The Ecological Limits of Work [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Ecological Limits of Work [pdf]

autonomy.work

93 pointskawera48 comments

The same author that wrote "Debt: The First 5000 years" has a brilliant book called "Bullshit Jobs". After reading, it's hard to not frame any labor discussion from the book's perspective.

There are two thoughts that came to me while reading this article that I think were a result of reading Bullshit jobs:

1. Not all labor is productive labor. We should be focusing on efficiency. By reducing hours I think this will cut down on the amount of 'unproductive' work.

2. A cultural change is needed, why do we automatically associate time with productivity?

I created a poll a while ago which unfortunately didn't attract much attention. But with N=8, most HNers have bullshit jobs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159

I did not know it was possible to create polls on here

Our cultural obsession with work = time = virtue comes from the Agricultural Age and early Industrial Age when there was a more direct linear relationship here.

Graeber asserts it's specifically a reaction to changing notions of career trajectory and adulthood as feudalism gradually turned into industrial capitalism and the normal life path, for practically everyone in society, of:

1) work for someone else to learn the ropes and get started (even aristocrats would leave home to serve in other households, unless they were top of the heap), 2) run your own farm/shop/manor/etc

was changed to just:

1) work for someone else, selling your time directly, and... that's it, until you retire or die, for almost all people who aren't born rich.

I don't have the background and haven't followed his references to dig into how accurate his portrayal is, but his does address this exact attitude in the book. He essentially claims moralizing about the virtues of hard (sold-by-the-hour) labor and long days is a reaction (by the upper classes, largely) against what was perceived to be a growing population of people stuck in perpetual adolescence—eternal apprentices, basically.

I finally read that book a few weeks ago, and one idea Graeber raises in it is something that'd been bugging me for a while: it seems like adding computers to a large proportion of activities and processes makes them less efficient, and increases the load of bullshit jobs to deal with making everything compatible with computer monitoring and computer-"aided" business processes, for gains that may be illusory and which surely do not make up for all the added layers (and cost) of bullshit.

The stuff about the rise of the influence of finance folks and practices on (previously) traditional management staff was interesting, too. I'm not sure his timeline works out, as I'm aware of (fictional) books that treated of precisely this sort of thing (bullshit office jobs, in particular) as an entrenched phenomenon at least as far back as 1961, but I think both ideas are getting at something worth further examination.

Bureaucratic processes tend to get more and more complicated until the host organization is barely able to manage it. Computers allow better process management, so it allows complexity to expand for little overall gain.

" adding computers to a large proportion of activities and processes makes them less efficient"

Young technophilic me didn't distinguish between digitization and automation. I've since seen this mistake over and over.

Automation is the removal of judgement. Automate before you digitize.

Older technoskeptic me now assumes that whenever a big bang project fails (eg new payroll system for big org), it's because they tried to faithfully reimplement some legacy "processes" dependent on humans, in the form of social cognition and tribal knowledge, sometimes also called "culture".

Also, automate after you digitize. In fact, redesign and reengineer to support automation.

I read "Debt" and I thought it was brilliant and personally very impactful. I've recommended it to many people. I've read a bunch of his summaries/essays on "Bullshit Jobs" and I'm astounded at the stupidity of his arguments, and I honestly have a hard time believing these two things are were written by the same person.

I think it's because "Debt" was primarily an anthropological work, flavoured by his ideology, whereas "Bullshit Jobs" seems to be almost pure ideology. I'm deeply sceptical of all neo-primitivist arguments.

Anyway, here's some things to think about: efficiency is important, but it cannot tell you much by itself - the actual amount of output matters, perhaps much more so. For example, a Hall effect thruster is immensely efficient, about 10-15x more so than a chemical rocket engine, however it's output in Newtons is so low, it is impossible to get to orbit. If you want to get to space, it this efficiency doesn't matter, it's never going to get you there. Likewise, perhaps your first hour of work is immensely efficient, yet your actual output might be so low that having everyone work 1hr/day would lead to stagnation and decline.

Interesting, I didn't get that sense at all from the book. It did not strike me as 'neo-primitivist' at all. Much more as a critique from the structural perspective [0].

And I'm not so sure saying that it wasn't anthropology is fair. It is definitely different. One historical, the other modern - both valid anthropological pursuits.

I would agree with you on efficiency though. Though I think the bullshit jobs described in the book are more akin to turning the rocket upside down and expecting it to leave orbit. Certain non-profits and industries are not even pointed in the right direction. Graeber asserts that this is intentional as a way to siphon funds.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_Marxism

What really got to me is that in one of his promotional essays, he describes how his primary classification is how people feel about their jobs. There were lots of examples, one of which was how someone spent months compiling a report for a shareholders, only to have the report never read, or about how people feel they're not useful. In no case was the question of whether the job/work itself was useful, only how the workers felt about it. There was also a categorization of his "Bullshit Jobs" and as I reading it, I kept thinking "those are actually useful jobs that someone needs to do."

