On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant (By David Graeber) | Hacker News Reader

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant (By David Graeber)

strike.coop

70 pointsanarbadalov15 comments

The Pandemic has definitely shown this to be true. A huge number of people didn't go to work and it didn't really matter. It remains a mystery as to what is driving this. Do bullshit jobs beget more bullshit jobs? A kind of multiplier effect?

If you are a manager doing a bullshit job, or managing people who are doing bullshit jobs, one of the ways out of of the bullshit (at least for yourself) is to employ more people, giveing you more people to manage. Managing people is not necessarally a bullshit job as there is a lot of compliance and HR type work to do, meaning that what you do is no longer bullshit.

You still have the problem of what to get your new staff to do so you run with what you know. more bullshit. In the military there is the concept of painting rocks to keep people busy, the epitimy of bullshit jobs.

From what I can tell the actual weird part of covid-19 job losses is that the bullshit economy has continued unhindered - by going remote - and it is actually propping up the rest of the economy.

The white collar folks are just filing their TPS reports from home and it has tended to be the people who make or do concrete things who are impacted the most.

As well as bullshit jobs there is a bullshit economy. This part of the economy is based on wants rather than needs. As soon as it became unsafe to participate in we collectively decided it wasn't very important at all.

This is the economy based on conspicuous consumption but there isn't much opportunity to be conspicuous right now. Nobody knows whether I'm wearing designer clothes at home or lounging around in my pyjamas.

> Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work.

His proneness to conspiracy theories casts everything he says in doubt. So let's get this straight: the "rulers" of society feels the need to spend a ton of money creating bullshit jobs, and then conspire to keep people unhappy and blaming others? I did not like Debt very much for this reason.

Perhaps you're reading too much into the literal meaning of that sentence. He's saying that this is the status quo, and the "rulers" are happy with the status quo, not that they're literally conspiring.

From the final paragraph: "... Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days."

Hopefully, but I prefer a writer who means what he writes, not leaving me to guess what parts he means and what parts he doesn't.

Keynes conjecture was also blatantly off in assumptions about automatability, divisability of work across multiple people (and overhead), apitude requirements, as nice as a 15 hour work week would be.

The complaints about "usefulness" of job in direct utility are also shortsighted and miss part of why planned systems have a history of failure in farms and consumer good supply. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't important.

Looking at an economy from either a worker's or an owner's view is ironically blinkered - the underlying system is what gives utility and wages to both. A pipeline between supply and demand may print money but adding in loops and needless length (as opposed to say acceleration constraints) wouldn't serve either interest long term.

Actual bullshit jobs certainly exist and imply a larger scale which can support the load and either enough systemic scale efficiency to counteract the local or just plain a lack of sufficient competitors who would gain an edge from doing away with the bullshit and prosporing or finding out the "bullshit" is actually important.

That Keynes bloke didn't figure into his calculations that one of the main reasons we will never achieve a 15 hour working week is because of human greed.

Along with large population of people who do not have enough income to live decently, and are therefore subject to "the grind", there are also many many examples where the person is making/has made lots, but still works for more. This is human greed. I think the average greedy person would rather make 2-3 times as much in a week, rather than buying their time back.

It starts at human need for low income, and then ends up as human greed, as income gets higher.

Although it would be nice, I'm not sure there will ever be a world where we all kick back and relax to enjoy the benefits of past generations. Some would call that forward progress. As you say, it seems the other way around and we are making things worse. Perhaps our individualistic quest for an easy life is contributing to that.

I mostly agree with you, but I wish we could come up with a better word than "greed" to describe the almost universal and constant desire for humans to improve their own lives, which has a connotation that the only way for me to benefit is by taking from others. I think most in this community would agree life isn't a zero sum game and there are actions I can take that improve my life that are also net neutral-positive to the world around me.

I think we should encourage this type of activity while condemning the negative externalities of people's actions, as opposed to blanket condemning "human greed" as a whole.

Machtgelüst might be the word you are looking for https://fnietzsche.com/will-to-power-appearance-of-the-conce...

This 3-part article series starting with the link below is a much funnier take on a similar concept as Graeber's:

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta...

Should add "2013"

An anthropology professor ruthlessly labeling other people’s jobs pointless.

Glass houses, my friend.

> I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit.

I personally know several who love their jobs.

It seems quite possible to love having a BS job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com