Comment by jbrun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbrun | Hacker News Reader

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There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this.

If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it.

Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are small and profitable (or that they are solo entrepreneurs), then all companies can be like that. You need to look at the "real world".

Modern civilization requires very, very large organizations that are very complex. Keeping these organizations running is not all sunshine and lollipops. There are a lot of boring, but necessary jobs. See large airlines, mining companies, electrical utilities,... etc. THe modern world is big, complicated and has lots of tedious tasks that ensure your airplane (for which you got a cheap ticket) is built safely, takes off, landes, has fuel, and whose passenger tickets are priced at an insanely cheap level.

As a straightforward example, just look at the complexity of producing and distributing fossil fuels. Read Vaclav Smil.

Are there boring jobs that may one day be automated, yes. But the thing with automation is that it will not eliminate jobs, because we will just buy more stuff - this is exactly what has happened since the Industrial revolution.

I think you're letting your desire, your "belief" in a market economy, dictate your interpretations. Belief is a key term here: if it were observation, we wouldn't need to believe; we would point out how the theory functions in _this_ case just like we can demonstrate the function of an internal combustion engine. Nobody talks about "believing" in PV=NRT. :)

I have a suggestion: Every time you start talking, to yourself or others, about what a market economy does by definition, add to your statement the concept of perfect information. That's a cornerstone of market theory. So if we just stipulate the theoretical function of a market economy is everything you believe, we are left with concrete implementations which will vary from that perfection by the degree to which information is imperfect.

How do you measure that imperfection? That's a doozy. But if someone managing a $1T company has information imperfect by a percent... wouldn't that leave room for $10B of bullshit? Even if every actor in the company was operating in good faith?

How completely do you think your nearest C-level executive understands the function of their organization? 99%? 80%?

So... I think "By definition bullshit jobs would be removed" is treating economics with a precision that would make physics blush, and is usually only attempted by philosophers.

The adverts on TV are a clear indicator that bullshit jobs exist, they are simply not necessary.

Further, much of modern society is not necessary. Fast food is stuff you could make at home, but you're too busy at your advertising job. And so bullshit jobs beget more bullshit jobs.

What's happening in western countries is that trade deficits - the slow bleeding of wealth - are happening while much of the upper middle class engages in bullshit jobs and the lower classes engage in burger flipping to each other and the upper middle class.

Not much productive activity is actually going, less than 20% of the population is engaged in manufacturing, resource extraction, counstruction, and farming, and the rest is bleeding out the accumulated wealth from the past (mainly by countries like China wanting to buy our pieces of paper - dollars - and giving us our plastic and electronic toys).

The real problem is the free market economy is short sighted. Private investors can only think short term because they simply refuse to risk money on very large but high payoff ventures.

The government needs to step in and spend, spend, spend on large ventures like space travel, medical science, robotics for bullshit job insanity to end.

> The government needs to step in and spend, spend, spend on large ventures like space travel, medical science, robotics for bullshit job insanity to end.

Isn't it hilarious that the governments are the largest purveyors of bullshit jobs and resource extraction?

There is a Danish book that adresses the issue, but they pick a different term, opting to call it pseudo work instead. The title of the book is: Pseudoarbejde.

It's not that the jobs are bullshit, or just plain boring, it that they don't need to be done, at all. One of the authors originally didn't believe in the idea, arguing that the jobs where valuable, because someone actually wanted to pay others to do them.

They have en example of a company that figured that if work fills the time allocated to it, then just allocate less time. They saved a ton of time reducing meeting to default 20 minutes. There where several other steps of cause, but they now have a four day work week.

There's also an example from a Danish hospital, where a doctor is required to check if a patient has fallen within the last 14 days, because the hospital had issues where patients had fallen and no one notice. The kicker is that the doctor only does screening for breast cancer, there's no point in asking if an woman who is only in for a screen if she's fallen on the way to the hospital.

A private company wanted a professional done yearly report, every year, requiring around three months of work in total. They wanted it, because everyone has one. It's 50 to 75 pages, which no one else had time to read, so they have another person to read it and cut it done to 10 pages.

So no, it may not be bullshit jobs, they are highly paid jobs, performed by highly educated people. It's just that it's not contributing to the end product of an organisation.

Similar to the old saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - the market is not instantly efficient, just over time.

