If Graeber had wanted to make contributions to management theory, he presumably would've written a different sort of book.
Hard disagree.
As an Anarchist, it's my job to support the dissolution of any hierarchy that is not democratically operated in a way that supports people attempting to live while also creating communities founded on democratic incentives.
You can't be a passive anarchist and yes improvements need to be made. Who else would be doing the evolving here?
You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest capitalist leaders?
Can you elaborate on this point?
>You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest capitalist leaders?
I'm inclined to agree with you that that is a bad idea.
we should be striving to, when building these systems (building a business/organization/etc…) to try our best to put a bit more emphasis on not discarding the concerns of the people doing the work. an example would be, management often gets disconnected, siloed, or tunnel visioned in their thinking.
for example, an executive might not understand why an engineer sitting in meetings 90% of the time might be frustrated and why this might be hampering forward momentum. and then, executives when looking at another metric might question “our code is not up to par, why are engineers not producing?” they may never connect the dots that the executives caused the whole thing from the start.
if the business/org had built into its design where engineers/developers doing the work had more of a voice and felt more comfortable using it so their concerns can actually be heard, those kinds of tensions could be more easily addressed and solve entire classes of issues.
while i can see both sides here, i tend to agree with the Anarchist position more, both for productivity and for the overall mental health of those doing the more grunt style work.
i’ve worked in both large projects and mid/small projects and one of things that i can point to as a constant—if you give people more freedom/ownership of a project: they’re going to feel much better about it, they’re going to work harder to complete it, and they’re going to communicate and figure out clever ways to address underlying issues that may stand in the way. they’re going to feel actual pride in what they helped build.
and an opposite constant is: the more alienated someone is, the less ownership they feel over something—the less they give a shit. at this point their work devolves closer to “just a paycheck.” not only is this incredibly unhealthy for the project, but it makes the people doing the actual work feel worse/unfulfilled. i would argue (and Anarchists seem to as well) this alienation manifests in all kinds unhealthy ripple effects in society.
tldr, we should be putting more emphasis on the actual engineers/workers overall happiness levels and give them more ownership of their work. also, when i say “ownership” don’t limit your thinking to “capital ownership.”
Anarchists, if im misinterpreting, feel free to chime in and correct me.
I'm just saying that when switch to this mode, we've put our anarchist hat away and are practicing something else. Whatever we are at those times, we're no longer the audience that Graeber is writing for.
Of course reality doesn't work like that. You don't have the "burn it down" phase, followed by the "build it better" phase. It's all jumbled up together. But I still think it's helpful to view these two perspectives as different personae.
But is a diagnosis not a declaration of: "there should be less of this in the world"?
I think you already answered that question for me. I’ll also add that I don’t think this book was meant to be a contribution to management theory at all, I think the broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of thousands of people performing meaningless work just for the sake of having a job. This isn’t an issue of management, it’s an issue of values.
Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other people's jobs to be worthless...
Under the previous 'bloated' administration there were 40 consecutive quarters of economic growth at one point.
Read up on the history of Greater London Council/Greater London Authority, its one attempt deal with the 32 boroughs and City of London Corporation. Compare it with say NYC, or similarly large city’s around the world and it’s clear London/UK could benefit from streamlining things.
By the way, I live in London and am reasonably familiar with its history. Asking people to 'read up' on things that haven't previously been a topic of the discussion is a bit presumptuous. I might know more about it than you!
Reducing support for local councils has been deeply unpopular, but pointing out 32 + 1 local councils for London is overly bureaucratic and long agreed to be inefficient doesn’t connect to that in any way? The actual solution is to get rid of most of them, but a stopgap is to reduce their funding and thus waste.
I don't really understand what this means. Any country that's existed for hundreds of years has bureaucracy that's built up over hundreds of years. Britain isn't an unusually bureaucratic country – quite the opposite in many respects.
>Reducing support for local councils has been deeply unpopular
And yet you seem to think that it's had various unspecified benefits. If so, why is it so unpopular with the general public? And what are these benefits? It's easy to cut 'waste' by cutting funding. Cut funding to zero and you'll have zero waste! Magic!
Most countries disrupt the existing bureaucracy over time, the UK is somewhat unique in how old many of it’s structures are. Tokyo and Paris are equally old cities, but their structure didn’t ossify hundreds of years ago they fundamentally changed over time.
Also, there is nothing unspecified about cutting waste being beneficial. The difficult bit about cutting spending in a democracy is the unpopular nature of doing so. So, again you personally don’t like what’s going on, and at the exact same time it’s good for the long term health of the UK. Not because their doing a particularly good job, but because their doing something necessary.
You haven't specified who's benefitted and how. Nor have you shown that 'waste' spending has indeed gone down, either in absolute terms or as a fraction of total spending.
