Why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid
salon.com
salon.com
The author makes an interesting point about people who dislike their work begrudging people who do meaningful things (in their judgement). Throughout our history, we have had an idealized vision of the average American in the back of our heads -- first it was the farmer, creating food for their family. Then it became the factory worker, creating cars for the masses -- now it may be the programmer, making the software that powers our world.
The interesting thread here is creation. We live in a country that idealizes making things and taking risk/responsibility. Yet society is heavily geared towards conformity, and work is an extension of that. Even tech startups are increasingly becoming a systematic, codified industry. Is it no wonder that there is some resentment of people who are perceived to truly be free to create?
This is why something like basic income[2] is so interesting. Once we are freed from having to conform to society in order to meet our basic needs, what will we be able to do? The cynic would say that people will all collect their checks and accomplish nothing. The optimist would say that everyone would start creating new art, music, machines, etc. I think somewhere in between, but that somewhere in between is still vastly more interesting than what we have now.
[1] http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=st... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
The largest and most instructive one is, I think, Facebook. And tumblr. To a lesser extent reddit. For shits and giggles, 4chan and SA.
And if you look at the latter of those, you'll see kids making things by themselves in large amounts. You could take that as support for basic income - everybody under 18 pretty much lives on basic income and then some. A lot of them make really fun things and publish on the internet.
My hunch is that if we do get basic income, it will take one to two generations before the floodgates really open and our problem will not be people being too uncreative, but exactly the opposite.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen dilettantes' blog articles that are more thought provoking than supposed social science classic writings, but in general the more user-generated areas of the internet - populated by adults as much as kids - we'd still mostly waste the free time we got anyway.
(I've been distracted from a bit of volunteering I was going to do in order to add a comment on a social site that won't be read by anyone after tomorrow, and probably won't be remembered by many ten minutes after they've finished reading it. QED, I guess)
That is a really great question and one that I think gets to the heart of the problem this article and others like it are demonstrating.
Furthermore, when we are truly passionate we can maintain focus and energy towards our goals for far longer periods.
4Chan might be dismissed as "cat memes", but it's also a massive worldwide experiment in totally anonymous communication. That is a very new thing, and although you might not find cat memes to be all that impressive, intrinsically they aren't much different from poetry: cat memes and poetry are both about expressions as an art form.
Linkbait headlines suck too, sure, but it's also a symptom of an effort to get more people to read news than ever have before. How well-read was your average teenager in 1900? And now? There are totally average people walking around now with nearly encyclopedic knowledge of multiple subjects, in their heads, and what they cannot recall from that article they read the other day with the linkbait headline, they can still look up on a mobile device.
I totally don't get the whole doge thing. It's the first social fad that has come along that has made me feel old. I can't relate to it, it's alien, it's foreign, it's weird, it doesn't make any sense. But, I think probably that's just because I don't understand it, not because it isn't interesting.
To be honest, those are made mostly by adults that need to work instead of creating actual value. cf. most news portals.
I'm also not entirely convinced making cat memes all day would be wasting time - if you do it long enough, you'll evolve it into a proper art form. The whole reason you have cat or any other kind of memes is because they let you succintly communicate something that's both new and would otherwise take a lot of explaining. It kind of sucks though when other people then take your meme and run with it making it say other things and diluting its meaning until it's nothing more than a reference to an echo of itself, posted only to show how hip you are with these new memes. Which is why cat memes (outside of one or two very specific images) and rage comics (all of them) are not welcome on 4chan any more.
1% of a given group A may be doing the creating, however many of the other 99% of group A may well be active in group B and be a creator there.
Additionally, I would guess that the percentage of of group that are active participants goes up as the group size goes down. In my DnD group the DM makes up ~15% of the group.
"if the idea is that Reddit serves as a microcosm of what basic income would do" then that idea seems obviously flawed to me.
The Free Market is structured along this assumption. 1% of people will make software, 1% will make music, 1% will farm, 1% will teach, 1% will build chemical plants, etc. etc. but they will each enjoy the other 99%'s productions. The assumption, of course, is that this will naturally fall into place. (Automation and even globalization/outsourcing threw a wrench into the system).
However, this "Law of Conformity" (mentioned in the great-grandparent comment) still applies in this 'new age' of 'basic income'. People will still converge on commonly esteemed things i.e. there will be A LOT of musicians, painters, filmmakers, etc. (many of whom will make crap stuff -- as is already noticeable on certain 'sections' of the internet).
