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Comment by robotresearcher | Hacker News Reader

The years before covid, unemployment was at historic lows.

The way unemployment is measured both practically and in the abstract (a PhD working as a cleaner is still employed) too subtle for a blanket dismissal like that.

No doubt it is complicated. Yet I was replying to a claim that there is not enough work, presented with no evidence or argument, that contradicts the most basic employment statistic. I think the burden is on the original claim.

Not really - I think you missed the point of the original claim, it wasn't meant to be interpreted literally. In this case, "not enough work" does not translate to "not enough jobs". It translates to tons of useless jobs that employ people to count beans and create powerpoint presentations.

Perhaps the original claim would've been better phrased as "not enough real/useful/impactful work".

Not everyone who has a job is doing all that much work. Even within a particular company you can have too many people and not enough work.

Of course, one could always create their own work by looking for opportunities to create value for their employer, but IMO it's rarely incentivized.

Which supports the hypothesis that many people who don't need to be working nevertheless are.

Well, they're pretending to. If you're going to be doing nothing all day, you might as well get paid for it. Especially if you're "working" from home.

People being employed doesn't imply that they aren't working jobs which needn't exist.

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