[sthomas1618]

> Assistants help with this paperwork, which is different for every state and requires hours of reading and making phone calls to decipher.

Regardless of this, this still sounds like a market inefficiency. I have not read the book (but I certainly will now), but I'm going to guess the author's response would be that while the assistant's job is necessary for the engineer to remain productive, it is still a bullshit job. What's needed instead is an automated service that handles this for the engineer at far less of a cost or less bullshit paperwork from government.

[imgabe]

I agree, these things are needed, but they don't exist. There have been great strides made in that area, but professional licensing predates the office computer. So, it's a legacy process that takes time to adapt.

There's also the issue of the quasi-sovereignty of states in the US. They are not going to want to give up power to manage their own affairs.

The author seems to think about things this Pollyanna, blue-sky way where we could just change everything magically to be more efficient, but back in the real world there are entrenched interests and institutional inertia that result in things happening a certain way. They don't change overnight. It's not bullshit to pay people to deal with the world as it is. It's really the only option you have if you want to get something done now, instead of in some hypothetical future where we've automated away every inefficiency.

[skybrian]

Is there a better way to talk about jobs that only exist due to inefficiency? It seems important to know that they could be automated away.

[imgabe]

If someone is convinced that it would be so easy to automate away X annoying job that someone has to do, I would encourage them not to talk about it, but to get busy doing the automation.

Best case, they were right and the task gets automated away, now we don't need to talk about it at all. More likely, they might find that it's actually not as easy to automate away as they initially thought.