Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs
evonomics.com
evonomics.com
Much of what we do falls into the pointless jobs category too. We write software to help people automate things that don't need to be done in the first place. Almost every piece of software we write has been written before, and will be written again tomorrow on a slightly different platform for a slightly different audience. What percentage of software development is totally redundant? 90%? More? What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value" as Graeber puts it?
When you take a step back and reflect on what we do day-to-day it seems so utterly bizarre.
Can we ever define the "clear, undeniable social value"? Isn't it better to just let people vote, say, using money like they do now?
Feeding a hungry child has "clear, undeniable social value". As does healthcare. Also infrastructure like roads and bridges has undeniable value. And testing whether drinking water and the food we eat is clean. So many things have clear value in society, but none of these cases are aligned with the profit motive, which is what the market uses.
When talking about software the work on the Linux kernel has clear, undeniable social value. Same for projects like Postgres and other indispensable tools. And this is mostly the work of volunteers, who during their day job work on software that does not meet this "clear, undeniable value" benchmark.
Note that in several projects, including at least linux and postgres, the percentage of purely volunteer work is constantly decreasing. See e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/713803/
That lead us to societies that are both decadent and destroying the planet. So I guess the answer is "no".
I think that's, at best, a twisting of any economic theory I've ever read.
As a software engineer, I have a skill that is fairly valuable in today's economy, and yet I've had a number of clients - mostly startups and small businesses looking to add automation - where I never added any real economic value to the organization at all. I'd work with the client, trust their domain expertise, build a solution to the problem they had, and then watch as no one ever used it.
And yet, this is an important facet of capitalism - investments that fail. In the age of globalization and automation, entrepreneurs have an out-sized advantage over employees. The ones that fail are effectively working "bullshit jobs", but the ones that succeed grow the economy many times what was lost from the failures.
That, in effect, is why Keynes's 15-hour work week didn't materialize. The value of the extra productivity went to the entrepreneurs and their investors, which in turn tilted the playing field even further toward entrepreneurs and investors.
The good news: the barriers to entrepreneurship shrink further and further every cycle of productivity increase. 10 years ago you could start a business with a laptop and some coding knowledge, and build an app or a website that could be worth millions. Now, you can start your own television station with a smart phone and some niche domain knowledge, as YouTube and Patreon are proving.
As a result, there are going to be more and more people out there working for inevitable failures, but the winners are going to grow the economy for everyone.
So, eventually, everyone is going to become an entrepreneur, the singularity is going to make us irrelevant, or we're going to have to re-think how we distribute scarce resources.
It seems to be directly linked to personal debt. Most individuals are more risk averse because they have to work to pay off their debts. New college graduates are a great example: they have huge college loans, so a chunk of the potential entrepreneurs have to take jobs instead of starting a business.
I'd call that a big negative externality to the accessibility of loans for higher education. If it was me, I'd rather have a few more blue collar entrepreneurs and a few less white collar employees who'd rather be running their own business.
That's only one side of it though. The other being the expectations discussed in the article. You see this quite clearly in housing markets where the price is dictated by the profile of who's going to live there and when they are expected to pay off the loan. A house with an expected 100 year loan in a professional market is of course much more expensive than a 30 year loan in a worker market. For what could be more or less the exact same thing.
Nevertheless, the author uses "evil" persuasion techniques himself. At one point, he appeals to the "evil elite" meme:
> The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. 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).
Later, he says it was just evolution:
> Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error.
If the ruling class decides what to try and what is considered an error, both those statements can still be correct.
Of course, assuming that you meant the classical meaning of the word slavery.
This does not invalidate your general argument though.
If you want to make an impact that is unrelated to making money, volunteer or join a nonprofit.
That's assuming people who are responsible for managing your work know what they are doing. I've seen plenty of net loss jobs, and especially in big corporations, it's easy for such losses to go undetected for years as long as the sum is positive.
But as a general rule, I think "someone else thinks your job is worth doing to the extent they're willing to pay you more than you could earn in other jobs to do it" is a better metric for the usefulness of a job than "do you resent the fact people would rather pay you for long hours pushing paperwork than for the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle of being a poet-musician", which is Graeber's preferred yardstick. (And if he's not spoken to any corporate lawyers that think what they're doing is very important, he probably hasn't spoken to enough corporate lawyers. Some successful songsmiths get sick of touring and consider their more successful songs to be sellout shite too.)