Also,one of the real (current) reasons you never get payed a lot of money for helping people is because: the people that need the most help usually cannot pay you (or at least not pay you well).
The people buying your software, art, etc. are buying it after their own needs are well met (usually). That is the basic premise of consumerism. The morality of consumerism is an issue all on its own.
But it is also arguable that the Free market itself converges (or causes people to converge) due to this "Law of Conformity". The past few generations have pushed their kids like crazy to opt for 'better paying' careers, simply for the fact that they are 'better paying'.
Why? The Law of Conformity, I guess. :P An on topic video came out today by a fairly popular YouTuber, on the last point I mentioned (about the high-pay career pushing): http://youtu.be/16pVXq7Lscg
Regarding 1, I'd venture a guess that people on reddit are generally younger, and reddit as a community is bigger (especially if you stick with the 'main' reddits.). Many of my friends feel discouraged to be creative on reddit because of the sheer volume of creativity already there. They share their creativity in smaller workshops or among friends.
And considering 2, a lot of people have to use significant energy to do 'bullshit jobs', so when they come home they have little left for creative expression.
I lean towards the 'it's worth a shot' approach. I've been freelancing for a few years now, and in my constant battle against seeing my job as just a job, I notice a sharp increase in creativity when I get the 'money' part out of the way (via a fun or lucrative project), and when the job routines fades from my system (after some time spent not working actively on a lucrative-but-slightly-boring project).
Furthermore, if I look at my younger, more carefree self and at my younger siblings and their friends, I'm amazed at the creativity. They play minecraft instead of more consumer-style games, they tinker with electronics, and generally, after the novelty of 'doing nothing' wears off, seek out creativity with a passion. And this doesn't seem to be a specific subtype of people (geeks, creatives, whatever).
Most paid programming jobs in IT are bullshit jobs that have no benefit to anyone. They just prop up other bullshit jobs in the accounting or legal departments, duplicate work done in some other company's marketing division, make the systems compliant with some new government regulation, work around bugs put in the systems for the express purpose of generating paid after hours call outs, exist just so the workers involved can list more new technologies on their CV's, are contractor jobs doing the work of the employees who are spending their whole day trading shares or doing nothing, laundering some open source software so it can be made proprietary, ... ... ...
Any programming job of any real benefit to anyone isn't even unpaid work. Someone doing a personal pet project is really paying because of forfeited income, as also is a student paying fees to work on a research program somewhere.
1. Do "Big Men" first come into any semblance of power through redistribution (I give my food to Tom down the street, now he is my first follower), or does it start some other way (My father is important, therefore I am somewhat important)?
2. I wonder if humans only punish generous behavior in their peers. I assume that leaders have a different standard, as we don't see them as "one of us", and thus we allow them to do things that we would otherwise look down upon.
Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.
This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.
My hunch is that the documented phenomena with punishing generous people is a "Sample population = The sort of person who attends a particular university in the United States" sort of issue.
If you think about it in that light, it makes the
achievements of the socialist bloc seem pretty
impressive: a country like Russia managed to go
from a backwater to a major world power with
everyone working maybe on average four or five
hours a day.
I was an early Agile person, starting with Extreme Programming in 2000. It blew me away how quickly a revolutionary approach to the work I loved was turned into a bunch of empty labels and pointless rituals that covered up the same old power structure but provided the useful appearance of change. [1] It's definitely made me wonder what early Russian revolutionaries would think of how the Soviet Union turned out.
[1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
Edit: just to clarify, this is a brief gloss that leaves out a lot of nuance.
[1] http://marxistsfr.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/02.htm...
Yet, the big swing in silicon valley is B2B.
The question we should asking ourselves is:
What can we, as software engineers and web developers, do to support our working class?
We need to reduce their debt, reduce their cost of living, and decrease the amount of time they waste dealing with the intricacies of living in modern society. How can we do this?
I like what Balgair has to say, to some degree - though voting without education may backfire, so it's not that simple.
Some off-the-cuff ideas re; debt reduction, in the hope that others find their flaws & suggest others:
- Facilitating P2P debt may help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the "overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this but can't recall the name.
- Reduce student debt by making expensive college degrees obsolete. I think the next step in that (now that we have libraries, wikipedia, coursera, udacity, etc) may be changing hiring practices: a startup that helps companies hire based on experience/aptitude rather than falling back to the college degree heuristic could have a big impact. Relatedly, other startups (or FOSS) might replace the traditional degree in other ways, like guiding students through free online tracks or connecting them to advisors, mentors, internships, peers, and jobs.
