The idea is that if most jobs were bullshit, it should be quite easy for a new business to capture market share. There are many people who have the capital and are looking for such opportunities.
This would only be true if the market share of a company is inversely correlated to the number of bullshit jobs in said company. There might be such a link because less money spent on bullshit job salaries means more money available for the marketing budget but it's not at all clear IMO that such a correlation exists and if so, how strong it is. Case in point: We can observe that there are many extremely profitable companies (say, Disney or Oracle) that nonetheless do not have a reputation for being all that bullshit-free.
In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
Among other things this idea ignores (and which other commenters mentioned), there's also time factor. The one thing that's often forgotten wrt. the market.
The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it.
If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing.
(Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.)
In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium
apologies to ask such a naive question, but im trying to understand, what is the basis that it is thought 'a market is "trying" to reach an equilibrium'...
maybe im too hung up on the semantics/wording, but im genuinely curious because in my mind "the market" isnt really "trying" to reach anything.... maybe its agents are (gain a profit, hoodswink someone, make a fair exchange, etc etc)... so in aggregate there may be some result over time, but i find it hard to imagine its trying to reach an equilibrium per se...?
If you read the book, it mostly contends with this idea, that competition is supposed to root out these inefficiencies, and it claims that it doesn't.
Maybe it is intrinsic to human nature, to create these bullshit jobs. In fact, isn't this exactly the same argument against so called "socialism"? That once you have a big government bureaucracy, public sector employees start working for themselves, rather than to serve the public. Well the same is true of big corporate bureaucracies.
Yes that's the theory, yet currently any company with sufficient capital or geopolitical advantage can be an effective market leader, while at the same time operating inefficiently at a loss.