And the idea that jobs which probably don't add value to their business exist as part of some sinister "ruling class" plot because of the "mortal danger" of too many people dropping out to become poet musicians, as opposed to because the less useful employees are good enough at promoting themselves to protect their salaries from a shareowning class that would happily reap the rewards of firing them if it understood its business a little better is just silly...
I work in the private sector. I meet many people whose contribution to profit is, at best, indeterminable.
The primary reason for existing in the private sector is whatever the directors decide it is. That need only align with profit-making to the extent required to keep the company afloat.
Not only are directors not necessarily single-mindedly committed to profit above all else, even when they are they aren't omniscient. One way pointless jobs could come about is because directors are just wrong about how much manpower a project requires.
Another way pointless jobs arise is empire building. I think anyone who has worked in a company with more than a few managers has encountered employees who exist solely for the purpose of bolstering a manager's team.
Perhaps the manager straight-up doesn't care about the interests of the company and just wants the largest team. Or, perhaps they're forced to hire N people even if they don't need them lest they lose budget for when they do need N people.
There is an oversupply of people willing to bust their asses to learn difficult things so they can work in the midde of the night to do stressful things that might scar them emotionally?
I've contemplated the answer to this question a lot. Here's my answer. Corporate drones risk emotional scarring too, but at least EMT's get to serve humanity and save lives. Maybe that's the reason for the high supply of willing candidates.
Second is they might not actually be important enough to justify paying them more. Markets work well when there is lots of supply and lots of demand, but if that's not true, then it's not easy to figure out where the supply curve meets the demand curve.
At the end of the day, I would postulate the answer is a combination of the above two factors, and a well qualified EMT simply isn't that important to society, and/or people who would make well qualified EMTs are not going to want to do that type of work at any realistic price point.
I wonder if EMTs in zip codes with wealthier people are better paid and staffed.
I think the barrier to entry for tech, which is highly paid and cushy relatively, is that it's built entirely on a different foundation of skills like mah and science.
Many other jobs that have just as high or higher ceiling of skill or difficulty revolve around social skills (sales) memorization, or even willingness to defer to authority or group will. (Affiliation is important to them)
In a way, tech jobs are highly paid in the abnormal way that garbage men are highly paid relativeley. Instead of being a dirty job, it a job that required certain levels of social ostracism and investment in unpopular subjects. children who grew up in environments where such learning wasnt ostracized have a huge adavantage in that they also have a foundation of social skills. Instead of competing with other kids on who was more gangster, they compete on who can 3d print the coolest thing.
Tech in silicon valley at least, leans libertarian and individual. The lack of social impetus in their decisions allows radical thinking(good and bad), but also dissociates them from seeking things like the heros status that comes with an EMT job. It also makes them unaware of super high level social skills like running a company and politics in general which makes them unaware when they arebeinf socially manipulated. ("Making the world a better place")
As an aside, a lot of manipulation is possible because of deep seeted insecurities. For locals, its the lack of social acceptance earlier in life. I suspect immigrants dont care too much about this and just want the money, so this vector is used to attract locals. (Turban wearing EMT wont get mich use out of the hero-status as hero-status is too deeply culturally embedded)
The biggest counterargument I can think of against this theory is that in China, where top students have the same prestige as the quarterback/cheerleader in the US, tech jobs are still relatively highly paid. (Though they often work crazy hours compared to sikicon valley)
Maybe it's a progression of math education. The US has terrible output, so math related job seekers have a low pool if competition. China has higher output, but b/c its still rote memorization based and knowledge seeking is still about seeking status, the output still is less than half. They work harder, but the limited pool allows them to command a higher salary.
An education technique that promotes true interest in math may create an equal split, making job compensation equal to difficulty.
Take, for example, a telemarketer selling junk.
Maybe they took the job because some ruling class wants them to not be productive and happy with free time, as the article claims.
Or maybe, just maybe, they do the job because they can make money doing it and someone else can make money employing them to do it.
