Most White Collar Jobs Are Fake
White collar jobs are primarily about political positioning to capture government privileges and benefits.
I don’t mean that the job doesn’t require any hard work from the person who holds it. I mean that white collar jobs are primarily about political positioning to capture government privileges and benefits. If you’re a farmer, a plumber, or a maid, you’re interfacing directly with the world to create value. Most white collar jobs aren’t geared toward creating value, they’re geared toward scoring points in a game set up by the bureaucracy.
The modern economy produces a huge amount of material wealth, but it is managed by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has set up an elaborate game, and it disperses wealth to people who score highly in the game. The ways to acquire points in the game have very little to do with genuinely productive activity. For example, one way to get a lot of points in the game is to go to college. You get lots of points just for having a degree, even if your classes have nothing to do with the job you get after college.
Lawyers
The legal profession as a whole is a net negative to society. The reason you hire lawyers is because you’re afraid that your enemies will use lawyers to hurt you. You can’t simply ignore lawyers, because the lawyers (and judges, who are all lawyers) control the police force.
In order to join the immensely powerful fraternity of lawyers you must first go through an extensive hazing ritual called Law School. In Law School you read some genuine discussion of the principles of justice. But you also learn a lot of self-serving ideological justifications for the existence of the legal profession, and most importantly, you learn the system of arcane and arbitrary rules. Helping people navigate the system of arcane and arbitrary rules is how you will be able to command a high salary as a lawyer. The more arcane and arbitrary the rules, the harder it will be for commoners to understand and the more your services will be in demand.
Ancient Rome banned lawyers in 204 BC. It made it illegal to receive payment for legal services (although under-the-table payments did happen). Lawyers were looked upon with suspicion for much of history, including in early America. Alexander Hamilton’s first marriage proposal was turned down because the woman’s father would not permit his daughter to marry a lawyer.
In ancient times the role of the judge was to use his conscience and judgment to arrive at the most just outcome. But the Anglo-American judiciary has long since abandoned even the pretense of seeking justice. Judges in the Anglo-American system don’t make the ruling which they think is the most just, they are required to rule based on precedent, which is a mass of arcane and largely arbitrary rules.
Doctors
Unlike lawyers, doctors to produce something of value. But the primary reason doctors command high salaries is not because of the value they produce, it’s because they have a lot of points in the bureaucratic game. Med school and residency give you a lot of points, but they’re mostly unnecessary. If you’re a doctor and you’re skeptical of that claim, try looking at it this way. Suppose we learn tomorrow that there will be a huge disaster in the next few years and to deal with this disaster we will need to have 20x more doctors than we have now. You are asked to lead an emergency training program to train as many new doctors as possible. Would you really need 11 years to train an emergency doctor who’s 90% as good as a regular doctor? 4 years of college plus 4 years of med school plus 3 years of residency is 11 years. If you think you’d only need 2 years to train someone to be 90% as good as a regular doctor, then you agree that most medical training is waste. If someone could become 90% as good as a regular doctor, then people might be willing to pay about 90% of a regular doctor’s salary to be treated by them. If that person took only 2 years of training rather than 11, that’s a great deal. It makes no economic sense to train for 11 years. Most people would be better off if they could pay a much lower price to see doctors who had only trained for 2 years.
The reason why medical training takes so long isn’t that you actually need that much time to learn everything, it’s because you have to check the boxes. You need to get the credential in order to be allowed to practice medicine.
The economic term for this kind of waste is signalling. In “The Case Against Education” Bryan Caplan conclusively shows that most of the value of a college degree is signalling. The smoking gun: people with college degrees do earn more than people without college degrees, but most of the increase in salary comes from the final (graduation) year. People who take 3 years of college and leave without graduating (rather than 4 years and graduation) don’t get 75% of the benefit of a college degree, they get about 0% of the benefit of a college degree. That shows that the salary increase associated with college doesn’t come from skills learned during coursework, it all comes from the credential.
Tech and Engineering
Software engineering is an exception. It is a white collar job that actually does produce value. Not at all coincidentally, this is the occupation for which credentials matter the least. If you’re an excellent coder and you have a github presence, you can get a high paying job. If you know everything there is to know about medicine but you don’t have a medical degree, getting a job as a doctor is impossible.
Business
I’m sure there are many productive areas of business. There are also many unproductive ones. I used to work for a multinational corporation which created web portals for the government. My team spent more than a year producing a web portal for the US Treasury which handled the massive amount of paperwork they dealt with for a single Treasury program. Here is how we made money (i.e. how we got points in the bureaucratic game).
The government mandates a lot of arcane paperwork.
It is difficult for government workers to handle all this paperwork
The government hires the company I work for to build a web portal to handle the paperwork.
So the work was real to us (it took effort) and it was valuable to the stakeholder (the government employees were glad to have a system to handle some of the workload for them) but it created no net value to society. If the government hadn’t created arcane paperwork requirements in the first place, my job would not have been necessary. I wasn’t producing anything valuable for society, I was just collecting points in the bureaucratic game.
Shortly before I left the company, they called an all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings were very rare events, so I thought it must be for something they thought was very important. First the HR people who organized the meeting told us about the company’s “social responsibility” to stop climate change. Next, they introduced a gay Jew from the CDC who they were hiring to be a new vice president. He told us how he was really gay and he’d been one of the first gay men to be legally married and how he was just so proud to be gay. Literally the only things he told us about himself was that he was gay and he’d worked for the CDC. They were explicit about the fact that he was being hired because they hoped his connections at the CDC would help us get more federal contracts.
College Professor
The vast majority of college professors are government employees. Some of them do valuable work, but the vast majority are just being paid by the government to do fun intellectual stuff. In a way, Academia probably pacifies the smartest people in society by buying them off. Why build alternative power centers that could compete with the regime if you can get a handsome salary just to pursue your intellectual hobby all day?
Office and Administrative Support
Mostly pointless paperwork created by unnecessary regulations (healthcare for example).
However, I would state that many software jobs are utterly pointless. "Pair Programming" and "scrum" can lead to a team of unintelligent developers arguing for an entire workday about the color of buttons on a website section the customers did not ask for. To understand the incentive for such meaningless positions, I strongly recommend this article from Professor Axlerod:
https://www.professoraxelrod.com/p/the-tech-job-meltdown
It’s such an odd paradox because normally HR produces more value for organizations than the HR payroll takes, but it only does so because employment law exists. If you repealed all employment laws you could lay off the entire HR department, and I could transition into something that produces value from society. Instead, I work in HR to prevent the government from siphoning money from the government, to give to employees that don’t deserve it.