On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs
libcom.org
libcom.org
White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own discussions with friends.
However... We've learned a skill, learned the job, and are available for 40 hours. Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20 hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do. So instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7 hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care.
To some extent, everybody knows this. Employers are starting to tolerate working from home a lot more, which I think is a tacit acknowledgement of the situation. I hope that our culture can come to grips with this and acknowledge that most people in creative jobs can't really put in a solid 40 hours of truly productive work, while at the same time not condemning them to work as consultants with no savings or pensions.
That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in 40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours IMO that you are getting paid for.
Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.
IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.
And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.
The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.
It'll exist long after software, too.
Remember that we live in a bubble.
Your assertion assumes either Doomsday scenario (where humans wipe themselves from the face of Earth, and automated machines keep going for a few more decades until disrepair catches up) or some sort of Singularity that makes humanity itself obsolet (a.k.a. Nerd!Rapture).
On the other hand, History teaches that every civilization has their decline and fall. I suspect that software in its current incarnation (electromagnetic encoding of behaviors on a semiconductor based machine) is so tied to our current civilization that it will not survive more than 1 or 2 centuries at the most. But it is easy to imagine future civilizations thousands of years from now that have sophisticated forms of information processing which people alive today would not recognize as "software", even if the principles behind those are the same.
I hope you can learn to live sustainably and in harmony with nature and your own soul before it's too late.
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
It's like expecting writing and/or books to go away three thousand years ago.
Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.
To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.
Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a lot of white collar workers.
As the king you should know local customs, shouldn't you? ;-)
I wouldn't recommend including this kind of perk in the official builders guild code. But honestly, at that rate of physical activity with sudoration and deep breath, alcohol had little noticeable effect and for a very short time.
Also I was doing pawn work (not sure how to translate to English) that's very simple and not dangerous.
Edit: I did work for months delivering beer to bars and little shops with a truck. That was also very continuous work: you were either downloading beer cases or barrels from the truck, very physical work or driving or filling the invoices... to complete the route on time, you could stop very little. Of course nothing that could be called slacking and no alcohol. But mostly everybody got wasted Friday afternoons after work.
From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.
As someone on the outside, hearing horror stories about mandatory 14 hour days and regularly working nights and weekends for startups I'd think they were doing it much worse. It's one of the things that has steered me away from working for a recent startup because I refuse to work more than 8 hours a week.
I had an interview at a startup where I asked the interviewer to take me through my average day at the company. He basically said I'd arrive at 8:30 and leave at 6:30 or 7, sometimes later. I told him that to maintain a healthy work/life balance I would be leaving at 5pm every day and asked him his opinion on that. He said it would be technically acceptable since they can't force you to work more than 8 hours, but would be heavily looked down upon. I didn't take the job.
I've often seriously questioned if I'm cut out for startups because of the relatively low number (much less than 40) of productive hours I put in when things are not pressing at regular jobs.
I could also just be making a bad assumption.
On the other hand stuff like computer programming can be very exhausting if we don't add at least a bit of physical activity to the mix.
And employers in white collar industries perceive such added physical activity as slacking off.
It also reminds me of 'the Feds' from Snow Crash for some reason.
But yet we still try to maximize for 40. If we automate the pointless bits, we don't scale back Bob's hours to 20 and pay him the same. We expect 40 again (never happened in the first place) or reduce his 'hours' (read: pay) to 20.
Maximizing for 40 is arbitrary for many jobs.
The thesis is that the primary purpose of a secretary is to be available to do work. When the boss wants something done, an idle secretary can do it immediately whereas a busy secretary has to finish what they're doing before moving on to the next task.
Obviously the study contains a bunch of simplifying assumptions, but the general principle applies to many service jobs.
<cue Theremin music>
When delivering food for a small Chinese restaurant I was paid per delivery but there was a set run (usu. 4-6pm) and I got to expense miles, etc. No sitting around.
Except when we were on breaks we were continually working.
I suspect it's exceptional that someone can do physical labor for 40 hours a week for 45 weeks a year for 60 years.
The common response is, "Well, yeah, but you should retire at some point." And that's a fair response, but farm workers are severely under-charging if they expect to work for 30 years (to make up a number) and then be retired for 25+ years.
In any case, the political/economic response has been to move up the age of retirement, which isn't helpful to the long term knee health of the hypothetical farmer worker here.
We only really live about 6 and a half years longer than we
would prior to the industrial revolution on average. This
relatively modest number is obscured somewhat by overall
life expectancy averages which are buoyed by drastically
reduced infant mortality.
Farm workers are not charging. If they had the market power to set a price, they wouldn't be doing farm work.
In contrast, office employees chug a lot of stimulants every day (coffee) and still manage to spend the afternoon fighting off drowsiness.
However, for a lot of it I'm asked for help or input where my brain's called into action for a few minutes a time every now and again by other staff. We know this isn't productive for us, but if it provides value to the organisation as a whole (usually by solving something relatively minor, which is best expressed IRL than through the screen), then that's what they need of me.
As another example, when I was a college student there were definitely a lot of weeks when I put in a legitimate 40 hours of work. But it was distributed over many activities, from actually sitting in lecture, to attending office hours, taking tests, studying/reading, working on homework, and participating in extracurriculars. There was a ton of downtime mixed in, and there certainly were virtually no solid eight hour blocks of nothing but work.
I honestly think a major impediment to office workers like programmers getting in a full 40 hours of productive work is just the environment itself. Just remaining stationary in an office for 8-9 hours a day is intrinsically exhausting, not physically but mentally. The worst part is when you have downtime, but still must remain stationary at your desk in the office. It now feels like you're working, but you're not. Your energy is draining, but you're not actually doing anything productive with that spent energy.
(To be fair, I also frequently would do homework up to or beyond midnight, or even on the weekends, whereas today I very rarely do work for my employer after I go home, unless an emergency comes up or I just honestly am so interested in a project that I want to. The upside to the 9-5 workday is that it has a well-defined beginning and end. In college, there was never a feeling of being done, except maybe after your final final for that semester.)
Beste would be I work at home so during the day time I can take a nap. The kid wakes up early. Bring him to school. I take a nap. Pick him up again take some time out with him and when he sleeps I work. But because I have to sit at work I have to work during my least productive time. Because I don't have the energy to do 24/7.
So before marriage and kids I had 2 responsibilities. Going to work and actually working. But after marriage I had more and I couldn't cater it.
It makes me wonder if the real issue is being able to do 40 hours of (relatively) unstimulating work, vs just 40 hours of work. I know for sure that I can't handle a tedious, brain-dead task for even half an hour without needing a break, and when I've had roles that were somewhat challenging but less interesting in, I killed a decent chunk of my 40 hours reading articles, etc.
There's definite truth to this, but it's also true that, as many hackers have attested, moments of downtime and wandering attention are often where new ideas come from. Sample:
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
For me anyway, a surprisingly large amount of time spent staring at walls or out windows may be "work" time.
In addition, I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com if you're curious), and a lot of a given day consists of pitching new work to callers, or editing, or waiting for someone to edit what I've written, and so forth. That stuff often isn't sustained attention per se, but it is necessary to the function of the business!
Take a non-hypothetical example: I'm given a math assignment, with the problem "prove (something complicated)". I look over the assignment, think for a few seconds about the problem, think "nah, that won't work", fail to come up with a different approach, and file it away somewhere in favor of surfing the net and watching my roommates play old console RPGs.
Days later, a new approach occurs to me and I come back to the assignment. This time I'm able to prove (something complicated). Writing out the proof takes 20 minutes.
How long did I spend on that question? I wasn't able to do the work immediately, so "21 minutes" can't be right. But I probably didn't actually need to spend several days having it in the back of my mind either. Maybe if I'd been confined in a little room with just me and the assignment I would have had it done in two hours, or five (really frustrating) hours. There's just no way to measure how long I spent "working". My quality of life goes up if I take the approach of "don't sit down to work until the solution serendipitously occurs to you", but, in an analogous situation, my boss might be a lot happier confining me in a room to sit "unproductively" for 5 hours and write ("productively") for 20 minutes.
I've been thinking about it at work for 8 hours no solution. But doing some mindless activity I found a solution.
With knowledge work we should think about the value you deliver not at amount of hours you put in.
There are exceptions. As an academic, I have that freedom. If I don't feel like working, I have no pressure to stay at my office. On the other hand, I often work during the evenings, weekends and vacation. I wonder how I would adjust if I had to switch to a regular job.
"Don't."
That's really all I can say. No matter how good you think it is, it will break your spirit, and if doing meaningful work at a reasonable pace is what's important for you, you (probably, there are always exceptions) won't get it in the corporate world.
EDIT: (I realize this is a very delayed response, but I've been mulling over this very issue for a few days now and it's something rather painfully close to home for me.)
I think the key though is "available for 40 hours" as you say. Even if I was only spending a fraction of the time "working", the work didn't come in a steady state such that I could just hammer it all out in 2 days and screw off the next 3. I might have to spend 30 minutes answering a phone call here, or an email there, or run out to make a site visit to a customer on one day, and then spend that afternoon writing up a report about the visit, whatever.
Most of the reason this happened is that, just like with any manufacturing job, you can't keep on steady work if your work inputs are delayed, and just like that, white collar jobs also have work inputs and outputs and they get hung up for all kinds of reasons, so you practically can't keep up a steady work tempo no matter how much you might want to.
And that's exactly how it should be.
I will say that this time is only available from ruthless automation and organisation.
I spend the other 20 hours making sure I only have to do 20 hour weeks forever (startup).
TL;DR: Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
I don't think our culture will ever come to grips with this.