- Change how employers pay employees. Most large employers have cheap debt and/or lots of cash, while many of their lowest-paid employees have terrible credit. This means they have to rely on mind-bogglingly expensive services like Payday loans and credit cards to cover their basic expenses (which don't come due on payday). A startup that helps employers pay daily instead of fortnightly, or pay bills directly, or even provide credit directly to their employees could put a lot of money back in poor pockets.
- I don't know the other main sources of American debt. Car payments? Large houses? I just don't know. But a systematic investigation of the sources of the debt, the costs of servicing it, and the underlying reasons it's required may be a decent way to scout out some good ideas!
Ultimately, though, much of this comes down to Policy and Culture. Student debt would evaporate if we just had free education. Cost of Living would likely plummet if we had terrific public transportation. There may be tax schemes (land taxes?) that would lower rent/home ownership costs. A culture of minimalism would likely also reduce cost of living =)
There are a number. The one I'm most familiar with Prosper.com. (Most of them technically aren't really P2P debt because the central site is the lender of record, in order to deal with regulatory compliance, which can be quite involved when it comes to lending and debt collection, but they approximate P2P lending.)
I'm not sure if it's what you're thinking of, but www.wefinance.co is a new startup in P2P debt, hoping to do exactly that.
If you want to alleviate the debt burdens of the working classes, get them to the polls. If you want to reduce their cost of living, get them to the polls. If you want to help them have more efficient lives, give them more freedom and rights by getting them to the polls. Find a way to get people voting and out and helping each other. Then, I believe that people will fix it themselves because they know that they can. You have to tech a man to fish, not fish for him. The best way to teach a man to reduce their debt, to reduce their cost of living, to decease the time they spend on waste and paperwork is to teach them that they have the power to do something about it.
In Colorado the Right-Left divide is real and is mostly a North (Boulder-Democrat) v. South (Colorado Spring, Republican), but pales in comparison to water rights. You want politics in Colorado, hell most big western states? It is ALL about water.
However, if you do believe that. Then get on it!
I am trying. I'm going down the road of grad school this fall, but I, hopefully, will try to participate in democracy and represent people later in my life. I would be very honored to represent people in this grand experiment called the USA, especially locally.
You are right though, get on it! But the question is how? What kind of app could you write or website or whatever that would help increase voter participation? I haven't a clue. But, maybe someday, someone will.
The irony of Graeber's generalizations is that his job has arguably less reason to exist than most hospital paper-pushers'. As a result some of his understanding of the real world seems more theoretical than practical (I mean, I agree with him in principle about the concept behind many internships being dubious, but I don't think "for the first few years they won’t even pay you" actually applies anywhere outside academia.)
Whether someone is virtuous, or caring, or helps others, is irrelevant in ascertaining their value, and thus how they should be paid. A teacher might produce pleasure in a student, but that student is in no capacity to makes its pleasure the deciding one. The moral good of a job is, at best, a footnote, and only valuable insofar as far as the dominant groups are pleased by them. The market doesn't care about your moral good.
The mistake of writers like this one is supposing that such a system can be fixed within the confines of modern capitalism. It cannot. People will conduct their campaigns, and go on strike, and create new movements, and perhaps pay teachers more out of social duty and pity, but they will ultimately butt heads with the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. If this writer is serious, the solution is not to turn to mere Marxist-inspired theories of labor, but to Aristotle and Aquinas.
For what Aristotle, Aquinas, and essentially the entire stock of pre-modern philosophy, approached differently was the question of, "what should our fundamental social value be?" Their answer was not, "pleasure." For Aristotle, it was the good produced by a life trained in socially-imparted virtues--which ultimately allowed one to contemplate the divine. For Aquinas, it was more explicitly religious: loving God, which entailed doing and believing all the things He wants us to do. And as was the case with the Enlightenment, the cultures that both these thinkers embodied were constructed around such answers, from the top down. In either system, the moral worth of work is not irrelevant, it's the only thing relevant (with differences in how moral is defined).
In-depth rebuttals should be directed to Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish philosopher whose book "Whose Justice, Which Rationality," I just paraphrased in part. (But seriously...)
