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Wouldn't we expect competition to have optimized this away? This is at the heart of the worldview disagreement between "capitalism is just the invisible hand in action" versus "capitalism is a conspiracy by the powerful to remain in power."
the argument is that markets are more efficient at resource allocation than central planning, not that they’re very efficient.
When Musk bought Twitter and now operates it with 20% of the staff it had, or when Google increases headcount by 1000% in a decade despite operating primarily the same product, this isn’t maximum efficiency. Managers establish fiefdoms. Individual employees care more about themselves than maximizing shareholder returns. Incentives are not fully aligned.
Twitter and Google both had relatively low labor-to-capital ratios to begin with. So, if true, they were increasing headcount by x% from a low base, meaning it might not have been very consequential for their bottom lines. The examples could be cherrypicked anyways, and do not necessarily have bearing on overall patterns. Overall, we've seen the economy restructure itself from a primarily agrarian one, towards a manufacturing one, towards a retail and service based one across the past century or so, and all of that indicates a responsiveness to actual economic demand.
In fact, we've not only seen a shift in employment patterns towards human-necessary roles, but we've also see a rise in economic dominance by companies with relatively small labor footprints. Tech companies, in general, as mentioned, do not employ many people in relation to how much money they rake in, and they've been dominating economic growth and market indices for the past few decades. If they were insensitive to the costs of employing unnecessary labor, and if this was the basis by which the entire economy was organized, we might see them gradually becoming as labor-heavy as other, previous market leaders.
But we don't see that. We see them maintaining unprecedentedly lean workforces. That's consummate with a representation of the economy where humans in data-organizing roles are increasingly automated away. These humans don't disappear, but fill in gaps elsewhere, such as in retail and healthcare, providing tangible physical services. Pet grooming has seen a boom in employment.
Some of them do apparently move into roles which are of dubious practical value, but which have been necessitated in large part because of regulation and bureaucracy, such as consultants. However, these regulation regimes have led to decreases in pollution and other harmful things, so the consultants and such can be said to be necessary components of these overall systems' functioning and thus their benefits. Furthermore, they do plausibly provide value in the expertise they are able to provide as well.
Overall, I do not see a basis for thinking the economy is unresponsive to actual supply and demand inputs when it comes to labor organization. The level of its efficiency may be up for debate, but it does appear to shift over time in relation to observable developments.
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Also even maximizing shareholder returns =/= maximizing productivity in every case. A company can make a very share-price friendly move to invest in something unlikely to succeed that is the current recipient of market hype, even if it's unlikely to actually work out.
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