I see more and more people taking Randall Noe's tone in blogs and stuff. Here's hoping.
Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?
To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?
Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].
Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b/enterprise startups.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-an... -- 167,400 musicians
[2] see http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php... -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw
Is "number of lawyers employed at the 100 largest law firms" a good proxy for the number of corporate law specialists? I don't know that much about corporate lawyers, but it seems like a lot of them might be employed by corporations or smaller law firms.
Since there are somewhere around 1 million lawyers in the US [3], it seems reasonable to me that at least %17 of them would be corporate law specialists, making the original assertion true.
[3] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...
The way I understand it, these pointless 'arms-race' jobs are jobs tend to also produce little to no value to society. They may produce value for their bosses in the form of making the boss look good to the uber-bosses, or they may provide value to their company as a means of maintaining competitive advantage in the market place.
These is less a direct function of the skills of the workers than a function of the roles in which those workers are placed. Some corporate lawyers clearly do provide non 'arms-race' value, some IT professionals only provide 'arms-race' value.
I don't think the existence of these jobs is a direct effort to "keep-the-masses-down", but it has the effect of mostly wasting worker's time in roles where the main value is how they help maintain the wealth of that 1%.
Of course, this an all or nothing proposition. Many jobs produce some mix of actual value vs 'arms-race' value. Separating these is not necessarily straight forward.
> Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2]
I... don't think those statistics show what you want them to show. Does that number of "musicians" only include those for whom it is their only/main source of income? I also don't see any breakdown in those statistics on lawyers for "area of specialization" but based on where they are employed. I don't know if Graeber's specific claim is true, but there do appear to be 5-10 times more lawyers than musicians in our country.
Sometimes arms races (in the figurative sense) can lead to better performance! This week's New Yorker has a splendid example of this in James Surowiecki's "Better All the Time How the 'performance revolution' came to athletics—and beyond" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time). It's not easy to excerpt, but he points out that athletes used to barely train at all and now they do it all the time; musicians are better; elite students are "better" in many respects; manufacturing has improved. As he writes:
as the sports columnist Mark Montieth wrote after reviewing a host of games from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, “The difference in skills and athleticism between eras is remarkable. Most players, even the stars, couldn’t dribble well with their off-hand. Compared to today’s athletes, they often appear to be enacting a slow-motion replay.”
What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball.
The whole article is wroth reading.
Quite a lot of it doesn't, and the less value it creates the more profitable it tends to be. Take PPI for instance.
While some of it has value, it swallows up a LOT more of our GDP than it should (much like the rest of the FIRE sector) and creates a multitude of bullshit jobs.
>Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].
I bet those corporate lawyers earn more in aggregate.
>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers.
I don't think so. He is just highlighting the fact that the almighty market is not so efficient and has a lot of us doing a lot of pointless bullshit a lot of the time for no reason.
i.e. we're developing the worst excesses of the Soviet Union.
For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume many people on this site have had a similar experience.
So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure, and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is possible.
Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I'm positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the code.
It's the difference between Paine and Burke.
I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is economic:
- In order to live you need money
- In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few)
- Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating "useless" jobs if needs be
How are you going to remove jobs if it so directly means no more revenue for those people ? The problem here is that we're conflating revenue with work. The only answer is to decouple them, and introduce something like basic income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
For the following reasons:
* It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression.
* We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.)
* People actually like to work - to feel useful. Basic Income will prevent the unemployed from starving but nearly ALL of them would rather have a guarantee of meaningful, stable, reasonably paid and respectable work than just getting paid to stay at home all day. The PWA provided that.
There is actually a good example of a public works program that was turned into basic income (Plan Jefes in Argentina). Unexpectedly, large numbers of the people who were part of it CONTINUED to work at the jobs (things like caregiving) even though under the new basic income rules they no longer had to go.
There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money, but for the actual effect it has. Your example shows it. You can also ask yourselves if chefs, musicians, programmers, mechanics would just grab the money and stay home; I don't believe so. Only those who do their job purely for revenues will stop... At least, that's my prediction (and hope). In other words, useless jobs (as in, not useful for others) will vanish.
Rather than answering supposedly common misconceptions that nobody on this thread actually had - answer me this instead:
What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? They need money, but they also want to work. During the last depression the PWA built tons of useful stuff, much of which we still use today. Why would Basic Income be better than doing that again?
* High quality housing projects in cities like San Francisco and New York to bring down the currently insane costs implying an insane level of demand.
* America has plenty of crumbling infrastructure.
The best approach would be both: a basic income to provide people enough to survive (probably not so comfortably, but...). From there, you could have a PWA that focuses on infrastructure that features a strong training component and pays well, or you strike out on your own.
I'm not against the very idea of it and if there were a referendum for it tomorrow I would almost certainly vote yes, but I honestly think that its basic presumptions are wrong:
* The the labor market today is allocating people to jobs efficiently.
* That as a society we don't have enough useful work for everybody to do today.
* That the government wouldn't efficiently allocate resources if it were to create jobs.
I believe this is largely true today in the context of people who are currently unemployed, and will only be more so in the future.
That the government wouldn't efficiently allocate resources if it were to create jobs.
You think it would? Look at military contracts, where it's more important for every member of Congress to be able to point to jobs "created" in their district, than that we actually get functional projects at reasonable costs.
Poverty is on the increase, our infrastructure is not only crumbling it is currently inferior in many ways to some third world countries like China. We have budget cuts for science and NASA not because they've run out of useful work, but because of a political imperative that we should create as many unemployed people as possible through budget cuts.
>You think it would?
It already did in the 1930s and I am confident it would again.
>Look at military contracts, where it's more important for every member of Congress to be able to point to jobs "created" in their district, than that we actually get functional projects at reasonable costs.
If we had an alternative working job creation program Congressmen wouldn't try and ram through military contracts to create jobs in their district instead. Meaning less military bloat and more infrastructure spending. Sounds good to me.
"If basic income were to be established, what would you think people do ?"
As owenmarshall said, you can perfectly have both -- establish basic income for "survival" needs, and let people have work if they really want to. Basic income doesn't mean abolishing all kinds of work, it just means making sure humans don't have to work to live.
I don't think the unemployment we have is economically efficient, though. Our neo-command economy run by wall street selfishly demanded high unemployment despite the need for currently unemployed people to work and desire for those same people to work.
Why do you believe that? Some small portion of those working, with better things to do, will probably work less or stop working. This will represent a larger portion of the unemployed, because of the size of the two sets.
Meanwhile, demand will rise as the people at the bottom end of the income spectrum are more able to meet their needs.
With increased demand for labor and decreased supply, it should become quite a bit easier to find a job.
On top of that, looking for a job is quite a bit easier when you know you have some resources to fall back on, and a basic income can help provide the bandwidth to pursue whatever training, &c, they find appropriate rather than having to jump through bureaucratic hoops or focusing on scrounging together enough to get to tomorrow.
I expect quite a few of the unemployed would stop being unemployed with a modest basic income.
If you give them basic income, then the jobs can pay what the jobs are worth, and no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs that take time that could be used for focussed training, risky (but potentially valuable) self-initiated ventures, etc.
Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market already), so instead treat the premium as basic income, and the job will be available, through the market, at its actual value (and, with an adequate BI, you don't need a minimum wage, because the BI provides basic support, so taking a low-wage job that may be more suitable for other reasons than pay doesn't have the opportunity cost of not being able to provide basic support.)
Wouldn't the government be providing these "make-work" jobs? The government regularly creates jobs, like research and infrastructure development, that would not be profitable for any private entity. Value can be calculated either from the perspective of the employer, or from the perspective of society at large, but the market only creates jobs which are valuable according to criterion #1.
In my view, this is the essential function of government. It is fascinating that, if you look back 2-3 years, when unemployment was still quite high, the private sector had recovered completely in terms of employment -- all the unemployment was actually being caused by reduced government spending (mostly on the state or local level).
So you are saying that the jobs building the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan and the Triborough bridge (among many other things under the PWA) were "economically inefficient make work jobs".
Why?
"because no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs"
No, I agree that it is an essential function of government (arguably, the only legitimate function of government) to correct for market failures by shifting incentives or directly purchasing goods and services so that exchanges which are a net benefit but which the market fails to provide because externalized costs or benefits are not taken into account naturally in market exchanges (as is the case, for instance, when benefits or costs are particularly diffuse in space or time or both). And many public works projects fit that bill, and when labor costs are low because of a dip in private market demand, more of those projects have a positive cost:benefit ratio.
OTOH, the social benefit from an income support is independent of its tie to employment, and therefore it makes sense for the income support to be decoupled from any public works program. Coupling the two creates inefficiency, as individuals receiving the income support are then compelled to devote time to an economically-inefficient job that could, instead, be devoted to economically efficient activities, including working at an economically-efficient job with a lower wage (that would be inadequate income for basic living on its own) than is provided by the government make-work job but which provides experience which enables the individual to progress to better paying jobs and greater contributions to society.
Economically inefficient jobs like building the triborough bridge.
Or providing healthcare.
Or building dams.
Or building schools.
Or building public art works.
Your entire argument is based upon a theoretical presumption that is disproved by reality: that if the government provides jobs that did not otherwise exist that those jobs will by necessity be make work.
Economic efficiency is also a terrible measure of whether something is worthwhile. Was sending a man to the moon economically efficient? Was it worthwhile?
Who decides what jobs are available? Who decide who gets which jobs?
By giving a job instead of money, you are using up a significant chunk of the labor pool. You need an additional chunk to figure out how to allocate it, and are then relying on them to allocate it well. To build something, you are also paying for and using up capital.
