If you look at corporate employment (the situation of the lower classes is a different matter) people are doing about 5-10 hours of real work per week. Real wor

If you look at corporate employment (the situation of the lower classes is a different matter) people are doing about 5-10 hours of real work per week. Real work is so rare that it's a political token allocated as a favor. If you pay your dues and make your bosses happy, you might get a real project after a couple of years. The rest of that time is spent acquiring and maintaining social status. Under corporatism, you don't get a leisure society. You get total disenfranchisement of those who lose in (increasingly noisy and degenerate, over time) political tussles and end up with "the wrong kind" of resume, and a frenetic but wasteful contest in which those who are still in contention beat the piss out of each other to make themselves eligible for the (dwindling) supply of real projects. When you have such a large number of people with nothing better to do but jockey for social status, you have a lot of cheap labor and it's easy to assign pointless grunt work that doesn't need to be done, and that does little for a person's career or general employability-- and people will do it. That, above, is what happened. Also, read nlawalker's post, because (s?)he nailed it.