Is there way to quantify how much of the economy these days is "bullshit" (purely speculative assets), and if we are at peak bullshit now as a percentage of total economic activity?
The entire economy outside of agriculture and real estate is basically "bullshit", if you really think about it. The ratio of bullshit to everything else seems to increase over time, though, as a general trend. It's probably correlated to technology.
Agriculture and real estate would not exist in their current forms without the mammoth apparatus of the entire economy surrounding them. Maybe you mean food and shelter are the only non-bull parts of the economy. Nomadic bands might find them bullshittish. And grain stores require soldiers to guard them, soldiers require weapons, weapons require metallurgy, mining, surveying, transport, etc. Pretty soon there’s a whole lot of something but I don’t know that it’s bullshit. It feels more like layers of increasing abstraction away from the source of the value: energy.