Political Memes

It's really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.

Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven't resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.

The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They're run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they're all friends and intermarry with each other's families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.

This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It's the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that's what they do.

This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven't been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.

This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.

Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They've had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.

But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can't employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.

How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We'll just stop wasting most of our labor.