The Manufactured Economy

 

The Manufactured Economy: Why a World of Extraction and Scarcity is Always Artificial

The fundamental narrative of modern governance is one of perpetual crisis: housing is scarce, labour is scarce, and essential public services are underfunded. Yet, a deeper examination of the economic structure reveals these crises are not the product of organic failure or natural limits, but are instead a consequence of artificial scarcity and profound labour misallocation driven by bureaucratic bloat and extractive financial models. The current economic system is less a finely tuned engine of productivity and more a fragmented, hijacked ecosystem designed to generate administrative complexity and justify its own ever-expanding existence.

This thesis argues that the central problem is the substitution of utility with complexity. The economy has shifted from valuing tangible production—the actual building, growing, or maintaining of things—to valuing intermediation, compliance, and administration. This shift has led to the creation of entire classes of "bullshit jobs" whose primary purpose is to justify unnecessary fees or manage regulations, ultimately degrading productivity, lowering morale, and creating the illusion that more workers and more capital are needed, thereby justifying politically convenient policies like high immigration and unchecked financialization.

I. The Fragmentation of the Productive Ecosystem

To understand the malfunction of the modern economy, it is useful to view it through the analogy of a natural ecosystem. In a healthy ecosystem, every component is integrated, and resources are recycled and utilized efficiently. A worker performing a task is contributing directly to the necessary outputs of the system.

Historically, this principle of integrated labour was standard practice in demanding industries. For instance, in sectors like meat processing or heavy manufacturing, essential safety duties were not separate, permanent roles but were rotated responsibilities among the core productive crew. The duty of a fire warden, for example, was assigned to a member of the skilled team, trained not only for production but also to act in the case of a divergence or emergency. They were being paid to perform their primary, high-utility job, and only briefly shifted context for the necessary safety function. This model ensures that nearly 100% of a worker’s time is dedicated to productive activity.

The modern economy operates on the opposite principle: fragmentation and specialization. Roles that were once integrated parts of a skilled worker's day are now outsourced, segmented, or regulated into stand-alone administrative positions, often requiring their own separate licence, renewal cycle, and regulatory body. This partitioning of labour creates massive, visible inefficiencies and dramatically reduces the overall utility of the workforce.

The resulting economy is no longer an integrated ecosystem but a collection of isolated, captured segments, each extracting a toll or fee. This setup demands constant monitoring, auditing, and collection, which, in turn, requires more administrators, auditors, and collectors. The administrative function becomes a self-licking ice cream cone, perpetually expanding its remit to justify its payroll.

II. The Anatomy of the "Bullshit Job" and Extractive Fees

The most concrete evidence of this structural malfunction lies in the proliferation of jobs created specifically to manage administrative burdens that generate zero net public utility. These roles are often characterized by high security, decent pay, and profoundly low morale due to the inherent pointlessness of the work—a phenomenon often described as the "boredom tax."

The Racket of Licence Renewal

Consider the bureaucracy surrounding mandatory license renewals for trades or certified skills. An individual worker, such as a forklift operator, requires an initial licence to prove competency. This is necessary and productive. However, the subsequent, regular requirement to renew this license, often for a fee, serves a different purpose. The cost of administering this process—including the salaries, pensions, office space, and IT systems required to track, process, and chase fees—often outweighs the minor revenue the fee generates.

The true function of the renewal fee, therefore, is not to recover the cost of service or guarantee ongoing competency, but to justify the existence of the administrative division dedicated to its management. If the license were made perpetual after initial certification, subject only to disciplinary action for malpractice, the entire administrative department dedicated to renewals would vanish. This is a classic example of creating a low-utility, administrative layer whose purpose is to extract a small toll from productive workers, justifying an entire ecosystem of unproductive roles.

The Stop/Go Sign: Specialization as Waste

A second, highly visible example of extreme labour misallocation is the specialized role of the traffic controller or "Stop/Go" person at roadworks. This function is essential for safety, but its execution is a bureaucratic absurdity.

1. Outsourcing and Extraction: The task is typically outsourced to a third-party middleman company, which inserts itself between the government/council and the productive road crew. This company extracts a profit margin that is baked into the public cost of the road project, creating an unnecessary financial burden.

