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In some developing countries, there's an unofficial social contract that the wealthy should employ as many people as possible, even if they need to make pointless jobs. A company I worked for had a remote office in India that employed people to hand out paper towels in the bathrooms.
In some developing countries, there's an unofficial social contract that the wealthy should employ as many people as possible, even if they need to make pointless jobs. A company I worked for had a remote office in India that employed people to hand out paper towels in the bathrooms.
It's easy to write a piece of software once and share it with everybody.
The product you are working on - what unique value is giving to humanity?
(I mean beyond "it pays the bills" and "it uses $popular_thing_of_the_year")
I believe we reached a level of productivity where - in rich countries - we are all keeping each other busy with loads of unnecessary work.
If you take the concepts in this argument and expand it beyond just companies (which the author started to do when mentioning armed forces counted as goons), I think we would see a society that is already filled with useless jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
My major source for all this was Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan . It's a sweeping book - 600 pages, I think, and covers everything from 1300 to 2000 - but one of its main focuses is the end of the Sengoku period and the rise of the Tokugawa.
The goon category is interesting in a future world where AI has replaced most jobs, because it can employ an unlimited number of people. (Goon jobs exist to counterbalance other goon jobs. Militaries are the canonical example.) Most jobs -- teachers, auto workers, plumbers, farmers -- have a natural ceiling on employment related to demand, but goon jobs don't because when one side hires more goons, the other side has…
But any suggestion of "mincome" or the like is met with such a harsh reaction... What, effectively, is the difference between goon-bloom and mincome? Is it just that one is too obviously a subsidy?
There are a whole lot of pointless jobs in government -- they only exist because of excessive authoritarian regulations.
Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
And isn't discussing a potentially enormous societal inefficiency worth doing?