[ImPostingOnHN]

> it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy

What part of that is suffering, if it enables 100k constituents to put food on the table?

[patmcc]

We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we?

We shouldn't employ people in economically un-viable ways just because they need income. We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work, or a combination of the two.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we?

If that is what's necessary to provide a social safety net, then maybe so. See the works progress administration for an example of this.

> We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work

Ideally yes, but that isn't happening, hence the first option.

We may be straying here, though: this discussion didn't start out with someone saying what someone else should or shouldn't do. We were discussing the ethical and economic consequences of an idea.

[Moomoomoo309]

"My father worked two jobs to have money to throw in the money pit!" - The Onion

I wonder if we were in a post-scarcity world, what we'd think of stuff like this.

[matwood]

The problem is that it's a misallocation of human capital which slows progress for all of society. We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

I agree with you (except in classifying the genuine effort of my fellow people to be "fake jobs" just because a computer can do some of the work) and believe making a resilient, trustworthy, proven system for the former is a prerequisite to withdrawing the latter, to avoid suffering.

Unfortunately for us, the barrier to the former is ideological in nature and imposed by the elite few in power now, before any matters of capital allocation (human or financial) come into play.

[justinrubek]

Nobody has classified genuine effort as fake. But what good is genuine effort when it can be done much more easily without it? There's no shame whatsoever in this. At least, I don't think we should add any to the situation.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> Nobody has classified genuine effort as fake. But what good is genuine effort when it can be done much more easily without it?

This was previously stated: the good being done is 100,000 people can feed their families. What good is going without that? You'll enrich some private equity dudes and make a lot more people unemployed and a lot more families unhappy.

[Muromec]

Or do neither of that and get a proper revolt to learn that lesson again.

[reaperducer]

These are human beings, not human capital.

[throw10920]

Claims handling is fake jobs?

[nradov]

No, but claims processing is already highly automated across much of the insurance industry and the level of automation will only increase in the future.