By giving money, people are free to use their time in whatever way is most valuable to them, only using up the resources they need to live, and those resources get allocated by market forces.
Giving a job is incentive to get your own job - if you give awful jobs like shoveling sludge or picking up highways.
The administrative cost in giving money in status quo benefit programs is tied up in means-testing, use-enforcement, behavior-testing, etc. -- making sure that all the variable inputs that control who gets which benefits, how much of those benefits they get, and how those benefits can be used. That's the whole problem unconditional basic income solves. You have very simple qualified class (all citizens or all legal residents, whatever is chosen as the target population), everyone in the class gets the same benefit, and there are no use restrictions associated with the benefit. Administrative overhead eliminated neatly -- and at the same time, the perverse incentives that go with the same restrictions that the administrative costs go to enforcing are also eliminated.
Most administrative overhead eliminated neatly. Fraud prevention remains. (Keeping dead people off the rolls, and duplicate entries, and so on.)
It's also a problem solved by a job guarantee. There is no need to create elaborate tests to see if the welfare job seeker is really looking for work. If they want a job, the state can provide it. If they don't want a job, no welfare.
With basic income or a job guarantee you will still need additional welfare (and means testing) for the disabled simply because they require more resources than a regular unemployed joe and really cannot work.
Those means testing things would crop up again even if you created a basic income tomorrow because the protestant work ethic so deeply embedded in our culture would create a political imperative for it to happen. Politicians would get to work corrupting it straight away.
Well, that presents you with a chicken/egg situation because for it to have any hope of becoming reality you will need to convince everybody (the majority of Americans) who believe that everybody should pull their weight.
>Do we really need to make existential threats to people who don't accept the work that the government thinks they should be doing?
Do we need to? No. Do I agree with you? Yes. But, most people think that it is a moral imperative that you should have to work for a living and we live in a kind of Democracy, so...
Until that part of our culture changes to accommodate we won't get basic income.
At the moment we're making existential threats to people who don't accept the work that the private sector (i.e. democratically unaccountable 1%) thinks that should be doing.
All I'm saying is that the government should provide decent jobs so that the 1% have to compete with the government and provide better jobs than they currently do.
Your questions can be answered by looking at what happened in the 1930s. The government decided that things like the triborough bridge and the lincoln tunnel, airports, dams, new schools etc. would be a net benefit to our society.
They were.
>By giving a job instead of money, you are using up a significant chunk of the labor pool.
Yes, it is using up a significant chunk of the labor pool that is currently idle.
>You need an additional chunk to figure out how to allocate it, and are then relying on them to allocate it well.
Exactly like we had in the 1930s with the PWA. Which worked.
>To build something, you are also paying for and using up capital.
Damn right. ZIRP and asset bubbles all over the place are not forming today because we have too little available capital. They happening because we have an excess of it.
>By giving money, people are free to use their time in whatever way is most valuable to them, only using up the resources they need to live, and those resources get allocated by market forces.
Those same market forces that didn't build the triborough bridge or the hoover dam but which did cause a massive overbuild of useless McMansions in Las Vegas and a glut of payday loans?
Sorry, I'm not convinced by arguments that appeal to the dogma that market forces are god and governments always suck at resource allocation. It's a fairy tale.
Of course they'll do it for the money -- at least, for a very long time until productivity is so high that the economy can provide a very comfortable lifestyle that most people are happy with without work (but that's going to take very high output with little labor, which we are nowhere close to and may never reach, given the way that experience drives expectations and expectations increase with output.)
BI reduces the downside risk of unemployment or entrepreneurial failure, provides opportunities to transitionally opt-out of regular employment or income-earning activity for education or other personal development, etc., but it doesn't in any realistic near-term scenario make it so that the vast majority of the population isn't working (whether at wage labor or something more entrepreneurial) for money.
Edited to add: To be precise, when I say "throw money at", I really mean "throw physical resources and people's time at, while shifting power toward whoever organized it". Obviously I'm advocating paying out some of the money either way so that's not the difference.
I don't either, but there is no silver bullet to avoid boondoggles. Moving everything to the private sector certainly doesn't prevent them.
I'll note again that I'm certainly well in favor of improving our infrastructure.
Your argument seems to hinge on this, but I see no reason to believe it. There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. There weren't any problems with people "needing to work" but not being able to.
> It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression
Much of the unskilled labor done by the CCC has since been automated into fewer skilled jobs. "It worked in a completely different world" doesn't convince me that it'll work in this one.
> high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.
See what I said re: unskilled->skilled labor shift. To what degree do you actually expect unskilled labor to move those programs along? They're held up by engineering problems, not labor shortages.
How are those things not work? They require focused effort, just the same as any job does.
Does something not qualify as "work" just because it is enjoyable?
Alternatively, you can re-word my argument if you'd like - the human need to work doesn't imply that BI is insufficient because people can find meaningful work on their own.
I thought the first argument was clearer, but your comment forced me to think harder about the second - and in retrospect, I think it makes more sense put that way.
Yep, the question is whether as a society you'd rather have them building bridges and schools or forming bands and writing (mostly pretty bad) poetry.
I can see arguments for both but honestly I think the first is an easier sell for the vast majority of citizens.
If you feel like your inflation is high enough and you don't really want more people out there writing poetry, basic income doesn't seem like such a great deal.
Why else did the people under Plan Jefes CONTINUE doing their jobs - kind of for free, really - after the jobguarantee was replaced with an income guarantee?
>Much of the unskilled labor done by the CCC has since been automated into fewer skilled jobs. "It worked in a completely different world" doesn't convince me that it'll work in this one.
I'm very unimpressed with the idea that automation has killed off all our jobs and will continue to do so. It's pushed as a red herring for the sudden surge in unemployment since the 1990s that was nearly ALL political in origin.
If automation had replaced all those jobs instead of politics deciding that they were unnecessary then our infrastructure would be in considerably better shape. It isnt'.
>See what I said re: unskilled->skilled labor shift. To what degree do you actually expect unskilled labor to move those programs along? They're held up by engineering problems, not labor shortages.
We've actually had a skilled labor -> unskilled labor shift since 2008. Check the statistics.
I don't expect a job guarantee to provide only unskilled jobs, either. I expect it to provide jobs for unemployed engineers, just like the PWA did. Hell, the PWA gave Milton Friedman a job as an economist (we needed them too). It's where he got his start. It wasn't only for unskilled laborers.
I'd love to. Link?
> Why else did the people under Plan Jefes CONTINUE doing their jobs - kind of for free, really - after the jobguarantee was replaced with an income guarantee?
Again, link? I can't find any reference about that program dropping the work requirement.
> I don't expect a job guarantee to provide only unskilled jobs, either.
I didn't claim that. Finding useful work for skilled laborers is far easier than for unskilled, and unfortunately most of the unemployed are the latter, which is why that is the more difficult problem to solve.
Edit:
From your other comment:
> Yep, the question is whether as a society you'd rather have them building bridges and schools or forming bands and writing (mostly pretty bad) poetry.
Again, bridges and schools are built by skilled laborers. Employing them is not that difficult part of this plan.
Also, its not a direct trade-off. Employing someone for a set salary is far more expensive than just giving them that money. BI becomes an easier sell when you recognize that PWA is both less effective (what about the people who can't work?) and far more expensive.
In other words, jobs don't exist to provide people with money. They exist to provide the boss with labour. The fact that people need money is just very convenient for the capitalists.
In other words, the job market is currently supply driven, but that is due to the fact that demand is inelastic -- everyone needs money to live.
ETA: There is also an indirect effect through public policy: politicians will not want to pass legislation that reduces the number of jobs, since that would increase unemployment figures, making them look bad. Of course, the fact that high unemployment figures are bad is a result of people needing to work to live.
Or finding work for these people that is a lot more useful for the society.
Meeting the needs of people who cannot pay you is not a job, without some sort of external involvement. Giving them cash is the approach that gives the market the most room to find the best solution. Giving cash to everyone unconditionally gets rid of strange incentives around discontinuities. Hence, a basic income.
Basic income sounds like a great idea until you realize the above.
I think you would still see some inflation as typical demand for the marginal dollar falls, even if you don't increase the total number of dollars, but it wouldn't look like student aid.
For the record, I support a low (certainly <$15k, probably closer to half that) Basic Income.
It should be noted that BI is a partial decoupling of revenue from work, not a full decoupling.
The B Ark is technically named "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B". The Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.
The B Ark was constructed, loaded up, and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course with Earth's sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally, no A or C ark was ever made.
The presence of useless B Ark people in company settings has generated a lot of thought, including this person (2) who suggests dealing with them by "hiring another “B” Ark person to have meetings with them. Demand that accurate minutes are kept and that they should meet at least twice day until the problem is resolved" and engaging them in a useless, circular project.
1. http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark
2. http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-wh...
A chinese woman once started talking to me in a bakery, saying she wanted to practice her english. She'd spent time in Australia and recently come back to China to look for a job.
"What kind of job are you looking for?" I ask.
"I want to get a job in an office."
When "working in an office" is the height of your ambition, a B Ark job is as good as things get. If you're looking for awful jobs people get crammed into by economic force, look at obviously-productive C Ark jobs, like being a miner or a peasant.
> What do your parents do?
> They're normal people.
Or, from a Chinese girl's online dating profile:
> 爸爸是农民。妈妈是工人。 [My father's a farmer; my mother is an employee.]
The elevation of the concept "job in an office" isn't a problem with insufficient english; it's something Chinese people in China do while they're speaking Chinese. I've also seen a banner at 复旦大学 (generally considered the third best university in China) advertising a lecture on... becoming an "office gentleman" or "office lady" (those terms were in english, but the rest of the banner wasn't).