2. Low-Utility Specialization: The core task—directing traffic or communicating with an opposite number via radio—is a simple, low-skill function. In a productive economy, this task would be certified quickly and rotated hourly or daily among the members of the primary road maintenance crew. The worker’s primary job would be cutting grass, fixing potholes, or laying asphalt, with traffic control being a brief, intermittent duty.

3. The Boredom Tax: Instead, the traffic controller is employed full-time to stand by the sign, often observed standing around, disengaged, or using a mobile phone. They are being paid a full, steady wage for a task that is only functionally required for a small fraction of the day. This is the "boredom tax"—the wasted wages of an artificially specialized role. This disengagement not only wastes capital but also degrades the quality of labour and contributes to the widespread feeling that essential public services (like keeping streets tidy) are neglected. The workers who should be cutting the grass or fixing the roads are instead employed in low-utility, non-productive specialization.

The segmentation of these roles is a profound engine of inefficiency, taking people who could be performing multi-faceted, high-utility jobs and limiting them to roles of passive administration or repetitive safety compliance.

III. The Illusion of Crisis: Housing, Labour, and GDP

The consequences of this bureaucratic fragmentation are the very crises that governments use to justify their ongoing, extractive policies. The crises of housing scarcity and labour shortages are, in large part, an illusion built upon this systemic misallocation.

Housing Scarcity: A Financial Anomaly

The crisis of housing is often framed as a simple issue of supply and demand: population growth outstrips building capacity, necessitating more construction. However, this narrative overlooks the fundamental financial re-orientation of housing.

In the fragmented economy, housing is primarily treated as an asset class for financial speculation—a vehicle for investment and banking—rather than a basic requirement of shelter. This leads to the hoarding of existing stock, speculative inflation of prices, and a massive transfer of wealth from productive workers to the financial sector. The shortage is therefore artificial, driven by the financialization of a necessity. Building more units under this financial framework only provides more assets for speculators, accelerating the extraction cycle without solving the problem of affordability or accessibility for productive workers.

Labour Shortage: The Misallocation Trap

The widespread claim of a domestic labour shortage must be viewed through the lens of bureaucratic misallocation. The workers are not truly absent; they are simply tied up in non-productive roles that the system has created to sustain itself.

If the millions of workers employed in administrative roles across the public and private sectors (estimated in some economies to be over 2.6 million people in the public sector alone) were reallocated to tangible, high-utility jobs—such as infrastructure maintenance, care work, or manufacturing—the perceived labour shortage in key areas would shrink dramatically. The system has simply chosen to finance a massive class of specialized, administrative "gatekeepers" rather than funding the productive "doers."

Furthermore, the disincentive effect, where men in particular "drop out" of the formal system, is a rational response to this economic shift. When a high-status, productive career path is replaced by either an endless, extractive debt cycle (university) or a low-utility, bureaucratic role, the incentive for engagement—especially for those whose self-worth is tied to tangible production—erodes. They retreat, leading to the labour participation decline that is often mistakenly labeled a shortage.

Immigration as the GDP Illusion

This brings us to the political justification for high immigration, which is often presented as the necessary solution to the twin crises of housing and labour.

The political economy of bureaucratic bloat needs a constant increase in the aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to mask declining productivity per capita. The fastest way to increase aggregate GDP is to simply increase the number of consumers and transactional participants in the economy—the "GDP eaters."

High immigration achieves this goal, regardless of the migrants' skill levels or placement. Every new person added to the economy consumes goods, rents property, takes on debt, and uses services, thereby increasing the total volume of economic transactions (GDP). This creates a politically convenient headline of "economic growth" and stability that obscures the structural decay, the ballooning debt, and the fact that the actual quality of life and productivity per person is stagnant or declining.

In this light, immigration becomes a tool to sustain the illusion of growth, allowing governments and the bureaucracy to avoid the painful, politically unpopular structural reforms necessary to transition the economy back to a model based on utility and production.

IV. The Political Economy of Bureaucratic Bloat

The immense size of the administrative class—a system that has experienced consistent, significant growth, particularly in areas like "Public Administration and Safety"—is not accidental. It is the result of a deliberate, or at least self-serving, political mechanism.