This is where the capitalist notion of people pursuing their own pleasure without interfering with that of others stems from. This is a qualitative, not quantitative, notion of utility, and arguments have been made that it does not allow for interpersonal utility comparisons. Which is why hardcore followers of the theory (market anarchists) oppose regulation, as it necessarily requires coercion (making someone do something other than the action they'd most like to do), and without the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons it's not possible to justify any such coercion.
There's more detail on his political/economic views in his book, 'Debt: The First 5000 Years':
Another of his books is titled, 'Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. Its summary on Amazon begins: "This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism."
So I rather doubt from the title and the summary that we'd discover that he blithely accepts the core tenets of modernism. It appears to me that he probably would reject quite a bit of the core tenets of modernism and those that he accepts he probably does so understanding their roots and implications. Again, I can't be sure b/c I haven't read it but the guy assumes an outsider, iconoclastic stance in almost everything I have read.
[0]http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-fle...
This is why we are so highly paid. We can put in 1 unit of work and enable checkout for all of Amazon, for instance.
Also: 1) supply and demand and 2) rewarding jobs pay less than shitty ones (all of finance in my opinion)
Consider the fact that tech has rampant age discrimination because almost no one wants to pay any extra for experience beyond ten years or so unless that person moves to management.
I think Stephen Colbert explained it best in his recent book, America Again. Being close to money attracts more money. Or as Piketty explained it, capital is valued higher than labor. Roles dealing with how capital is allocated are given undue benefits.
The alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that we all choose different blends of monetary and non-monetary remuneration, according to our skills and desires. Some may derive great joy from helping others, and accept lower pay for this; others may eschew the socially rewarding jobs in favor of occupations which provide financial security for their families.
It's not just the guy who pulls out a broken rail and nails a new one in place. Finding someone to do that isn't hard or expensive. It's the guy who knows who will do that for a competitive price in a timely (urgent) manner, can ensure such guys are available to thousands of miles of track, has enough replacement track on hand & well-situated, owns (or can rent) equipment to move such long heavy rails to where needed fast, has personnel handling all the QA & regulatory burdens to ensure those rails won't likely fail soon after installation, etc etc etc; few people are willing & capable of pulling all that off. Rail replacement also includes paying some to do "BS jobs" which those with the money & responsibility know are needed, even if seem largely pointless or distasteful to most casual observers. And yes there's some abuse buried in all that; human nature is far from perfect.
I didn't fully appreciate how some earn their keep until I joined a startup. Organizing productivity demands talent and risk, without which (and obtained/retained by salary) very little resembling corporate productivity would happen. Yes, swinging a hammer is valuable; knowing who should swing it, where, when, and to what purpose - moreso.
I stopped to think where we disagree fundamentally, and I think it boils down to this:
Our technological, social, and economic developments, I believe, have led to crazy increases in wealth and comfort, and I suppose happiness too, at least in the West, but arguably even globally. I think we more or less agree on that.
I think we are also in agreement in many ways we're better off than we have been in the past.
We are somewhat less in agreement over the cause of this, and I suppose that could be a worthwhile conversation. I'm inclined to believe capitalism played some role in this, but that, from a 'social evolutionary' perspective, it's become, or turning into a malignant growth. I'd say technological developments play a much bigger role, and perhaps capitalism was just a mechanism that 'worked' to enable this. But I'm by no means certain of that, and it seems to me that there's no way to get anywhere on this subject other than sustained conversation where we move down to our most basic 'axioms' step by step.
Where I am more certain, and where I suspect we agree least, is whether the status quo is 'good enough' and by extension worth defending or 'fighting'.
I think it's not worth defending too much, primarily because I strongly believe that should be no reason whatsoever for us to be working as much and as hard as we do now. The 'general' increase in wealth and comfort pales in comparison to what would be possible if we had a fairer system in place, and I believe it is absolutely worth the effort to take a shot at creating such a fairer system. I think we've learned at least something from the past, and that we won't attempt to just implement a full totalitarian redistribution scheme.
And even if there's a significant risk of our efforts turning into another 'failed utopia', merely the rising social instability and the (I'd say) well-proven disastrous ecological developments are reason enough for me to take that risk rather than making some small incremental changes to our current system.
However, that would be outside of the confines of the discussion in this thread, and that's quite frustrating.
I guess what I'm saying is that without considering these more fundamental disagreements, our collective discussions in this thread are bound to frustrate and not really significantly 'shape' or change our views.
That said, I enjoy reading your views and I mostly just felt like writing this; it's not something 'aimed' at you in particular!
