Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism
economist.com
economist.com
In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just six days a state of emergency was declared, and after nine days the city had to give up and give the strikers their way.
In May 1970 Ireland’s bank employees decided to go on strike.
At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill.
> Heading into the summer of 1970, Ireland braced itself for the worst.
> And then something odd happened. Or more accurately, nothing much happened at all.
> In July, the The Times of England reported that the “figures and trends which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect on the economy so far.” A few months later, the Central Bank of Ireland drew up the final balance. “The Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” it concluded. Not only that, the economy had continued to grow.
In the end, the strike would last ... a whole six months!
[0] http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...
I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.
There are very few doing the essential jobs.
As a counter-example, I think everyone who is currently working to reduce environmentally-damaging emissions of industrial processes are essential to society, but if they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little immediate impact.
Basically, we see exactly how it unfolds when a ransomware epidemic breaks out. Ransomware, in many ways tying people hands, such that an outage occurs.
In many areas, servers would chug along undisturbed. In other areas some of them would halt, either requiring input from some attended task, or because of a fault of some kind.
Two other considerations would remain variable, per specific scenario: remote sabotage in the form of zero days appearing in coordination with strike activities, or local on-prem sabotage, in the form of erased disk drives, unplugged cables, or physical damage however subtle.
The remote sabotage could involve a nation-state advanced persistent threat swooping in, or sympathy attacks from external groups which may or may not include those striking, to exacerbate the circumstances. Meanwhile on-prem monkey wrenching would have to occur immediately prior to a walk-out/lock-out.
So, pretty much the same disposition as any other strike, but with the added quirk of remote access, except any or all of the servers could theoretically run problem-free for the duration of the strike, and predicting which systems go down and when would almost always require insider knowlege to accurately estimate.
Meanwhile, everywhere this happens, people in need of a database would just do stuff in Excel, and snailmail USB sticks everwhere. Once that starts happening, it’s anybody’s game.
Especially if the help articles are on an internal network.
I'm confused. All your arguments seem to be for why sysadmins _do_ need a union. If they're irreplaceable (at the current wage level) and underpaid like you seem to claim then it sounds like they're leaving money on the table by not bargaining collectively.
Sysadmins in an org are there to stop you from doing things, not help you.
In fact in most companies this is always the case. They routinely lay off sysadmins, qa and other support personnel and ask developers to take over.
I'm now seeing trends of tech leads sort of roles doing the same jobs as a managers.
If your job involves some prime mover to which you are just a helper/enabler, its likely you can be easily eliminated.
Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void left by the striking workers.
For the meagre effort of keeping a few extra tabs (something they were already used to) they could earn increased reputation or advertisement (while you go the pub 'bank' you might as well have a drink on your way out). The realy price at which people start providing banking functionality is much lower than the average wage of a banker (the banking sector is permission oriented!).
The price to get non-garbage collector to start collecting garbage tends to be much higher than the average wage of a garbage collector (the underbelly of society is obligation oriented!)
Stated otherwise, if everyone received the average rent, wages for dirty/unhealthy/boring/complicated/... jobs would rise, simply because they can stay home and live cheap. This would be the most neutral and emergent determination of wages since there is no master table from Washington/Moscow/Brussels to decree the relative wages. No need for endless protests and strikes.
Examples:
- dirty: toilet cleaner, garbage collector
- unhealthy or risky: fire fighter, chemical sector
- boring: monotonous factory work, high quality assurance inspection
- complicated: physics, engineering, ...
This does not mean everyone would end up with the same wage, the more collectively undesirable a job, the higher it would earn on top of your average rent.
There are plenty of other interpretations here. The simplest one is that in NYC trash collection is treated as municipal infrastructure, not a commercial business. People already pay taxes for garbage collection, so it's highly unlikely they'd decide to also pay vendors in short order.
In the case of the union, their wages were probably artificially high due to the government keeping out competition.
> someone would come in to fill in the void
If a good or services is demanded by the consumer, then someone will find a way to satisfy that demand, barring market interference by the state (for legal business - you get black markets otherwise).
That can coordinate and tackle the scale of problem of New York waste disposal?
Come off it, you’re going to fall and hurt yourself.
Someone who collects your garbage for a dollar and takes it to the dump is not violating a regulation prohibiting them from dumping it in the river or your yard.
The problem is the regulations that prohibit them from doing nothing actually wrong while not fulfilling some arbitrary formality or greasing the right palms.
Those regulations about waste management didn't happen in a vacuum. They're not just there to cause headaches or corruption. They were created in response to observed problems - like dumping trash right into rivers. And that "trash" might include really dangerous substances. Moreover, the raw profit motive of capitalism encourages such behavior. If it costs two dollars to dispose of the waste safely, or one dollar to drop it in the river, the market's response is to drop it in the river. That's just free market economics. Tragedy of the commons is an actual thing.
The economic term for this is externalizing costs. The market, on its own, is strongly motivated to externalize costs whenever possible. There's no inherent morality to economics, any more than there is an inherent morality to thermodynamics. It's just a fact of nature. But externalized costs are a form of theft - they push cost of business onto the general public, without payment. Regulations exist to keep business from stealing from the rest of us.
You may be the one missing the point. What prevents ordinary people from taking trash to the dump for $1? Regulation.
> If it costs two dollars to dispose of the waste safely, or one dollar to drop it in the river, the market's response is to drop it in the river. That's just free market economics. Tragedy of the commons is an actual thing.
And if it costs one dollar to dispose of the waste safely but incumbents can charge two dollars if they get a law passed to impede competition, the market's response is to get a law passed to impede competition. That's just "free" market economics. Collective action problems are a real thing.
> The economic term for this is externalizing costs. The market, on its own, is strongly motivated to externalize costs whenever possible.
It's also motivated to internalize benefits, which organizations do through the mechanism of regulatory capture. And those regulations exist to enable businesses to steal from the rest of us.
In this light, regulation isn't an impediment to business - it's an opportunity. By making the task more difficult, we make it more profitable.
Now, I'm sure you're anxious about some sort of corruption where businesses collude with government to lock out competition. So, tell me... what is a contract? Is it anything other than a regulatory mechanism to exclude competition?
Suppose you start the BuckABucket Trash Company, and charge a buck. I hire you because you're cheap. Then you come back next week and find out I've ditched you for GayNinety Trash Company, who charges 90 cents. Sucks, right? Makes it very hard to commit capital to the business! You just bought a truck and everything. The way you prevent this behavior is by locking me into a contract - you'll take out my trash for a buck, but you get to do it for the next year. Everyone wins. I get cheap reliable trash service, you get a steady customer.
Except now we've just regulated away your competition. Funny, that.
Really, put down the right wing ideology feed about economics and think about how it actually works.
In any real system with non-zero scarcity, profit is relative. If you have less of it in one place there is more of it in another. In the case of things like garbage collection, the other place is when consumers use the money they didn't burn on artificially wasteful trash collection to buy something else. Which benefits both the consumers and the suppliers of the other product.
