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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

One thing not mentioned is that productivity increases in one area free up some of those people to do entirely new jobs that did not previously exist, just because society couldn't afford to allocate people to those jobs.

Not many doctors and dentists and so forth 1000 years ago, because the agricultural base couldn't support it. It took 95% of people being farmers to produce enough food for themselves and the remaining 5% of the others. Now 5% of people can produce enough food for the other 95%, which allows them to be doctors and programmers and whatnot.

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Alternatively how much of our labor force is working in useless jobs? Aka jobs that just exist because people need a job to survive?

first you need to define “useless” which is probably the difficult task

This book is about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

It defines them this way: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

It goes further and defines various types of thse jobs, with examples for each. Those are included in the Wikipedia article.

I hadn't heard of this book before, but I appreciate this from the wiki article:

"As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all, without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure."

I think the 'without qualification' part is really important, so that there is no incentive NOT to work, and no stigma attached to receiving the money. Just give it to everybody and otherwise leave them alone.

That's not really a thing, despite what David Graeber [1] would have you think.

The reality is that business owners always want to make as much profit as possible, so they're never going to intentionally or knowingly pay labor for something that is useless, money that would otherwise go straight into their pocket. Sure there are some inefficiencies in the chain and a subset of managers trying to expand headcount unnecessarily because of office politics, but owners and board members are incentivized to eliminate that as much as possible because, you know, profit.

The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia, where for various political reasons, effective oversight of costs is missing in certain scenarios. Usually that's a temporary phenomenon, as eventually a "nosy" journalist (or whistleblower) reveals a bunch of money is being wasted, and political pressure builds to reform that and stop wasting taxpayers' or donors' money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job

The larger a company is the more out of touch the owners are, so they are not knowingly leaving money on the table. And larger headcount usually mean higher valuation, so they don't mind. And it might only take a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, so the time need to be filled out somehow. Good luck asking your boss if you could go down 50% in time, and keep 100% of the salary.

> Good luck asking your boss if you could go down 50% in time, and keep 100% of the salary.

That’s just the lizard brain mode of thinking. The person you paid $5k to redo your roof isn’t more deserving of the money because they spent two weeks on it instead of one. You’re both better off if they get it done faster.

My company went down to 80% time for 100% salary and every metric we use for productivity didn’t change one bit. I have no doubt we could drop another day down to 60% and still have hit all our targets. And anyone who actually works knows why, because the time off isn’t cutting into working time, it’s cutting into bullshit time.

To the contrary, the larger a company is, the more professionalized management becomes, and the more inefficiencies can be eliminated. Lots of economies of scale to be found.

And valuation has nothing to do with headcount, that's not how stock market analysts work. They look at revenue and costs and growth. The higher salaries are because of increased headcount, the higher costs are and therefore a lower valuation.

If it only takes you a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, you can bet they're going to find some more productive work for you real quick. In any business, there's virtually always more profitable work to be done that there are employees to do it, so it's not difficult.

> The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia

You should read Graeber’s book sometime.

There are jobs that are useless but still benefit business owners financially. Graeber gives the example of a receptionist at a small firm. The firm had so few callers and visitors that the receptionist was totally unnecessary and sat idle most of the time.

Why did they hire her? If the members of the firm answered the phone themselves, they would not be taken seriously. Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.

> Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.

looks are sometimes not unimportant nor useless. It's only the hacker mindset that thinks otherwise. "Normal" people do put some importance on appearances. Therefore, it's not useless.

I think “useless” is the wrong aspect to focus on. Having someone sit at a desk doing nothing except answer a couple of phone calls sounds terrible. It’s good from the firm’s perspective because they get their receptionist, but the person in that role likely doesn’t get anything more than a pay check out of it.

> the person in that role likely doesn’t get anything more than a pay check out of it.

but why is there an expectation that they get anything more than a paycheque out of it? It's called a job for a reason.

Because people spend a large portion of their lives at work. I think it’s sad that so many people have to work these kinds of jobs because their talents aren’t monetisable. A person shouldn’t have to justify their need for shelter or food.

> A person shouldn’t have to justify their need for shelter or food.

while a good moral argument, the world has not reached a point where such outcomes can be had. At some point in the future, when there's post-scarcity for all basic resources, then it would be possible that people shouldn't have to justify their own shelter or food.

I honestly believe this could have been achieved already, at least in my country. But opportunities to push us in that direction are avoided more often than not. Maybe the same characteristics that advanced developed nations will also be their downfall?

I believe the same is possible. Especially the fact that we end up spending more money to make it not possible.

You can also define bullshit jobs as creating little or no value for society, yet enabling the emplyer to make money.

Business owners usually don’t run companies. They hire “professionals” to do that. And those “professionals” usually care more about their personal gains and personal grandiose feelings than maximising profits long term.

It's interesting to look at developing countries like India for that answer. In these countries there are so many people doing jobs that in Western countries simply don't exist, because labour costs are too high. I wouldn't really call them "bullshit" jobs as another comment did, it's just a different way of allocating resources.

For example in the construction industry barely any heavy machinery is used - it's cheaper to have labourers do the work than it is to rent machines. In road reconstruction you will see men digging the road by hand, then women carrying the rubble away somewhere with small buckets.

Now therapists are probably this job.

Bezos has an interview where he’s talking about the future of labor and mentions pet therapy is a career individuals can have. He was using it as a way to say we don’t really know what the future will hold.

> "Surely," a triceratops says, "there was some point between gunpowder and... something called Amazon Prime... that you folks had to think, 'Are we supposed to be running a planet? Wouldn't we rather make Marvel movies?'"

https://www.looper.com/1047273/rick-and-morty-season-6-episo...

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