I live in a small country the size of Ohio and work in logistics. There exist over 100 major logistics companies in my country. This doesnt count the one or two man “companies” but just the larger ones from 10+ employees onward.
Over 100 for a country the size of Ohio. 20 would be perfectly sufficent, 30 would be plenty but 100 is just wasteful. As a result no one can find people because there are far too many companies competing for far to few new people coming in.
Its the same in a lot of other professions. There are too many companies in the same niche, leading to wastful and unnecessary competition.
Ah competition. It can be good if 10 or 20 companies compete against each other. If you have 100 or 1000 competing against each other its outright war. So much energy is wasted. Instead of cooperation or healthy competition between a few – it becomes a chaotic mess.
Then theres also too many stores. If Costco builds a store on this spot – Wallmart has to have another in the same location. If Aldi opens a new store in this location – within a year Lidl has to have a store there as well.
As a result you have then perhaps 300 smaller food stores/supermarkets for a region where 100 larger would suffice. As a result they have to employ lets say 20×300 = 6000 people instead of 40×100 = 4000 people. So we need 2000 extra people working these jobs because of wastful and unnecessary stores. Not to mention the material and electricity wasted on building 300 smaller stores instead of 100 larger ones. Not to mention the destruction of nature. 300 smaller parking lots will produce a lot more Impervious surface than 100 larger ones.
The next thing is “Planned Obsolescense” – since companies have to sell more all the time, they manufacture the products with flaws that shorten the lifespan or use inferior materials that achieve the same effect. As a result we consume 2x or 3x the resources we have to and produce 2x or 3x the waste we would otherwise. Not to mention all the transporation fuel.
This doesnt even adress the phenomenon of “Bullshit Jobs”. At least 10% of all jobs are absolutely useless and could be rationalized away within a few week.
Then theres the fact that wages have decoupled from performance. A hard working factory worker will still get just 1% or 0.5% of the factory CEO that does nothing most of the time and just tells people what to do. When the company fails – he still gets his bonus while the factory worker becomes unemployed and gets nothing.
If we rationalize the Economic/labour market, we could save hundreds of Millions of Jobs worldwide. Understaffed companies and departments would finally get enought people. And we would free so many people to become Doctors and scientists and engineers, there would be enough money for Universal Basic Income. There would be less Resource consumption and nature destruction.
This is a system people would perhaps want to be part of. In this wastful and irrational profit driven mess? Not so much.