For example, I know I am in one of those jobs so I tendered my resignation a few months ago and will be gone in December. Hopefully no one else fills it.
Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank.
A lot of laws also require people to be at their desks for 40 hours - because there's a categorical definition of 'full-time equivalent' - whether or not that person is actually (instead of nominally) working all 40 of those hours.
"where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers"
Graber misses quite a bit here (read on for the full context); Republicans are not resentful of teachers in general, just public sector teachers.
Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.
That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare. If the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary system.
So bedridden terminal cancer patients have had all benefits cut and told to look for work.
This is not an exaggeration, by the way.
Graeber has missed something very obvious. We do not have a market economy. What we have is a <i>status</i> economy.
People who get useful stuff done have low status, because in the bullshit economy the ability to get and hold status is the most valuable of all skills.
So all transactions become a test of relative status, and people who have to do productive work have lower status than people who move status tokens (i.e. 'money' and 'power') around. And the weak - the homeless, the ill, the disabled, the outsiders and minorities - have the lowest status of all.
Which actually sounds rather like the original definition of "meritocracy":
You'd be surprised. Visit any western country (US, the UK, France, ...) and see it happening.
>If the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary system.
Not sure what those "transfer payments" are. Anything like Western Union money transfers?
Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.
This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive?
Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs.
Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.
Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.
Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.
Most people could spend a week with a marketing book and do some basic marketing. Likewise, most people could spend a week learning WordPress and create a passable website. So let's reduce the number of web developers by 90% too!
Think of the billions it could save in inflated invoices from web agencies (commissioned by clueless marketers).
Let's just reduce all jobs by 90% and make everyone teachers, doctors and street cleaners. I have a really good feeling about this.
Now if you want to hire top tier marketing talent (which are most likely consulting or teaching anyways ex. Seth Goding, Dan Kennedy) you might end up spending around that or higher. Hell, their small group seminars cost 27k$ and last 3 days, so I'm just going to go on a hunch here that getting that tier of marketers to write copy for you is going to be very expensive.
And I'm going to disagree further. Marketing is not a "bullshit" job at its base. Say we outlawed it. You're not allowed to tell people about your products. They have to walk into your store and ask about them, and you're only allwed to hand out a datasheet if they ask. What does that do to new products? I'm going to say that if your average joe tries to buy a mobile phone and first has to dig through 20-30 pages of chipset info to find out the features of it, you're not selling any mobile phones anymore. You're asking why you don't just write out the features that matter? Sorry, that's allready in the realm of sales copy. Sharing your enthusiasm about it? Nope, go straight to jail, do not collect 200$. Because that's what good marketers do. They try to understand what they're selling, who they're selling it to, and how to convey their enthusiasm about it to who they're selling it to in order to make a sale.
Now there is the argument that a lot of marketing is annoying, wasteful, ineffective and so are a lot of CRUD apps that have been churned out by fresh behind the ears Java programmers. There's a fair share of programmers that don't know about proper variable naming, splitting things into objects cleanly, designing usable user interfaces, and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of software engineers. And there is a fair share of marketers that don't know about targeting, hooks, blind bullets, cost per customer, tracking, split testing and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of marketing. Should we discount the field as useless because there's a lot of rhinestones to the diamond? Then it'd only be fair to throw programming out of the window with it.
By the way, i'd recommend giving something like the Robert Collier Letterbook a read, he goes through things like how highlighting a single trait in the coal he was advertising saved a mine or how he repeatedly sold the Harvard Classics through using half a dozen of different approaches, or pick up something like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. I personally think that the only Ninja in Tech should be a Marketing Ninja, because when great advertisers sell you, you don't notice it. Well, maybe server admins too, but i digress.
I was wondering when someone would notice!
I will add another set that is often missed in discussion - electricity, fuel and man-hours. We are heading for a crisis in supply of the former two in part because of wasting a big part of them on those bullshit zero-sum jobs.
I'm not sure that people going to jobs is very big deal energy-wise. Isn't smelting steel our largest electricity consumption? Industry uses buttloads of energy; dwarfs what you and I use to heat our houses and run our cars by orders of magnitude.
Oh here it is: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec2.pdf
I think there would be much less need for products from more useful industries if we could cut down on some pointless zero-sum things we're doing. I don't have any numbers in front of me though. It would be interesting to see how much % of resources we actually waste like that.
The 4 day work week will imply social changes, and therefore the resistance but it will come in the next 20 years.
The author understands that its a slow process and it takes time, but congratulations on talking about a taboo.
Concerning the value of jobs, in the Philippines, go to a restaurant: one guy comes and set the dishes, the other the glasses, the other takes the order, etc.
The root cause for this is I believe overpopulation unprecedented in the history of mankind.
Not to defend lawyers, but who would solve disputes? Everybody bashes lawyers, but the day an employer tries to make you sign an indemnity paper that is less than you have right, you are glad that there is a lawyer there to defend you.
> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).
I was with him until there... I'd like to believe things like that and blame it all on the "evil politicians," but I'm really not sure the "ruling class" is that organized. Then, at the end of the article, he says something that seems much more reasonable to me, although contradictory:
> Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error.
So I'm not sure what exactly he's trying to say is the cause.
However, the systems which accomplish that goal have emerged via trial and error and were not consciously designed by the 'oligarchs'. The 'oligarchs' watch the broad trends and have supported changes to the system that supported their goal and have hindered changes to the system that do no support their goal on a case by case basis.
I suspect the 'oligarchs' striving for the above goal is not a 'conspiracy' among the elite so much as a shared cultural belief in stability.
What I read from that statement, and knowing a bit about the author's background and sharing much of the same political ideas myself, is that it's in the interest of the ruling class that people do not have much time on their hands to actually start enjoying not working. Unemployment, and retirement for some, would clearly be more managable if friends and family were not working so much. Just to discover a way of life that's not centered around working. I also think that a working class with more time on their hands would inevitably become more organised with increased class conciousness as a side-effect.
So basically the idea is that less working time may be a "slipperly slope" that goes against the interests of the ruling class both in the short-term and even more so in the long-term.
The second statement is, as I understand it, that this is not driven by some organised unit of capitalist but rather by the idea that the higher classes are more aware of what is in their interests that no central organisation is needed.
So since organization isn't really necessary for the proposition at issue, I don't see your disbelief in the organization of the "ruling class" as even relevant to the issue, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that it is justified.
Even the first ten amendments, "simple" as they are, have mountains of debate and legalese surrounding them.
Go back to the 1970s and a lot of people were saying exactly this ^^^ word for word.
Instead we started working longer hours. The 'dream' never happened.
The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what people do. And with hierarchy, there is also more chance of waste and having a bullshit job.
But those bullshit jobs can come at almost any level. My first job out of college was at an environmental firm with extensive government contracts. The firm got paid for every hour they logged under my name on maintenance of projects that didn't require much maintenance except on paper. So the firm got paid for me showing up and doing nothing.
But I can confirm that it was horrible. At first I liked that I could come in at 10 and leave at 3. After a while though, it killed me inside.
Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week.
1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him.
2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some.
3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.
Despite the fact that this is quite illegal, there is no enforcement (http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-labor-department-l...).
Of course, people don't always choose to have bullshit jobs, and getting to the level where you can build something of impact is not easy. I'm far from there myself. But I have the feeling many of us don't really look for meaningful jobs - truth be told, we don't even _think_ about these things.
Isn't this kind of innovation restricted to the Kittygrams that operate at large scales, though? Kittygram will need to reach a large mass of users, get bought out, face the need to extract specialized data from images, and finally hire expert engineers to work on that problem before they can innovate.
How many startups get to that point? Even if the Kittygram founder had a vision of building an innovative object recognition solution and merely used Kittygram as the means to an end, it feels as if there must be a more efficient way to solve these problems.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...
To put it in a naive tech twist - maybe there should be an online tool that allows me to distribute a proportion of my wages to a list of "people who care for me and things I care about".
Basically, can I create my own tax system and transact most of my affairs in it? Would anyone be interested in joining? Has DogeCoin already tried to do that?
I would never live completely outside of state taxation, because of obvious practicalities like the military. (By the way, Graeber has an argument that army is the reason for existence of both money and taxes in his book on Debt.)
In technical terms, post-bitcoin there is no reason for the state to be involved in the tax system. DogeCoin was a close attempt at an ecosystem where money goes around and contributes to good causes, not sure what is going on with it now.
There are successful local currencies(Brixton pound) that support local city councils, can the same thing be done on a global scale?
a) We're not working 15 hour weeks. I'd say that's mostly because people like to do things. Give people enough money to not need to work and they'll still want to go build stuff
b) His musician mate made loads as a lawyer, not much as a musician in spite of contributing more to society as a musician. That does seem to be a market failing. Gandhi types preaching peace and making a big positive impact can make nothing, patent trolls can make a fortune while screwing society. Not sure how to fix that.
c) "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger" - not convinced by that one. I think it's a failing of the human mind to attribute what are probably emergent market phenomena to plotting human bad guys.
It's interesting you use Gandhi as an example, there is some substantial evidence he had access to a great deal of the world's bounty due to his positive impact. This would seem like a market efficiency.
It seems this artist had significant exposure to the potential customer, along with a recording contract which would suggest promotional funding. With my cold-hearted economist hat on it's tempting to assign this less to a market inefficiency than not contributing much to society.
So, if people in general are to benefit from technological advancements, there needs to be legislated wealth redistribution to overcome the inherent miserly-ness of the 1% whose wealth is largely a function of that technology.