Creating friction on purpose to artificially increase the profits of one industry is a deadweight loss. The transfer of wealth is the broken window fallacy but the resources wasted on the artificially imposed friction are real.
And many types of contract are a violation of antitrust law for exactly that reason.
As I've pointed out, contracts are friction. And, since profit without friction is impossible (scarcity is just one form of friction), contracts are a Good Thing, a thing that makes capitalism viable.
Illegal monopoly behavior is just a pathological corner case of contract law, and it's silly to focus on it. Consider an alternative - you contract me for a service, and I reduce my costs and increase my profit by simply not providing that service. This isn't exotic. This is common as dirt, happens every day.
Because that's what we're talking about -- the thing that prevents an ordinary person from collecting trash for $1 and taking it to the dump in a way that doesn't involve externalizing costs or doing anything nefarious, yet is still prohibited.
There are approximately zero people who think it should be legal to dump trash in the river.
> As I've pointed out, contracts are friction.
Except that contracts are anti-friction. If you have someone collecting trash for $2 even though it costs $1 because they're the only one with a truck (so scarcity), someone else might be willing to buy a truck and do it for $1 but only if they're guaranteed the business for a period of time sufficient to pay off the cost of the truck. So the contract reduces friction by $1.
Your claim is that it then prevents it from being reduced by another $.10 when the first guy offers to do it for $.90 to try to regain the business, but the only reason that would happen is that the contract allowed the second guy to enter the market. And you can do all of this negotiating before signing with anyone -- go to the first guy and demand $.90 or you'll sign with the second guy for $1. Then the existence of contracts gets you to $.90 when otherwise you would be stuck at $2.
You may not even need to actually enter into the contract for the existence of contracts to reduce friction, because each provider knows you could enter a contract with the other and at least one would prefer to provide you service at a low price with no contract than have you sign with the other guy.
> And, since profit without friction is impossible (scarcity is just one form of friction), contracts are a Good Thing, a thing that makes capitalism viable.
Unless you're just defining friction to mean scarcity, I'm curious what these other forms of friction are that can produce profit without scarcity.
For example, adding any amount of friction to the process of producing table salt by chemical reaction isn't going to make table salt more expensive because there is so much in the ground that even a hard prohibition on manufacturing it chemically wouldn't materially affect the market price.
And the fact that profit comes from scarcity still doesn't mean you ever want more scarcity on net as a society -- there is plenty of "real" (no known way to avoid) scarcity to profit from without wastefully creating more on purpose.
> Illegal monopoly behavior is just a pathological corner case of contract law, and it's silly to focus on it. Consider an alternative - you contract me for a service, and I reduce my costs and increase my profit by simply not providing that service. This isn't exotic. This is common as dirt, happens every day.
And then you get sued for breach of contract, the judge orders you to make good and now you have that expense plus the legal expense. How is that supposed to increase your profit?
Unless you mean breaking the law and getting away with it, but in that case what's even more profitable is bank robbery, right?
The reason these things are all illegal is that they're a form of conduct that increases rather than reduces friction, which is why they're against the law. Because friction is bad.
I had the impression that profits are derived from the reduction of economic friction. The more efficient a process is the more profit it can produce (compared to a less efficient process).
If the chef can make dinner for 30 people in an hour at the same price per person, now the restaurant is more profitable because there is less friction -- 30 people eat in one restaurant instead of 10, so for 30 people you need one chef instead of three, one building instead of three, etc. Less friction, more profit.
What you need for profit isn't for you to have friction, it's for someone else to have more than you -- relative advantage. The more you eliminate the more profit you make. Or the more surplus ("consumer profit" if you will) you create for the customer, if you have similarly efficient competitors engaged in price competition.
And that's where regulatory capture comes in. In competitive markets a large fraction of the total surplus goes to the consumer because otherwise a competitor could gain market share by charging lower prices. 100 times $6 is more than 50 times $10. But if you exclude competitors with regulations then you can charge $10 margins and still have 100% of the customers. Then there is more "profit" but not more total surplus -- there is less total surplus because the artificial friction consumes some of it. So you're shrinking the pie in order to get a bigger piece of it for yourself, at the expense of everyone else. Which is effectively stealing.
The law of private property. Thats not regulation.
Do they get access to the dump for free? Round my way access to the dump is something in the region of €6 ...
Presumably the professionals have economy of scale and a prerential fee schedule to work with ...
I don’t think we need regulation to explain this economic phenomenon. Basic laissez faire works fine.
When talking about labor and unions, this is essentially a tautology because the power of unions is the power of collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining cannot obtain unless all human capital (laborers) is deployed through the union. Human capital that is outside the union fractures the power of the union and destroys the power of collective bargaining.
In vulgar terms, human capital outside the union is referred to as "scabs" that temporarily heal the wounds produced by a labor dispute.
EDIT: readability, grammar
Yes, there are laws to protect unions. You cannot look at that in isolation. There are also laws to prevent some types of collective bargaining. Think of it more as a negotiated arrangements - unions agreed to avoid some behaviors in exchange for certain legal rights.
For example, in a free market, a union should be able to use its collective bargaining power to negotiate a closed shop arrangement with an employer. This is illegal in the US. In the same free market, employers can agree to blacklist people because of their union membership. This is also illegal in the US.
We could remove all laws which would protect unions, leaving them hobbled by all the laws which prevent them from fully exercising collective bargaining. But pressure builds up, as you can see by the (successful) wildcat strike this year by teachers in West Virginia.
Commercial carting (everything but households and public trash cans) in NYC is done by enterprising people with some regulations that get flouted because of the impossible time pressures they're put under. They die and are injured at a terrible rate. https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...
> If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their own ad hoc sanitation service
they would also be doing very useful and important work (would just be paid even less perhaps).
What makes you think they didn’t?
The scale of the problem in New York means you’d need an awful lot of such individuals to keep up and the workforce isn’t that flexible ...
These guys work very hard and in a highly coordinated way that is hard to replicate. Which was the point that they were proving by going on strike.
Bankers in Ireland in the 70s not so much though if it happened in Ireland today it might be a different story ...
This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former.
In general, that's not actually true.
* Nurses make good money. E.g., NPs and PAs make six figures even in smaller cities with low CoLs. It's not hedge fund money, but then, 90% of people who work in banking don't make hedge-fund money either. Also, 90k in a small city is pretty comparable to 200k in Manhattan.
* Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird. A couple of more apt comparisons:
- At the lower end of the salary scale: Teacher/police officer vs bank teller. The teacher/police officer make more.
- At the higher end of the salary scale: Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader vs. hedge fund guy.
* Farming is also extremely lucrative -- the owner of a large farm can easily make out much better than the owner of a community bank. And the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.
Even the title of the article -- why garbagemen should make more than bankers -- succumbs to this fallacy. Most bank workers are tellers and other low-level employees who ARE making a bit less (or not much more) than garbagemen!
> In general, that's not actually true.
Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true.
> Nurses make good money.
