Last week I was in New York and I was struck by how many people seemed to work in very unproductive jobs. You would think that America's economy would be one of the most efficient given that it's the largest economy in the world and that it would be difficult to find easy way to increase productivity. To me though it seems that many work in jobs which could easily and more cheaply be replaced with a sign. For example, if you walk around Times Square there will be plenty of people directing you to various businesses. Do those people increase sales more than having a sign directing tourists to the business would? If so then that would free up those people to work more productive jobs elsewhere. The best example of such an inefficiency was at a Burger King where a man told customers to order downstairs if they wanted take away and upstairsif they wanted to eat in. To me there's no reason that function couldn't have been filled by a sign, freeing up that man to do something productive and letting him work a job where he'd get more satisfaction.
So far I've mainly complained about economic inefficiencies but I want to dedicate this section to the people who are stuck working such seemingly meaningless jobs. Some socialist theories believe that working is an important part of life and that people derive pride and a sense of meaning from your work but that can't possibly be true if you're no more than a human signpost. Who would ne excited to go to work if your superiors give you such meanial and meaningless tasks? To me this seems to be due to low wages. When labour is cheaper than capital why not hire someone to direct people instead of investing in a sign? This is not neccesarily a problem, but if minimum wages were more in line with minimum wages in northern Europe you'd probably see less people in those sorts of jobs. You could always make the argument that a job is better than none and that hiring is beneficial to the individuals hired and the economy at large as they gain an income. This is true. Perhaps raising minimum wages isn't feasible due to how the American political economy is structured and it might lead to a higher structural unemployment. It just seems a waste to have people working in low income unproductive jobs for someone who's used to how northern Europe works.
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