It is a common way of thinking about work that I've seen in friends, etc. I just think it's very cynical and self-centred and ultimately self-defeating, like the whole "follow your passion" advice. Asking how your job is useful to someone else, rather than how gratifying it is to yourself is a much more useful way to look at work. Being useful to other people is also an alternate way to find meaning in what would otherwise be derided as a "bullshit" job.

In the book he addresses this criticism and investigates 'false positives' of bullshit jobs. i.e. situations where people are so isolated in the organization that they do not fully see the impact of their work. But I think the valid question that this brings up is "to whom is this work valuable?" And I think this is the subtle difference between a 'shit' job and a 'bullshit' job. A shit job is exactly what you described something that adds value but is not fun to do. A bullshit job neither adds value, nor is fun to do.

Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" speaks really well to the self-defeating nature of "Follow Your Passion" but I think that is more on the personal level where as Graeber deals more with an institutional viewpoint.

Personally, I'm not advocating either of us is right or wrong, I just got a different impression from the book. I can't speak for the promotional essays. I have not read them. Could you link to one that you are thinking of?

I have a really, really hard time finding any meaning in a job that isn't directly working to address environmental and/or societal collapse. It feels like we're on the deck of the Titanic trying to network instead of looking for a lifeboat.

Unfortunately, my efforts to be useful in this regard in my career have failed. Regardless, you can be useful to someone and still have a bullshit (or worse) job. Hitman comes to mind.

> Regardless, you can be useful to someone and still have a bullshit (or worse) job. Hitman comes to mind.

Or advertiser, if you want to aim for "useful to someone, destructive to society, and not strictly illegal".

As a kid, one of the biggest benefits of technology I heard was freeing up our time from mundane labor. But with our phones making us available almost 24/7 it seems the joke is on us.

A three hour work day is something I could get behind 100%.

To me 3 hours isnt enough, i need at least an hour to warm up before jumping into the zone. Im thinking what would work out for me: 4 hour work days with the ability to squeeze 2 days in one and being able to do 2.5 days of 8 hours a week, no more no less. I’d be as productive as I am now, maybe even more. During the time off I’d still have work ideas popping up in my mind while doing things like being with family, playing with my kid, etc.. Currently thats what i do in terms of productivity but the dead time is spent sitting in a chair in an office 1.5 hour away from home.

6-8h a day is fine by me, just not 5 days a week and/or on a rigid schedule.

How does a three-hour work day make sense for anyone who isn't wealthy?

In a lot of the world we have what are, in the short term at least, zero sum games.

An example would be housing in a place like SF or London (and seemingly creeping down the scale as time goes on).

If Person A works three hours a day, Person B is going to work six and end up with twice as much as you. If they can't do it at one job, they'll take two.

Low paid individuals already do this, they'll have multiple jobs because they don't get enough hours at any of them.

In the current situation - A will be living in student-like conditions, or homeless, and the B that works six hours will have a flat or house to themselves.

Forecast that out a few years or decades and A is in poverty whilst B has established wealth via savings and investments.

It feels like one of those ideas that would work if there were less scarcity in the environment.

Exactly the same argument could have been put forth back in the days when 40-hour workweek and 2-days weekend were introduced. Somehow we managed.

I imagined someone would write a response to this effect, but surely there's a line _somewhere_.

People already do get an advantage by working >40 hours, but there are diminishing returns.

You can't realistically work double that for extended periods, and having two distinct 40 hour jobs would be practically impossible.

Not only that, but the "40-hour" work week, and weekends, are something that apply more to labourers, which at least as far as I can see in the UK are almost uniformly struggling to get 40 hours as it stands (zero hour contracts, shift work, part time, ...... etc).

Reduced working time doesn't have to be accompanied by reduced pay https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw...

We just need to realise that most office workers don't work 40 hours anyway and adjust cultural norms accordingly.

> (zero hour contracts, shift work, part time, ...... etc).

These are fairly recent phenomena, not only in the UK but all over the world, aren't they. We need to fight against it.

> It feels like one of those ideas that would work if there were less scarcity in the environment.

Isn't it obvious that there IS less scarcity since the beginning of the 40-hour culture? Perhaps it just wasn't distributed fairly.

Your former comment doesn't address my point. The "pay" as such is almost irrelevant.

We're all competing with others in our local market for housing.

Perhaps we could go on a massive building spree.

The fact remains though, that a big old semi in London is in limited supply. A ton of people are still going to compete over it.

If one ten hour job means I get to live in a flat share and a forty hour job means I get a semi-detached house, I'm going for the latter.

Empirically so, since I work 40 hours as it is whilst not having to.

I imagine that if we all worked 3-hour-days the price of housing would massively reduce, as rent and purchase prices can only be what the market can pay, and that goes for the land they’re built on too. I doubt this would be a perfect 1-to-1 match to income changes, even if it happened in every country at the same time.

"If we all worked 3-hour days" is an imaginary situation that doesn't reflect the fact that a ton of people are immediately going to attempt to outbid each other by working more, though.

Hand waving it away with some sort of "but all the prices would reduce" assumes some sort of co-operative prisoner's dilemma situation.

