NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have - customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and so on. They do not solve a real problem but a fake problem created by inefficient institutions. They therefore do not make our society better off but rather they represent a great cost to society - of many people's time being expended on something fundamentally pointless instead of something worthwhile. One way of spotting such anti-jobs is to compare staffing in the same industry across different countries. US supermarkets employ people just to greet customers and bag groceries, for example, which would seem a ridiculous waste of time in most of the world. In Japan one can find people standing in front of road construction waving a flag (they are replaced with mechanical manikins on nights and weekends).

Another way to spot anti-jobs is to to observe the effects of Covid restrictions and look for areas where removing workers or tasks made no impact on performance, or even improved it. Take waiters. In America there are around 2 million people doing this job (1.4% of all employment). The experience of Covid lockdowns shows that much of what waiters do can be done better by pasting a QR code to tables for customers to scan to visit the menu webpage and order and pay directly. Having learned this, it would be ridiculous to go back to employing people to waste their time and their customers' by doing such fundamentally needless work. We still need some waiters to bring the food and drink we ordered (for now), but we don't need nearly as many because we don't need to employ people to ask us what we want and then tell someone else to make it.

I. Waiters are Bad at their Job

The point of going to a restaurant is to enjoy a nice meal in good company. The people you want to interact with are the ones you brought with you. Unless you are rather odd, your interactions with waiters are merely of the instrumental kind - they are merely a means to get food and drink brought to the table. If there were a better way to get served you should take it. And the fact is that relying on waiters is a major hassle and a distraction from the meal and the company you chose. In Europe they tend to leave you alone, but then when you do want something you have to interrupt your conversation to try to find one. In North America they are constantly interrupting your conversation in an effort to insert their unctuous willingness to please into your memory for when you calculate their tip.

This hassle is not only annoying but actually quite expensive because human interaction is a friction that slows everything down and adds to the costs of going out. It is notably quicker as well as easier to get food in places that use QR ordering (or variations on it, such as ipad menus). At the same time, those restaurants don't need as many staff to serve the same number of customers. Lower costs for operating a restaurant show up as lower prices for customers, which means more people can afford an (improved) experience of going out for dinner. In turn that means more restaurants and more jobs in those restaurants. (It's like what happened with ATMs. They made it cheaper to operate bank branches so the number of branches went up and the total number of bank teller jobs actually rose.)

There may have been a time when computing power was so scarce that it made economic sense to pay an actual person to act as an information retrieval device, telling you from memory what was available and answering your questions about it (allergies and substitutions and so forth). But now that nearly everyone under 65 (and most over 65s) has a smartphone this scarcity no longer exists.

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