The central argument about bullshit jobs (the book) was that automation did, in fact, replace a huge number of jobs in the economy. Maybe even as many as were p

The central argument about bullshit jobs (the book) was that automation did, in fact, replace a huge number of jobs in the economy. Maybe even as many as were predicted to be lost in the worst doom and gloom scenarios. Graeber's contention is that we simply watered down the work and spread it around to more and more people. I think that is not too unreasonable to suspect. OTOH, I find it particularly frustrating that we have so many large, structural and environmental problems that we need to solve and so much of the workforce feels that they are accomplishing absolutely nothing. Marx's alienation of labor is conceptually alive and well in today's economy. Sadly, it appears that capitalism has mis-priced the actual resource allocation - workers are complicit with low-value, low-effort jobs, and the market structure will not appropriately reward those willing to tackle "the big problems".