Why Do Valueless Jobs Command Salaries? Shattering the 'Salary = Proof of Value' Illusion and the Empirical Evidence That Society Runs Without Banks, Bureaucrats, and Middlemen

Even readers who logically understand our structural thesis—that up to 90% of modern white-collar and administrative jobs produce zero net social benefit (Δ = 0)—often find themselves pulled back by one persistent, intuitive doubt when looking at the real world:

"Still, the people doing those jobs are getting paid proper salaries every month. If profit-seeking companies and governments keep paying them good money, doesn't that prove their work must have some real value?"

Let us state it plainly: this assumption—that "receiving a salary is proof that a job creates value"—is the single greatest cognitive bug keeping modern citizens mentally enslaved to bullshit jobs.

In this essay, we discard subjective sociological surveys about "personal fulfillment" and dissect the exact economic mechanisms by which zero-value (or net-negative) jobs continue to command high salaries. Furthermore, we present hard empirical and historical evidence demonstrating that even at the macro level—across entire industries like commercial banking, municipal government, and brokerage middlemen—if these institutions vanished tomorrow and were replaced by code and open protocols (such as Bitcoin or automated registries), after a brief transitional adjustment, society would function without the slightest problem—and at a fraction of the cost.

💡 Core Summary in 3 Minutes (5 Key Takeaways)

1. "Getting Paid = Creating Value" Is a Reversed-Causality Illusion: A salary is not necessarily a reward for producing positive value (Δ > 0). You can also collect a handsome salary simply by erecting an artificial "tollbooth" (via legal regulation, licensing monopoly, or bureaucratic rules) across a public road and splitting the compulsory tolls (economic rents) extracted from passersby.

2. Subjective Surveys Are Garbage; Measure "Functional Replaceability" Instead: Sociological studies (e.g., Soffia et al., 2022) rely on asking workers, *"Do you feel your job is socially useful?"* Because highly paid bankers and bureaucrats rationalize their own existence to protect their status and ego, subjective surveys miss the real parasites. The only valid scientific metric is objective functional replaceability: *If this task, firm, or entire industry were replaced by code or protocol, would society continue to function after a brief transitional friction?*

3. Hard Evidence That Banking Is a Parasitic Tollbooth: NYU Professor Thomas Philippon's 130-year empirical study proved that despite IT revolutions reducing information processing costs to near zero, the unit cost of financial intermediation (~2%) has not fallen since the 1880s. Moreover, during the 1970 Irish Bank Strike, all banks shut down for six months, yet the economy continued to grow as citizens spontaneously cleared credit peer-to-peer. Remittance and settlement can be completely replaced by Bitcoin and P2P protocols.

4. City Halls, BPO Cartels, and Middlemen Are Artificially Engineered Make-Work: Estonia's decentralized X-Road infrastructure and "Once-Only" law automated 99% of public administration, eliminating counter clerks and manual form verification. Municipal clerks, BPO contractors, real estate/insurance brokers, and routine tax/legal preparers get paid only because databases are deliberately kept fragmented and laws are written like spaghetti code to force human intervention.

5. Their Salaries Are Not "Pay for Production," but "Disguised Welfare": Why aren't replaceable industries abolished? Because replacing tens of millions of white-collar workers with code overnight would force them to confront the truth that they produced nothing, triggering mass unemployment and political revolt. Their paychecks are conditional basic income (disguised welfare) paid in exchange for sitting in an office eight hours a day and performing bureaucratic rituals to preserve social order.

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1. Why Do Zero-Value Jobs Command Real Salaries? Dissecting the "Salary = Value" Illusion#

Why do people instinctively believe that if someone receives a steady paycheck, their work must be valuable? Because they unconsciously accept the naive textbook myth of neoclassical economics: that in a market economy, wages equal the marginal productivity of labor (the value added to society).

If markets had zero regulatory barriers, zero information asymmetry, and instant, frictionless EXIT to alternative protocols, organizations paying people to do useless work would indeed go bankrupt. However, the real economy governed by state-corporate cartels operates on the exact opposite principles.

