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Most valuable things, including the examples you raised in your post (CPUs, GPUs, drugs, and surgical equipment) don't contain rare earth metals. Of course, rare earth metals are indeed important and I am not claiming otherwise. But you'll notice that the countries with large rare earth metal deposits aren't necessarily the richest countries on earth -- some of them are among the poorest. This seems to be in tension with your claim that the wealth of nations is derived from natural resources.
The jobs that are truly not needed are, by and large, jobs that exist as a result of useless government regulations. Either government jobs, or private sector "compliance" jobs. It's true that many of these specific types of "service sector" jobs are dead weight and serve no purpose. You have correctly observed that government regulations are often pointless or counterproductive.
It does not follow, however, that service sector jobs are generally useless or fail to create wealth. In fact, as I laid out above, the vast majority of the wealth of modern economies derives from service sector jobs. Just not the specific class of useless service sector jobs you have identified.
The simple reason is that NK has a bunch of artillery shells lying around, whereas the EU doesn't. This is a pretty extreme case of special pleading. If we're talking about literally anything other than artillery shells (cell phones, eggs, insulin, toilets, tractors, etc.) the EU has far more of it and far higher quality versions of it than NK. And if the EU wanted or needed to, it could surely close the artillery gap with NK as well. This has almost nothing to do with natural resources and everything to do with intangibles like human capital, rule of law, markets, etc.
Good, persuasive points. I feel like the number of people who are directly and clearly needed in the whole IP, R&D, law+order, STEM university, manufacturing, logistics and extraction stack are in the minority but that's only a feeling, I highly doubt I could find any statistic to prove it. And what's the point of even being here if we don't put fact before feeling?
Let's run with this premise for a moment and assume it's true. Let's assume that if we were smarter about how we run these sectors we could cut 90% of the people in them and still get the same benefits. What are the implications of that?
First of all, it would still be true that the service sectors are creating most of the wealth in the economy. It would just be fewer people creating the same amount of wealth. Which means these sectors would be creating even more wealth on net, because we are having to pay fewer people to get the same result.
And now we can potentially do even more R&D, IP, logistics, manufacturing, etc. with the resources that are no longer being wasted on useless employees. I would expect these sectors to use their efficiency gains to grow and contribute an even larger fraction of the economy's wealth going forward. Money spent on bullshit jobs can now be spent on non-bullshit job. People who worked bullshit jobs can now be retrained to work non-bullshit jobs.
So even if you are completely correct about this, it doesn't undermine the importance of the service sector. If anything, it shows that services could potentially be even more important to the economy than they already are.
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