EDITED: He's right, you know.

There have always been less people engaged in productive activity than in pure consumption, ever since the caveman days. Children didn't work, the old didn't work. The medicine man didn't work. But they all ate.

"We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working."

He is absolutely right, we have a real unemployment approaching Depression levels and there are no shortages of essentials. Store shelves are groaning with unsold goods, factories have unused capacity, corporate profits and executive salaries are high, the stock market is booming and the rich are getting richer like they never have before. What do we need more workers for?
We've got too many already.

What the hell will we all be doing if we DO achieve full employment? We can't all be entrepreneurs and MBAs, or software engineers. Someone has to deliver the mail and man the toll booths on the turnpike.

Or do they?

There is an alternative. Even though we traditionally solved the surplus worker problem by taking people "off the payroll" as soon as it was possible, turning them into housewives, students, or infantry, we can't do this anymore because the job has evolved from a means of increasing production into a mechanism for justifying consumption, as the author points out. But rather than throwing people off the work rolls, we could accomplish the same thing by

1) paying them more
2) cutting their work hours
3) providing them with cheap leisure and cultural activities
4)retiring them early
5)extending their education
6)giving them a substantial safety net of government services.

In fact, this strategy was used throughout most of the 20th century quite successfully, and it was coupled with a booming economy as well.

Unfortunately, it was abandoned in the 21st century for religious reasons. It was called "wealth redistribution", one of the great sins of that time.