In reality, the money used to pay salaries originates from three fundamentally different mechanisms:

The Road Builder vs. The Tollbooth Gatekeeper#

To grasp this distinction intuitively, consider a simple parable.

A team of construction workers builds a paved highway connecting two towns. Their labor creates indisputable physical utility (Mechanism 1: Productive Value) by reducing travel time and enabling trade.

The next day, however, a group connected to political authorities arrives and erects a tollbooth and a physical barrier right across the middle of the highway. They enact a rule (or corporate regulation) stating: *"For safety verification and ledger reconciliation, every vehicle must come to a complete stop, submit a paper form in triplicate, receive an official stamp, and pay a 500-yen toll."*

Soon, dozens of diligent staff are hired to operate this tollbooth:

• Counter clerks who visually inspect paper forms for missing signatures
• Accounting staff who count the 500-yen coins and type them into a spreadsheet
• Middle managers who schedule shifts and hold weekly KPI meetings
• Subcontracted IT vendors paid millions each year to maintain the tollbooth's legacy software

Every morning at 9:00 AM, these employees commute in neat suits, work diligently, process thousands of forms, receive a proper monthly salary, support their families, and pay their mortgages.

Now ask yourself: Does the fact that these tollbooth workers are diligently working and receiving a steady monthly salary prove that their job creates social value?

Absolutely not. Their salaries are not derived from value they created; they are funded by parasitic rents extracted by artificially blocking a road that people could otherwise travel non-stop. If the entire tollbooth organization vanished tomorrow and the barrier were permanently raised, travelers would reach their destinations faster and 500 yen richer. Social welfare would not fall—it would surge.

From an economic standpoint, the vast majority of what "hard-working, salaried professionals" do inside commercial banks, city halls, BPO contractors, brokerage firms, and corporate headquarters is indistinguishable from that tollbooth gatekeeper.

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2. Subjective Surveys Are Garbage: Measure "Objective Functional Replaceability"#

Since David Graeber published *Bullshit Jobs* in 2018, sociologists and labor economists have attempted to test his claims empirically.

Yet mainstream academic studies (such as Soffia, Wood, & Burchell, 2022 using the European Working Conditions Survey, or Dur & van Lent, 2019 analyzing 47 countries) suffer from a fatal methodological flaw. They rely on subjective self-reporting surveys, asking workers: *"Do you feel your job is socially useful?"* Finding that only 5% to 20% of workers answer "rarely or never," these researchers concluded that bullshit jobs are relatively rare—and noted that bankers, bureaucrats, and corporate lawyers almost always report that their jobs are highly meaningful, whereas assembly-line workers and cleaners feel the most alienated.

Some academics actually cited this to claim that finance and bureaucracy are not full of bullshit jobs. This is a textbook example of academic gullibility.

Why the Biggest Parasites Always Believe They Are Essential#

If sanitation workers, logistics drivers, or power-grid technicians vanished tomorrow, cities would drown in waste and civilization would halt within days. Their work is 100% objectively essential. When they report low meaning on surveys, they are expressing *Marxian alienation* (low autonomy, harsh conditions, low pay)—not functional uselessness.

Conversely, if you ask a banker earning \$150,000 a year structuring regulatory arbitrage, or a bureaucrat drafting subsidy application guidelines, *"Is your job essential to society?"*, 100 out of 100 will puff out their chests and answer "Yes!" Human psychology is governed by cognitive dissonance reduction: the higher the salary and prestige attached to a position, the more fiercely the occupant's brain invents elaborate jargon and self-justifications to convince themselves that society would collapse without their stamp.

Recent organizational research on "Functional Stupidity" (Alvesson & Spicer), "Sludge" (Cass Sunstein's quantification of administrative friction), and the Generative AI Bullshit Paradox—where senders use AI to generate 20-page reports in ten seconds, and recipients use AI to summarize them back into three bullet points—confirms how organizations endlessly manufacture self-referential busywork while participants insist they are doing vital work.

Therefore, to identify bullshit jobs scientifically, we must ignore workers' subjective feelings and apply a single cold, objective standard: Functional Replaceability.

