I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those.
But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question?
So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get.
So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc.
An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.
Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected.
The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box.
Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky.
My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. Consumption is easier than creation.
Great job mentioning Skinner boxes. I think this might be another dimension to this pathology: to what extent is our economy a Skinner box?
And you're technically right about classical Puritans. They would regard a lot of what we "do" today as BS make-work, not true work. But I think that distinction has been lost. The "work ethic" is an example of what I call a "zombie idea," an idea missing its head that continues to march on through a culture and eat peoples' brains.
I work in the ad industry. I'd argue that the entire ad industry exists as a skinner box, tweaking settings and turning knobs with the sole goal of having consumers consumer more of their product.
My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend.
This is difficult for me to understand. How can you tell the difference between resting hands (easy to defend, imo), and idle hands?
I'd say the difference is how long they're "resting". Taking a weekend or vacation? Wonderful. Haven't had a job in a year and not really trying to get one? Idle.
I would having a job is only a subset of what not being idle means.
I always divide my time into two basic phases: productive and consumptive. Either you are creating something or you are consuming something. Sitting around watching TV is consuming; creating a tv show would be producing.
I think both activities are valuable and have their place. Sometimes you need to relax and enjoy a passive activity, but what makes society great is the production of new things; be they art, science, entertainment, goods..
I tend not to judge the WHAT of the creative side. It doesn't matter what you create, but the creation of new ideas and things is what makes us human.
That's true. I've been in meaningless make-work jobs before, jobs where I could literally goof off 90% of the time. I left.
A lot of people might think "wow! awesome!" It's not. It's soul-crushing and unbelievably depressing. It doesn't leave you more energy for other things; it saps your energy and makes you feel like shit.
Meaningless make-work is the worst. Having nothing to do isn't so terrible. I can come up with plenty of useful ideas left to my own devices. It's when I have to do busy-work that's bad.
My point was that the job was demonstrably unnecessary. I have seen, from an outside vantage point, entire departments that are wholly unnecessary doing nothing but creating work for other wholly unnecessary departments.
Although I agree not a direct creation of "the ruling class" in the sense of the 1% wealthy, it's interesting to think about the Sociopaths in the classic RibbonFarm posts:
The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
I think there's a degree of truth in that, especially in very bureaucratic organizations, but I think it's orthogonal to this discussion.
I did a stint in business consulting and rubbed elbows with a lot of certified 100% grade-A sociopaths. In my experience they were not deep thinkers or conceptual thinkers, and thus are actually unlikely to hatch deep long-term conspiracies of the sort that would result in an elite agenda to create make-work. They struck me as exceedingly shallow short-term thinkers who do a lot of bullshit posturing and a lot of social climbing. They don't analyze deeply. They look for opportunities for quick ascension via tactics like this:
kind of like an asymptotic line, optimizing for efficiency - we spend more and more time making less and less of a difference. The problem is, with companies the size we have nowadays, even a small percentage improvement leads to runaway success, so every company is incentivized to continue optimizing.
Maybe we should limit the maximum size of a company?
But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question?
So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get.
So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc.
An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.