On average, no. There's the eventual objection about what "compensation" means versus "salary", but moving the bar introduces a number of other variables. Keep it simple, as per the article. Feel free to goole nursing salary - not counting the issue of registered nurses acting as sergeants for teams of nursing assistants who perform the vast majority of the care, they are arguably underpaid (and assistants are shamefully underpaid). This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.
> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird
Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".
> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader
Whatever that means. Making some other unclear comparison serves what purpose? Law enforcement entry pay is less/parity with a teacher, but is less than a federal worker at the post office in salary and definitely in other benefits.
> the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.
Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.
The world isn't in the state you believe it is.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse
The median salary for a nurse, nationally, is $68,450, which isn't high. The median salary (again nationally) for a software developer is $100,080.
If you drill down to best paying cities, though Registered Nurse is a well paid job. In San Francisco, for instance, the median salary for a Registered Nurse is $136,610.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...
According to BLS stats, that's actually higher than the median salary for software developers in San Jose (the highest paying place, at $133,010) and certainly higher than San Francisco ($122,420).
There's a lot to dig into here, in terms of data, so I don't want to come off as claiming that the stats above are conclusive.
First, nursing is a tough job, and deserves to be paid well, If it is, that's great, and if it isn't, that's a problem. I also don't have any problem whatsoever with registered nurses getting paid more than software developers.
I actually think software developer is often a more stressful, dreary, and dis-spiriting job than many people here on HN believe. I work for a university, and I definitely have cold sweat moments when I worry about lost data, broken processes, and security breaches. And a lot of what I do is wading through legacy code with a fine toothed comb. I believe a lot of dev work is like this.
Another factor is that nursing requires a specific set of coursework and a specific set of credentials. In software development, we have no such requirement - you can read a book on "PHP & MySql" (or don't read it) and call yourself a software developer. Then again, actually majoring in CS (or a related field) at a reputable university is challenging, and passing the coding interview at a place like google is also challenging (challenging for me, I failed to get through, some people here on HN will say it was trivially easy for them).
Is the job more flexible? As a developer, I can go off and grab a cup of coffee more or less whenever I want, but shifting my schedule to part time, or working three very long schedules, or leaving the field for a while and coming back where I left off - all things that I discovered would be more useful than "coffee flexibility" when I acquired a mortgage and school aged kids and a spouse who also has a full time job, honestly, I don't think that software developer offers as much.
Burnout may be common. Age discrimination? (or what I like to call "Age related employment issues, since I don't think it has to be discrimination per se that makes it tougher to be a developer as you get older)?
Pay? I don't know if the BLS data includes highly variable pay such as stock options. I think it's based on tax returns, so it does include some variable pay, but may not capture it all.
There are just so many factors, it's hard to draw very strong conclusions.
I am comfortable, however, saying that the data does not clearly support the notion that in the Bay Area, registered nurses are underpaid. I'd say the data moderately supports the contention that registered nurses are well paid (again, in the bay area and a few other high cost areas).
Concretely, average SE salaries in flyover states are pretty comparable to average RN salaries in flyover states.
I doubt it goes quite this far for software development and nursing, but it may be a factor.
This is pretty off-putting, especially given a few glaring factual errors in your own post.
>> Nurses make good money.
> On average, no.
NP average annual salary: 95,523 USD
PA average annual salary: 98,180 USD
RN average annual salary: 67,490 USD
IDK what "good money" means, but ALL of these are paid much better than average for their respective levels of education. And certainly, beat out e.g. what a fresh BA/BS would make at a place like Edward Jones or Bank of America. Hell, my first SE job offers were lower than the RN average, and I certainly felt like that was "good money"!
>> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird
> Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".
Again, offputting.
Quants at hedge funds often have Ph.D.s in hard sciences from top universities. Comparing across vastly different pedigrees is no representative.
Why not compare apples to apples?
>> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader
> Whatever that means.
Yes again, offputting.
What I meant is this.
Leader: Superintendents rarely make less than $150,000 and make up to $N00,000 which, especially with CoL adjustments, is often better pay than the 200,000+ salary ranges typical for quants at hedge funds.
Vendor: And those are just the public sector jobs. A LOT of money is made in selling education products. Do you really think the CEO of Pearson is living in the poor house?
Just like literal bankers (people who sit in banks) are a very small fragment of what we think of as "banking", literal teachers are a very small fragment of people employed in education and literal police officers are a very small fragment of people employed in law enforcement.
> Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.
This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.
Cargill, for example, is family owned and pulls in 114.7 _B_illion in revenue. (For reference, BoA, America's largest bank, pulls down 87.352 Billion in revenue.)
"Family owned" doesn't mean what you think it means in American farming. Many "family owned" argi businesses (including actual farms) are really freaking huge operations.
> This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.
Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment. The feudal system also exists in banking and in lawyerings, and the top rung of the education hierarchy is doing extremely well while the lowest rung of banking or lawyering is barely scraping by. Maybe if you'd engaged politely with me instead of getting pissed off...
Ironic, given you started with none. I standby the response, as appropriate commentary.
> IDK what "good money" means,
I don't know either, but that's irrelevant to the topical subject of comparison (not equivocating over 10% here or there in difference).
> Again, offputting.
That is often the case, when you are demonstrably wrong and have to deal with the realization.
> This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.
The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.
> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.
You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.
You said nurses don't make good money. I think 100k is good money. Better money than most people in the banking and legal industries make, that's for sure.
> The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.
Cargill has higher revenues than the largest bank in America.
Cargill has larger assets than most US banks.
Cargill had higher profits last year/quarter than most US banks, even big household names.
You "guessed" that wasn't the case. You were wrong.
>> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.
> You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.
The word management wasn't even mentioned once in my original post. I mentioned banking and law.
What I was pointing out was that low-paying jobs exist in every industry, and there are plenty of people in nominally low-paying industries who do very well (e.g., nurses RN and up) as well as many people in nominally high-paying industries who do not (e.g., bank tellers, low-level financial advisors, accountants).
(BTW, you should consider re-reading the end of the article that we're discussing. The conclusion to that article is quite literally that the exemplar discussed by the article -- NYC garbagemen -- are doing fine. So fine that people who get the job feel like they won the lottery.)
> If you can’t afford to send your kid to a top college and then support them for 2-3 years doing unpaid internships in some place like New York or San Francisco, forget it, you’re locked out
<s>Unpaid internships aren't a thing in the US, they are not even legal</s>Looks like they are a thing...maybe just outside of tech. Or:
> Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no difference.
The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it.
Labor productivity is constantly increasing, if you measure it in a systematic, rather than anecdotal way. Here is an article about some trends in US labor productivity, notice that even though growth has slowed it is still steadily increasing: https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-producti...
Just because someone is getting rich off your work doesn’t mean it’s useful.
The world would be better of without it.
If we could apply technology to create a frictionless barter system you'd see bullshit jobs drop real quick because nothing you produced could be turned into something valuable.
Fiat money on the other hand can just slosh around and as an extremely imprecise measure of value allows things like bullshit jobs to exist.
