> So, who has a “make belief” job and who has a real job? Here is a hardship test: if you stopped doing your work, and nobody replaced you, how much suffering would that cause?<p>By this definition any form of research or speculative R&D is a "make belief" job. Despite the dramatic advances made by people in those occupations on any given day if they went home no additional suffering would result.<p>The premise of this piece suffers from immediacy bias and is in my opinion ridiculous.
I suspect that desire for prestige is less of a factor in why jobs are created and kept than the article suggests, but I'm quite willing to accept that it may be a significant factor — a notion that I hadn't considered before (naievely, perhaps). Love the quip about governments being inefficient financially but efficient in terms of providing prestige.