[bko]

I agree that there are a lot of bullshit jobs but I would note that these bullshit jobs tend to be concentrated in protected industries. For instance, finance has a lot of bullshit jobs and I personally know many people who work at banks and their sole responsibility is to create inconsequential reports and spreadsheets. Every once in a while there will be a round of layoffs to trim the workforce but overall these jobs persist. The incentive on managers is to hire people and build their team to exert more power and justify higher title/salary. There is little shareholder power to trim the workforce of these bullshit jobs and political pressure to not lay people off. Competition is not really an issue due to the existing regulatory barriers to entry.

Take an industry that is more competitive such as restaurants in a large city. The manager there would never hire someone for a bullshit job. In fact, that manager often performs menial tasks that are normally above his pay-grade.

Of course there are transaction costs to anything. It's a lot easier to hire/fire a busboy than an office employee. This keeps some employees around in bullshit jobs to serve as a flexible workforce. But I still believe that this does not account for the majority of bullshit jobs in these protected industries.