The Real Reason So Many Jobs Are Pointless
We care about jobs being created, but not meaningful ones.
“In this town, it costs the government $60,000 per person to bring someone off the streets.”
The attendees at a conference were shocked when they heard this news from the speaker, the head of an organization designed to help the homeless in the local area find shelter, get off drugs, and ultimately get themselves back on their feet. The goal of the presentation was to get public donations and support for this organization.
As shocking as this fact is, the reality is that it doesn’t cost as much as that to get off the streets. I say this because I’m not living on the streets, and I made roughly $22,000 last year—below what a minimum-wage worker in town would make.
Even if I didn’t have a roommate, it would cost me easily half of what that person claimed.
So the question is, where is the rest of the money going?
According to my dad, who attended that meeting and heard that fact, he believed it would go to a coordinator who would help facilitate the organization’s needs.
On the surface, this job makes sense. They’re like a nurse helping a patient. But instead of medication, they are a font of resources, programs, and funds that they could immediately provide to these individuals to bring them out of homelessness.
But the more that you dig into it, the more it feels rather pointless.
I know that with my own circumstances, I’m definitely privileged. It helps to have a roommate who cuts living expenses in half. It also helps that the apartment we’re in is one of the cheapest. It also helps that the vast majority of my revenue streams are paid in foreign cash, with the foreign cash being much stronger than the Canadian dollar.
But taking those privileges away, I’m aware of a job resource centre in town where people can look for jobs, a small home area for shelter, as well as food programs. These projects are small, but given proper attention and funding, they could easily expand and make a larger impact on the homeless community in town.
And those costs wouldn’t be $60,000 per homeless person.
The problem with that organization is that they have tunnel vision on the problem and only think about what their current plan is. They never once considered what programs were already out there and making an impact.
But this overall trend is something that we see multiple times in every industry right now. Jobs are being created, but the substance of those jobs are either redundant or meaningless. And they are expected to be filled by someone.
The Value Of What Businesses Create Has Stalled
A common example of this is every current smartphone on the market. Looking at the latest smartphones, the biggest selling point for each phone is its camera functionality.
There may be a few other things sprinkled in there—like size, security, and UX/UI design—but the biggest draw is the camera.
The innovations that we’ve seen in these cameras are not much to write home about. For sure, a modern phone has an amazing camera, but it’s not much better than a mid-tier point-and-shoot camera. And even with that, the point-and-shoot probably has a few extra features.
This has been the trend for years now. Every update to smartphones after a certain version was primarily devoted to the camera and less to the innovation itself.
You could argue it’s because of technological limitations—like chips—but I think there are other reasons. After all, we went from bulky phones to flip phones and then to smartphones. Since smartphones hit the scene, the design of these phones hasn’t changed much. And again, earlier versions of these smartphones came with so many upgrades that there was a massive difference between version 1 and version 2.
These days, if I went from my iPhone 7 to an iPhone 10, I’d get more security and a better camera.
Thanks a lot, Apple.
My point is that companies aren’t as innovative as they once were. And if they tried to hop on the latest fads to try and wow people, they failed spectacularly. Take AI as an example. With ChatGPT taking everything by storm, every major tech company is jumping on board with this “new technology.”
But the current problem with AI and ChatGPT is that these technologies don’t innovate. They imitate.
They might be able to create art, a new magic card, or some epic fanfiction, but the AI is basing all of that on pre-existing information. Stuff that was already created before, which the AI just picks off.
And so with Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and others like it, these kinds of services aren’t creating anything new beyond people talking about their weird experiences with it. These services don’t actually make search engines any better.
And all of this comes back to the people who work for these companies.
Now the workers themselves aren’t responsible for this stalling. Rather, it’s upper management that is responsible since they are overlooking the teams that create these products and make innovation happen. They’re the ones guiding and motivating the team to create these new products.
And so if the positions that are offered are misleading, boring, redundant, or meaningless, then it’s going to be tough for anyone in those situations to create anything truly awe-inspiring.
Most Businesses Have Become Parasites: A Final Iteration Of Untrue Capitalism
We’ve known about this problem for quite some time, as David Graeber reported his findings in a 2018 book he penned. His argument was that myths around the efficiency of capitalism have blinded us to the fact that a lot of economics is built on those striving for power and status. He argues that, from the start, capitalism was never made to bolster the economy.
He has a point.
Between mass layoffs, stock buybacks, and industries forming oligopolies, it’s obvious that across industries, this doesn’t boost the economy at all. And yet these are seen as wise business moves or strategies that every company should be doing.
I do believe there is some form of good capitalism out there, but the vast majority of it is what we see today, which is utterly wasteful. There is a drive to prioritize power, influence, and profit without benefiting the public. William Baumol suggested this over 30 years ago, and his prediction is on the mark:
- Companies are buying up other companies whenever they get too large or rock the boat. This stomps any opposition or competition in the market.
- Companies are political as specific individuals appeal to those already in positions of power like supreme court judges and senators. These ensure regulations are manageable and key companies stay on top.
- Companies are buying patents to ensure better products than what they offer never see the light of day.
Further evidence of all this is the multiple financial crises that we’ve run into. The fact that these things happen in modern markets shows the economy isn’t as efficient or as value-driven as it’s made out to be.
After all, we would be spending money and stimulating the economy if products were affordable, of great quality, and had multiple options.
A 30-year review conducted by Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway reveals that much of the “financial engineering” served to hide risk, dump risk on unsuspecting investors, or raised risks overall despite being advertised as the exact opposite.
All of these things come back to Graeber, who tied these phenomena together in his 2013 essay proclaiming a weird fact:
Upwards of 30 percent of jobs that companies create now do nothing useful to society.
It might’ve seemed odd back then, but as time went on, the more it made sense:
- A 2015 UK survey found 37 percent of people found their job not making an impact on the world.
- A later poll in the Netherlands found 40 percent saying the exact same thing.
- Many hustle bros love to talk about how 50% of the world hates their job or feels disengaged from it. They’ve been talking about that for over a decade.
When the company itself is focused on a goal that only benefits a few at the top, this sets the tone for those that work for it. At best, you feel disconnected. At worst, you’re stuck in a job that doesn’t go anywhere, an empty husk.
It’s easy to think that the signs of these jobs are obvious, but they’re not. Like the example I gave at the start, it has all the hallmarks of a job that would seem useful. But it’s redundant. Instead of hiring one person to oversee that program, there are three available positions: at a construction company that makes small homes, at a food bank, and as a financial advisor.
And that’s just the start.
Many large businesses have these "do nothing" positions in various departments, such as human resources and public relations. Furthermore, lobbying, telemarketing, consulting, and management companies do have their fair share too.
In the end, these jobs are akin to medieval feudalism. They are meant to stall and be a wedge for something else that would change the status quo. It’s a long way from what capitalism is supposed to be like.
Instead, it’s just siphoning off money and providing little merit to anyone beyond those at the top. Even if you’re getting paid in these positions.
As my dad put it, we need to look beyond the boxes in which we contain our problems. We focus so much on a particular issue that we miss out on other important factors.
As much as we blame capitalism for the problems we’re in today, it’s more like we don’t understand how and why capitalism can help us. We’ve lingered on old business practices that date back to the 1970s and don’t reflect the economy today, so the outcome is predictable.
Productivity has stagnated as any drivers of change are stomped out by bigger and more resourceful companies that want to keep the status quo.
We need to redefine capitalism just like we need to redefine the work that we do. It’s not always about the quantity of the jobs that are being created, but the quality.
Maybe then we can get back to putting genuine effort into solving human problems.
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