As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much.
Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.
This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive?
Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs.
Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.
Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.
Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.
If being a marketer is a bullshit job, then being a web developer is a bullshit job too.
Most people could spend a week with a marketing book and do some basic marketing. Likewise, most people could spend a week learning WordPress and create a passable website. So let's reduce the number of web developers by 90% too!
Think of the billions it could save in inflated invoices from web agencies (commissioned by clueless marketers).
Let's just reduce all jobs by 90% and make everyone teachers, doctors and street cleaners. I have a really good feeling about this.
Just got finished at a job with small web agency. Most of the businesses we worked with were small enough that they really could get away with learning Wordpress. Hell, most of our projects were just skinning Wordpress and charging clients up the ass for it. I wouldn't call the job bullshit, since a few clients really did need a dedicated team of experts. But it was at least 80% bullshit.
Where are you pulling those numbers from? According to Payscale the median rate for a marketing manager in Germany is €48,785 per year. A senior web developer actually makes €48,896 on average, which is about 100€ more than that.
Now if you want to hire top tier marketing talent (which are most likely consulting or teaching anyways ex. Seth Goding, Dan Kennedy) you might end up spending around that or higher. Hell, their small group seminars cost 27k$ and last 3 days, so I'm just going to go on a hunch here that getting that tier of marketers to write copy for you is going to be very expensive.
And I'm going to disagree further. Marketing is not a "bullshit" job at its base. Say we outlawed it. You're not allowed to tell people about your products. They have to walk into your store and ask about them, and you're only allwed to hand out a datasheet if they ask. What does that do to new products? I'm going to say that if your average joe tries to buy a mobile phone and first has to dig through 20-30 pages of chipset info to find out the features of it, you're not selling any mobile phones anymore. You're asking why you don't just write out the features that matter? Sorry, that's allready in the realm of sales copy. Sharing your enthusiasm about it? Nope, go straight to jail, do not collect 200$. Because that's what good marketers do. They try to understand what they're selling, who they're selling it to, and how to convey their enthusiasm about it to who they're selling it to in order to make a sale.
Now there is the argument that a lot of marketing is annoying, wasteful, ineffective and so are a lot of CRUD apps that have been churned out by fresh behind the ears Java programmers. There's a fair share of programmers that don't know about proper variable naming, splitting things into objects cleanly, designing usable user interfaces, and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of software engineers. And there is a fair share of marketers that don't know about targeting, hooks, blind bullets, cost per customer, tracking, split testing and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of marketing. Should we discount the field as useless because there's a lot of rhinestones to the diamond? Then it'd only be fair to throw programming out of the window with it.
By the way, i'd recommend giving something like the Robert Collier Letterbook a read, he goes through things like how highlighting a single trait in the coal he was advertising saved a mine or how he repeatedly sold the Harvard Classics through using half a dozen of different approaches, or pick up something like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. I personally think that the only Ninja in Tech should be a Marketing Ninja, because when great advertisers sell you, you don't notice it. Well, maybe server admins too, but i digress.
> but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.
I will add another set that is often missed in discussion - electricity, fuel and man-hours. We are heading for a crisis in supply of the former two in part because of wasting a big part of them on those bullshit zero-sum jobs.
There's plenty of fuel around. We will have some upset as we switch sources, but believe it that business will switch to whatever keeps them going at a good price, when push comes to shove.
I'm not sure that people going to jobs is very big deal energy-wise. Isn't smelting steel our largest electricity consumption? Industry uses buttloads of energy; dwarfs what you and I use to heat our houses and run our cars by orders of magnitude.
Bullshit jobs don't exist in a vacuum, they are consumers of goods and services produced by other industries. For instance, I'd wager that most of the print industry serves advertising. All those magazines, leaflets and billboards use horrible amounts of paper, paint, metal and electricity (and all of this is ephemeral, often thrown away without even delivering its message). And of course you need to design it, manage it, transport it, etc.
I think there would be much less need for products from more useful industries if we could cut down on some pointless zero-sum things we're doing. I don't have any numbers in front of me though. It would be interesting to see how much % of resources we actually waste like that.
Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.
This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive?
Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs.
Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.
Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.
Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.