Like many industries, it's a great jobs program for those who would be unable to do anything else (think middle aged insurance peddlers with no technical skills

Like many industries, it's a great jobs program for those who would be unable to do anything else (think middle aged insurance peddlers with no technical skills and poor enough health to be unable to do manual labor jobs). The entire car insurance industry, for example, could easily function with a fraction of its current workforce. We have the statistics on car crashes, we have the statistics on driver demographics. All that's required is to aggregate the data and target some number to achieve, say, 3% economic profit. You could eliminate the jobs of many risk analysts and sales and have the entire industry function without the overhead of having to pay 90% of useless workforce. Is it a cruel way to look at it? Absolutely. Killing jobs is political suicide. But could it be done? The risks are known.