fred on everything covers where we are and some of how we got here;

Today, FOE will explain economics, fraud, unemployment, and the end of the world. There will no longer be a need for economists, if there ever was. You will understand everything.

FOE is that sort of column.

Long ago, everybody worked on farms, growing food. This was a real service. People wanted food. They liked to eat it. At the same time, there was a tremendous demand for refrigerators and cars. People didn’t know they wanted these things because they hadn’t been invented. But they wanted them anyway.

Then farming automated, so everybody went to work in factories, making the refrigerators and cars, which they now had the money to buy. These products were not as important as food, but reasonably important.

Then the factories automated, so everybody started nail salons or tanning spas. Well, only some started them. But employment followed Fred’s Law of Declining Utility. People who didn’t have nail salons became lawyers, PR executives, professors and diversity consultants. These usually had no utility at all, but they kept their practitioners from being obviously unemployed. This, the prevention of evident pointlessness, became more and more central to the economy. Thus psychotherapy, grief counseling, and pet grooming.

Along the way, there flourished other means of keeping people off the job market without anyone’s noticing. Universities expanded, warehousing in custodial care millions of young who had neither interest in education, the intelligence to undertake it, nor much idea what it was. Then came the student-loan scam, the moral equivalent of sharecropping, that both facilitated students’ isolation from workaday reality . It also provided a steady stream of money for banks..........http://www.unz.com/freed/leisure-unsought-neural-networks-and-other-dramas/