There will always be work that has become bullshit that the market hasn't gotten around to killing yet. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or can't exist for a long time. Some even last lifetimes!

None of this means we can't do a better job helping the market remove the bullshit work, though.

> If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.

Nobody believes that perfect markets exist.

This is obviously incorrect.

Jobs are paid for based on the value they provide to the person paying for the job, not based on the value they create.

A job which takes value from other people and destroys some of it in the process will get paid for just as readily as a job that creates value ex nihilo as long as the person paying for the job ends up with the same amount of value.

The article's last paragraph and link to book review[1] discusses this.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-...

That's a fascinating article. I must admit that I've never really thought about the "shorting real estate" angle when discussing real estate bubbles, and it's a very interesting insight into why we keep getting them.

>If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.

That's the theory, but we all know that theoretical capitalism and what we have today are very different beasts. Bullshit jobs are not literally companies paying people to do nothing, but more systemic problems.

My local shop wants to sell a banana to me. The intrinsic complexity of this task is: A small group of people who grow bananas. A large group of people who manage global shipping. A small group of people to sell the banana to me.

However, let's inject some bullshit: My local shop and a shop slightly further away both want to sell bananas. Therefore they advertise. Let's add two large groups of people making graphics for the side of busses, posters for walls, animation for web advertising, filming television adverts, maintaining 'woke' social media accounts, et cetera. We now involve more groups of people for the busses to sell this advertising space, television networks to manage ad time, et cetera. We now have more people advertising the banana than selling it, but no more human beings are buying bananas, because there's a fixed size market for it. _Those_ are bullshit jobs, because they achieve nothing but keeping the market in the same steady state it would otherwise have been in, except with vast resource expenditure. No one company can stop advertising, though, because then their competitor's resource expenditure would actually become meaningful.

You have this completely wrong.

The advertisers are hired to increase demand for and sell more bananas. If banana demand is actually fixed and the advertisers don't work out (are bullshit jobs), the banana company is not going to keep using the advertisers and cut out the bullshit jobs.

Creating demand for bananas is not creating value for banana companies. It is taking value from companies with competing products.

Its not the banana company selling bananas to the people being advertised too, its the banana stores, who are competing.

No no no, the point is that the jobs aren't useless _locally_, in that my most local store cannot fire their advertising department, but they are still useless _globally_, in that the sheer scale of resources poured into creating the advertisements to compete with other stores is zero-sum.

$1 of banana advertising does not generate >$1 of banana purchasing _overall_, though it may _take_ >$1 of banana purchasing from a different store. No meaningful value was created for society.

There's a degree to which advertising is educating consumers as to where they can get bananas. The cost required to fulfil that is significantly lower than the actual cost of the advertising industry, because the advertising industry effectively generates other jobs in the advertising industry to compete with itself, as our competing banana establishments both pour more and more of their money into advertisement, because if they don't they lose sales to their competitors. Because more advertising is needed, more advertisers are needed - but the market isn't expanding, or rather, it isn't expanding even a fraction as quickly as the advertising industry.

So we end up in this absurd position where we spend _so many resources_ advertising bananas, when we could spend a tiny fraction and get the same result - no, a _better_ result. Estimates suggest that 40%+ of all bananas are simply wasted, because they don't fit the aesthetically pleasing, advertisable profile of an "expected" banana. Because competition is so tight, and so many resources are put not into the intrinstic complexity of selling bananas, but into the "bullshit" systems surrounding it, we have a waste _floor_ of 40%, even before considering the direct cost of the advertising industry supporting bananas.

And that's bananas. That's one fruit. The whole market is like this, to varying degrees, where entire industries only exist to support other industries, which only exist to deal with the problems they cause. It's bullshit - not in the sense that any one company can just fire all the worthless people, because obviously it's more complicated than that, but in the sense that we have vast chunks of human productivity going into tasks which do not benefit _anybody_. We are burning our finite resources out advertising bananas while at the same time facing down the impending crisis of climate change and asking ourselves where we could possibly make the efficiency improvements necessary to save our species.

I don't know either - but let's start with the bananas.

> If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.

Citation needed. What is "market economy" and how does it remove bullshit jobs?

It's a theoretical model of how markets work, but substituting the people for omniscient spherical cows because real people make the modelling too difficult to be useful.

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