 lsat isn't actually much worse at law on average than the white kid with a 168. But once their careers are underway and the selection metrics are more meaningful, promoting unqualified diversity candidates to partnerships or judicial seats can really bite.
You need to give more than a 3 point allowance to substantially increase black representation at law schools.
Blacks score on average 11 points lower than whites, with an SD of 9 for both groups.
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So, men?
Exactly, we just have to make sure we discriminate against the white and asian ones.
Why? White men are more likely than any demographic of women to be in jail (I found the number of 158/100000 when googling for white men, 88/100000 for East Asian, and 68/100000 for black women). Seems to me any attempt at making jobs to keep people out of prison should discriminate against women regardless.
And black and hispanic men are incarcerated more frequently, right? So you favor a worldview where corporations hire black men > hispanic men > white men > asian men > black women and so on and so forth? At least for their fake and gay jobs, anyways (which is most of them outside of software development and engineering).
No - I favour a world where corporations hire the most qualified > the less qualified. I'm simply stating that if the point of jobs is to keep people who would otherwise be criminal busy, then it should favour men over women.
And black/hispanic men over white/asian men.
Sure? If you're awarding people extra "points" based on how likely they are to be in jail, I'd call the midpoint of the curve when it swaps from "benefits" to "discrimination against", which (given that population trends are approximately 50% female) would be at the gender level, not the race level, but if you want to call anything that isn't "maximally in favour of" as "discrimination", then yes, that would be discriminating against white/asian men.
Like, I don't understand the point you're trying to make here; our current system is that the more progressive stack points you have, the more affirmative action selects for you; so "white straight male" is bottom of the pack, while "queer PoC who identifies as female" is the top; I'm stating that it is extremely backwards from how it should be if the jobs are simply busywork to keep people out of jail, as "male" is like, 90% of the weighting towards criminality there.
To be clear, I'm stating that I do not think there should be affirmative action at all; I think that we should hire based on merit. If we're not hiring based on merit, but instead based on how much we can keep people out of jail, then we should hire based on male vs female, then race, then sexuality.
I'm really not getting what you're saying here - it seems to me that you're proclaiming that DEI is already a program for this, but ignoring the fact that it is doing a terrible job of it.
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(The above is actually from a comment below, not the original post)
As the internet kids say, "This."
If we're actually in a "money doesn't mean much" AGI world, people don't stop having preferences and values. It will just shift from the directly tangible material ones to more abstract ones. Namely; taste. I can't remember where I saw it, but this is the "big theory" of one of the AI super thinkers (Karpathy maybe?). Taste, appreciate for aesthetics, and deeply held belief in something like "beauty" will become the way that humans organize their preferences. Instead of "how much is in your bank account? What zipcode do you live in?" we'd signal relative capability by demonstrating our ability to evaluate these abstract ideas.
There's a ton of precedent for this. Fashion, as an industry, is perhaps just a few months younger than city level agriculture. Besides finance, which is the business of money itself, and technology, which is nonlinear efficiency gains, Fashion has created more billionaires than any other business - I believe this actually includes energy (oil etc.)!
Gen Z is defined by its adherence to "vibes" - an abstract concept that combines aesthetics and trends with general emotive intuition. Trying to "flex" your bankroll with Gen Z, in fact, often "fails the vibecheck." Gen Z is, of course, the generation that will define themselves by, with, and through their relationship to AGI (the boomers can fortify themselves within their retirement castles, while Gen X and Millenials have a good old culling of the herd to see who gets to cannibalize what's left of a human economy).
So what does this mean in practice? People who can develop a taste / aesthetic / abstract values "stack" will do well in the AGI era. Pure shape rotators are going to have difficulties. But, then, I don't actually know that many 20 year+ software development veterans that don't have a kind of style to themselves or opinions on how things ought to be (not, here, in reference to moral or metaphysical values). I'd be more concerned for someone who's only ever grinded leetcode and muscle-memorized development frameworks. On the other side of the spectrum, wordcels who only ever try to track the mood (vibe?) of the audience and pander to them are also probably hosed. Contrast this to the likes of The Last Psychiatrist and even Scott himself; opinionated (even when ostensibly trying not to be), stylistic, with loose opinions strongly held.
In this way, I have a lot of hope for people not based on the title or functional nature of their job, but on the level of personal passion and opinion that they can develop.
