I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless, and we can get rid of (almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN to people doing real work, and society would be much better off.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyspecific/comments/1fpmtt8/pig_wearing_clothes_in_a_childrens_book_doing/ (It's not clear to me why a pig society would have a pork-cutting job. Seems rather macabre!)

Like many populist intuitions, this intuition is completely backwards. Middlemen are extremely important!

I think the last 200 years have been a resounding victory of the superiority of the middleman model. Better models of coordination are just extremely important, much more so than direct improvements in “object-level”/”direct”/”real”/”authentic” work.

What do Middlemen even do?

The world is not, by default, arranged in ways that are particularly conducive to human flourishing, happiness, or productive capacity. Sometimes, individuals try to rearrange the world's atoms to be better for human goals. Whenever you have an endeavor that requires more than two to three such people, or if those two to [...]

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Outline:

(01:52 ) What do Middlemen even do?

(03:29 ) Some historical trends

(03:54 ) Early Middlemen

(05:08 ) The 20th century: The good middlemen are truly middlemen

(05:57 ) The Information Age

(07:12 ) Takeaways and Future Work

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First published:

November 17th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ppGtJqcSe82ncZQNM/middlemen-are-eating-the-world-and-that-s-good-actually

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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