>If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.
That's the theory, but we all know that theoretical capitalism and what we have today are very different beasts. Bullshit jobs are not literally companies paying people to do nothing, but more systemic problems.
My local shop wants to sell a banana to me. The intrinsic complexity of this task is: A small group of people who grow bananas. A large group of people who manage global shipping. A small group of people to sell the banana to me.
However, let's inject some bullshit: My local shop and a shop slightly further away both want to sell bananas. Therefore they advertise. Let's add two large groups of people making graphics for the side of busses, posters for walls, animation for web advertising, filming television adverts, maintaining 'woke' social media accounts, et cetera. We now involve more groups of people for the busses to sell this advertising space, television networks to manage ad time, et cetera. We now have more people advertising the banana than selling it, but no more human beings are buying bananas, because there's a fixed size market for it. _Those_ are bullshit jobs, because they achieve nothing but keeping the market in the same steady state it would otherwise have been in, except with vast resource expenditure. No one company can stop advertising, though, because then their competitor's resource expenditure would actually become meaningful.
The advertisers are hired to increase demand for and sell more bananas. If banana demand is actually fixed and the advertisers don't work out (are bullshit jobs), the banana company is not going to keep using the advertisers and cut out the bullshit jobs.
No no no, the point is that the jobs aren't useless _locally_, in that my most local store cannot fire their advertising department, but they are still useless _globally_, in that the sheer scale of resources poured into creating the advertisements to compete with other stores is zero-sum.
$1 of banana advertising does not generate >$1 of banana purchasing _overall_, though it may _take_ >$1 of banana purchasing from a different store. No meaningful value was created for society.
There's a degree to which advertising is educating consumers as to where they can get bananas. The cost required to fulfil that is significantly lower than the actual cost of the advertising industry, because the advertising industry effectively generates other jobs in the advertising industry to compete with itself, as our competing banana establishments both pour more and more of their money into advertisement, because if they don't they lose sales to their competitors. Because more advertising is needed, more advertisers are needed - but the market isn't expanding, or rather, it isn't expanding even a fraction as quickly as the advertising industry.
So we end up in this absurd position where we spend _so many resources_ advertising bananas, when we could spend a tiny fraction and get the same result - no, a _better_ result. Estimates suggest that 40%+ of all bananas are simply wasted, because they don't fit the aesthetically pleasing, advertisable profile of an "expected" banana. Because competition is so tight, and so many resources are put not into the intrinstic complexity of selling bananas, but into the "bullshit" systems surrounding it, we have a waste _floor_ of 40%, even before considering the direct cost of the advertising industry supporting bananas.
And that's bananas. That's one fruit. The whole market is like this, to varying degrees, where entire industries only exist to support other industries, which only exist to deal with the problems they cause. It's bullshit - not in the sense that any one company can just fire all the worthless people, because obviously it's more complicated than that, but in the sense that we have vast chunks of human productivity going into tasks which do not benefit _anybody_. We are burning our finite resources out advertising bananas while at the same time facing down the impending crisis of climate change and asking ourselves where we could possibly make the efficiency improvements necessary to save our species.
I don't know either - but let's start with the bananas.
That's the theory, but we all know that theoretical capitalism and what we have today are very different beasts. Bullshit jobs are not literally companies paying people to do nothing, but more systemic problems.
My local shop wants to sell a banana to me. The intrinsic complexity of this task is: A small group of people who grow bananas. A large group of people who manage global shipping. A small group of people to sell the banana to me.
However, let's inject some bullshit: My local shop and a shop slightly further away both want to sell bananas. Therefore they advertise. Let's add two large groups of people making graphics for the side of busses, posters for walls, animation for web advertising, filming television adverts, maintaining 'woke' social media accounts, et cetera. We now involve more groups of people for the busses to sell this advertising space, television networks to manage ad time, et cetera. We now have more people advertising the banana than selling it, but no more human beings are buying bananas, because there's a fixed size market for it. _Those_ are bullshit jobs, because they achieve nothing but keeping the market in the same steady state it would otherwise have been in, except with vast resource expenditure. No one company can stop advertising, though, because then their competitor's resource expenditure would actually become meaningful.