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Comment by BetaCygni | Hacker News Reader

Other people clearly don't think your job is worthless or they wouldn't be paying you to do it. The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's. If you're happy with the standard of living from 1930 you could probably achieve that with 10 hours of work per week.

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On a micro scale, your job clearly isn't worthless. A large tech company needs patent lawyers, or it will be completely destroyed by its competitors. But what if all patent lawyers suddenly resigned and started their rock bands, or became carpenters?

So, "bullshit jobs" are essentially jobs where you are playing a zero-sum game. Like SEO: your site goes up, another site goes down by the same amount. And you have to keep spending on it, otherwise your site will fall off the first page.

The world is not going to drift towards the global optima.

Nash wins, idealists lose. Sad, but inevitable. :)

That's why we need "pragmatic" idealists. People that realize that trying to make people go against their immediate self-interest in the game just won't work, but that the game itself can be changed to push the Nash Equilibrium up.

> Other people clearly don't think your job is worthless or they wouldn't be paying you to do it

That's true on its face, but the problem the article is trying to put its finger on is that money earned does not necessarily equate to value created. GDP grows every time money changes hands, but that is only a proxy for actual value delivered to human beings. As the economy grows more complex this proxy becomes more abstract and provides more opportunity for arbitrage and siphoning of wealth through clever manipulation.

They're paying people to have the specific domain knowledge that can be applied quickly in emergencies.

I suppose it's a bit like being a fireman at an airport, the chances of having a plane need your services are I would've thought pretty rare, but you still need to be there and you've still got to be ready because you've got to react incredibly quickly if something goes wrong.

Can't have an airport without firemen even though an incident requiring their services may never happen, I guess companies feel the same way about corporate lawyers, HR departments and PR people.

> The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's

I wouldn't blame entirely blame consumerism for why we won't work less.

A lot of things have gone up drastically in price in the '30s: higher education (which "everyone" is encouraged to get, from "every" adult figure in their life, from about 6th grade on. Wasn't like that in the '30s); housing; medicine.

In the '30s my great uncle was given a house as a wedding present. His siblings also got houses when they got married. Can you imagine something like that today? Gifting your children something that, in today's age, costs $100,000 (and sometimes 2x-3x more)?!

Of course we buy more things, and I know my grandparents didn't spend money on a smartphone every 2 years or have a $100/month cable bill. But blowing $2K on a TV is a drop in the bucket when you have a $200K mortgage (aka: debt).

I'm willing/able to live cheaply, and buy less things, but my creditors (the big three, above) want their bills paid. So I can't "just" work half time at the code factory and get paid 50% less, because I have debts the like which people in the '30s would have no idea about.

("You mean going to the doctor could be 1-2 months worth of take home pay, even with this 'insurance' that costs 10% of your take home pay??")

I'm not really up on what the standard of living was like in the 30's, but is it really possible working 10 hours per week? That would barely pay rent in most places.

The trick is getting into a government subsidized housing program, making use of food stamps, and taking as many other handouts as you can get. A former friend does this and works about 10 hours a week as a dishwasher (sometimes more if they have a busy week) spending the rest of his time playing video games or reading Objectivist literature.

" reading Objectivist literature " while on food stamps?

Clearly he is doing so from curiosity and not conviction.

Or get some serious skillz and a good gig.

In rural areas, 1930's living did not include amenities like plumbing or electricity in most places. In urban areas, you're looking at an interior room in a cold water tenement or a boarding house type situation.

It would be tough to do it in the city without becoming a victim of crime, but you can pull it off in many rural areas. Note that the 10 hours of work would be paid work. You'd be doing all sort of tasks on your own behalf. If you lived in the northern US, for example, right now you'd be chopping wood and preserving food in preparation for winter, for example.

Right, which leads to the question: which is the more "bullshit" job? Adding widgets to Facebook at $100k per year? Or unpaid time chopping wood to burn for fuel? Both of them lead to a warm room in the winter, but one is exhausting, dangerous, unpaid, and incredibly ineffecient.

You can have home, land, and installation of home on land for about 25K, if you're willing to settle for small values of each. Ebay has cheap land in rural places. You can buy a new manufactured home for less than 20K: https://www.factoryexpomobilehomes.com/micro.asp . You can get ten years' supply of basic food for probably $3000, depending on exactly what you get, from Costco: http://www.costco.com/emergency-kits-supplies.html . After property taxes and septic installation and other miscellaneous niceties, if you round up to 36K, that's basically $250 a month that you'd need to clear after taxes.

Edit: for 10 years; I'm assuming you'll have to replace such a cheap home after 10 years, but if not, the amortized cost is considerably lower.

Well, you'd need to move somewhere rents are really low. Rents were lower back then because rent is largely a zero-sum game, but they've risen a lot more in city cores.

Actually, you should probably buy your own house. In a lot of places that's quite cheap; if there's low competition for space, it wouldn't take very long at 40 hours/week (living a cheap place) before you can afford your own.

You forget that nasty reality called property and school taxes. In reality, one never owns one's home. You own it as long as you can pay any remaining mortgage and all the taxes. Let's also not forget maintenance costs. Ever paid the bill to replace a leaking roof or kitchen appliances or...

Deprecation of assets via property tax is an incredibly good idea. When you don't have that, people see property as a speculative asset class, buy property, do nothing productive with it and...that's basically the Chinese property bubble.

Yes, you must pay taxes on your home, but that's because your home is consuming resources from the locality even if it is owned outright.

The grand parent made a really good point. Lets say I don't want to consume local resources. I still have to pay taxes. As far as I know, this is true in the US and Canada. I believe this may not be true elsewhere. Regardless, the "having to pay taxes" has implications such that one can never completely leave the rat race.

Btw ... I'd be happy to be corrected. Are there places in the US/Canada without such taxes? Since they are levied locally, I imagine they could exist.

The mere existence of your land imposes a burden on local resources. Unless it's completely paved over (unlikely) it may start on fire, which may spread to nearby property. Paved over or not, it may be used by people without your permission as a base for criminal activity, necessitating a police response whether you want it or not.

Let's say it was paved, and a solid steel structure built with a roof so steep it was of no practical use to humans. You've eliminated the fire and criminal issues, but now rainwater runoff is flooding the road and your neighbors' property, you're causing ecological damage by eliminating vegetation and animal habitats, and you're blocking sunlight from your neighbors' yards.

And since you're not consuming local resources, that means you have no way to get to or from your property, so really, what good is it to you anyway?

There is no practical way for you to go about your life that has zero impact on those around you. So yes, you must always, to some extent, deal with the reality that there are other humans on this planet.

Country property taxes are generally pretty low in rural areas. Not zero mind you, it's the local gov's primary source of funding barring states sales tax, and gosh forbid if there are kids in the county to be schooled. If you don't want to pay property taxes, move to a fourth world country like Somalia.

China doesn't have property taxes, but the schools are underfunded and local governments are addicted to condemning farmer property and reselling it to run the cities. Not to mention the bubbles that result, since you can just sit on property as a static investment if it isn't taxed annually. Property taxes are good, trust me, the alternative (being priced out of the market by speculators) suck.

Water, sanitation, road or port facilities usage, etc are probably still 'local'.

Rents are only zero-sum because somebody figured out how to price-fix realty. In a healthy world you will have lotta new beautiful towns and affordable rent everywhere (but a select few historic places).

But the cost of "luxury" items has declined a lot since the 30's how much did a TV or a Car cost in the 30's compared to today.

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