HFWR
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Re: Increasing uselessness, not sure I can get much more useless...
We are slowly automating ourselves out of a job. We kept ahead of the game until now by increasing education and getting people to use their brains instead of muscles (thankfully). But that road is coming to an end, and pretty fast.
Just to throw one statistic out there: there are 3 million truck drivers in the united states. Likely all of these jobs are going to disappear in the next 30 years or so.
Most of that demographic will not be mentally capable of the new jobs that will be available by then (data scientists, software developers, logistics planners, healthcare professionals ..).
So ... what will you do?
... Swollen bureaucracies popped up to provide the appearance of work while the purported workers did little that would not better have been left undone. Military enterprise soaked up more people doing nothing that should be done. Exotic fighter planes that would never do anything to justify their existence but bomb remote goat-herds absorbed thousands of engineers and hundreds of billions of dollars. The engineers could as well have been paid for digging holes and filling them in, but this was judged unduly candid.
... College graduates began living with their parents and lining up for jobs a Starbucks because there was no need for them anywhere else. Resort was had to outright charity. Thus food stamps, Section Eight housing, free lunches at school, AFDC, and all the other disbursements of free money. Those receiving the free money no longer had any incentive to work even if the opportunity offered. In the cities generation after generation now lived on charity, largely illiterate and in what is never called custodial care. They are simply unnecessary. There is nothing for them to do. So they don’t do anything.
What else can we do?
A lot of the upper class people enjoyed themselves with natural philosophy
... Wouldn't it be great if tax dollars were spent on something more tangible like better roads or bridges? Instead of the many, many things that just keep the masses busy?
Riding horses, hunting things, smoking things, reading things, eating fancy food, and throwing fancy parties.
Probably what a lot of us of small but independent means do today.