Graeber's theory of what jobs are BS doesn't really work. For instance, say a surgeon decides 'hey, y'know people are going to die anyway, my work is useless' then according to Graeber's definition their work is BS while most people would say it is useful work.
But one that says that anything people pay for does't really work either. Say I'm rich and pay you $100K a year to go somewhere and do nothing. Surely that is useless.
However, no doubt there really are quite a lot of jobs out there that don't need to be done. I've certainly had pretty pointless jobs. 37% of people say their job is pretty much useless which is remarkable.
Graeber's book is worth a read, my review is here for anyone interested ( https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-jobs-a-... )
And that's not even at the point of BS for most people saying their job is BS.
another random thought is when you know you're being asked to do something in an inefficient way. The job might not be useless but your time is being wasted and it feels awful.
Only actual surgeons don't say that (in any statistically significant number), and people don't think that superficially about their jobs (again, in any statistically significant number).
So what you're saying is that when we do this survey next time, we need to control for nihilism? :)
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...
Notice its only ~800 adults, in one country (UK), and 50% said their job was meaningful.
But crucially there was never any research to track this trend over time so there was never any quantitative study to see if this has changed or even gotten better over time. Instead it just assumes things are getting "worse" based on anecdotes.
I'd expect that if better survey data existed there probably would be a trend rise in it, because educated people who've chosen a particular career path are probably more likely to be introspective and regretful over career choices than people who were always destined to take over the family trade or work in the big local industry. The grass is always greener on the other side, and it's not difficult to think of jobs which could have a more meaningful impact on wider society than your current one unless you're Norman Borlaug. But I'm not sure that one person's envy of their friend who chose a career path which helps cure cancer instead of doing prep work clients rarely use in court, or another's envy of their friend who helps sets legal precedent in landmark cases instead of handling patient consent forms for unpromising drug trials provides a better basis for assigning worth to jobs than someone thinking their work is important enough to pay them, and that's not because I fetishise markets or think principal/agent problems don't exist.
It's not a low skill job phenomena either. At one of my software jobs we we're tasked with generating reports that I later learned we're never read and we're actually auto trashed by the management it was sent to. The only reason we were still around was because the manager with authority to fire us didn't care about anything smaller than a few million, and it wasn't worth the effort for lower level managers to bring the issue through company politics. That's a bullshit job
What we are saying is that Graeber's claim that job satisfaction surveys indicating 40% of people would not describe their job as "making a meaningful contribution to the world" are clear evidence that enormous proportions of the workforce have no value to anyone is bullshit.
(And particularly his original article, which put it in terms of a "poet musician" being rather more cynical about the merits of his day job than his apparently less commercially valued art, and this being evidence this creative output was undoubtedly worth more to society than the service he actually could get paid big bucks for)
Yeeeeeah, if you could put the new cover sheet on those TPS reports, that'd be great.
I suspect that interpersonal relationships are systematically weaker - that is the cause of this phenomena and also the cause of Peter Thiel's complaints about institutions getting worse at complex coordination.
I think that interpersonal relationships are weaker because people can depend on each other less, there's a technology replacement factor. People need repeated face to face interactions to form the strongest bonds and this is happening less. It could be why entrepreneurial activity rates are down and hikikomori exist. Most hikikomori wouldn't be useless at all but they lost confidence because the peer group that would have boosted them onto the initial stages of something doesn't exist. The network of "I know somebody who" is not as strong as it used to be and we all know recruitment agencies are a horrific mess even in the extremely limited niche version of "I know a guy/girl" they represent.
tldr; If we were nicer everything would be nice.
I think some of it is that people think about their job in the context of an ideal world. There are blizzards of paper that wouldn't be necessary if we were all philosopher kings, but there are bad actors of every type at every level to mitigate, not to mention the endless games of social status to play.
The ones paying the salary also get the profits. The question is not if these jobs make money for someone, but if they contribute anything to the society and/or if they have meaning.
Money is the medium through which societies (attempt to) measure such contributions and meaning. And this includes abstract and indirect ways, like art, fun, future potential, etc.
False axiom.
Money is a very bad medium for that purpose. Money was created to measure exchange value, and it should stick to that role, and not even try to touch meaning.
A person who made $10 billion selling poisonous crap to consumers, paying researches to mark it, and advertisers to brainwash them (e.g. a cigarette maker) does not contribute to society more than a doctor who found a cure for a disease that killed millions but made no profits off it.
What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society). No single individual or small "central committee" can impose that judgement, simply because they do not know the final end result down the road. It's toothless virtue-signalling.
Worse, if they try too hard, history teaches us to expect a murderous genocide.
Here's where you're wrong though. "Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is a thing -- it describes my personal estimation of the worth of things. In fact not only it's a thing, but everybody has the same thing (their own value estimations of things), I'll add thankfully.
And few would let money dictate their personal estimation of the worth of things especially (as we discuss here) concerning meaning (Ebenezer Skroutz comes to mind). It would influence their actions, sure, but not their idea of meaning and value in toto.
It's "valuable contribution according to money" that's not a thing. Money just measure how much profit one can extract, not the value of how they extracted it. Crime, for one, generates tons of money as well. Few would agree it contributes lots of value, unless (as some do) we twist the meaning of value to be a tautology for demand.
But while individuals sometimes do that thing (which you also seem to propose), that is constrained their definition of value to monetary profit, no society has ever done that. Value and meaning, for societies and for most individuals, are ethical considerations that go beyond "makes us money".
>What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society). No single individual or small "central committee" can impose that judgement, simply because they do not know the final end result down the road. It's toothless virtue-signalling.
Which is neither here not there. I didn't propose that "a single individual or small "central committee"" imposes their judgement.
Just that money influx (or lack thereof) can't substitute for that judgement.
To use your words, "What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society)", and this involves moral considerations, collaboration, and personal judgement of those actors, not just their monetary exchanges -- that would be a caricature of reductionistic 18th century economics, where money defines all that's good.
It is your earlier posts where you say "Money … should … not even try to touch meaning" and "The question is not if these jobs make money … but if they contribute anything to the society" that raise the red flag.
While money and social contribution are not equivalent (which nobody claimed), they are massively interlinked and correlated—by design, by necessity.
Good individual intentions can lead to social hell, bad intentions can lead to social progress; good intentions can help, bad intentions can hurt. We're notoriously bad at predicting social outcomes from our individual preferences. It's often downright counter-intuitive, as the two breathe at completely different scales.
I'd take "social value according to money" over "social value according to coldtea" any time, when evaluating long-term societal contributions. Not ideal but it's a distributed process honed over millenia, with many costly experiments and some non-obvious failures and successes. We don't have to follow that blindly of course, but we better learn from it. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water by introducing such false dichotomies.
Are they though? Adam Smith (and others) have argued that, but I think that the correlation is at best accidental. The mechanism that connects money with society is demand (money goes to those providing something people want).
But society can demand all kinds of things that weaken or destroy it as well. Many had in the past, and many have today.
It's not even about individual judgement vs society: in many cases the whole of society can agree that X is harmful, but tons of people will still demand it (and thus reward it with money) nonetheless (including the same persons that condemn it).
