Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.
Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.
Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Social programs, bank account, etc are just an abstraction you need a surplus or the only thing that changes is who starves.
Social programs often compensate for massive distortion in the economy. For example, SNAP benefits both the poor and the businesses where SNAP funds is spent on, but that's because a lot of unearned income goes to landowners, while preventing people from employing laborers and starting businesses. SNAP merely ameliorate a situation that shouldn't had arise in the first place.
So, yes, reasons other than efficiency explain why people aren't working, as well why there are still poor people.
Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education.
Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.
Yes it is, if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved that’s a self correcting system. Less than that work and you have less people.
You can argue about all the many secondary reasons for each of the different groups (retirees, prisoners, etc), but only one thing is required for every group.
Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.
Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.