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“Bullshit jobs” is a terrible, curiosity-killing concept

Plus! Sanction Economics; Exiting; Building Complements; Shares and Votes; Quality Problems; Diff JObs

The big wealth-generating industries tend to be intolerant of this kind of thing; when competition is fierce, it's hard to justify arbitrarily accepting low margins, and when some roles require long hours, it's demoralizing to employ people who are visibly going to shirk. It's a perpetual motion machine: at best, if this employer monopolized all private industry, they'd be able to recapture the after-tax income of the people doing make-work jobs, but even in that extreme example, an easier way for that rich person to maximize their money would be to keep it instead of hiring someone. That process produces specialists whose work has a highly tangential relationship to the finished product; you can't point to any specific feature of an iPhone that can be credited to anyone in Apple's HR, marketing, or finance departments.

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