"We gave up being builders in favor of increasing productivity". Ah, what an ironic statement. Not building increases productivity? What ends up happening is th

"We gave up being builders in favor of increasing productivity". Ah, what an ironic statement. Not building increases productivity? What ends up happening is that if you allow that just the leaves of an administrative tree are builders, then the administration grows at r^2 whereas the workers only grow at r. You can visualize this if you lay out the tree with the root at the center of the circle. Even if 80% of administrative work is mechanical and could be done by a computer (which I think is reasonable), automation still provides only a constant factor which only delays the time at which the worker/admin ratio falls to 0, but does not avoid it. I would guess that the optimum human society capable of mutual defense (IOW, a nation) is something like OOM 1M, in proximity to enough land and water to sustain itself, divided into ~50 institutions of ~10k each. And I would imagine it would be best if there was a council in charge of each institution, effectively in charge of 2nd order issues regarding the programming, and overriding, of computer mediation and management. That describes a society where only a very small fraction of the work is what we would call white collar administration. Consider all the jobs who's net effect on the world is to slightly change the paperwork in 1 or 2 files in an office somewhere, and all the secondary, tertiary jobs that exist to support that goal! That is white collar work too, but I'd not call it an improvement to productivity, but rather an unfortunate side-effect of moribund information systems that people dare not streamline.