[1] http://givingpledge.org/index.html [2] https://www.anthonyrobbinsfoundation.org/
The majority of them are still working in their bullshit jobs. I asked several if they were going to retire soon and they all replied the same. If they retire what would they do? Even though their work is mostly pointless from a job function perspective, it gives them something to do and keeps them active and social. It is not stressful for them and they enjoy it for the most part.
I wonder if we are all working these jobs because there is nothing better to do.
We live at a time when "I have nothing to do" is a really bullshit excuse. You have the whole internet available!
- learn languages (e.g. Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish - to cover most of the world's population)
- learn new stuff (statistics/machine learning, quantum mechanics, chemistry/biology, philosophy, programming, ...)
- do crowd-funded science (https://www.zooniverse.org/)
- help with open source projects (they need both programmers and non-programmers)
- teach people English (or any other language you know)
- entertain yourself (chat, watch movies, read books, play games)
Even for older generations, who might not be so comfortable with technology, there are plenty of useful things they can do in the real world.
- mentor kids
- tidy up parks and other public spaces
- participate in or organize hackatons/hardware hackatons/makerspaces
- experiment with learning/science/research in your home (make a spice garden, grow plants using hydroponics, prototype using 3D printing, redecorate your home with cheap materials)
- hang out with lonely (often elderly) people
- (learn to) cook
- work out (bodyweight exercises - you'll live longer)
I seriously cannot imagine ever being bored with nothing useful to do (except when I get home after work, I'm tired and I only have an hour or two of free time, so there's not much time to start anything meaningful - but even so, I spend a lot of time programming my personal projects).
Ok, so maybe that is where we differ. A "job", for me, is "work I do for money". If I had a passive source of money that would give me the option of not working ever again (and fully supporting my family, and future generations, etc), even if I still "worked" on the same stuff as I do now, I wouldn't call it "a job" (as it would be completely voluntary and optional) but "a hobby".
The other 90% or more of the people claiming they're bored would never do 40 hrs/wk of volunteer work... its just a socially acceptable way to say they can't afford it.
A good gauge would be to ask them if they'd do it part time or volunteer.
Some other reasons that aren't socially acceptable to talk about but are true, revolve around workers in highly capitalist sectors / hobbies can't have fun toys at home. My Aunt the chemical engineer can have a lot more fun at work than at home. Large machine tool operators who actually love the craft not the paycheck can't have a lathe bigger than their garage at home in their garage. Cluster operators. Large network operators. Some of the more exotic/modern corners of EE work.
What people say socially often has nothing to do with reality.
I think that this a damning criticism of contemporary society when it produces people unable to cope with freedom in it's literal meaning.
However this is not really an individual thing, the problem is rather caused by the fact that "all the others" are unavailable for those with time on their hands - being busy working.
Nicely Put.
The argument against the article's proposal is quite simple - if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?
It's not that either's wrong and I don't know anything about the author's backgound. Just interesting to think from the other person's POV.
Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because they're not priced, but they're by no means insignificant. They range from developing-world peasants farming land to which they simply have no title deeds, through to the form of communist praxis which is the dominant social structure of the supposedly free-market west -- the nuclear family. (Or do you present your kids with a bill for their personal care and feeding? Non-dysfunctional families run along lines Marx described as, "to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities": sharing without reference to individual wealth is explicit in state-recognized marriage vows. That the power/money relationship often reverses a generation later, as adult children support or nurse their aged parents through their last year, just underlines the pattern.)
Graeber, as an anthropologist, is interested in all human interactions, not just marketized ones. And his particular field has been the intersection of the market sector with the non-marketized greater cloud of human relationships.
I thought it was a stretch for Graeber to basically call everything socialism in the (roughly speaking) second section of Debt - especially since there is a categorical distinction between Marx's tagline ("to each... from each...") to what actually happens (in families etc), which is, "to you according to what I perceive to be your need, from me, according to what I can afford to give".
[0] particularly funny was when he suggests that the erroneous historical model of the genesis of money was created to justify the academic economist's profession, while offering an anthropological counter-narrative. This could just be a major exercise in projection.
I happen to agree with a lot of what he writes in this short essay, too - especially about how Keynes' prediction has come true (although I would disagree as to what is causal).
That's not necessarily true. There are a lot of reasons why people or companies pay for things, and those reasons aren't necessarily related to the value of the things themselves. Consider:
- The effect of advertising (in grocery stores, for example: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2009/11/10635.html).
- Corporate environments where bribery -- or its fancy equivalent, paying for nice dinners and ski trips for customers -- determines sales.
- Conflict-of-interest: guy responsible for purchasing works out a big contract between his firm and the vendor his wife owns.
- Vendor lock-in.
- Fear. This explains pretty well the bidding wars between Google and Facebook -- each of which fears losing an advantage over the other -- over startups whose value can very rarely reasonably amount to N times the value of companies who actually Build Things.
Money is at most a loose approximation for value. It can represent other things as well.
One, working for a boss is secure - I know what I'm gonna earn by the end of the month, no stress there.
Two... I honestly wouldn't know what to do with the remaining time. I'm not an artsy hipster that spends all that free time being creative, I'd probably spend the extra time playing video games and growing fat. I for one need the structure in my life.
I could happily find things to do in my spare time though. Like playing an instrument, or reading.
It could, in fact, be argued that we have made negative progress since 1910. In that same time period, most households have gone from one worker to two as women join the labor force. So now, on a household basis, we are looking at 60+ hours per week instead of 40.
The financial system has especially bloated overhead. The US used to have a financial system with three big, independent sectors - commercial banks, savings and loan companies, and stock brokers and markets. The Glass-Stegall Act kept them separate. Trouble in one sector didn't crash another sector, because the sectors couldn't invest in each other. That ended in the 1990s. Trouble soon followed.
The whole hedge fund / "private equity" industry is a net lose. "Private equity" is really leveraged buyouts using equity-to-debt conversions to reduce taxes. It's an artifact of tax policy, not a real industry. In many cases, the money ultimately comes from low-cost borrowing by banks from the Federal Reserve.
With different tax and regulatory policies, the finance industry would be about as big as it was in the Eisenhower era, far smaller than it is now. This isn't a secret, but it's not something discussed in public much.
On the medical care side, the US spends about as much in public funds on medical care as the European nations with state-paid medical care do. But that's less than half of US medical spending. Find out what a "prescription-benefit management company" does, and how big they are.
I find those kind of statistics pointless. Most of the time they are based on incomplete data and as much guesswork as any rant.
An intelligent opinion on the other hand, based on observation and with a coherent point of view, is worth more than all those statistics (to paraphrase Alan Kay, who said "A point of view is worth 80 IQ points").
The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger [...]
but rather because: 1) modern technologies require a more extensive management (with an entire workforce dedicated to maintaining them). 2) because globalization creates a much more complex framework for corporations (different local laws). 3) there are much more financial options available today to both individuals and corporations. a small company from Utah can today raise money from investors in Abu Dhabi and an individual from Europe can invest in Australian mining companies - just to name a few examples. this range of services is unprecedented and requires an accordant workforce.
There's 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. I find that stats and figures mostly help in giving an impression of "validity", where in fact there could be all kinds of flaws in them, how they were collected and what they cover.
For example, I worked at a company where we made networking software for some military radios. We had a "Hardware Engineer" that fixed or returned radios that had stopped working. From all economist metrics this was not a bullshit job. He was using his engineering degree to do engineering work.
But in reality he added nothing to the productivity of the company. He actually reduced the productivity of the company by taking 3 days to do 5 minutes of work. I stopped using him and did it myself when he was at lunch. It is impossible to get metrics on bullshit level because it includes lots of nuances. For example, i'm sure this guy and his manager would say that only he was capable of doing the hardware work because he took a 1 hour course on electrostatic discharge.
It would take a lot of evidence gathering for me to prove that this was a bullshit job and once I did prove it his manager would have immediately assigned him some new responsibilities making my previous data worthless. This is a big problem with macro-economics. Economic Job data is limited to Salary,Title,Hour worked. It doesn't tell you much more than that.
The more I see, especially since 2008, the more I think Keynes was really onto something re: monetary velocity. Our biggest problem is excessive pessimism and a zero-sum mentality, manifesting as various paradoxes of thrift. Without monumental efforts at hand-waving to keep the money flowing, our tendency is to deflate all the way back to the dark ages.
Bullshit jobs are a semi-conscious hack to keep this from happening-- to keep people "working" so they get paid so the money flows.
The other crazy hack around this problem is inflation, and fiat currency in general.
The Austrian types who preach how all this nonsense is a result of these things are precisely wrong. Don't blame the hack for the thing it's fixing.
If we can find a more permanent solution to the problems that we're hacking around, maybe we can dispense with the bullshit. Maybe that's a guaranteed minimum income.
As much I'd like to believe that managers are stupid, they're not crazy to hand out free money. If an employee generated no additional income to it's employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place. Similarly, if the holder of a good derived no enjoyment from it, it would be of no value at all to him.
It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no social value. The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place. The job of a corporate lawyer is to ensure corporations are compliant with all the paperwork necessary to their operation. For sufficiently large corporations, they're a necessary condition for it's functioning.
For me, the only reason why his argument might seem personally intuitive is because the majority of things in capitalism are of no use at all to any given particular person, even if all of them are "useful" in some way. Paparazzi, dog-washers and all-night pizza deliverymen are useless for all but the people who demand their services. It's not hard to see why consumers would have little interest in contract law if they deal so little with it, and when they do, their job of understanding it has already been cushioned by a specialist.
I see little point in coffee shops. Nonetheless, people flock to places with well-developed service economies that offer such things (e.g. New York, San Francisco) along with dog-washers. Perhaps because they know they'll cater to their bullshit tastes too.
