Well, automation optimized away most need for physical work. Information technology and economies of scale optimized away a lot of thinking. So, the only driving factor behind many jobs is now the power dynamics.
Power is when you can tell another person to change and they are forced to do as you tell them. So, the more power-driven your corporate ladder becomes, the more useless jobs it creates. The whole purpose of those jobs is to please the boss and contribute to their feeling of power. The actual economic output of the job can be zero, or negative, as long as is produces "power output" to the next level of management.
Normally, when companies are forced to compete against each other, playing the power ladder too much makes you uncompetitive, so you are forced to bring merit back on the table. Except, the zero interest rates of the whole decade and the uncontrolled mergers have mostly destroyed this. So yeah, unemployment is low now, but every job sucks and people are miserable.
Automation helps, but there are plenty of jobs requiring physical labor. They’re often low paid from a worker’s perspective and very pricey from a retail customer’s perspective. Consider child care. Often this isn’t about middlemen taking profits, but rather because the work doesn’t scale and people expect pay similar to industries that do scale.
Office work often is in industries that scale very well and they can afford to be less efficient.
Power is when you can tell another person to change and they are forced to do as you tell them. So, the more power-driven your corporate ladder becomes, the more useless jobs it creates. The whole purpose of those jobs is to please the boss and contribute to their feeling of power. The actual economic output of the job can be zero, or negative, as long as is produces "power output" to the next level of management.
Normally, when companies are forced to compete against each other, playing the power ladder too much makes you uncompetitive, so you are forced to bring merit back on the table. Except, the zero interest rates of the whole decade and the uncontrolled mergers have mostly destroyed this. So yeah, unemployment is low now, but every job sucks and people are miserable.