When we look at some of the other "bullshit" jobs, we see similar things. Sure the amount of actuaries is predicted to increase by 14% in the US from 2014 to 2024, but there will still be less than 30k actuaries in the us, with an increase of upwards of 4k. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm There are only 250k public relation specialists: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/public-relat... There will be 8k anthropologists by 2024: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/ant...
His numbers don't pan out. There aren't that many bullshit jobs.
'It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish'
Best cases: - Private equity CEOs buy out companies and get rid of the pointless jobs this article rails against - Lobbyists help inform politicians about the impacts of complicated laws - Actuaries make insurance more efficient and affordable - Telemarketers.... yeah.... - Bailiffs help to enforce rule of law - Legal consultants can help companies to be more efficient
There are huge negatives to all of these jobs but it's not fair simply to write them off as wasteful and unimportant.
We're kept on the "hamster wheel" by a carrot, not a stick.
It is undeniably true that we don't need the overwhelming majority of things consume be happy. People have found happiness without being rampant consumers for thousands of years. Unfortunately, advertising has directly influenced people's ability to find happiness without consumption. The problem is not everyone can consume everything they believe is required to be happy. Furthermore, many people give up work/life balance or go into debt-slavery in order to try and consume their way to happiness. As a result, people who might otherwise be happy are made unhappy by in significant part by advertising.
Even worse, if you actually do reach your consumption quota, you find it doesn't make cause lasting happiness. Most people infer that the answer is to consume more, and they end up killing themselves on the hedonic treadmill.
I think this is fundamental to capitalism and, at least from a Marxian point of view, this is what’s so bad for the wage earning person about capitalism. The owners of “finance capital” (ie the wealthy) will eat into workers’ wages exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor.
>The standard line today is that he [Keynes] didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.
I think there is a lot more going on here than what Graeber addresses in this article. IMO, the reason we don’t all work 15 hours per week has a lot more to do with the nature of competition (both in the labor market and in the economy at large) and the legal framework around a 40hr work week than it does “consumerism”. This whole article in general felt like a massive over simplification of the issue in order to justify Graeber’s lived experience
I’m not an economist and I definitely don’t understand these issues as well as I wish I did but this is just my two cents. Perhaps Graeber is due more credit than I gave him.
"The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"
But doesn't go really any way to explain how (and who) might be manipulating people to this end.
It never ceases to amaze me, how american leftists continue to ignore the soviet legacy as a learning opportunity.
Interesting. What society would that be?
- In order to obtain money, one needs to work (except for the lucky too few)
Thus work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating bullshit jobs if needs be. You can't remove jobs if it so directly means no more revenue for those people unless you introduce something like basic income.
Perhaps the worst assumption is that we have a capitalist economy/society and thus its ills can safely be attributed to capitalism. In America at least, we have a mixed economy in which the state is deeply influential in most industries through regulation and/or outright participation. Additionally, all income can potentially be taxed and interest rates and money supply are controlled by a quasi-governmental corporation (and since barter is rare, money is in general half of every transaction).
I would suggest that it is possible that many (or a majority?) of the "pointless" jobs exist because the income tax (if people aren't working, they aren't being taxed) and because of government laws and regulations (more laws and regs = more pointless paper pushing = more people being taxed). My theory has as much logical support as the author provides at least.
Also might want to look up the term "contrafreeloading"
Look at the jobs he cites as meaningless: It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.
Bailiffs, lobbyists and legal consultants are directly tied to state actions. Private equity CEOs and actuaries directly benefit from a century of monetary policy that slants the playing field toward finance. 5/7ths of the examples he came up with rely on state intervention for their existence, and yet he blames capitalism.
Even his musician/corporate lawyer friend owes his own employment to the vast swaths of corporate laws and regulations that exist.
Then he finishes with this: If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job.
Again, how can you not point to government monetary policy and say this is exactly what's happened?
If someday in the future drone delivery is allowed, and it's cheaper to use drones than humans, then they will get unemployed an no one in the evil elite will drop a tear.
[It's more complicated, because the delivery guy sometimes help with the other activities in the pizza shop while not driving, like cleaning or moving the sacks of flour. So the dismissal will not be immediate.]