It REALLY isn't that hard.
>The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place.
Right, they run the full gamut from avoiding legal battles with communities that are trying to shut down polluting factories that damage their health to avoiding legal battles with people who have suffered injury, incapacitation or even death from using their products. Using every trick available.
Their job is to make sure that large corporations are protected from us and they are paid handsomely for it.
You consider this 'social value'?
Because that's effectively what you've done in your reply.
Fundamentally, lawyers exist because we no longer (generally) find it acceptable to challenge each other to duels, or send Vinnie and the boys to bust someone's kneecaps when we don't like what they're doing. Irreconcilable disagreements between companies/businesses/individuals all need a means of resolution.
Okay then.
Poet-musicians seldom play for such high stakes, though ones that can't sell enough albums to pay the recording costs or get enough live gigs to feed themselves haven't necessarily left their audiences feeling happier on aggregate.
It's really easy to believe that certain corporate lawyer jobs have no social value, or negative social value. It's also really easy to believe that somebody who enjoyed being a "poet-musician" is rather bitter about the fact they now spend sixty suited hours a week wearing a suit composing boilerplate prose, and their whining about what a massive waste of time their job is isn't a particularly good illustration of misallocated resources. It's natural to believe that stuff you enjoy doing is more socially valuable than stuff you don't, but personal feelings of validation are an even worse proxy for social value than the market system.
In particular I'm unconvinced by the link drawn between "talented poet-musicians" failing to get their recording contracts renewed and maldistribution of incomes, as if the 99% were unable to afford to patronise poet-musicians rather than seeing no value in doing so. And funnily enough, if the poet musician suffered from being undiscovered rather than untalented, they could probably benefit from the endeavours of people involved in the drudgery of service sector "bullshit" jobs like A&R man, ad exec, or analyst for music retail platform.
Because it's largely true. They are there to let corporations use the law as a tool to make higher profits.
They make so MUCH money not because they can convince corporations that they need to drop unfair terms from employment contracts but because they can figure out a way to get them included. That makes them very profitable as well as unethical, hence their high wage.
If all they did was the kind of thing you're talking about - ensuring compliance with the law rather than creative ways of getting around it - their pay would be average or low because they are not making the company money.
>In particular I'm unconvinced by the link drawn between "talented poet-musicians" failing to get their recording contracts renewed and maldistribution of incomes, as if the 99% were unable to afford to patronise poet-musicians rather than seeing no value in doing so.
Really? I'm convinced. Are most Americans financially secure enough to be patrons of the arts? HELL no. Rent, healthcare and education are #1 priorities because they're so fucking expensive.
Why are they so expensive?
Because the corporate (debt) beast needs to be fed.
Well, I keep emphasizing: I’m not here to tell anybody who thinks their job is valuable that they’re deluded. I’m just saying if people secretly believe their job doesn’t need to exist, they’re probably right. The arrogant ones are the ones who think they know better, who believe that there are workers out there so stupid they don’t understand the true meaning of what they do every day, don’t realize it really isn’t necessary, or think that workers who believe they’re in bullshit jobs have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think they should be doing something else and therefore dismiss the importance of their own work as not good enough. I hear a lot of that. Those people are the arrogant ones.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...
The thing to remember here is that hiring managers aren't spending their own money. And most managers I know (though notably not the best ones) have always wanted to manage bigger teams, both for simple ego reasons and because it tends to lead to promotions and higher compensation (in one company where I worked briefly, title and compensation were directly linked to number of employees managed).
This motivation leads to all sorts of decisions that are suboptimal from an economic perspective, including lots of "bullshit acquisitions".
That is, European workers (for example) can better fill a 35-40 hour work week because they only have to work ~47 weeks of the year, whereas in the US, many feel lucky to have even two weeks off.
In this particular case, I think linking to libcom.org instead of strikemag.org is doing a significant disservice to the author.
This is the robots-are-coming-for-us fallacy rearing its head again. Once again, the premise is that we only need certain things -- food, shelter, electricity, internet, health care. Once robots make these things, well dang, there won't be anything else for the rest of us to do, will there?
No, no, a thousand times no. Humans value not only things to keep them alive, but scarcity and novelty. As the basic needs become automated, huge industries will continue to explode devoted to creating scarce and novel things for other humans to collect and consume. Most of these "bullshit jobs" are in this sector.
I find these essays always have some kind of value statement, either implied or outright -- "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialist in corporate law?"
It says that if you had a magic wand, we'd have more poets. If I had one, we probably would, too. But it tells us absolutely nothing about why there are jobs that folks don't like, or jobs that you or I might find useless.
But
1. Is there a limit to how much we can consume? Look at the super rich. They have more money then they know what to do with, so they stash it in hedge funds. The middle class drives consumption more than the rich. Leads me to think there's a point where consumption doesn't grow with your income.
2. The bullshit jobs discussed in the article are not about creating novel and scares things to consume. Advertising, corporate law, etc, has an arms-race element. Companies spend more on advertising to keep up with their competitors.
2) I think for biological reasons, people need status more than spare-time. We need some kind of hierarchy to determine who is more entitled to spread their genes. If everybody is unemployed, how do you know who has more status? Money and consequently buying power does simplify this problem very neatly, reducing it to a one-dimensional metric scale, easy to compare and communicate.
Then the only people working be those who want to (either for extra money or status).
The only people having kids would be those who are motivated enough to find a way of getting off public income for long enough to have them.
For example, let's look at the cognitive overhead I face as a programmer. There's a certain amount of time I spend just spooling content into my brain's working store. I'm not contributing anything new; I'm just keeping the old in my brain and coordinating with the changes my coworkers are making. Let's pretend that forms a nice, round 10 hours of time a week. If I work another 5 hours, that time has a 2:1 overhead:production ratio. Since the productive time is what's being sold, it operates at a steep 300% cost inefficiency. The next 5 hours brings it down to 200%, the next 10 to 150%.
There's a lot that would change in our economies if we could eliminate transaction and overhead costs. But physical and temporal limitation utterly forbid that in practice. One should always take those highly abstracted economic projections and starting points of analysis: see what assumptions lead them to be skewed from reality. That post-analysis is, in my experience, often the truly enlightening part.
"Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). "
It was quite the opposite. Just one person serving a huge queue.
You queue to say what you want and get a ticket. You take that ticket to a different queue and pay for the item and get a different ticket. You take that ticket to a third quue to collect the item.
Also, having your mind free but your arms working is a good way of thinking deeply.
Edit1: I should add I don't like bullshit jobs!
Edit2: Addendum For example you should try to learn and read a lot at night but just some core points, and the next day while working physically you should echo mentally all those material, discussing, analysing all in your head.
When I was younger I could reason without writing, now I should need to write thing down, anyway the desire to get out of a bullshit job is a great force, the most boring the job stronger the desire to escape from that job and greater the concentration you find to center into your real passion, your real job, the one you adore.
What is the point of FMCG marketing people? Do they really serve a purpose in society or do they just funnel funds from the competitive process (which as a whole might be productive) into different hands, including their own. There are some positive externalities like television, but that kind of incidental value is hard to find meaning in.
How about all the lawyers playing zero sum games? Social media people for office supply companies? Paparazzi? Are reward programs offering blenders in exchange for credit card miles really necessary?
I think the point he's making is somewhat valid, especially from a personal intuitive perspective. The wider question is can society work differently? Can we trade work for leisure? Can we find self definitions and motivation outside of work?
(A) A lot of work is bullshit from either a 'gives your life meaning' or a 'is useful to the world' perspective. (B) Everyone working full time is such a foundational part of our society that we don't know how to change it without breaking the world. Work is our identity, our drive to get good grades in preschool, the way money is distributed in society, a politically stabilizing force, etc.
You're talking about what we could do if we lived in that world.
A basic income, even a very low one, would be another way to get there. We could do away with the idea of full-time / salaried work entirely, and everyone is just part-time hourly. People could work enough hours just for subsistence, or more up to whatever comfort or consumption level fits their desired lifestyle.
If a person believes their paying job is at the core of who they are, they are either very lucky (working a dream job), or very unlucky (overworked, unfulfilled, and/or indoctrinated). All people, not just the wealthy or beautiful or lucky, deserve as much freedom and autonomy as their society can provide to them. Every person deserves a chance to become a great thinker, visionary, artist, scientist, craftsperson, and you can't do those things without plenty of free time to explore and experiment.
Wanting a better world and believing it's possible is the first step to getting there.
Short answer: Communism lost
http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d8eiv/why_do_ameri...
> In the United States, socialism is virtually nonexistent.
Except for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Unemployment.
And don't forget the military.
-- http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/21/troops-of-t...
> The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans’ health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole.
-- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=...
I'm surprised this isn't obvious to most people.
I also find libertarian soldiers extremely amusing.
As for the healthcare, universal healthcare for soldiers is a horribly malfunctioning system in the US, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon.
I live in The Netherlands, a pretty liberal kingdom with excellent social security and unemployment benefits. But don't be mistaken, it's not a socialist country. Not by a long shot. The biggest political parties are liberal-conservative and social-democrats. The latter lean towards the left, but our only true socialist party is much more to the left. They're only the sixth party by size.
Well, they definitely aren't capitalist.
Much of the US believes that to be the case.
In a fun example, an American financial newspaper claimed (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/hawking_british_and_...) that if Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the NHS that he'd be dead. He is, of course, British.
"A political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole".
Most countries are like that, the US and European countries included: those countries own the means of exchange (they decree the fiat money they own as the only legal currency) and they regulate the means of production and distribution (exacting taxes and benefiting cronies).