Most people don't "care about the world" because they only ever care about themselves in the world. Although such a disposition seems and, in fact, is self-centered, it's also inherently reacive; How do I get what I want out of this given set of circumstances?. They might be playing a single player game, but it's in a world they accept as more or less immutable. Escaping AGI is the same as escaping The World; you have to minimize the ego and develop a values system that goes beyond the here and now. You have to align yourself with something infinite (the abstract) and then believe in it deeply (taste / passion / aesthetic opinion). If people do this, they'll be fine AGI or not.
I don't think 90% of people will ever do this.
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It depends on each individual's personality I think, but I do believe that most humans have a genuine human need to do something useful. Standing around at some make-work job isn't it. Maybe the ladies at the DMV can convince themselves that they're doing something useful by insisting on 12 levels of paperwork. Maybe the people in 3rd world stores are just happy to be getting paid (although I suspect that they're also needed to be there just in case for emergencities or to show strength). Maybe the people in DEI initiatives at Google have convinced themselves that they're truly doing something more important than making money.
For me, there was a time when I was working at a longstanding bureaucratic company which suddenly announced layoffs and reorganization. It was done in a rush, and left me essentially with no boss and no real job responsibilities. At first I thought "sweet, I get paid for nothing!" But after a while it genuinely started to wear on me. It was like a weird ironic punishment.
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That's part of the pitch for doing an Employer of Last Resort / Job Guarantee program, compared to UBI (or in addition to it). That there's still quite some inherent value in not encouraging people to just waste away on the couch, and that people who keep up some level of skills & pro-social behavior/habits are still suited to transitioning back into the private sector when there's more demand.
As for what people could do in these minimum wage programs, sure it could just be bullshit jobs, adult daycare, making art, organizing & participating in parties, etc. But it's also hard to imagine that we couldn't come up with various useful things for people to do, if we're not truly in some extreme futuristic abundance AGI world. The premise is typically that the national currency-issuing government foots the bill, as it always can, but that the administration would be decentralized at lower local levels everywhere, and people can decide what the enrollees are tasked with in their community/city/state (maybe tailored to the person as best as it can be). Money will still be useful as a technology for distribution (and to incentivize not getting fired from even your minimum wage public sector job) far into a transition toward the premised post-(real)work society.
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Look, my job is pretty close to the last one to be eliminated by AI. And granted that someone needs to work at the dmv and it isn’t an especially competency rewarding position, preferentially handing it out to favored groups is just the way the world works.
But at the end of the day there’s no need for that. As you yourself noted, google invested its profits in hiring people for vanity projects, nonsense, and empire building. Low interest rate phenomenon, sûre, but if someone can get hired by google they can take cyclical unemployment through belt tightening, or it’s their own damn fault. This seems like a universal. People and institutions like to spend their money, a dragon hoard is in fact completely pointless. I don’t have a wad of cash to occasionally stroke while going ‘my precious’ in gollum voice. People want the things money buys. Not the money itself.
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Great post!
If we're indeed getting to somewhere between "Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy" and "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" (I'm not convinced - we've build an exceedingly complex civilization and AI can't save us), I think your central premise is correct: a job gives people purpose/structure/incentives. You want/need all of that for a more stable society.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
If you run a jobs program, why not do something good? Take small groups of children on a well-designed adventure. Teach them music, art or crafts. Coach them in a sport. Give them a lot of time one-on-one if you have so much capacity. Hell, take a group of adults through the same program - less formative, but it probably makes them happy/health/social if it's well-done (no excuse why it wouldn't be, you can pay people to do planning and quality control, then staple more incentives to the quality). And most of them don't have anything better to do anyway.
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
We could just do that again, so the people uninterested in adult day care can occupy themselves with something productive of their own inspiration. Most likely some of them will greatly contribute to the shared culture.
This is actually how I'm trying to design my future career to be 'AI-proof'. Not getting into details, I'm trying to open a fitness/adventure centered small business because I believe that kind of work 1) will continue to be valuable and human-centric even in Semi Automated Luxury world and 2) I'll be moving into the ownership/capitalist class while the opportunity still exists.
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I think this may be one of those "exponential curves are self-similar" things: if you pulled up an administrator for Hammurabi and described the state of modern farming, I'm sure they'd look at you agog and ask what you do with the idle subsistence farmers. And the story there is that "division of labor" led to a centuries-long Renaissance in terms of pretty much every human endeavor that isn't "scratch out a living on a small plot by hand". For all the claims of "singularity", indefinite exponential growth seems an equally valid outcome.