The Bureaucracy as Political Patronage

The modern administrative sector acts as a massive form of social welfare and employment patronage for the political establishment. A public sector employing millions of people translates directly into millions of households whose financial security depends on the stability of the governing structure. These jobs are often high-paying, secure, unionized, and come with pensions—a vast, stable middle-class voting base that can be relied upon to resist any political force threatening the status quo.

This mechanism ensures that political parties, regardless of their nominal ideology, are captured by the bureaucratic imperative: they must maintain or grow the bureaucracy to maintain their power base. This explains the absurdity of symbolic efforts, such as announcing cuts of 1,000 jobs when the total public sector workforce is in the millions; these gestures are purely political theatre, designed to appease voters concerned about waste without meaningfully challenging the entrenched administrative structure.

Ideology and Complexity

The nature of modern bureaucracy is often critiqued as favoring complexity and inefficiency. This administrative culture prioritizes detailed processes, elaborate compliance measures, and documentation over practical results—a mindset where the process of governing is more important than the outcome of good governance (e.g., cut grass, functional infrastructure).

The neoliberal shift, which promised deregulation and efficiency, ironically gave rise to new forms of private and governmental bureaucracy ("New Public Management") focused on auditing, reporting, and creating new compliance structures. This created an extractive system where the primary goal became managing costs and risks through complexity, rather than delivering utility through simplicity. This complexity inherently necessitates more administrative personnel, thereby feeding the cycle of bloat.

The workers in these administrative jobs—often observed enjoying the fruits of their stable, tax-funded labour in local cafes—are not malicious; they are simply participating in a structure that rewards complexity and status-quo maintenance. The entire system is structurally designed to reward the act of administering a non-essential function over the act of performing an essential, productive one.

V. Dismantling the Illusion: Structural Reform

The problem is systemic and requires a complete re-orientation of economic incentives, not just minor political adjustments. To transition from a fragmented, extractive economy back to an integrated, productive ecosystem requires breaking the protective shield of the bureaucracy.

1. The Necessity of a Utility Audit

Simple job cuts will always fail because the cuts will fall on productive "frontline" services while the administrative core remains untouched, protected by union agreements and the "safety" narrative.

The essential first step is a mandated, external Utility Audit of every governmental and licensed private role. This audit must be conducted with one criterion: Does this job contribute tangible public utility (build, teach, heal, maintain, or provide essential direct safety), or is its function primarily administration, compliance, or intermediation? The political mandate must commit to reallocating the staff identified as non-essential into productive, hands-on, frontline roles.

2. Eliminating Extractive Revenue Streams

The bureaucracy must be financially starved of its reason to exist. This involves a structural elimination of the fee-for-service model for non-safety-critical, non-revenue-generating licenses.

• Abolish Unnecessary Renewals: End the renewal fee cycle for basic professional competencies (like forklift licenses). Certifications should be perpetual, maintained by industry standards and disciplinary action, not by unnecessary state administration. This immediately eliminates the entire administrative division responsible for managing the recurring cost and paperwork.

• Integrate Low-Utility Duties: Legislate the end of specialized, middleman roles like the full-time traffic controller. Traffic control competency should be a simple, certified module integrated into the primary training for all road crew and labourer roles, making it a mandatory, rotated duty. This frees up labour and removes the middleman’s extractive profit margin from public works projects.

3. Restoring the Dignity of Utility

To change the economic ideology—to make people feel that productive work is once again worth doing—the financial stability and social status of utility-driven jobs must be elevated above the administrative class.

The massive capital and payroll savings recovered from eliminating bureaucratic bloat must be ring-fenced to increase the wages and security of essential, hands-on, productive roles: the street maintenance crews, the infrastructure builders, the trades instructors, and the care workers. This shift sends a powerful signal: society rewards the individual who maintains the roads and keeps the environment clean over the individual who simply collects an unnecessary fee or manages paperwork.

The crises of labour shortage and housing affordability are not inevitable; they are the calculated byproduct of a system that has allowed itself to be hijacked, fragmented, and turned inward on itself. The path to a thriving, productive economy lies in recognizing the artificiality of these scarcities and possessing the political courage to dismantle the bureaucratic anomaly that sustains them.