Robert Dur, Professor of Economics of Incentives and Performance at Erasmus School of Economics, together with Max van Lent, Assistant Professor of Economics at Leiden University, has conducted research on how people see their jobs. With artificial intelligence (A.I.) rising in popularity, about a quarter of the work force in rich countries sees their jobs as potentially pointless.
Dur and Van Lent found that approximately 8% of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17% are doubtful about the usefulness of their job. There are sizeable differences between countries, sectors, occupations, and age groups, but no trend over time. A vast majority of workers cares about holding a socially useful job and we find that they suffer when they consider their job useless.
Dur and Van Lent have also looked into what can be done to reduce socially useless jobs. Mainly, they advise governments to ‘use taxation to discourage employers to create or retain pointless and harmful jobs and encourage them to create socially useful jobs’.
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You can read the full paper from Robert Dur and Max van Lent, 2 May 2018, here.