So I guess I'm on team "we're pretty good at finding new ways to keep ourselves busy", with a look of part dismay at "consoom content slop" trends (as if alcoholism and other vices haven't been with us for ages too).
Part of it is just how you look at the economics: you can exchange money for goods or services, but when you buy goods that money isn't expended in the production and distribution of that good, and it at the end of the day it ends up in the accounts of one or more actual humans. Automation can reduce the number of humans in that chain, but the prospect of eliminating it completely seems pretty far off: "my car, fashioned from steel mined from land I own by my own robot army, fueled by gas my robots extracted and refined".
I agree there are reasonable concerns about the concentration of capital, but the free-market endpoint of "Scrooge McDuck holds all the dollars" is a self-defeating liquidity crisis where nobody can exchange goods or services (even spending from the gold pile ends the condition), and other than inflationary threats, the market is typically ambivalent about a huge hoard of unmoving currency. "Bertrand Russell's teapot, but it's a quadrillion US dollar bills that I own" is at best a way to start a religion, unless the astroid mining folks strike it rich, but even then it'd only directly hit goldbugs unless they have actual US dollars, which are a social construct.
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Surely 'even faker jobs' can only be a transitional step to either eudaimonia or annihilation?
Why would govts buy voters off if voters can no longer riot and overthrow the govt, if the power of millions of people in the capital city is insignificant compared to Slaughterbot Swarm #873? Why would leading corporations care what regulations there are if they can send their slaughterbots in and turn the regulators into meat paste? Or less dramatic scenes of 'super-charismatic AI explains the best course of action to take and calmly, politely shows why your particular idea, senator, would be expensive, risky, embarrassing and actually produce the reverse of what you wanted + some huge kickbacks to sweeten the deal.'
The key factor here is power transitioning from human armies to machine armies, leadership roles being taken by AIs. The rich/AIs can always renegotiate the deal later when they're more powerful. Who would trust Sam Altman to uphold a deal a moment longer than self-interest dictates?
I think we should focus on dull but important outcomes over more interesting but less significant transitional stages.
I think there are a lot of inconvenient logistics and highly conflicting motivations to consider around this among elected representatives, government bureaucrats, private sector businesses (which are not just their owners but everyone else making decisions), random rich people (many of whom are reliant on consumption by the ‘99%’ for the entire value of their holdings). Mass unemployment due to AI might be only a year or two away, at what point does Elon pull the trigger? But wait - he makes cars and satellites - who controls the kill bot fleet? Armin Papperger? The DoD? There are a lot of coordination mechanics that I think make a “kill the poor” scenario unlikely, not least because the merely moderately rich would know they were next.
In general, I think the oft-made argument that welfare was implemented so that the there wasn’t a communist revolution is at best largely inaccurate.
I don't agree that consumption produces values or wealth, it's production that creates wealth. They're not going to be worried about poverty if they have machines making all this wealth for them. The robot factory producing more robots is a source of wealth independent from any consumer demand, in so far as the robots can then make powerplants and mines.
Coordination is a complex and unsolved problem but you need to have power to be worth coordinating with. Who cares what the seething masses think if they have no power to do anything? That is why distribution of power is important with AI. The more distributed power is, the better off we are.
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‘Taking away the interests of the poor in other solutions, whether communism or church based charity’ was literally the motivator behind a lot thé early welfare states, though, wasn’t it?
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This is tangential, but I think people underestimate the effect wireheading will play in this. For those unfamiliar, wireheading refers to experiments where rats and people have had stimulatory electrodes inserted into certain parts of their brain and sometimes, due to misplacement in people or correct placement in animals, result in completely addictatory behaviour surrounding the stimulation of the electrode.
We already have this to a large extent in drugs. Anyone with any experience with this knows its incredibly profound the extent to which "push a chemical button" (and a very crude button) changes subjective experience. Societies nearly have (or perhaps have) collapsed under this even with these crude mechanisms which are naturally opposed by evolutionary homeostatic mechanisms.
If we end up with true wireheading a lot of these concerns become redundant. Wireheading without reason is extinctatory so we may see future life as a combination of wireheading with rational self-preservation (in contrast to the self-annihilation of the heroin addict).
A lot of modern suffering is from a brain poorly adapted for modern conditions. Luxury-automated-gay-space-communism is further from the adapted environment. Our experiences with drugs have demonstrated an arbitrariness to experience you can bypass. I think you'll have to be a pretty enlightened creature to overcome the pull of this technology if (or as) it becomes available.
Once this comes online it would greatly affect what you're proposing, but hard to predict timelines.