It gets worse when a full scale, highly elaborate, mechanism of advertising, consumer manipulation, misinformation, etc is at play to make people want this or that.
And we haven't even added monopolies, favoritism, etc to the list that much further skew money awarded as a measure of societal demand (as this demand can be artificially propped up)-- and even worse for societal value.
So, my argument is that at best money counts demand (not the same thing as value), and that even that can be skewed.
>I'd take "social value according to money" over "social value according to coldtea" any time, when evaluating long-term societal contributions.
>Not ideal but it's a distributed process honed over millenia, with many costly experiments and some non-obvious failures and successes.
I'm not sure it's that honed. For millennia economy took the backseat to other considerations (civic, religious, philosophical, moral, cultural, etc). To the point that individuals and societies would not follow certain money making paths against those considerations.
It's only in the latest couple of centuries that economy took the seat front and center - and not necessarily for the better (and we have a long way to learn about the cost of the externalities we amassed while doing so, which might even leave the planet uninhabitable).
Winning (and not even that easily -- it took almost 80 years) over a few communist countries with inflexible dictatorships starting from ex-rural / third-world conditions, is a pretty low bar to determine the effectiveness of the market/money as the measure of societal value.
Money is a good decentralized way to determine where people's preferences truly lie. If you poll everyone we'd all agree teachers should get paid more. But the fact that they don't get paid more means we collectively don't really think they should. Asking people to stake money for their beliefs is a good way to eliminate posturing. No one is truly over or under paid on average
It is important not to attach too much meaning because of it, because, like you said, is the crap peddler more meaningful than the doctor? This certainly can’t be determined based on income.
However, there’s no real other way that’s useful. Money at least forces prioritization and has supply and demand effects.
A classic example is teachers being underpaid. Teachers should be paid more, but the reason they aren’t is because communities prioritize them lower than other costs. This isn’t a direct measure of value, but it certainly an indicator when teachers are paid less than administrators [0].
Unfortunately, there’s no meaningful way to assess meaning that is easily measureable and comparable universally. It’s not really possible to measure the impact of the doctor’s cure over time and compare that to a different doctor. Or a speech therapist. Or whatever.
[0] highly variable of course, but here’s some California Data https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp
I think you could argue that addictive substances shouldn't be considered a normal part of capitalism, they're too far from the norms, but that quickly takes you down a complex path (is a water supply "addictive"? you sure do need one!).
I fully agree that money is the best mechanism we have to decide if work done by someone is valuable or not. Teacher's wages are suppressed by the fact that it's not very hard and there are lots of people who want to do it. Whereas administration is (perceived as being) harder and not every teacher is willing to move into management.
I agree with you that the self-assessment will contain some false positives. That's pretty much inevitable.
Assume for a second there are a lot of bullshit jobs. There could be two types of bosses paying for this. The ones that understand it's bullshit and still have a reason to employ the person (e.g. keeping the budget/headcount/department size high in a bureaucratic setting in order to cement their power), then there might be a lot of bosses who don't understand enough of what their underlings are doing and pay them because they believe they contribute value even if they don't. The incentive for the employee is not to cause big waves because they have a family to feed, a house to pay off, etc.
I believe there are jobs that are at least a big part bullshit. In small companies they usually get weeded out quickly, but as soon as you have some kind of large bureaucracy (military or large company), you have a lot of people hiding.
From my experience in large companies there are:
a) A lot of people who are completely out of their element and don't contribute because they don't understand their job. They keep their job, because they don't cause big waves and are not on the radar of their bosses, or because of employment laws making it a too big hassle to fire them (especially true in unionized companies in Europe). Their position isn't useless, but they're useless.
b) People that are good at their job and only need maybe 5-10h a week to complete their task. However they want to get paid, so they sit there for the full 40h week. They will probably see their own job as useless, while they do actually contribute as much as the mediocre people doing overtime. So they're technically not useless, but they could do a lot more, or work a lot less and earn the same money, but because the system doesn't allow this, they're stuck in a situation which causes bore out.
c) people doing actually useless work (like described in the article).
Government work must be even worse.
On that note, at a previous employer, the technical director hired a business analyst who subsequently told him to his face that she spent the days doing her nails, so he certainly knew the job wasn't useful. She went back to her desk. She quit out of boredom after about a year to pursue a job in teaching. He hired another one who spent the days working on a website for a local youth group. This happens, every day.
It was soul destroying and eventually I quit. My boss phoned to ask why so I told him straight. His response was 'So what, you're getting paid for it?
Obviously, he was doing more or less the same thing but for more money and better perks.
However, that individual employee may be doing work which means that Megabureaucracy is losing less money than it would if the employee did nothing. The employee might conclude that they are in a "bullshit job" - but actually what they are doing is adding value, even though they are part of an enterprise that as a whole is subtracting value. i.e. they are causing it to subtract less value than it otherwise would.
The same logic applies for employees that are working in an inefficient department of a company that is efficient in aggregate. Helping an organization that is inefficient to be less inefficient is still economically valuable - but to the individuals concerned they may consider their own jobs as economically valueless.
A lot of jobs which could be classed as bullshit exist, formalized as 'jobs' because of something missing from somewhere else.
Robin Hanson estimate half of US medical costs are not physical but people needing moral support/reassurance from others, dare I say if people feel unloved they crave attention?
Another cause of bullshit jobs is sometimes moral responsibility. Who looks after the severely autistic and those born crippled? One perspective is that these are bullshit jobs because, like the Icelandic policy demonstrates, it is strictly speaking possible to prevent some classes of these people from being born. Other people are going to be angry to hear that, since those jobs obviously involve a lot of effort and stress and they would think them the archetype of useful work.
I can understand that position but if your job exists mostly because of fetal alcohol syndrome then the moral high ground is due to be hit by tremors in the next economic crisis.
This is the kind of thing we don't like to talk about much but, and I'm sure I'm delusional, but reasonable people could hash out sane solutions to prevent most harm.
tldr; Bullshit jobs are going to exist on the contours of subjects we find to be touchy or gooey. This is why wedding planners exist.
A bullshit job is one that you know a tool exists already that could do your entire job. A bullshit job is one where you know the entire output of your work is thrown away or ignored
People with disabilities value different things and even though they don't have outward "success" in the eyes of society, they have tremendous heart.
I've never been the same since working with them. It exposed a lot of my own "disabilities" trying to relate to people. The writings of Jean Vanier has a lot about this...
It's a value we have on it's own, not something we do because it has an economic benefit. Like I said, I think only sociopaths would look at keeping the disabled alive, or helping them day to day, as a bullshit job
We should be asking ourselves deeper questions before we have these issues so we don't buy into the herd consensus.
I could probably write a book about the examples I've seen, but here's one of my favourites to illustrate the point: Domain experts recommend a particular product after a rigorous vendor selection process. However, senior management overrules the specialists and force them to implement the Microsoft solution, which the domain experts have advised is unsuitable for the environment and not a good match for requirements. As the specialists predict, the Microsoft solution takes a lot more time and money to implement and the users hate using it, so the project is deemed a failure, and a new project begins immediately to replace it. Sounds like a complete waste of few years and a few million? Not if senior management had negotiated tens of millions off their annual Microsoft licence fees on the condition of being able to say they were in the process of rolling out this particular Microsoft product.
