A real job is a net value to society? As determined by who? Say you have someone who was wired to pick up trash from beaches. Some people might consider this a useful bit of work; some might not. I could argue that huge amount of our entertainment sector provide no value; people could just watch older material, read old books, and so on. New entertainment is generally just a rehash of older stuff anywhere, so where's the value?

> What the "efficiency is killing jobs today!" argument really comes down to is that it is a dodge by those who promoted the bad policies to blame something other than their bad policies for the unemployment, and by those who have flawed ideas about how jobs create the economy rather than the economy creating jobs.
This is an interesting point, because its not where I'm coming from at all. My perspective comes from the science-fiction idea of a post-scarcity society, where just about anything can be manufactured with little time or effort. This is the direction I believe we're headed, and fairly soon (whether through micro/nano-assembly, an intelligence explosion, or what have you. There's a variety of scenarios like this often considered in conjunction with the singularity and the like).

The problem with getting to a society where just about anyone can have just about anything is just that: getting there. When you have advanced enough assembly technology or automation that you can build a lot of stuff and replace a lot of human components of the economy, you have a lot of unemployment without having reached the point where unemployment is something that no longer matters. In that situation, without some kind of government intervention or something similar, I don't see how the people that can't find work are supposed to survive.

"They need to work out how to do things that people want." Yes, this does sound glib. I'm very much short on ideas as far as what this might entail. You seem to be approaching this with the mind of an entrepreneur, who spends their time trying to do exactly that. Most people don't. I'm tempted to say a lot of people can't. They aren't going to say, "well, I'm unemployed with no useful skills, so now I'm going to go learn to do x, because x is a growing job market." These people don't have a clue what the best places to specialize to get a job are, or what they would need to do it. What they WILL do, however, is start complaining, or protesting, or drinking, or something similar.

I guess the funniest part of this is that people will try to improve themselves, to a point. I provide free computer use tutoring at a library as part of one of their programs, and I see a lot of immigrants that barely speak English and older folk that have no idea how to use a computer, that come to learn how to apply to jobs online, or send emails, or some similar computer-related task. But these people will never look at the world and say, "what need is there out there that I can fulfill?" The most obvious problem here being they don't even know how to determine what people would want; much less what they would do about it. Just because you may be smart enough to do this in no way means it should be applied to people in general.

And I'm not blaming you for this, or even turning to for an explanation; your understanding of the situation doesn't fit with mine, so I question it. And I'm not going to blame reality for the situation either. Certain European countries provide their citizens with free education, even through college; and with enough money to live on when unemployed, and they seem no worse for the wear. This seems to illustrate that it is in fact possible to have a functional market economy even when the government is effectively redistributing a certain degree of wealth for the good of society.