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Perhaps I am too economics pilled but at a sufficiently high level your outcomes (2) and (3) seem like the same thing to me. Or, to the extent they aren't, (3) seems like it contains a contradiction. On the one hand there are still going to be unmet human wants and desires. On the other hand I am supposed to believe there is no scalable use human labor could be put to in order to satisfy those desires. I am skeptical that both these facts can obtain.
I guess I'm also skeptical of the concept of "bullshit jobs" more generally. I have not read Graeber's book but browsing the wikipedia article for some examples does not give me confidence. For basically all the listed jobs it does not seem difficult to me to describe how the people doing the jobs provide value for the people who are paying them. Maybe "bullshit" is supposed to mean in some broader societal sense but then you are just saying you value things other than what market participants value. That's fine, but you shouldn't expect the market to produce outcomes as if it valued something else!
Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.
Graeber, to be clear, was a shit academic when he reached outside his field (I have no way to vouch for his anthropological work). 'Debt' is riddled with sloppy work and treats 1800s economics as the state of the art to beat up on.
Graeber was a sloppy academic and Debt is broadly terrible and ignores a lot of good economic history. Nevertheless, the “bullshit job” concept has outlived him, and arguably in places like this now means something a little different to what he meant (which was more about caaapitalism, maan) which is why I was careful to imply that in my post.
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I guess I see Molochian incentives create bullshit jobs. Sure, locally speaking, I value hiring a super expensive lawyer to defend me in court, but only because the guy suing me hired his super expensive lawyer. We could take away those two jobs and be in the same place.
Yeah. Purely PVP roles, ego boost retinues
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I think that's the point. There is a gap between what people think is a valuable use of their time and what their boss / the market thinks is a valuable use of their time. For example, if some guy is being ordered to dig holes all over the place then being paid to fill them in is providing a marketable service to your employer, but nevertheless the overall work is going to feel stupid and pointless.
Sure, but what fraction of jobs does that describe? The examples in the wikipedia article are things like store greeters, lobbyists, academic administrators, and managers. I think it would be pretty hard to characterize those jobs, depending on the specifics, as being like digging a hole and filling it back in!
It is often argued that management is, by and large, a bullshit job because it has expanded so hugely and yet the same organisations (eg universities and hospitals) used to run perfectly well with smaller numbers.
Management seems to have grown with the ability of people to generate, communicate and store paperwork. If Person A is spending all of their time sending emails to other departments and then Person B is filtering a department’s incoming mail to sort out the dross, we can be back at digging a hole territory.
Previously, if someone took the time out of their day to physically travel to you and tell you something, you could reasonably expect it to be important.
I cannot speak for all managers but this description does not sound like any manager I have worked for. My managers have done key work in prioritizing the work for me and other team members. Coordinating work across teams. Translating high level strategy shifts from higher level executives into concrete terms for people like me. Their role has been very, obviously, valuable.
It is kind of funny to read this in a world where Office Space exists. It's a satire but I am under the impression the phenomenon it satirizes was real. Was it important to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports?
I have had some respect for my managers too, don't get me wrong. It's just that I also note that management has massively increased and I wonder how much of
really, really actually is valuable compared to the 1930s where this work was not done to the same degree. It feels valuable, but is it? Are those strategy shifts really necessary? Are lower-level workers essentially allowing their own abilities to plan and coordinate to be taken over by their manager? Is this all optimisation that gets 99% of the juice out of the orange instead of 95% at the expense of vast amounts of extra work? Is this all a Red Queen problem?
Those aren't rhetorical questions, they're questions I really don't have the answer to. Modern society has broadly done away with the originals (which one could take as evidence of efficacy, or of public goods issues) and for caste reasons I don't really trust the institutes like Harvard Business Review whose job is theoretically to answer these questions.
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That sounds more like administration than management. What I believe has been shown in multiple industries (but particularly the public sector ones) is that as administration grows, it decouples from the actual operations of the business itself and becomes self sustaining, and in fact starts doing less actual administration, in not only per capita terms but in absolute terms.
Its kind of like how teachers keep inventing new method to teach that clearly don't work, because thats more fun than just doing the same thing in a fairly formulaic way.
Very few actually want to do the real administrative work, so new more interesting work is invented.
Most managers are actually fairly directly involved with the real operations of the actual business, it's not a support function like more pure administrative departments such as HR.
Noted, and I'm not sure if I agree or not. Please see my reply to @Gillitrut.
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