When you say “we seem to be entering a phase of our society where there are more people than jobs, and we don’t know what to do about that”, I think that you got it backwards…! Capitalism (and the very concept of salaried work) emerged in England when privatization and concentration of arable land, driven by increases in agricultural productivity, forced rural populations into the cities. That in turn gave its initial workforce to the English industry, those new urban dwellers effectively becoming that “reserve army” that capitalists need to keep wages down and prices “competitive”. And that doesn’t really change once it’s the very basis of a system… (I’d try a coding analogy, but I lack the vocabulary.)
Just think of the migrant workers, and the increasing demand for “flexibility” and “mobility” from workers, in all fields (even for students!). Precarity means business owners can always find workers, the whole shtick works on despair. You can see that clearly in Canada’s unemployment measures’ wording: when it was created, we had the mindset of protecting workers from situations of unemployment, classical Fordist-type approach, we wanna make sure people can afford to spend. Now, it’s the opposite: from unemployment insurance, we now have employment insurance. From “It’s okay, we understand it’s the market, we’ll all contribute to a fund to help those workers in their times of need”, we got to “It’s okay, we’ll find you work (lazy…), we assure you that you’ll be employed ASAP (better be flexible and mobile though, and don’t expect a GOOD job, with comparable salary, advantages or location as you had before or anything… the important is that you get off “government welfare” you punk…!”… bla bla, taxpayer money, bla. You get the gist. Basically, unemployment, while the bane of most people’s existence, is essential to maintain “business as usual”. Without the surplus of working force, this beast we call the “modern civilization” would collapse under its own weight.
The only reason you feel like you’re hacking capitalism doing social entrepreneurial stuff is because some people are able to gamble on (sorry, INVEST IN) social ventures, because there is something to be sold (here: your personal “cultural capital”, or human capital in general, including your knowledge, but also your ability to turn it into value). There’s a whole litterature about “immaterial capitalism”, which would be enlightening for someone interested in those more sociological issues of adavanced capitalism and the ways in which it creates value. But other than that, I’d just add that like the charities of yonder, which made rich, well-to-do Victorians feel like they were doing God’s work aiding some paupers, while still effectively maintaining the workforce as poor as possible, today’s “social capitalism” or “green capitalism”s are just another guilt-atoning drop in the ocean of capital-induced inequalities and violence. For-profit companies don’t hire you to change the world. They hire you to make profits. If you don’t, you’ll see all the “socio-environmentally responsible” measures melt faster than an Antarctic ice-sheet in 2017….