[Legogris]

I was also thinking exactly this during my couple of years in Japan - that having a huge amount of "bullshit jobs" is one way of keeping unemployment low in an increasingly automated economy where growth is stagnating.

In an economy where having a job (or somehow having attained large sums of money because of luck/previous endeavors) is necessary to not be an outcast, this is one way of mitigating this or at least pushing the larger problem forward. We would very likely have a huge crisis if all bullshit jobs were to disappear overnight.

[lkrubner]

An economy can not be increasingly automated and increasingly stagnant. It’s one or the other. In the USA the economy has been fairly stagnant since 1973 because the post war boom ended in 1973. The move to automation also collapsed in 1973. Please see productivity trends here:

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

You can control what years are shown on that page. I sugggest you look at 1950 to 2018. Although the data is noisy, you can see it has declined. Also note that the era of occasional double digits advances ended decades ago. The 14% in 1956 and the 12% in 1971 have never repeated this side of 1973.

The economy is stagnant because the trend toward automation has died out. Although people in tech keep predicting a robot revolution, there is no evidence of it in the productivity numbers.