It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen.

The "mystery" is why this anthropologist is making an unsupported claim that globalism equals to, or is the inevitable result of, "capitalism".

He then goes on to say:

Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union [...] the system made up as many jobs as [politically necessary]. But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix.

Which is basically what we have these days, at the global level.

The American industrial base, for example, was "outsourced" and "offshored" due to geopolitical necessities. The two showcase countries in this context are India and China.

The integration of the Chinese Communist regime into the AngloEuropean financial system required the wholesale transfer of technology and production means ("capital") to China. This was the bargain that was reached in the 70s.

The goal of seperating India from the Non-Aligned movement also necessitated the quid pro quo of artificially jump starting the Indian software servies sector.

So the current state of the economic order is not a natural end-state of "Capitalism" but rather the result of top-down manipulation of national economies in service of the desired goal of a unified global order in control of the ruling elites.

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).

Do tell. Is that what happened in the 60s? [& p.s. is the professor aware of state of affairs in prosperous leave it to Beaver 50s or is his forgetfulness necessary to support his bogus narrative?]

The unrest of the 60s was due to structural flaws in society (racism), ideologically driven wars (militarism), and a healthy dose of agitation from academia and even national intelligence services (turn-on-tune-in-drop-out-ism).

Apparently the London (surprise surprise..) School of Economics is prone to grant professorships to anthropologists who have not read in history, for any reasonably well read student of history would be able to point out that hunger, tyranny, and gross societal imbalances are the factual causes of "mortal danger" to ruling classes.