Leverage comes at the intersection of "benefits lots" and "can be done by few".
Example: American physicians are not generally more effective than French physicians, but they are vastly better paid. Far more so than can be explained by any linear relationship like hours worked, and far more than any impact analysis would suggest. Many examples in, e.g. finance exist as well.
Some references, one from the right[1] and one from the left[2].
1.http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/25/american-medical-associatio...
2. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/11/21/doctors_carte...
Looking at society in its whole, I've always thought that the category that makes the most money are the "middle men". If you put yourself between many producers and many consumers, and take a small cut of every transaction, then you get rich quickly. We have example like VISA/Mastercard, the movie distributors, and many more. I guess these are what he calls "bullshit jobs". Even CEOs fall here: they connect thousands of workers to millions of customers (in a way).
In addition, for every problem that we solve--global distribution, connectivity, transportation--we create even more. All of these "solutions" require additional infrastructure, research and development, and ultimately, breed entirely new disciplines and fields of study--i.e. STAFF. Additional flexibility breeds complexity.
100 years ago, I probably wouldn't have ventured very far from where I was born. Food would be grown locally. I wouldn't have internet, etc. Today I have MUCH more flexibility, but that comes at the price of complexity. I tend to believe the SUV / iPhone argument but think they're pretty terrible examples. All things equal, I could likely maintain the same level of technology and lifestyle as someone 100 years ago on about half my income. It's simply, not our culture, which is in large part driven by consumerism. Even if I WANTED to, most companies wouldn't allow it.
The real question we should be asking ourselves, is do we need the iPhone / SUVs, etc. And if not, why are we working so hard for them?
The film Happiness [1] also explores the work / leisure balance in depth.
As a personal anecdote, I don't need those things. I don't need a car, I don't need a smartphone, I don't need a TV, I don't need more than a few clothes, I don't need furniture other than a bed, I don't need to eat out or eat expensive food/drinks, if I wasn't working I wouldn't even need a computer and internet. I'm quite happy without most of those things. I make an engineer's salary and save almost all of it, so that one year out of college (cheap education, no loans) I now have savings that could easily last me 5 years in the bay area at my current lifestyle (counting housing/food/healthcare) or significantly longer in a cheaper area. (Though I'm not quitting yet, I still enjoy my job and maybe there's the beginnings of golden handcuffs there.)
Unfortunately for my case, I expect it will be hard to raise a family on this below-standard-expenditure lifestyle, although that is something I think I want to do. For one thing, I can't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on board with living without all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a woman exists, but I wouldn't know where to look.
And even though I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work on my own (zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's disapproval of this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if it was hard to get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money like everyone else?
I can't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on board with living without all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a woman exists, but I wouldn't know where to look.
Clearly, outside America.
I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work on my own (zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's disapproval of this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if it was hard to get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money like everyone else?
The answer to this is definitely No, you won't regret it. As long as you can carry yourself in the workplace, you are likely to return with skills, motivation and experience far outweighing that which your peers in industry were able to gather in the equivalent period. After years running my own startup in mainland China, I found my workplace competition in London to be frankly underwhelming... to put it bluntly, I was learning things full time during those years and they were filling in time for a salary with bureaucratic and temporal challenges to overcome. Even if you can't envisage a return with such confidence, you're smart and will be fine. Fear not.
I wonder if this represents a change in Graeber's own mindset, or is merely representative of the interviewer.
PS. I've had emails with Graeber and he's every bit as personable and intelligent in private communications as in his conventional written output.
Ahh. So for some reason, private companies (or shareholders, if you like) are willing to give their money to people who they know are doing absolutely nothing. Well, I simply don't believe that.
In a 1000+ employee profitable company do you really think the shareholders will revolt because senior management has a few dozen worthless positions that help consolidate their power?
Teachers tend to be heavy on b) and light on a).
Hedgefund managers tend to be heavy on a) and light on b).
You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating jobs.
If more are indeed "dissatisfied", methinks it's because they have the relative luxury of dissatisfaction in place of the harsh existential reality of survival. As the Tappit brothers noted: the difference between two headlights and one headlight is a lot less than the difference between one headlight and no headlight. Those with Bell phones complained little because the alternative was writing a letter or walking - or not communicating at all - to another person; we complain of phones as we do now because we can't imagine not having at least a landline handy.
