Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can

Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats. More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.