The nice thing about transparency is, of they understand the desired outcome and are given sufficient autonomy, they might find an even better path without specific direction from management.
In that sense it really isn't a misunderstanding, just a perspective like any other on what is ultimately a subjective question. Looking at Megabureaucracy only as a closed system in which I can be valuable or not is a rather limited perspective.
You could go even further and say that Megabureaucracy is in the business of producing landmines. It generates a lot of value for employees, owners and customers, and my job is to optimize the body of the mine for fragmentation, so my work is absolutely crucial to Megabureaucracy, yet there is an obvious sense here in which I could perceive my work not to be a meaningful contribution to society.
I'm not sure that would be effective either. It would be a rare manager/exec who would admit (probably even to themselves) that they were wasting money paying for unneeded employees.
I think the outside, objective measurements that you mention -- though they have their own limitations -- are as good as it gets.
Well, it may not be the end of the world, but they're right that there's a plateau you'll hit if you didn't graduate from one of a very small number of colleges or have experience at one of a very small number of "prestigious" employers in your background (which you can generally only get by graduating from one of a very small number of colleges). Don't get me wrong, I've done just fine for myself, especially considering where I came from, but I've also rubbed elbows with some of the "elites" on their way up - LinkedIn lets me see how their careers progressed, and one thing they all have in common is impressive academic pedigree. As I'm raising two kids of my own, though, trying to groom them for the best college opportunities, I can't help but notice how carefully crafted entrance requirements are to perpetuate dynasties of "upper-crust" types. When I was applying to college, they looked a lot at things like extracurricular activities and volunteerism, which I didn't have any of. So now that I have kids of my own, I'm helping them with their application-stuffing things like sports, music, church - and I can't help but notice how expensive and time-consuming all of this is _for the parents_. You literally can't do it unless one parent makes enough money to let the other stay home and coordinate the kids' activities while _still_ making enough money to afford a house in a "top" school district (or worse, private school) and have enough money left over to pay for musical instruments, sports equipment, fees, private lessons, and on and on and on. In a roundabout but still very specific way, I'm trying to buy my kids a spot in a good enough college that they won't lose opportunities for going to a second (or third) tier college like their dad did.
If a ditch digger adopts new technology, their labor productivity increases, but that doesn't mean their job isn't bullshit
Imagine an economy which is producing 1 million widgets per hour, each worth $1, with 500 skilled employees. So labour productivity is $2000.
Now imagine those 500 people are replaced with a machine that can produce the same output, and they all get jobs as baristas, each making $50 worth of coffee per hour. Now labour productivity has gone UP to $2050, even thoigh those people are doing less skilled work than before.
As far as I can tell, your objection is that labor productivity is mostly a function of level of automation, and you’re thinking people are confused and think it means “the people worked harder/smarter but weren’t allowed to make new machines to achieve that goal” or something like that?
In the specific example you give, I’m really unclear why it would be bad to transition people from a mind-numbingly-boring-but-requires-constant-attention job working on an assembly line, to an essentially social job with a modicum of politeness/effort required.
I guess I agree that this is fundamentally one of the flaws in Graeber’s analysis; if people’s only labor force options are “self actualized helping people with lot’s of autonomy and reasonably good pay” vs. “forced to serve others for essentially feudal reasons with slightly better pay”, obviously many if not most people would choose the former.
But the reality is that the alternative to a service job are often assembly-line boring. It’s not obvious to me how many people would choose assembly-line over feudal retainer.
Of course, there’s an alternate objection to analysis based on labor productivity, but it’s fundamentally Marxist: complete automation gives capital vastly more leverage and labor nearly zero.
So yes, labor productivity says nothing about distribution of the gains from automation and is mostly about automation, not meaningfulness/autonomy for the worker.
That's just considered a requirement for Graeber's classifications. It's not the only factor. I read the book and can vouch for his approach. He's really talking about bullshit jobs that any reasonable person would accept as being bullshit.
It's the combination of self-assessment and looking at the details of the job to evaluate its bullshitness according to some quite sensible criteria that he still doesn't overly prescribe (it's all quite reasonably presented as an initial investigation that isn't complete by any measure).
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
A Netflix subscription is just data. A subscription and the broadband access to go with it is within most peoples' means now; broadband to the far-flung reaches people go to live when, as mentioned, they're not constrained to urban areas might be a challenge, but before too long LTE data will be sufficient for most purposes (especially in regions with lower population densities!)
People don't need a new iPhone X. Period! There's cheap alternatives that do 90% of the same thing. People who would be likely to spring for universal-income-based life are unlikely to be able to afford one in either case.
More broadly; food and housing is (given some geographic freedom) trivially accessible and cheap, internet access is almost at the same level, and most of what we consider "nice things" are trivially replaceable with much cheaper "nice things" that simply haven't had the same level of advertisement support. There's no material barrier to people living good lives on universal-basic-income-level resources.
But those with a job could subsidize those without so they can stay in school or live life in decency. Like, mid-range Android, not iPhone 10. But still decent.
When money dries out, sometimes these things take care of themselves.
When India liberalized its economy in 1992, all of a sudden there was a sudden spike in growth of private companies. These companies had a little higher rate of productivity and accountability than most public sector companies.
With increasing competition on both price and quality end, most of these bankrupt companies came to realize that their organization was basically a pyramid with the actual contributors being few and were at the base, whereas there were layers and layers of people in the pyramid all of managers and supervisors of some kinds whose whole jobs was to pass on memos and monitor attendance.
There were huge purges. Mass elimination of jobs followed.
You don't need to imagine, it is right here, everywhere around, in programming, in tech and in almost all other trades.
Yeah....
> 5 working hours a week
Nice that you're able to live out your priorities! Is this contract work? That would be quite remarkable if you were a (nominally, apparently) full-time employee somewhere. Does your family have another person with income?
That's quite impressive. Well done. Now I have a goal to strive for.
I suspect you're just looking at greener grass on the other side of the fence. Education is riddled with nonsensical fads, people selling each other things they don't need (probably >50% of university education is like this) and so on. You just have a vague feeling that "education" is something moral and pure, whereas "mobile apps" is rubbish and doesn't need to exist. But that probably isn't true. It's just familiarity.
This part resonated with me, having seen it first hand throughout my career. Some of the most productive people remained under constant threat of being downsized lest they increase their output even further in some way, disproportionately compared to those in other positions.
Some more on the 'zero-sum jobs' (a metaphor) - jobs that are useful to the direct employer but are useless to the bigger organism. This can happen on many levels: a manager employing someone just to have bigger department (manager is the employer the biggger organism is the company), army (the employer is the particular state the bigger organism is the whole civilization). There are also cases where something is useless only partially - like advertising which does a useful job of informing customers, but that job is kind of the least important for it. There are also cases where there is like a pair of jobs to it: like police and thieves.
