My experience is that bullshit jobs certainly do exist. Note that it is not necessary for the job to actually be easy to be kind of pointless.
One example I think is quite clean. The EU had (or has) a system where computer games that “promoted European values” developed in the EU were able to get certain (relatively minor) tax breaks. In practice this meant that the companies would hire (intelligent, well qualified, well paid) people to write them 300+ page reports delving into the philosophy of how this particular first person shooter was really promoting whatever the hell “European values” were supposed to be, while other people compiled very complicated data on how the person-hours invested in the game were geographically distributed between the EU and not (to get the tax break). Meanwhile, on the other side of this divide were another cohort of hard-working intelligent and qualified people who worked for the governments of the EU and had to read all these documents to make decisions about whether the tax break would be applied. I have not done the calculation, but I have a sense that the total cost of the report-writing and the report-reading going on could reasonably compete with the size of the tax break itself. The only “thing” created by all those person-hours was a slight increase in the precision with which the government applies a tax break. Is that precision worth it? What else could have been created with all those valuable person-hours instead?
My experience is that bullshit jobs certainly do exist. Note that it is not necessary for the job to actually be easy to be kind of pointless.
One example I think is quite clean. The EU had (or has) a system where computer games that “promoted European values” developed in the EU were able to get certain (relatively minor) tax breaks. In practice this meant that the companies would hire (intelligent, well qualified, well paid) people to write them 300+ page reports delving into the philosophy of how this particular first person shooter was really promoting whatever the hell “European values” were supposed to be, while other people compiled very complicated data on how the person-hours invested in the game were geographically distributed between the EU and not (to get the tax break). Meanwhile, on the other side of this divide were another cohort of hard-working intelligent and qualified people who worked for the governments of the EU and had to read all these documents to make decisions about whether the tax break would be applied. I have not done the calculation, but I have a sense that the total cost of the report-writing and the report-reading going on could reasonably compete with the size of the tax break itself. The only “thing” created by all those person-hours was a slight increase in the precision with which the government applies a tax break. Is that precision worth it? What else could have been created with all those valuable person-hours instead?