If you track the rise of administrative staff from 1990 to 2020, you see a massive increase. For example, HBR posted that healthcare jobs grew by a total 75% fr

If you track the rise of administrative staff from 1990 to 2020, you see a massive increase. For example, HBR posted that healthcare jobs grew by a total 75% from 1990-2012, and that 95% of that growth was non-medical staff. This growth doesn't really have anything to do with necessary work. It has to do with how incentives function for management. We do not and have never had an economy where everyone is needed for production. In economics, as the marginal increase in utility for a worker goes down you would think that there would be less workers hired, or at least they would be more evaluated prior to hiring. That doesn't take into account the competing incentives of middle and upper management who have no real incentive to increase production efficiency or where that incentive isn't properly balanced against the social and internal gain from having a larger budget and staff within an organization. If you have the ability to hire and gain from hiring people more than you lose from their work being totally unnecessary, you hire. It's not your money you're wasting. Afterwards, you or your new hires will create systems of increasing complexity to justify the continued employment and hiring of new workers.