The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization.
The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode.
Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed, possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.
Grocery stores have gone from an average of 9,000 products for sale in 1975 to over 55,000 today. Similar expansions of products exist in communication, finance, automotive, fashion, appliances...
There were approximately 2,000 federal crimes in 1900. Today there are nearly 5,000.
People with college degrees skyrocketed from about 10% in 1970 to well over 25% today. Stanfofd conferred degrees in 22 majors in 1968; they offer over 120 today.
And to take a small but real example for me, when I went to consider a preschool for my 4 year old, I received more literature on curriculum, activities, nutritional programs, Harvard studies, diversity initiatives, and instructor CVs ... Than I did when I chose my university back in 1998.
Or take my job as a Microsoft platform analytics professional. When I started out it was just SQL Server and its 5-10 components. Now someone coming into the same level is expected to have understanding of machine learning and AI, Big Data, chatbots, log analytics and other streaming/event sourcing capabilities, cloud architecture ..oh yeah and SQL Server and its 10-15 components ...
I can cite examples in medicine, finance, communications, linguistics (6 million words in Urban Dictionary, most of which aren't in the OED), pop culture ...
Taken together you would easily see that all the "convenience" and "simplicity" you're touting is completely offset by the amount of cognitive processing we have to do to navigate our modern world. We have all been forced to carve out mental fiefdoms - filter bubbles - just to cope. And that's led to the break down in coordination you cite - there is less empathy because I simply can't connect with the many someones out there with a vastly different set of life choices than me, at least not collectively.
To celebrate diversity is to acknowledge and embrace that we can come together on anything at all given the vast gulfs between most of us.
"Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were important."
Would this really be true? I've heard that an artist needs something to struggle against, something to constrain the medium they're working in, to inspire the creation. Just having it be wide open is not optimal.
I think it's much the same for any field. You have to be challenged to have your spirit moved to take action. You have to have a focus for your intent.
Just having copious amounts of free time might not be the cornucopia of wonderful ideas and creations proposed in the article.
Carl Jung
I share the same thinking. Innovation and art are the product of many things, and not just free time. I won’t claim to know what those things are, but to suppose free time alone is enough seems to be a shallow insight.
If i want to fuel my creativity, all that is really necessary is learning about things. More stuff in, more stuff out. Simple life experience is enough for some folks. Simply getting out of one's comfort zone is enough. I'd hardly call this stuff struggling, though, as one can thoroughly enjoy every minute of this stuff.
I'm also at a point where I'm only working seasonally.
Some folks will create things, some folks won't. It depends on what their own drive is and whether or not they have the money to do the things they are interested in. Lots of folks have stories, few are authors and are usually not interested in actually writing. Same with art and music and science.
Go to your favorite library. Take one book and destroy it. Is it still a library? Yes, of course. Destroy three more ... still a library. But what if you keep going? Clearly one book is not a library. So ... where is the crossing point?
The same is true of many jobs. Yes if I was vaporized tomorrow my team would still function pretty fine. But that doesn't mean my job is bullshit. It means that we're overstaffed for the average demand. It probably also means that 9-5 is a bit silly. But if you got rid of all of us you'd have a problem, and the company can afford a bit of slack capacity.
Besides, actually working on a team that's redlined is exhausting, and doing it for more than a few weeks is a recipe for burnout. There's real business value in high employee morale and a low turnover rate, and having some amount of built in slack at normal operating capacity seems like a relatively cheap and reliable mechanism to safeguard that value long term.
Consider the case of the guy hired to run a communications system nobody uses because the people in the office actually prefer to avoid each other. And when he tries to quit, they give him raises because they like having him around so that they can avoid each other and have some excuse about this communications system. He sits around all day doing nothing, sometimes someone asks if there are messages, but there aren't because nobody uses the system. That's the sort of bullshit jobs we're talking about. REAL bullshit.
Is there really any reason to believe that this would amount to anything? Sure, there might be some people out there who would do useful or important work. But isn't there also the possibility that the majority of people would just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe we would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long?
Maybe a rather unintended purpose of some of these bullshit jobs is to put a strain on the endless desires some of us might have.
On the other side of the argument, yes, this having fun in your free time might just be a way to blow off steam after a mindless, pointless day or year at work. Following this argument, then yes, taking out the boring work from the equation might also reduce or eliminate the need to feed your pleasure side. But I, for one, I'm not really convinced of this. It might still be true, but it's not a given in my view.
EDIT: If you read the end of Gruber's book, there's an exploration of this and the associated moralising.
If we accept the premise that 40% of people add no value to the world in the jobs they have, it seems preposterous to even entertain the thought that none of these people would add any value to society, if you liberated them from their jobs.
The whole open source software movement is proof to his position. People spend a lot of free time delivering value out of hours, value to both businesses and society. Most of these people have a normal day job.
Sure, maybe 1% or 2$ of that 40% would do meaningful work. Let's say we take that for granted. What about the others? What social role would they play? Who or what will pay for their idleness? Who would want to clean up the garbage if a majority of people do nothing and still get payed? How would you explain to someone who cleans the streets the the idle folk might come out with something useful in some distant future? How would the social fabric just not disintegrate? How can you keep the society functioning as a whole?
This is a bit like shoveling snow. I shovel the street around where I live so I can park there. Some people help, others don't. I'm fine with that. I care about it being shoveled so I take action. If I didn't care, then I wouldn't. That's the point.
Fundamentally, playing video games and watching videos gets boring after awhile. People want to be useful once their survival and security needs are met. It is obscured in our society because low wage workers are barely surviving and the bs jobs people, who often make plenty of money, do not have long term security. They know that they can be fired at any moment because they are not actually useful. That job insecurity is what fuels the managerial feudalism and why useful workers are squeezed out (they have the true power to strike).
Much of the population lives below the point where the drive to be valuable kicks in. Implementing a UBI would allow us to potentially get above that point.
No one wants society to fall apart and so it does not. If everything was based solely on money, there would be no kids, there would be no helpful people, there would be no taking care of elderly parents, there would be far more law breaking than there is, etc. Society works because we need it to do so and we will do whatever it takes make this happen.
Hell, I consider my own work reasonably valuable/productive, but if I was free from needing to do it to survive I would likely find something more productive/interesting/meaningful to do.
But also, people who write open source for free in off hours have good marketable skills. They are not in same position as people who cant do something like that.
There is also a lot of work involved in making function software that is just that - a work, oftentimes thankless boring or politically bullshit difficult work that needs to be done and is done by people who feel responsibility or duty to finish it.
How much of the free time development is done, directly or indirectly, in support of their day job though. Often times they're doing it either to improve the tools they use on their day job, improving the skills they use on their day job or trying to learn new skills so they can get a new/better day job.
I think people intrinsically want to be active and have projects and learn and create. BUT you have to detox from living such a structured life, and that's a process that takes time. It's no surprise to me that people who have gone to school or daycare since before they can remember, then had to work full-time after that, don't really know what to do with themselves when they have a few days or a week off, or that they spend that time in ways that appear to be wasted. You need to recover from having someone else tell you what to do all the time. Sadly not everyone does.
