Kulturkampf

[benji]

as someone who worked a fake job in the fake UBI corporate smoke and mirrors world for a long time, I find it hard to disagree.

I’m not sure that the corps are intentionally establishing useless roles and departments, but there’s a lot of mechanisms that support this. As one example, departments have to spend to justify budgets, so they find employees to fill the bucket. Many places have employee reviews that are 100% vibes based, and if you’re not setting the place on fire you can always be useful as a warm body for an on-call rotation during the company wide holiday break.

It’s also why massive layoffs can happen and Microsoft doesn’t delete Windows or whatever. We fired 16% of everyone and…you wouldn’t even have known if we hadn’t told you.

There's two problems to this though. Massive corporate bureaucracies are not most of the economy and for every corporation that bloats endlessly like GE there's an Amazon that ruthlessly forces employees to confirm their value with unending metrics. Bureaucracies by their nature create bloat but they also solve certain problems for large scale decision making. It may be entirely true that there's thousands of employees who on 50 weeks of the year do absolutely nothing for the company, but they may have two weeks of the year where nothing can be done without them. Some companies prefer to keep this inhouse rather than having to pay for outsourcing it.

That's not an "economy" scale problem, that's on the people higher than them within the company to determine if those two weeks outproduce the nothing they get over the other 50 weeks. If the company is immune to this calculus, they probably will not be a competitive company and so will matter even less to the economy. It's a mistake to ascribe it to a system wide problem simply because your company is poorly run enough to have the issue.

Another thing is that layoffs of significant amounts of the workforce were and are normal, but corporations are so big the same percentage now comes out as a large actual number of people which causes people to believe the turnover is not only massive but unique. But it's not, most businesses have regular 10-20% turnover. This isn't a problem with the system, it's the system working as intended, misallocation of resources (either by the company or the employees) leading to a reallocation of them leading to a new misallocation. Only when you know the whole and the goal can you evaluate what a "perfect" allocation would be, for corporate conglomerates this is definitely impossible.

I think it has a lot to do with the too big too fail mentality. If your company is big and retains a lot of employees it's reflected in the share price and an important piece of the economy that the government listens to. 

There is also the part where a lot of women have entered the workforce and they also created new jobs. When you hire a 'manager' that person is going to hire more people to manage and when you hire a woman, especially a feminist one, she's going to hire more women. 
 
On the extreme side is the argument that the modern corporate world is just "jew daycare" to keep women from having babies. 

I think the ultimate goal is consumption though. Women are the biggest consumer group by far. They spend a lot on clothes, they buy the latest iPhones. They have all their heavy stuff like kitty litter delivered and hire the gig economy services like Ubers and Ikea assembly

So your theory is that a bunch of people believe clearly dumb things and despite these things constantly failing they regularly deliberately pursue these in the hopes they'll fail upwards in a system that doesn't reward the dumb things. And that this has manifest across the entire global economy. Since you use the exact same arguments and meme references like Jew daycare as that guy and his replies I have to assume you also agree with the general thrust of his 75% figure. Then you just need to accept you're the same as every Marxist before you.