Moreover, what those countries have is definitely not Capitalism, because capital comes from savings and most (all?) of those countries have a trade deficit (even major exporters) which means whatever game it seems to be they're playing amongst each other isn't the usual praxeological capitalism where both parties profit from a trade. Right now they're playing a game called QE, with Japan winning (which means, losing).
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/09/30/germany-replaces-c...
So why is it socialism for the government to use tax money hire doctors and nurses to help people (e.g. UK NHS which was very clearly seen by its founders as a socialist endeavour) and not socialist for the government to hire soldiers to defend the country from attack?
NB I'm from the UK where it's clear that the public sector here has some of the very best people working for it (in the front lines of the NHS and the military) as well as some of the worst (particularly senior leadership in both organisations).
Most of the Western Europe is ruled by Social Democrats or Socialists of various kinds. While it might be less pronounced in Netherlands or Germany, you could take a look at Denmark, or Sweden, or France, or find out what were the slogans of the latest campaigns in Spain.
According to the dictionary definition of socialism, it requires 'socialization of means of means of production' or 'social ownership'. In the current crop of Western Socialism, this is done via governmental regulations of business and large redistribution of wealth via taxes.
Note that Socialism is not Communism. It can rather well coexist with a market economy, as long as both are somehow constrained, and the economy is strong enough (like in Germany or France, unlike in Spain).
And even supposing there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone, and if you go on vacation somebody uses the opportunity to snatch away your job: isn't that rather a problem of distribution and work organization, not of social welfare? If it's more efficient for organizations to have one person work 40 hours than two persons 20 hours, they'll prefer that.
Because life is better that way.
The employer/employee relationship is incredibly biased. A lot of people simply cannot afford to lose their job, whereas pretty much every employer can afford to fire almost any individual. This means people are willing to work for little pay, poor benefits and no vacation because they are effectively forced to, even though everyone would be better off if everyone was forced to take vacation
You also did not argue the core assertion that the employer-employee contract is heavily skewed to the employer. That has been true for the last 30 years. Productivity has made great inroads, yet pay and benefits have dropped significantly.
So yes, this is a government issue. The employers have a sweet deal and the plebes have no power. But alas, Republicans in the Senate will make sure that much needed reforms won't happen.
In short, the people who can't afford to lose their jobs also cannot afford to fail in business.
Isn't it the job of the banking system to enable people to start businesses?
Out of curiosity, why not?
And frankly, isn't it already the case? Most people are unable to produce enough for their own survival today. They can't grow crops, build a home, even make their own bread. Instead they are specialists at project management, javascript or flipping burgers. I'm not arguing that this is bad or wrong, I am only saying your statement that a society of people with specialist skills would not be possible.
Another direction to go is my grandma did meaningless low skill BS work in an office shuffling papers as a clerk because she specialized in knitting and had amazing knitting skills, but didn't feel like being sentenced to life in a textile sweatshop in Vietnam, or where-ever clothes were being made at that time (Vietnam now, but in the 70s? Surely not the USA by then?). For my own example there's no way I'd tolerate 140 hour work weeks as a medical doctor although I'd probably have made a heck of a doctor, and I'm not living in poverty so forget academics/sciences, and I'm not living urban and working in an open plan office so forget SV. As a hobby I enjoy woodworking but as a profession the pay is bad and the working conditions are awful, also its not very deep so I'd get bored with it long before I retire, so ... no.
So you have chronological problems or retraining problems, and also people that are a skills match but hate the working environment. Maybe in a communist society the central committee could force my grandma to be a textile worker or force me to be a medical doctor or work at a startup, but there would be a lot of force involved.
And what message is that for people: hey, don't learn stuff, because we need your cheap unskilled labor?
Yeah, I guess something like unions could work for that. Oh wait, apparently those are bad, too. Well I guess "just earn enough money" is the best fallback.
Be careful about stereotyping; not everyone who dislikes the involvement of the State is against unions - as long as they're not enforced by law, but voluntary.
An extreme example would be an anarcho-syndicalist, but there are libertarians who support unions as well.
I just don't buy this. If you view capitalists as evil, they are doing it to pocket money, not as some grand conspiracy to keep people busy. If it were economically possible to keep people busy in a capitalist society, inflation would be zero.
This has always bothered me, even before I was old enough to join the "work force." I had a hunch back in the day and have subsequently confirmed it early in my career: working less promotes better, clearer thinking, and ultimately a higher volume of results (i.e. when I work less, I end up getting more done).
This is incredibly telling of our times:
Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
I encounter this more often than I'd like to admit. Brilliant, talented, positive people finding their core competencies squashed under meaningless political bullshit. I constantly shudder at the idea of what these people might accomplish if they were given the resources and freedom to do what they were actually good at.
I've been reading Freedom From the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti and this one excerpt really speaks to this problem:
For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, `Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.
Then, once you're there, have side projects. Do personal stuff on work time. Spend less time working and more time thinking. Use your expertise to extract the time you need. Remix and refactor the insights you get from the stuff that you do. Network and build up a support group that will help you when it's time to spread your wings.
> If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.
My Typical 8 hour day
1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):
7 hours: code
1 hour: overhead
1 hour: insure rigorous Requirements documentation
1 hour: insure rigorous Test Plans (whether used or not)
1 hour: peer review (of devs I would have never hired)
1 hour: code review (for what peer review missed)
1 hour: answer auditors' questions
1 hour: status reports
1 hour: status meetings
55 minutes: bitch to boss
5 minutes: codeThe reason why it seems to be ridiculously onerous is because it gives the government the power to slam execs in jail if they do not have sufficient control over the company.
It's executive bullshit that ruined your day, which is caused by executive paranoia about going to jail which was caused by executives who stole from their own companies.
Most businesses are filled with processes that everyone knows are done for absolutely no value to anyone, but we do them anyways and they absolutely sap our soul.
Unfortunately the lack of any real enforcement means that it hasn't been all that successful.
That doesn't mean it's a bad law.
The idea that you can't do more than 15-20 hours a week is not true.
I do love my job. Perhaps that's why I work this much.
I admit that I have a hard time relating to this general idea I see over and over about the need to fill up time with non-work. Also, over the years, I've met my fair share of those who also work just as hard.
There is one job of value to society that teachers, etc., are failing (or succeeding; take your pick) to do: managing their own sustainability. The unlisted list item on all job descriptions is "protect this job from backstabbing, layoffs, budget cuts, or impoverishing or killing the person who takes it." Snarky aside on engineers: we are usually bad at this, because, just like I said, it's not in the requirements.
Btw great article!
Some of these are pretty amazing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) 528 points by gu 351 comments
On one hand it is the most stupid of all the answers: its' because of money, the salary that you get paid to do this pointless jobs.
And on the other hand it is because of something less clearly perceivable, yet profound and 'democratized': a part from the 'real' jobs mentioned in the article - physical labor jobs, agriculture, health services - almost all the other workers are equated by the secret perception of being paid more instead of the value of their job, the value of their real work effort and contribution. But this perception alone won't do the job. It works because it is matched by a counter-perception, almost as unmentionable: if most of the employees feel they manage to get paid more than what they do (not of what they deserve because this implies other personal, political, social, intellectual considerations), most of the employers do feel that are paying their employees less than what they contribute to the wealth of the company or organization, less of what their contribution's value is.
I believe that this is at the parallel combination of these perceptions is, at least one, of the main reasons why everything keep staying the way it is, why we don't work less.
What to do?
Organize the work differently. Start-ups have the potential to structure a division of labour, responsibilities and remuneration that provides a better sense of empowerment, equal contribution to the common aim of that the organization/company has, fair returns from the effort done. It doesn't last long thou. As soon as the start-up become institutionalized, e.g. direct control is lost over certain operations and processes, the company/organization become bigger, certain part of the work done is captured only with quarterly reports or similar simplification, tales of the work done, the objective achieved, it tend to become as any other existing company, recreating that dual perception that I've mentioned before.
Bottom line is (probably): perception for perception, let's ask more often and with less fear(?) to our colleagues, to the other people in general how much do they earn? what does really involve their job? It may sound a futile exercise but I believe that by communicating to each other, by spelling it out, we will play around with other possibilities, with alternative organizations and modes of labour.
Capitalism in crisis is all about reallocating work force from unproductive work at looser companies to do something great at productive companies! That's what bankruptcies are all about. Yes, my bank should be history long time ago. Its assets should be taken over by a bank that didn't make the stupid mistakes. And smart people who avoided those mistakes. This is what the bankruptcy process is about. Then this new CEO that weathered 2008 crisis making his small bank winning party here and taking over assets of bankrupted banks -- would see that nonsense and fire half of the staff. So they can go do something productive! This is how it works in true capitalism. We don't have it though because we believe in socialism. So yep, pay for your zombie bank (and my salary!) because the people who you voted into the office, didn't let the markets work!
What happened with the bank bailout was pure capitalism, the banks simply bought the government!
During cold war you could try to buy Moscow communists as much as you wanted so they allowed you open bank branch in USSR, but this would never happen.
You can try buy guys like Ron Paul all day long in attempt to get bailout, but you won't get it.
The problem is with the voter. If the feeling at the Capitol was that there will be severe punishment for the bailouts, our beloved Senators and Representatives would be too worried to loose their office to vote for that nonsense. Mind you they can sell their services to other industries too and make money in the process without the risk of loosing office (aka "everything"). The voter allowed them to do that. Because voter doesn't understand that bankruptcy and crisis are important parts of economic cycle. And are needed! To remove excesses from the system. To relieve workers from BS jobs too! So you can start over after 1-2 years in healthy economy without zombie banks. We didn't allow capitalism to work. Blaming capitalism for that doesn't add up.
