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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Graeber is brilliant and I highly recommend his book: The Utopia of Rules.

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.

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>> What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value"

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?

> Isn't it better to just let people vote, say, using money like they do now?

That lead us to societies that are both decadent and destroying the planet. So I guess the answer is "no".

Not always, but in many cases we can. If you just let people vote with their dollars then you end up with a dystopian healthcare system, a 20% child poverty rate, comically expensive higher education, and so on.

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.

> 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/

author thinks the result of doing so is biased, as he mentions, '' if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else. ''

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