The Industrial Revolution allowed us to solve more and more desires. All of our basic ones are satisfied (in the West, for 99% of people). But the treadmill of desire continues, so jobs were created to satisfy those, too. And they feel fake because those jobs are increasingly divorced from central, "real" human desires.
Likewise there are only so many hours in the day, and days in your life. There is a hard (large) limit to what you can do in a lifetime. We may be increasing what we desire as resources become cheaper, but it is increasing asymptotically to 'what a person can consume/experience in the hours they have'.
Well, yes, that's the marketing angle, but its not actually true.
http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-featu...
I'm sure someone will see value in a gold retina display. And if we get that done, I'm sure we'll start selling retina displays that have been baptised on pluto by the pope himself.
There is no limit.
The trouble is, as was pointed out in the article, is that removing steps means removing a person from their source of income and in a lot of cases also their identity and social network. So how do you remove bullshit jobs without causing a massive collective existential threat?
One way to look at it: idle people with decaying skills and self esteem are just another kind of waste. So if your first step is to eliminate some particular sort of bullshit work, the second step could be to find some non-bullshit way to employ the people who no longer are doing anything.
Thinking broadly, that shouldn't be hard. After all, we could afford to pay people to do bullshit, so we'll be even better off if we pay those people to do something productive. But the current way we account for things often makes it tricky in specific cases.
People will then choose jobs on the "efficient frontier". Which point on the frontier depends on how much you value pay.
Now it follows from the efficient frontier that if job A is both better paid and helps other people more than job B, then no one will do job B. So for all pairs of jobs (A,B) that people do, one will be better paid and the other help others more.
I think the confusion is that, as you get paid more, you tend to help people less directly. A minimum-wage fast-food worker is obviously helping people. That's what he does. He probably says the literal words, "May I help you?" a hundred times a day. But he's not helping very many people and he's not helping them very much, and that's why the job doesn't pay so well.
Compare to, say, a chemist (as in chemistry, not the British term for a pharmacist). He's not directly helping people. In his day to day work, he doesn't interact with the customers. But he's helping to create new products and maintain existing products that people want, in a fashion that can be ludicrously indirect but is still ultimately extremely helpful.
Or look at senior management. We like to deride them, but most managers in most companies are useful. They don't help the customers directly, but they help their employees help people, and that can translate into a lot of help in a big company.
Yeah, there are people who get paid a lot to basically shaft other people, but they're not the common case.
If you want to break that barrier, you have to provide your help indirectly in some manner, whether it's shaping an organization for people to work within, or building tools that help them do their jobs, or what have you.
Making panini or coffee - good ones - takes effort, time, and resources to a degree few are willing to engage on their own. I've a dozen coffee makers, acquired in the quest to learn how to brew a perfect cup, and still drop $1.75 at Starbucks because a swipe of a card and a few minutes of scheduled skilled labor are often preferable to finding decent beans, grinding them, heating water, buying & fitting a filter, pouring, timing, cleaning and stowing what's needed; ditto lunch and dog-walking. Sure, we could all make fancy lunches and fine coffees and walk the dogs, and enjoy doing so at select times, but most people are unable and unwilling to at that level day-in-and-day-out when slinging dirt, paper, or bits can acquire such lifestyle.
As for the "BS jobs": in between the productive (slinging dirt, or deciding who should sling which dirt where) are "glue jobs" and "filler jobs", not notable of themselves but required to cover & hold together aspects of productivity, without which cumulatively expensive problems would arise.
That opportunities in any job may be abused for personal gain, or trail off to nothing useful, is simply a reality of human nature and imperfect systems.
The question, foundational to much of the biased rambling in the rest of the interview, is either naive or disingenuous. We have independently conceived of odd luxuries, and made them profitable for someone to do despite being arguably wasteful, or that they are in fact our chosen outlet for the long-predicted "life of leisure". Like "living on the Moon", the remote notion is romanticized, but when given the option to ... most people are disinterested in eeking out survival on a giant atmosphere-free dead rock, or idly reading or playing games whilst subsisting on mundane food & accommodations; rather, they'd instead choose a routine of imposed obligations, coupled with swipe-a-card easy access to higher luxuries of relatively fine foods and fancier surroundings.
I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity (and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods & services with the swipe of a card. Force redistribution to impose the social structure & values the interviewee wants, and methinks most of us would rebel at the results; we're not living that way for a reason.
