> I surprised myself by how sympathetic I am to this proposal, given I've made a career in finance. The problem, however, is separating productive from unproductive schemes ex ante.
This is just the finance sector subset of the larger problem of bullshit jobs. We know a substantial fraction of jobs are bullshit (non-value-creating), but which ones? I have a strong suspicion this is unsolvable because any metric you start using to decide which jobs are bullshit will instantly be gamed. The system will work as hard as it can to prevent you from figuring it out, and since it's made of people it is at least as intelligent as you are.
The only foolproof way we know of to reduce the number of bullshit jobs is brutal recession, but unfortunately that also takes a ton of fragile but very innovative and promising things down with it. Recession is a bit like extreme chemotherapy. It might kill some cancer cells but it also kills a shitload of healthy ones and sometimes the treatment ultimately fails because it doesn't kill enough of the former to justify the latter.
Similar principles exist in other areas like advertising. There's a saying in the ad business: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%."
>The only foolproof way we know of to reduce the number of bullshit jobs is brutal recession,
That is a very convoluted way of implementing negative yields.
Because people want to avoid losses associated with negative interests they instead do the inflation thing and pretend there are no losses, the discrepancy between book value and real world value grows ever bigger as the book value is not representing losses in the real economy. The moment sentiment even dares to look at a downward trend poof reality has come back from its slumber. Negative yield is coming out of hiding, all at once.
This is just the finance sector subset of the larger problem of bullshit jobs. We know a substantial fraction of jobs are bullshit (non-value-creating), but which ones? I have a strong suspicion this is unsolvable because any metric you start using to decide which jobs are bullshit will instantly be gamed. The system will work as hard as it can to prevent you from figuring it out, and since it's made of people it is at least as intelligent as you are.
The only foolproof way we know of to reduce the number of bullshit jobs is brutal recession, but unfortunately that also takes a ton of fragile but very innovative and promising things down with it. Recession is a bit like extreme chemotherapy. It might kill some cancer cells but it also kills a shitload of healthy ones and sometimes the treatment ultimately fails because it doesn't kill enough of the former to justify the latter.
Similar principles exist in other areas like advertising. There's a saying in the ad business: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%."