> If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.

This is demonstrably not true. I mean, it's tautological. We have the economic surplus to support the unemployed, yet we do not. Therefore, the problem is not the lack of economic surplus.

People have noted this apparent perversity for well over a century, but it seems unlikely to change anytime soon. So the question isn't whether transemployment is preferable to some lower-friction redistribution scheme, but whether transemployment is better than letting those same people starve, or die from opiate addition, or alcoholism, or diabetes, or any of the other methods of benign neglect by which society has found to execute the economically redundant.

Also, I'm not sure that "the entire purpose of work is to create value" really encompasses the role of "work" in American society. The creation of value is, to the worker, often a side-effect, since that value in the capitalist model generally accrues to someone else besides the worker. The purpose of work for most workers is to bring in wages, which are necessary for personal comfort, but more importantly (above a certain level) as chips in a zero-sum game of social hierarchy. Extracting value from labor is the province of the employer; extracting wages from time spent, regardless of value created, is the province of the worker. The capitalist market's labor economy is the resulting intersection.

This is just semantics. Typically wages are valuable--I don't know anyone who is being paid in smiles. Ostensibly when work is done and paid for, value has been created.

The purpose of work for many people is to pay for food, housing, transportation, personal pleasure, etc., not to create value. Most people don't primarily care if their job directly creates value, they just want to comfortably survive and provide for their families.

It's fantastic if your mechanism for surviving creates value for lots of other people. We should strive for that.

Surely comfortable survival and providing for your family are valuable.

Anyone who has spent any time in a poor community knows that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I had access to a lot more workers?"

That's not the question businesses are asking. They're asking, how can I solve this problem as cheaply/efficiently as possible? And the answer is increasingly not human labor.

There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay).

Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution.

The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse.

However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy.

But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either.

However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots?

Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more.

I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.