Quoted from an interview with Ian Welsh by Jay Ackroyd. File this under "echo chamber" because i'm not sure Welsh, a pretty radical Scottish politician, is bringing any new data to the discussion, but i agree with his sentiment (as per my previous posts like this and this) that we're doing a poor job of sharing the productivity gains of the modern economy.

...why do we distribute surplus through jobs? All right, why do you need a job in order to survive, right? I mean the fact of the matter is 80% of the population could stop doing what they do tomorrow and all the food would still get produced, and all of the goods would still get produced. About 60% of the population does nothing but shuffle numbers at this point. What they're doing is keeping track of who owns what, right? The actual productive labor in the economy is remarkably little.

Full interview is audio-only. Annoyingly inefficient!