di Robert Jameson
It’s time to face up to the simple, obvious problem that stands like a devouring colossus over our economy, smothering progress and thus blighting our future: the massive and nonsensical waste of millions of people.
Am I talking about unemployment? Alas, no. Unemployment is indeed a very serious waste of resources. When millions are unemployed, the main problem is not, as many people see it, the welfare money that has to be paid to the unemployed. This is trivial compared to the real cost; the appalling waste of resources that unemployment represents. When people want to be working, want to be doing something useful, but aren’t able to, we miss out on the goods and services those people could have produced. Alternatively, the rest of us could share our work with them, work fewer hours and have more leisure time.
Unfortunately, however, even the waste of unemployment is dwarfed by the waste I’m referring to. I’m referring to the waste of millions of people who arein employment.
The unacknowledged fact (pretty much universally ignored or even denied by politicians of almost all persuasions) is that, in many supposedly advanced economies (such as the UK, where I live) there are literally millions and millions of people who are employed predominantly in tasks which are of little or no economic value and which provide little or no benefit at all to society. Indeed, many of them are actually employed to perform tasks that do considerable damage to our economy and our society. Even many people who do perform useful tasks do them so inefficiently that it is debatable whether they actually provide any net benefit to society.
At first thought, this may seem difficult to believe, especially for politicians. Politicians on the right tend to want to believe that the market is almost perfect and that anyone employed in business must be doing a useful job. Politicians on the left tend to assume that anyone in the public sector is providing a “valuable public service.” Unfortunately, both groups are woefully wrong. Both public and private sectors are deeply involved in this shameful waste of people’s talents, time and effort.
So where are these wasted people? The answer is: Almost everywhere. Countless thousands of them work for central or local government, pointlessly interfering with and obstructing people in their lives, administering unnecessary regulations or inventing new ones. In the private sector, many thousands of people work in marketing, often dreaming up new ways to convince us to buy things that don’t actually do us any good. Others work in customer services, fobbing off people with genuine complaints. Then there are cold-callers, lawyers, accountants, administrators, telesales people, local councillors, middle-managers, executives and, of course, the infamous bankers and financial traders.
I’m not attacking the concept of a useful middle-manager, marketing person, administrator or banker — some such people are performing useful functions, and some may even perform them efficiently, but millions of them do no such thing.
The simple truth is that many people earn money without their work providing any substantial net benefit to society. Many of them perform functions which actually work against society’s best interests.
Every adult, surely, has some kind of personal experience of the waste I am referring to. If you’ve never had to deal with a pointless, obstructive bureaucrat or an incompetent boss or a dishonest salesman or a totally unhelpful customer services representative, then either you routinely avoid contact with anyone you don’t know or you’ve been extraordinarily fortunate.
I’m not trying to blame the individual workers involved. Many of them are struggling through, trying to do the best for their families. Perhaps they know they are doing little of value, or perhaps they can’t face going to work in the morning unless they manage to convince themselves that the job they do is, in some way, vitally important. In most cases, they are just trying to hold down a job and bring home a wage.
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