[Definition of Objective Functional Replaceability]

Suppose a task, a department, a corporation, or an entire macro-industry were abolished tomorrow and replaced by open-source code or a direct peer-to-peer protocol. Once the initial transitional confusion settles, do the core societal functions of production, settlement, and daily life continue to operate smoothly?

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If the answer is YES (society runs fine, or runs vastly faster and cheaper), then no matter how busy those workers are or how much money they are paid today, their jobs are objectively 100% replaceable bullshit jobs.

Let us apply this scalpel to the largest sacred cows of modern employment.

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3. [Empirical Evidence #1: Banking & Finance] How Bitcoin and Natural Experiments Expose the Redundancy of Bankers Worldwide#

Citizens are conditioned to believe that "without banks, payments would freeze and the global economy would collapse." Yet **needing the *function* of payment and credit settlement is completely different from needing *banks and bankers*.** Two landmark pieces of empirical evidence prove that the bulk of the modern banking apparatus is a redundant intermediary cartel.

Evidence A: Thomas Philippon's Proof of the Unchanging 2% Parasitic Spread (1880–2010s)#

In a landmark study published in the *American Economic Review* (2015), New York University economist Thomas Philippon measured the unit cost of financial intermediation in the United States over 130 years, from the 1880s to the 2010s.

In the 1880s, finance relied on horse-drawn carriages, paper ledgers, and human clerks calculating by hand. Over the next century, telephones, mainframes, the internet, and fiber optics reduced the technical cost of recording and transmitting information by orders of magnitude.

Naturally, the cost of intermediating capital should have plummeted. Instead, Philippon discovered a stunning anomaly:

• The unit cost extracted by the financial sector to intermediate \$1 of capital into the real economy remained virtually unchanged at roughly 1.5% to 2% for 130 straight years.

Why did a century of computing revolutions fail to make finance cheaper for society? Because every dollar saved by information technology was captured internally by the financial cartel—consumed by zero-sum high-frequency trading games, complex derivatives churning, regulatory compliance rituals, and sky-high compensation for bankers.

Evidence B: The 1970 Irish Bank Strike (A 6-Month Total Closure Natural Experiment)#

What happens if a modern country's commercial banks actually shut down? History already ran the experiment.

From May to November 1970, a labor strike shut down approximately 85% of all commercial bank branches in Ireland for six and a half months. Cash withdrawals, check clearing, and bank lending froze. Economists predicted immediate economic collapse.

Instead, as documented by Oxford economist Anthony Murphy and Central Bank of Ireland researchers, the Irish economy did not collapse—it continued to grow normally throughout the strike.

How? The moment the centralized banking tollbooth vanished, Irish citizens and businesses spontaneously formed a decentralized peer-to-peer credit clearing network. People endorsed checks directly to one another as circulating media of exchange, and over 11,000 local pubs and retail shops acted as decentralized trust nodes, using their direct local knowledge of customers to clear checks and provide liquidity. For half a year, without bank clerks or headquarters, commerce and payroll functioned smoothly.

Complete Replaceability via Bitcoin and Open Protocols#

If citizens in 1970 could route around a total banking shutdown using paper checks in pubs, consider how trivial replacement is today with cryptographic protocols.

Why does an international bank transfer (via SWIFT and correspondent banking) still take days and cost exorbitant fees? Because banks maintain isolated, proprietary legacy ledgers that require bucket-brigade reconciliation and manual compliance checks across multiple intermediary institutions.

If the world replaced legacy bank payment rails with Bitcoin (and instant settlement layers like the Lightning Network) or open smart-contract protocols, there would be a temporary transitional shock as legacy fiat credit claims repriced. Yet the core monetary function—24/7/365 global value transfer, self-custody, and programmable settlement—operates with mathematical certainty without a single bank teller, compliance officer, or megabank skyscraper. Even the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has admitted in its own multi-CBDC trials that distributed ledgers render correspondent banking middlemen obsolete.

