I used the term corporations in the interests of brevity, in my mind, when I use the term corporations I am referring to organizations that are owned by shareholders and as such are beholden to those shareholders. In current societies where business is driven by capitalist ideals these corporations produce whatever they produce, whether it be quality or junk, solely to drive dollars toward the other organizations that actually hold the stock, or act as proxy for those who do.
As I age and learn more history I have really come to question the drive to efficiency. Efficiency != Good. Making more widgets that cost less with less manpower might be good, but it might also be bad. I expect in most cases it is both.
I feel the same way about growth. I think the larger corporations get the more increased growth tends toward a net negative result. I personally would rather have more smaller corporations making similar but not identical widgets. I think a society benefits from a variety of solutions to the same problem, corporate growth possibly leads to less expensive widgets, but society as a whole is lessened by the decrease in variety.
And a simple fact does remain, as efficiency increases less people are employed to produce the same number of widgets. I think if a company is profitable, then they are efficient enough. I am not a luddite saying stop improving your processes, I am just saying that efficiency and growth as the primary objectives does not improve society. Making a better quality widget and employing a larger portion of the population does improve society, maybe at the cost of less value to the shareholders.
We have plenty of jobs left that efficiency and technology still do need to significantly improve. One that always bugs me is mining. Every nasty dangerous underground mining job we eliminate with technology is a net good. That is an extreme case, but there are a lot of jobs that are inherently dangerous, and replacing those people with technology and processes that separate the people from the danger are good.