This line of argument ignores the obvious collective action issues in play. I think everyone could work 20% less, and make due with 20% fewer luxuries, and 90% of people would be happy with that trade-off. But any given individual can't work 20% less, because then they'd get fired, and their kids would go to shitty schools in places with lots of crime and not be able to afford medical treatment if they got sick. So everyone works more than they want to, and most of that extra production goes to shareholders.
I'm not a "life of leisure" kind of guy. I'm a workaholic without many hobbies and not a lot of patience for relaxation. But I'm almost positive that people like me are in the distinct minority, and can't help but feel that it's us forcing our values on everyone else.
I read somewhere recently that being a leftist or a right-winger is in part wired up on your brain. I tend to believe that, one side just doesn't seem to understand what motivates the other to think as they do.
Sure, there are stark anecdotes, but on the whole the aphorism applies: a thing is worth only and exactly what another will give for it.
To an economist, a transaction's worth is defined by the point at which the supply and demand curves intersect. The supply curve depends strongly on how much $$$ an employer has available to it. $1M for Goldman Sachs or $300K for Google is peanuts; $30K for the neighborhood bookstore may break the bank. So someone could easily be paid 6 figures at the former simply to keep them off the market and prevent them from working for a competitor, even though most people would say that activity is far less socially beneficial than becoming a primary school teacher and educating dozens of children.
To an anthropologist, all human beings have the same worth, and so it doesn't make sense that the top-line revenues of your employer matter so much more than your bottom-line contributions to society. Someone who is doing productive things, whether they do so on behalf of a powerful organization or not, should be rewarded more than someone who is not doing productive things.
I think the author goes too far in suggesting a widespread realignment of society - I wouldn't really want to live in an anarcho-communist utopia either. But one of his central points was that the dominant discourse in American society is to assume that if people are paying for work, it must have value, and your comment is ample evidence of that.
This statement misses the point entirely. People are obviously being paid and that is why they doing the job.
But what we're talking about is the situation where someone is being paid for work that is worthless and unnecessary to those that are paying them. Mostly because it isn't a person paying them, it's an organization -- an organization dysfunctional enough to be paying for work it doesn't need.
Exactly. Arguing that capitalism is "freedom" is doublespeak, particularly against anarchism advocates like David Graeber. When you must obey a boss's commands all day, your opinion is unimportant; the boss decides what your time is worth. You are the boss's rented instrument, regardless whether you think the work is useless or harmful. Under management's watchful eye, there's no free speech at work; so you'd better not discuss with your coworkers.
Exactly why people want to redistribute power more equally, just as in the ages of kings, slaveowners, totalitarian parties, top-down fake democracies, etc.
If one wants to consume food, resources etc. produced by other people, one has to be willing to offer something back.
McDonald's provides an entrepreneur all the equipment, infrastructure, consumables, staff, even customer base - all one has to do is show up, flip burgers, and earn $8/hr. Of course there are rules to using all of those resources, and McD's stockholders get a cut (hey, they're providing all that stuff); if you don't like it, you can leave.
You can't "redistribute power more equally". Most people don't, in reality, want it: they refuse the responsibilities that come with ownership & liability, hence they get less of the revenue. Most people don't want equal distribution of power, they want to receive more wealth without earning it.
What I learned from that is, without training the workers should not normally be entrusted with power. It's in nobody's best interest.
What you do with this information, I suppose, depends on your political leanings. You can emphasize either side of the story, and be sort of correct.
You can work as an EMT, in the back of an ambulance, running 15+ calls in a 24 hour shift (which is basically back to back with a few minutes break between calls), dealing with anything from sick old people to immediate life threats.
And you’ll get paid approximately $9/hour for doing so.
Another group mentioned in the article are unpaid interns, e.g. Journalists. The market has somehow valued their jobs at zero.
Capitalism and market forces are nowhere near enough to provide for a quality of life for an intern. Capitalism is a game scored by the amount of money you have. Unpaid interns are losers in this scoring system, but you are called a socialist if you try to protect people like them. This seems to be part of what the article is saying, but using a lot of Jargon. (anarchist vs socialist unions)?
Wow. I really thought working as an EMT paid better.
I think our collective values would change if people had more time to stop and think about what is important to them. For those that realize that a fast car and 2 expensive latte's a day don't matter at all in the long run, shouldn't there be more options than assuming they want to work more to afford more things?
I have a fried who had a baby, he asked to take a 40% cut in pay for a 3 day work week. They said yes. I can't say they offer that to everyone just saying it's a possibility
I'd say you're technically correct, but mostly because 'cumulation of free choices' is rather ambiguous.