Hence the motto of the article: capitalism creates unnecessary jobs.
* There is no need of professional potatoes farmer, because everyone can have a personal (family?) potato plants in the backyard.
* There is no need of professional general doctors, because everyone can look up the symptoms in Wikipedia. (I strongly recommend a professional surgeon!)
Jobs specialization is very useful. For example in a small software project someone can do all the job. But in a big software project usually there are some divisions. Someone does the UI, someone the server stuff, someone the Android port, ... It's not a flat organization where everyone just add code wherever they want willy nilly. Perhaps someone can fix an obvious typo in another part, but for big changes most of the work is done by the official or unofficial owner.
Yes, that's the all point of the article and also the one I explaining: Capitalism is about "maximizing profits" not about social, intelectual, or even productive efficiency.
But I'm not convinced the idea promoted in the original article that the real objective is to persuade the masses to give up their free time to work 60hr weeks in finance (as opposed to because the masses prefer predictable payrises and not losing all their savings) has enough theoretical underpinnings to elaborate on.
If anything, the more controversial aspect of mainstream monetary policy is the opposite: that its theoretical underpinnings assume that there can be too high a proportion of the population in work...
Take an industry that is more competitive such as restaurants in a large city. The manager there would never hire someone for a bullshit job. In fact, that manager often performs menial tasks that are normally above his pay-grade.
Of course there are transaction costs to anything. It's a lot easier to hire/fire a busboy than an office employee. This keeps some employees around in bullshit jobs to serve as a flexible workforce. But I still believe that this does not account for the majority of bullshit jobs in these protected industries.
I don't think Graeber is trying to say that. The word "capitalism" shows up exactly once:
> In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. [...] Still, somehow, it happens.
He isn't saying that bullshit jobs are created because of capitalisms, but despite it. The title says something different, and IIRC the original title when it appeared on "Strike!" was just "Bullshit Jobs".
The vibe I get from the article itself is that bullshit jobs happens because of the intervention of law makers. (At least to me, law makers are the same sort of self serving scum everywhere, whether they carry a socialist, capaitalist or any other flag.) The real question is whether it happened by malice or by incompetence. Or maybe through tax law compounded by incompetence.
Graeber is unapologetically anti-capitalist. As an anarchist, Graeber doesn't think the government is the solution to all society's ills either.
If you spend even the smallest amount of time studying the history of Capitalism, it is quickly apparent that the state has been vital in its formation. Indeed to form "capitalist" markets, you need the state and its apparatus to divide up the world and apportion it out. For example, Enclosure[0] in England was the process of dividing up the land and handing it over to private interests in order to create markets, and it was absolutely vital to the development of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.
More recently, you have the dividing up of the ethereal with Intellectual "Property", the very idea of which must seem like a joke to most theorists of property. The very concept of non-exclusionary, indefensible property is a contradiction in terms. Yet, Capitalism in the 21st Century is deeply dependent on this legal fiction, from pharma-giants and agricultural companies like Pfizer and Monsanto, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google, entertainment and media conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney, to restaurant franchises like McDonald's.
Then there is Graeber's central thesis in Debt, that taxes in themselves are vital to the very creation of money and markets.
Once you have divided up the world according to your concepts of "property", you still need to enforce it. And what better way to do that than use the state. So you use the state and its massive military strength to destroy labor movements[1][2], police international waters to make sure your oil tankers cargoships arrive at their destinations, and bully other nations into signing "free-trade" "agreements" to enforce your bullshit notions of property all around the world. And in the end, if all this still fails, you do it the old fashioned way and get the state to stage a coup[3][4].
[0]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_Mine_massacre [3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A... [4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Markets over technocrats.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955445 and marked it off-topic.
Not all in life is about efficient things. Anthropologists and philosophers are involved in something else.
Remember, according to Keynes we should we working 15 hour weeks by now(and if that's sustainable people would be paid a reasonable wage for a 15 hour week).
He then provides an example of a rock musician who was providing a measurable benefit to people's wellbeing, but is now working as a corporate lawyer(and aparrently generating nothing of value). The author's central question is basically asking why we live in a society where there's a finite number of artists, but an infinite number of lawyers(all kept busy for 50hrs/wk and paid well).