[imperfect_blue]

I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation.

Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it?

Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, transport, construction, entertainment, etc.

Some jobs are superfluous and arise out of coordination failure, that's true. Lawyers, administrators, salespeople and parts of finance and the government comes to mind. But "most people could stop working" is an unreasonable assertion.

[falcolas]

> Who would grow your food?

>> There are exceptions of course.

There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc.

Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment.

Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous - that many more people could not have to work without a material impact to the availability of goods.

[gus_massa]

You forgot to count plumbers, and everyone in the construction industry.

Also the guy that fills the milk bottles. My brother used to work in a milk bottling plant, but he was not filing the bottles by hand. A machine filled the bottles, someone overlook the machine, my brother was making the chemistry and biological test to ensure the milk was safe to drink. And there was some additional people they call in case the machine gets broken (or to build a new machine.)

You are forgetting to count a lot of people.

[falcolas]

Even if every single position in the US held today were considered essential, there would still be more people in the US who are unemployed than employed.

And every job currently held today is absolutely not essential.

[kortilla]

That doesn’t support your point though that we’re anywhere near post scarcity and can support people quitting. Many jobs that were classified as essential during the pandemic are things people don’t have oodles of joy doing (garbage pickup, power plant coal loader, etc).

You can cut out the entire “entertainment” or whatever industry you think isn’t essential, but we still need to convince the people working the essential jobs to do it while everyone else free-rides.

[kortilla]

That farmer count is only as small as it is because of the massive society they are built on that allows that to scale. You briefly scratched at with miners, but you forgot all of the machinery and auto manufacturers, the massive energy industry that powers all of it, etc.

> Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous

I think you just don’t understand the purpose of many jobs. If the accountant for the local grocery store didn’t exist, what do you think would happen?

[falcolas]

If your society focuses primarily on money, bad things.

If your society focuses on supporting a population's needs, not much.

[ryandrake]

Even if we somehow "solved scarcity" and robots could automatically produce all the goods and services everyone needs for free, if we don't get past the primitive "value must be provided through work" mentality, there would be no benefit.

Stuck with this "work virtue" mindset, society would find a way to make it so half the people were paid to dig holes and the other half paid to fill them in, just so we could go on with this fixation on the need to work for a living.

[fhd2]

Parent has a point from my experience - most products I worked on never really caught on in terms of being reasonably widely used. I don't think I've ever worked on anything I'd call truly essential.

From what I've seen, most programmers are indeed spending their time building experiments that have the primary goal of making money for the person that pays them - if they create true value that's more of a lucky side effect. And lots of those experiments fail.