I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers.
Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.
But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a "problem" of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.
And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things I want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what you want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.
Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.
But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a "problem" of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.
And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things I want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what you want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.