>So, again you personally don’t like what’s going on, and at the exact same time it’s a very good thing for the long term health of the UK.
How long is 'long' here? The country was in a better economic state when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. How long will we have to wait to see these long term benefits?
> How long is ‘long’ here?
Everyone’s kids is who benefits.
I am talking 30-40 years, countries don’t turn around on a dime. That said from 2000 to 2010 the UK was ‘flat’ and it just dealt with COVID, but I am not blaming the people in power for either the event just how well they set the country up to improve in the future.
https://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/our-news/more-children-ris...
In any case, you are implicitly conceding that you cannot point to any tangible benefits of this government's policies in the present day. They are merely policies that you think are ideologically correct, and thus expect to have good outcomes within some very long timeframe.
No idea why you are brining Tokyo into this – sorry.
> cannot point to any tangible benefits
How about debt/ GDP ratio that fell down to 82.8% in 2019 right before the pandemic. This trend was really easy to find 84.5, 84.3, 83.5, 82.8 (pandemic)
Making longer term predictions is much harder than retroactively looking on a few backward looking and easily gamed indicators. Rather than directly looking at GDP you need to compare things like GDP per capita PPP with other countries adjusting for demographics, economic development, etc but it’s really not worth getting into with someone that’s thinking in terms of political ideology.
That said, debt as a percentage of GDP is actually higher now than it was in 2010 when the Conservatives came to power! (This was also true before the pandemic.) See the chart here under the heading “Government debt”: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...
>I am bringing every single other country into this because it makes it obvious why the UK is failing.
Wikipedia article on Tokyo; therefore the UK is failing. Ok. London is a prosperous and successful city. It's really not the part of the UK you'd point to if you wanted to show that the country as a whole is failing.
> Future economic prosperity requires the current generation of children to be healthy, well educated and well adjusted members of society.
If that’s your personal ideology then fuck old people benefits… Except no, that’s not what either of us believe. You need to balance what you want to do with what you can sustain doing, there’s all sorts of lovely benefits the government of the UK could provide in theory but you need to weight nice to haves vs the ability for the system to sustain itself.
The UK has been in a downward spiral for longer than either of us have been alive, fixing that is necessary or you’re not actually benefiting young people. Saying think of the children is all well and good, but debt isn’t a viable solution you need to cut somewhere if you want to prioritize children’s benefits more.
PS: UK’s debt to GDP ratio was under 30 in 2000, and hit ~70 in 2010. The growth slowed and stopped after conservatives took over. Let’s not pretend the previous 10 years before the conservatives was good governance, it created a huge long term burden for the country which is going to stick around long after those leaders are all dead. The conservatives haven’t done a good job, but debt fueled spending is only useful in an absolute emergency not the solution to any and all problems.
No idea what you are getting at here.
>Saying think of the children
The health and wellbeing of children is important. It is not wrong or irrational to think about it. On the contrary, it is irrational to make supposed 'savings' by neglecting the very people who will be the engine of the future economy.
>UK’s debt to GDP ratio was under 30 in 2000, and hit ~70 in 2010. The growth slowed and stopped after conservatives took over.
We're both looking at the same graph. The debt to GDP ratio has been consistently higher under the Conservatives than it ever was under the preceding Labour government. You are picking an economic statistic at random, misrepresenting it, and still failing to point to any tangible benefits of the Conservatives' cuts in public spending. We are supposed to just accept that cuts are good because 'spending less is good'.
More on the Conservatives vs. Labour and debt here: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-ha...
This is entirely fictitious.
Have they reformed feudal system of leasehold that makes me the equivalent of a medieval peasant? Have they reformed the absurd planning system which takes years to approve a barn, stops British farmers from building wing turbines, stops my friend from raising a roof by 10 cm and blocks every renewable -project in the land? Have they repealed FPTP voting to have a more modern system, replaced combined sewers that dump poop on the beach?
Have they reduced the number of local authorities in London, or combined parish and country councils in the countryside?
No, they have not reformed any of the old systems that plague UK. Your entire argument is fanciful fantasy.
But credit where credit is due, they were making real progress on the UK’s debt before the pandemic. That’s exactly the kind of thing where the benefits don’t show up in the short term but is still vital for a country to prosper long term.
The bullshitters tend to be better at keeping their jobs than the people actually doing the work. They've had the practice - years of justifying their existence to the people controlling headcount numbers.
I got to uk 12 years ago and it’s been cool at the time, but a steady decline the whole way. The place I left was developing and has now evened or surpassed UK by many quality of life metrics. The trend will probably continue.
Now I am wondering why I moved, at great cost to myself. When I tell locals about this, I’d hope they would be as annoyed about decline in living standards as I am, but they sometimes get offended. Apparently comparing Britain to ‘inferior’ countries is offensive.