And why not? Is there some ethical imperative that says you should not "have fun and go to the beach all day long", if you have what you need to go by?
I'd extend Pascal's praise of idleness: ""All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." -- to including "go to the beach" and such along with sitting still in a room.
The point (and I think Pascal's point) is not doing nothing, but in being able to be content without having to create schemes and busywork when there's no need for any, but instead find satisfaction to being itself.
Well, don't let the door hit you on your way out of the beach then!
Who said anything about making this mandatory for everybody? What I discussed is that it shouldn't be seen as bad to "have fun and go to the beach".
Well, evolutionary humans started as animals not much different in behavior and inherent needs than gorillas. All civilization has been made by "ignoring human nature" in its original form and thus transforming it.
Imagine if every pair of prospective parents had a couple dozen more hours available per week, because they don't need to spend more time at the office than what is actually needed to do real work. Parental engagement has a massive influence on a child's achievements.
Actually, health insurance is not that expensive. A couple of years ago my wife was out of a job and checked what it would take to have health insurance on our own. Turns out a top-level plan for a family of 4 cost less than 200 USD a month. Given that as a contractor we typically make a lot more than with a full time job (between 1.5 and 2 times), health insurance is not a good reason for remaining full time.
A silver plan for a healthy mid 20s male is $400/month in NYC. That's just for a healthy young male, the least expensive demographic to insure. AND that's for a high deductible HSA eligible plan, so out of pocket max per year is $7k for single and $13k for family.
I'm simply not convinced that if a worker believes that his job makes no difference it really is so.
Most people I ran into don't really understand importance of such things as safety, maintenance, record-keeping and other things that don't give instant gratification. Taxi drivers are constantly surprised that I buckle up in the rear seat (while they don't buckle up themselves in the drivers') and tell me that I shouldn't worry about the police - without giving any thought to actual security. Junior developers that I mentor always have to be reminded about good practices and not cutting corners - and I am certain that they're much brighter than average developer out there.
It's very easy to imagine how such people would see their jobs as meaningless while they're actually performing a neccessary, although not often needed, function.
Ie: 100 employees = 10% bs 1000 employees = 25% bs
I’ve deal with whole groups at people at certain organisations that I simply used to call: “corporate politicians”. They don’t produce anything, they get information from A, manipulate it to make them look good, then broadcast it or send it straight to B. A good way to test for one is to tell them at an appropriate time that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
If you get smiles and nods and winks, you’re dealing with one. I guess they never stop to consider that if everyone thought like that, no one would know anything.
"Everyone hates the political class who they see (in my opinion, quite rightly) as basically a bunch of crooks. But all the other resentments make it very difficult for anyone to get together to do anything about it. To a large extent, our societies have come to be held together by envy and resentment: not envy of the rich, but in many cases, envy of those who are seen as in some ways morally superior, or resentment of those who claim moral superiority but who are seen as hypocritical. "
https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...
This sounds like people are just rediscovering alienation[1] again.
1.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber
I found it quite enjoyable and particularly the explanation and relation to feudal ideas. Why are productive workers being squeezed out while the managerial class is expanding? Shouldn't the opposite actually happen (fewer workers with better automated oversight controls should need less managers, not more).
His final chapter leads to a proposal about UBI as a way of walking out of this trap.
He explores the explosion of administration in universities. Basically, lots of money flowing in and it has to go somewhere. So it goes to a level that can be easily cut (administrators) instead, of say, paying adjuncts more which is not easy to walk back from.
It is a fast read and has some interesting ideas in it. It is not a definitive scholarly piece of work, but it provides a starting point for understanding how bs jobs arise when there is plenty of excess going on (lots of profits => bs jobs )
Some related readings: "Debt, A 5,000 Year History" and "The View from Flyover Country"
Most of his examples in interviews sound like office workers, but what percentage of office workers would have to be working bullshit jobs for his 37-40% numbers to be realistic? I have a hard time squaring his claim with what I know about the jobs people do: See, for instance, a breakdown by industry: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-..., or by occupation: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-projections-and-...
He does categorize the types of bs jobs into several categories:
1. Flunkies. They are largely around to make others feel more important by having others around. Often busy little tasks that don't seem to have much to do with a job description or being useful. Sometimes they sit somewhere just as a warm body. 2. Goons. Largely those without social value. An example might be someone who edits advertisements to make women look unrealistically thin in a way that makes real women feel bad about themselves. These are non-good PR types, corporate lawyers, telemarketers... 3. Duct Tapers. These are people doing something that only exists because the problem is not fixed, for some reason. Example is of a form submission setup that must be routed to a person because they decided to change the format but did not change a program. Or being a "proofreader" of someone whose reports are beyond awful. 4. Box Tickers. They serve to simply ensure that some rule is being observed. Example: someone filling out a preference form that someone has to put in somewhere but the results are never consulted. Others might be highlighting pointless forms, helping people jump through government hoops, asking for funds, or be bureaucrats almost anywhere. 5. Taskmasters. People who assign tasks to others even though those others could easily figure out what they need to do (Type 1) or people who create and oversee bullshit jobs (Type 2): "strategic" and other buzzwordy bullshit.
In addition to those, there are useful jobs that only exist to support useless jobs, such as those cleaning offices of those are useless.
I am not sure where he puts the following, but he had two stories of people where they were essentially hanging out just for an emergency to happen: an engineer managing a rapid response team that never, ever got called to do anything and a caretaker for an elderly woman who was largely fine, but could not be left alone. He writes how they at first tried to find something to do with themselves in a productive fashion, but then simply couldn't take it anymore and quit.
I think he wanted to explore what are the implications of jobs where the one doing it feels useless, whether they were actually useless or not.
The 30-40% of jobs figure comes from both limited surveys where people rate their jobs as well as looking at some statistical growth of jobs. As automation took away a lot of physically productive jobs in the past 70 years, jobs in the information/management/financial sectors grew to fill in that gap, which is roughly 30-40% from the graphs he provided. In his mind, particularly as he is an anarchist, such jobs are majority useless and/or harmful.
For me, I'm simply interested in the idea of finding ways to help people find engaging work because I think society benefits from that the most. I also found it interesting that the ones who had the hardest time being in a useless job are from the working class. While uselessness and boredom is soul crushing for everyone, there are systems of raising that it more palatable.
I would also say that this is largely a starting point for many further explorations of these ideas. This is a narrative of exploration, not a fully flushed out scientific theory. It was definitely written with a popular audience in mind in order to, hopefully, stimulate more analysis rather than a report on findings.
And having read your description of the useless jobs, I'll reiterate that while I'd entertain the idea that 40% of people think their jobs are bullshit, I don't think those 5 categories possibly contain 40% of workers.
Money flows into universities via the administrators. It mostly gets stuck there because that's what benefits the admins. I don't think it's a conscious choice - there's just no incentive for universities to use money wisely. It's hardly a competitive market.