The eight-hour work day and minimum wage, for example, are a result of the labor movements efforts, but these efforts often found their origins in the 'activism' of people like the interviewee.
Much of our current economy, one could argue, is not the result of the individual employer's or employee's 'free choices', but rather via 'notions of how society should be' developed by people like the interviewee.
> Force redistribution to impose the social structure & values the interviewee wants, and methinks most of us would rebel at the results; we're not living that way for a reason.
I guess my point is that we are, to greater or lesser extent depending on where we live, living with social structures and values that we would not individually rebel against. And much of that could be considered 'conditioning'. Here in Holland we have the government actively doing things that I suspect many Americans would rebel strongly against, ranging from health care to 'be nice to your neighbour' style government-funded advertising.
Now, it's a different discussion whether one agrees with forced redistribution as a specific implement (I'm not sure I do), but I'm just arguing that many of the reasons for way we live are precisely a result of that thing you have a gripe with.
(and, I guess, aside from using this to share my view, I'd be curious to hear where you would draw the line when it comes to 'notions of how society should be' -> 'imposing social structure and values')
It is mystifying to me how people think Starbucks is anything like a 'perfect' cup of coffee. It's fast-food coffee. I would have expected this line to be "I abandoned my quest for the perfect cup, because Starbucks was good enough to fill the role and easy".
a few minutes of scheduled skilled labor are often preferable to finding decent beans, grinding them, heating water, buying & fitting a filter, pouring, timing, cleaning and stowing what's needed
When you have more time in your day, then having to grab a coffee doesn't have to be done in a couple of minutes during the rush to work. It can be a more languorous affair, and the ritual itself can become enjoyable.
I think you misread that paragraph somehow.
Without the urgency to earn, the luxuries we do enjoy wouldn't be possible. Coffee wouldn't, for nearly everyone, wouldn't be anywhere close to even Starbucks "fast-food coffee". More time in your day means a lower standard of living.
While it's nice to suggest that Wall St. doesn't create any value for people, ~20% of our GDP would suggest otherwise. The truth is that Wall St. acts much like Adam Smith's invisible hand. For our system to work, capital must be allocated to optimal uses. Command economies do a poor job of this, except in war time. Wall St. helps us reallocate capital to the most productive endeavors. That sounds pretty valuable to me. Even if the folks on Wall St. don't build your car, they did pool the capital necessary to finance the construction of the manufacturing facility. Can't have one without the other.
As a final point, if the 'caring class' isn't compensated enough, perhaps it's because there is an oversupply of 'caring folks'. Or perhaps they're not really creating any value for others? Perhaps some of the 'caring class' should get creative and find other ways to be caring, or perhaps they should find ways to provide more 'care' with their time so they can command a higher share of the value they create?
I'm also contribute back to the tech community by sharing my code that I experiment on my own during hackathons and weekends on Github. Unlike other professions where things are not as transparent, I love that our field is always on the cutting edge, experimenting with the latest frameworks and technology and sharing the results (be as it may that sometimes it's not as well-documented but I make up for it by writing an enthusiastic blog post about it).
of course if we had thousands of bill gates, I guess it would be better don't you think?
If your job helps others, you may want to do it [1] for reasons other than money and therefore get paid less.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
As a data point, looking locally, California state senators get paid about $95k and reps about $90k. Which seems to be not much more than the median salary for an "Attorney I" in the state: http://www1.salary.com/CA/Attorney-I-salary.html
At least in Holland their income is really low in comparison to higher-ups in big corporations doing similar kinds of work, and much of their 'cushy' lives depend on future positions in said corporations.
These positions are often not acquired by helping 'everybody', but rather by means that often seem merely varying degrees of corruption.
No, its not a full-time job. New Hampshire is among the (many) states without a full-time legislature, though their pay is pretty low even by the standard of part-time legislatures. [1]
[1] Not particularly current, but this doesn't change all that much: http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/full-a...
Not really. Sure, they get paid a lot more than the median income, but compared to, say, top executives in private firms? Not even close. The President of the United States gets paid far less than the average Fortune 500 CEO.
That's only true of some politicians (e.g., politicians with a legislative role -- including in many cases chief executives -- where the pay of elected politicians isn't left, as it is in some states, to a separate compensation committee of non-politicians.)
It really is amazing how much of the work done by the highest-paid people is completely unnecessary, if not counterproductive.