I would immediately defect, take two jobs, and have twice as much as anyone else. Most people I know would.

> co-operative prisoner's dilemma situation

That’s what governments are for ;)

Seriously though, as with so much else in economics and politics, there are many more things that need to be determined than just a nice end-state. That doesn’t mean the nice end state isn’t nice or worth searching for routes towards.

We have a housing cartel ensuring the supply of homes remains lower than demand in areas with decent jobs. So the person who wants to work a 3 hour day can't compete with the person who says "well, I'm willing to work a 5 hour day to afford a home, at least for now".

Of course, in reality it often comes down to the person who wants to work a 40 hour week competing with the workaholic who works all weekend on a regular basis.

Similarly, a lot of couples might prefer to have one partner stay at home and do childcare, but this is impossible (except for the rich) with a housing shortage, because homes will always go to the wealthiest (usually those willing to be two income full-time households).

Once you have 100 households seeking 101 homes instead of 90 homes (etc.) it _does_ become possible. When you're competing with "I'd like a bigger home" vs. "I need any home at all" it gets easier.

This makes no sense. Moving emphasis from Production (work) to Consumption (leisure) increases carbon usage, and halts progress towards more sustainable technologies and conservative behaviours. Climate progress takes effort not entertainment.

Why does leisure have to mean consumption? And isn't consumption necessarily limited to the amount produced?

I wasn't particularly impressed by TFA, but I don't understand this criticism of it.

Well, you still need to consume, eat, house yourself etc. Any situation where you're not paying for that without a productive output is one where you're increasing the ratio of consumption to production. Of course not all work is productive, but solving inefficiencies is _work_ not leisure

Most work isn't aimed at making technological progress towards a more ecological or otherwise better future.

Most work is also not aimed at food production or housing anymore because of technology.

A large proportion of work is aimed at housing, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Housing costs in first world countries these days generally expand to consume available income, via land price inflation. Actual build cost - "production" - is a minor piece of the pie.

That's assuming all work is valuable (and productive). There are swaths of jobs that could be eliminated in favor of automation.

I think the most sustainable long term approach is to aim for efficiency. No need to have people commute to an admin job that could easily be done by software.

That being said, we need to also strive for sustainable consumption.

Yeah, my leisure is running, meditation, hiking, playing guitar. Aside from driving to hike on occasion (or train), I don't consume more.

You don't drive to the mountain when you go for a hike or wear shoes when you go running?

You can do an awful lot of that before you start throwing off waste at even a fraction of the rate of a fast food restaurant or other small business.

I would agree: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/15263800131...

That doesn't even begin to compare to commuting daily to bullshit jobs.

"I would thus argue that the climate crisis calls for (...) us to adapt Paul Lafargue’s phrase, the ‘necessity to be lazy’"

I didn't know it, but my laziness has been saving the world from global warming.

As a personal anecdote, I've been working between 4 and 2 days a week for more then 5 years already. I am never going back to 5 days. Never.

did you have to take pay cut?

Yes, but I guess the cut is not linear.

Can you elaborate on how you managed that? I'm trying to get there but not sure how to make it happen.

I wonder about how distribution would play a role in yields vs pollution - especially when accounting for training costs and logistics.

Would it be more efficient to have one person working 80 hours a week and thirty nine unemployed or 80 working half an hour a week or anywhere in between? Of course this is a very multivariable problem and that is ignoring the many sociological issues that would occur with such a system.

If you're lucky enough to be earning a decent amount, you can simulate this (kinda) for yourself. Following the Mr Money Mustache approach, save a good portion of all your income (>50%), invest it, and work towards an early retirement. Instead of a work week that's 1/4 the hours of everyone else, you'll have a career that's 1/4 the years of everyone else.

> As early as the 1880s, Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl Marx, put forth the demand for a three-hour work day...

If three-hour work day seemed feasible back then it must be even more so today.

I think shorter working time is one of the most overlooked solutions to the climate catastrophe. And before you object by bringing up adverse economic effects, please consider that introducing 40-hour workweek did not collapse the economy.

"For example, in the U.S in the late 19th century it was estimated that the average work week was over 60 hours per week..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time

I think three eights or four sixes (24 worked hours a week, either way) is a good goal to aim for, since it's the tipping point at which something other than paid work might dominate one's waking hours, while still leaving time for other normal activities and necessities.

I would rather work less longer days than more shorter days, under any scheme. Maybe in a world where I was working fully remote, it wouldn't matter, but the overhead of getting ready, commuting, and getting wound down again is a constant that doesn't vary significantly whether I work 12 hours or one.

tbf I'm not sure the demands of a radical anarchist who wrote "The Right to Be Lazy" and quit practising medicine because he considered it quite useless are necessarily indicative of the practical feasibility of a 3 hour work day, then or now. Lafargue's the guy that was so uncompromising in his demands he put Marx off identifying as a Marxist!

Not really seeing how a shorter work day alone saves the climate. Shorter shifts meaning more travel per unit of work completed could easily imply the opposite...

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