Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose that is a third way to deal with automation. I usually say, there are two ways to deal with productivity increases (from automation and industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4 day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc). I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so everyone is…
I believe your third answer is indeed the reason that despite so many things being automated, we're not seeing benefits of that in terms of reduced workloads on people. The way I see it, as long as creating bullshit jobs is easy, the market will force everyone to work 40+ hour a week to survive. And as long as creating bullshit jobs that just shuffle money around is easier than creating socially valuable jobs, we won…
On the one side we have supply constraints on necessities. If there isn't enough good housing for everyone and we're not allowed to build more then people will have to work 40 hours so they can outbid other people on the good housing and not get stuck in the bad housing. We could solve this by building more good housing, but only if we actually do that.
On the other side it's a question of where the surplus goes. You have a company that makes billions of dollars -- far more than it needs to operate. What happens to the rest of the money? If the managers get to use it for empire building, you get bullshit jobs. That happens a lot.
Ideally we'd solve both, but even just one would be progress.
If you don't have to work 40 hours to afford necessities then you're not going to choose a 40 hour bullshit job. You're either going to choose a real job or a job with lower hours so that you can spend more of your time doing something you want to do, which might very well itself be a real job (i.e. starting your own business).
Whereas if we can figure out how to transfer more wealth away from organizations and into the hands of real people, that gets rid of bullshit jobs too, because most of them come from the principal-agent problem and the misalignment between managers and owners/taxpayers. Transferring the money to any person or entity without middle management would be a net improvement.