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4. [Empirical Evidence #2: City Halls & Public Administration] How Estonia's "X-Road" Proved 99% of Bureaucratic Clerical Work Is Redundant#

Alongside bankers, municipal civil servants—and the massive BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) and IT contractor cartels attached to them—are the prime example of people who "look like they are doing essential work because they process documents all day and collect steady salaries."

Look closely at what actually happens inside a typical municipal office:

1. A citizen fills out a paper form (or a clunky web form) with their name, address, income, and family status, attaching paper certificates obtained from another window in the same building.
2. A clerk (or outsourced temp worker) visually inspects the paper for missing fields.
3. The clerk manually re-types the numbers from the paper into a separate terminal and checks whether the applicant meets statutory If-Then rules (*"If household income < X and children = Y, disburse Z"*).
4. The document is routed through three layers of supervisors for approval stamps before a bank transfer file is generated.

There is zero uniquely human judgment here. It is 100% deterministic If-Then conditional logic and database lookup.

Evidence: Estonia's 99% Automated State#

The Baltic nation of Estonia proved at a national scale that municipal paperwork is an artificial fabrication. By building the X-Road decentralized data-exchange layer and legally enforcing the Once-Only Principle (forbidding any government agency from asking a citizen for information already recorded anywhere in the public sector), Estonia achieved the following:

• 99% of all public services operate online and automatically 24/7.
• When a child is born, the hospital's digital record automatically triggers child benefit and parental leave payments—parents never visit city hall or fill out a single application form (proactive governance).
• Tax filing is pre-populated automatically and takes under three minutes.
• Estonia permanently eliminated administrative sludge equivalent to roughly 2% of GDP every year.

Why Japanese Municipalities and BPO Cartels Deliberately Preserve Broken Systems#

In contrast, why do Japanese ministries and 1,700+ local governments employ hundreds of thousands of clerks and spend trillions of yen outsourcing benefit payouts to staffing giants (like Pasona), ad agencies, and IT general contractors to print envelopes, mail paper forms, and visually check returned documents?

Because if they unified databases and wrote laws as clean, executable code (Rules as Code), the justification for their budgets, executive posts, and subcontracted BPO empires would evaporate overnight. The mountains of paperwork processed in city halls do not exist to serve citizens; the paperwork is artificially engineered as an alibi to keep paying salaries to bureaucrats and contractors.

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5. [Empirical Evidence #3: Private-Sector Middlemen, Multi-Tier Subcontractors, and Routine Licensing Cartels]#

"Even if government and banking are protected by regulation," some argue, "surely private-sector salaries reflect genuine market value?"

On the contrary, vast swathes of the private sector consist of information-asymmetry parasites that would vanish after a brief adjustment if replaced by open protocols:

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6. Why Aren't Replaceable Jobs Eliminated? Collective Action and "Disguised Welfare"#

This brings us to the ultimate question: If banks, city halls, brokerages, and corporate back offices can be replaced by Bitcoin, automated protocols, and AI with zero loss of real function, why hasn't society replaced them already?

Two politico-economic laws explain why these jobs are fiercely protected:

Reason 1: Mancur Olson's *Logic of Collective Action* (Asymmetric Rent Defense)#

As economist Mancur Olson proved, the benefits of eliminating institutional waste are diffused thinly across millions of citizens, whereas the losses of abolition are concentrated acutely on the specific cartel whose salaries depend on that waste.

If replacing banking and municipal clerical cartels with code saves 100 million citizens \$500 a year each (\$50 billion in total social gain), no individual citizen will quit their job to lobby parliament for \$500. Meanwhile, the banking lobby, civil service unions, BPO contractors, and licensing associations facing a \$50 billion revenue wipeout will spend billions in political donations and organized votes—screaming about *"security," "human touch," "protecting the vulnerable,"* and *"compliance"*—to block any protocol that makes them obsolete.

Reason 2: Employment as "Disguised Welfare" (Implicit Basic Income to Prevent White-Collar Revolt)#

There is an even deeper taboo. Suppose tomorrow morning we replaced 90% of banking clerks, municipal bureaucrats, middlemen, and corporate administrators with Bitcoin, Estonian-style automated registries, and AI agents.

