Strangely enough, Economies around the world are, increasingly, becoming vast engines for producing nonsense. In the same way as the fact that so many people feel unhappy being paid to do anything defies our current assumptions about human nature, the fact that so many people are being paid to do nothing in the first place defies all our assumptions about how market economies are supposed to work.
Part of the reason no one has noticed this phenomenon until recently is that people simply refused to believe that capitalism could produce such results, even if that meant considering their own experiences or those of their friends and family as somehow anomalous. All conversations on changes in the structure of employment have to begin with an acknowledgement that the overall global trend, especially in rich countries, has been for a steady decline in farming and manufacturing, and a steady increase in something called "services"
The idea of a service economy in general is the real issue here. When a country's economy is characterized as being dominated by the services sector, one gets the impression that its citizens primarily support themselves by serving each other iced lattes.