In terms of real societal function (payments, logistics, production, administration), after a few weeks of transitional friction, the world would run smoothly and far more efficiently.

However, while the economy's functions would survive, its political order would implode. Tens of millions of university-educated white-collar workers—who woke up every day believing they were respectable middle-class contributors earning a meritocratic salary—would suddenly be forced to confront the brutal truth: "Your job was completely replaceable by a few lines of code, and you were producing zero net value for society."

Modern states harbor a deep ideological taboo against handing cash directly to people who do not work (unconditional basic income or welfare). Yet throwing tens of millions of white-collar workers onto the street would trigger immediate political revolution. Therefore, the state and large corporations maintain a grand institutional charade:

[The True Nature of Modern White-Collar Salaries]

*"If we simply hand people \$3,000 a month in welfare for doing nothing, taxpayers will revolt and recipients will lose their self-respect. Instead, let's deliberately keep laws, tax codes, banking rails, and corporate approvals complex and fragmented. Let's manufacture millions of artificial administrative seats, require people to sit in offices in suits for eight hours a day stamping forms and attending meetings, and pay them that \$3,000 a month under the label of a 'salary.' That way, they can pretend they are productive earners, official unemployment stays low, and political stability is preserved."*

That is why valueless jobs pay real salaries. What those workers receive every month is not compensation for productive output—it is disguised welfare (a conditional basic income) paid in exchange for performing eight hours of daily bureaucratic theater.

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7. Three Counterfactual Tests to Shatter the Illusion—and How to EXIT#

Once you see this mechanism, you can never again look at a busy office building or government agency and think, *"They get paid, so their work must be valuable."*

To determine whether any job—including your own—creates genuine value or merely collects tollbooth rents and disguised welfare, apply these Three Counterfactual Tests:

1. [Test 1: The Barrier Removal Test (Removing Coercion)]

If all legal mandates, licensing monopolies, database lock-ins, and internal approval rules were repealed tomorrow—allowing citizens and customers to transact directly without passing through your desk—would people still voluntarily pay out of their own pockets for your work?

2. [Test 2: The Protocol Replacement Test (Code Substitution)]

If your department or entire industry vanished tomorrow and were replaced by a P2P settlement protocol like Bitcoin, an automated registry like Estonia's X-Road, or an AI agent, once the initial transitional dust settled after a few weeks, would any real function in society break?

3. [Test 3: The Direct Cash Transfer Test (Eliminating the Middleman)]

If the entire budget, payroll, and fee margin consumed by your organization were abolished and returned directly to citizens as cash (or lower consumer prices), does your current work generate more net benefit (Δ > 0) than simply giving people their money back?

Any job that cannot answer YES to all three tests with empirical data—no matter how high the salary or how prestigious the title—is a functionally replaceable bullshit job.

Conclusion: Stop Paying the Tollbooth—Route Around It via Protocol#

As we have argued in *Deconstructing Bullshit Jobs* and *Deconstructing Bank Rents*, the elimination of unnecessary human labor through technology and open protocols is a triumph of civilization.

Our enemy is not human beings; it is the perverse institutional design that forces millions of humans to act as human friction—tollbooth gatekeepers between senders and receivers, or manual copy-pasters between disconnected government databases—just to justify distributing income.

• Break free from the cognitive illusion that "receiving a salary proves a job has value."
• Bypass banking cartels and predatory remittance tolls using Bitcoin / Lightning and UNIVGOV's native Cosmic Currency UNI (which grants an unconditional 1,000,000 UNI initial endowment to every registered citizen with zero-fee P2P transfers).
• Subject all bureaucratic and corporate overhead to the reversed burden of proof (Δ = 0 default) and replace spaghetti regulations with machine-readable, Git-native open rules (Minimal Space Law Code).
• Decouple human survival (income distribution) from eight-hour bureaucratic servitude.

The era of respecting parasitic gatekeepers simply because they wear suits and collect paychecks is over. We can replace their functions with code—and build a society where human time belongs to human beings.