BTW, I respect socialism and socialist movement. I'm liberal on social issues as liberal you can get. But for the economic issues Right just gets it.
Add to that the fact that no ordinary citizen directly voted for the bailouts, how can you blame this on the voter? The problem is not the voter, but the system.
There are a few issues I have with this statement, hence I decided to slice your post. I hope it is ok. Here is what I can't agree on: 1. From the very sentence above my understanding is that you notice something very important here: is it that in your opinion democracy doesn't work? You see this point you make isn't about capitalism. It's all about Democracy. Your claim here is that (sorry for vulgar interpretation): democracy doesn't work because I see elections after elections that voters vote for guys with most money for the campaign. But that's issue with democracy. Not capitalism. As long as money exists, rich&poor exist -- democracy won't be perfect. I take different view than that on this. I think you need more than just money to kind of "cheat" in democracy. You need stupid populous too. You need dumb people who care just about 6-packs and entitlements. So whoever promises them the most for the vote casted, gets elected. And then that gets funded by cheap credit, forever low interest rates (FED) and public spending. No wonder both parties do the same. This is late stages of democracy though. Not issue with capitalism. Last time I checked capitalism worked fantastic for a country - namely China -- but without the fallacies of democracy. 2. You are not the only one who notices that. US Government noticed that as well. And compared to China, it seems democracy and capitalism aren't as effective as authoritarian system and capitalism. It's not only China. Look at South-East Asia in general. If you ask, why we have more militarization of police, huge prison population, NSA eavesdropping, etc, etc -- it's all about the elites in the US seeing on the example of China that democracy doesn't really work. 3. Another issue with the statement: would you voted for Hitler given he had the most money in elections in 1933 ? Right, democracy isn't idiot-proof. That's the real problem with it. You can't really let 6-pack-joe voting, that's idiotic notion. Again, nothing to do with capitalism.
>Add to that the fact that no ordinary citizen directly voted for the bailouts, how can you blame this on the voter? The problem is not the voter, but the system.
Democratic system that is. Ordinary citizen not knowing how to vote. Poor idiots. Almost like Jews voting for NSDAP. (Sorry, couldn't help myself). Your disbelieve in American voters is mind blowing! The distrust in democracy horrifying!
EDIT: voted <-> voting ; stop <-> help
Voters don't go and seek out candidates with the most money, it's the other way around. Somebody with small funds simply can't reach as many voters as somebody with a huge war chest.
A capitalism where money is the outmost metric doesn't work, just like communism with absolute centralization and discounting all ownership doesn't work. Sidestepping the need for social responsibility, a very important factor, that people tend to ignore, about free market theory is that it's based on the premise that all information is available to you when you make an economic transaction. In that case, the market can be self-regulating. But in reality, this is by a large stretch not the case. Especially in politics.
So there you have a democratic system where money is power to to spew your viewpoint to as many people as possible. The voter doesn't have to be particularly ignorant for this to work, as this subverts the usual social channels. You always have incomplete information about the world, even without the help of politics. Money is an undeniable influence factor. A free market can only work if both sides to a transaction disclose all relevant information, be it money or politics.
My problem with "The System" is that the influence of money (and other hidden factors) is hushed under the table, and thus, in the vein of the previously mentioned free market principles, self-regulation ceases to work, and you have entrenchment.
So that is the dichotomy perpetrated by "pure" capitalism with regards to democracy. If you want money to win, there you have it. Those in power rescued the banks, themselves, effectively, to keep their money and their power, at the cost of the people at the lower rungs being disenfranchised. This has nothing to do with socialist principles.
Coming back to the beginning, the two-party system is already biased towards entrenchment, effectively barring small upstarts from entering politics. The mechanics of how this comes about are subtle and evolutionary enough that nobody notices it until its too late. The system is already too broken (maybe only almost...) to allow reform from within, eg. by the regular mechanism of voting and elections. There is also a huge amount of technical debt from the before the information age, that needs to be shed, as well as legal debt from at least two centuries of evolutionary lawmaking.
TL;DR: reform is needed, but the system is too encubered to let it happen.
The collusion between big business and big government is the root of the problem that they both rail against.
The Tea Party focuses on the government part and Occupy focused on the business part. They'd be a lot more effective if they focused on their common ground.
As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Party supporters on the other hand overwhelmingly side with the government regarding the treatment of money as speech.
Pick pretty much any issue and you'll find that the two movements bitterly disagree, just about the only thing they can agree on is that the government is corrupt and the country is moving in the wrong direction, but that's a universal platitude that everyone will nod their head at.
Side with the court -- the government (specifically, the Federal Election Commission) was the losing party in Citizen's United, so siding with the government would be the position you ascribe to Occupy, to wit, seeing the ruing as damaging to American democracy.
One can imagine that if the US had a parliamentary system that, at their height of influence, the two movements could have each won seats and ended up in the same coalition because of alignment on issues with transitorily pre-eminent saliency, but the alignment was on a very narrow set of issues that were a very small subset of the issues that members of each movement cared about (and, especially in the TPP case, a very small subset of the issues that the organization as such cared about), and even then the alignment was mostly an alignment about opposition to particular policies rather than on what substantive policies should be in place.
I'm sure Bill Gates, when he goes shopping, just buys the eggs he expects to need. That doesn't show us that he can't buy all the eggs in the store.
... And yet you happily pull down a six-figure paycheck for a job you believe is worthless?
Because, if so, you should know that the sense of moral superiority that you seem to share with most modern Randroids is outstandingly hypocritical.
I like Ayn Rand but don't agree on everything she said. But for the sake of argument let's say I agree with her 100%. So, then:
I use the company's money and time to work on my own Projects. I selfishly exploit stupid and weak that should die in the natural capitalistic process, but democratically elected Government didn't let it happen. I'm a parasite on the sick system because I want it to die. I don't see anything against Ayn Rand philosophy here. But then again, I'm not her cult follower or whatever.
And then being in this position I also see that the party can't go on forever and probably the day of reckoning will come. Most of these 300k employees wasting their time on BS jobs now, will eventually loose them. Maybe as soon as next year granted the FED raises interest rates substantially.
Oh, I agree with you completely. Most of her critics will say that her system is obfuscatory bullshit to distract from the fact that it's no more sophisticated than the plain old selfishness that you see in every preschool. It's just that Randroids don't usually admit that they are societal parasites, so your candor is refreshing.
Also, to be clear, I'm not sure if you're joking about exploiting the banks. Isn't your beef with Congress that they used taxpayer money to bail the banks out? Is it really that hard to see that you're exploiting the taxpayers, too? Don't you see that "the banks" are nothing but a bunch of people just like you, thinking they're not part of the exploitation of the taxpayer?
Then the rest of your rant really is, like, what do you mean? What did you expect? The government spending to be effective? To have people busy working in zombie banks or unionized companies? Sorry, turns out doesn't work that way. Socialism doesn't work, the only rational thing to do when working at zombie bank and is to put your time to more productive tasks. If a dreamer like you voted for that spending and is ready to spend his tax money on it... who am I to judge it? I'll gladly take it. Sure it is better than sweating 80 hour weeks at productive place like Apple. What did you think? Where Im coming from we have this saying: if someone wants to fight with you, run away. If someone wants to give you something, take it. Thank you! And don't forget to vote for even higher taxes and even more Government spending. 120k/year with all the slacking I do still doesn't get me the Land Rover I wanna have.
And if I can't afford the payment because the bank goes bankrupt next year. Please don't forget to support measures to "distress families with debt"... I mean I didn't want this car, bankers told me to buy it. We did that with housing, why not continue once this bubble pops? Raise taxes, pay even more, so I can still stay at the house I can't afford, driving a car I shouldn't have bought in the first place, all from your tax money already. But you don't care, as you know -- it is all bankers fault!!! - so bail me out brother! ;-)
Must be stinky rich to have this type of philosophy in life.
Large organizations become large because somehow, at some point in their past, they discovered how to produce some sort of wealth greatly in excess of what they were spending to produce it. This creates security for the entity. This security means that they are no longer getting feedback from the real world about what is working and not working; long before the feedback reaches the people in the organization it needs to reach, it has been absorbed by the buffers of high wealth and a lot of people. Consequently the entity begins acting without feedback from the real world. As control systems theory would teach us, the system begins slowly-but-inevitably spinning out of control until it finally exceeds its buffers and comes down in one or another form of catastrophe.
I've phrased this in "wealth" and "feedback" because it has jack-shit to do with "capitalism" or "socialism" or anything else. It's a general problem with things that get too big. (It does so happen to be a special case of this problem that many, many people want to pile everything into one big entity and call it the "government", but the problem is very widespread beyond just that one case.) Everything needs feedback to stay connected to the real world, and any time that an entity gets too large to respond to feedback, trouble is assured. The bigger the entity, the bigger the trouble. Big governments, big corporations, big anything is dangerous. And it's not because of some mystical badness due to largeness, it's very specifically their ability to operate without or even despite feedback from the real world. It isn't magical thinking to think that's trouble... it's magical thinking to think that entity could ever operate without feedback. Despite how this may appear to be ideology, I consider this engineering, and rather simple engineering at that.
Smaller organizations can still do very bad things. My parents happen to live in a township (a local government entity that stands in for a town/city in the rural area they live) that did something very financially stupid and now they've got some disturbingly substantial extra taxes to pay for a few years to pay it off. Smallness didn't prevent the township government from doing something stupid. However, the people who did that stupid thing were immediately outsted and will never serve again... that's feedback. When's the last time you heard that last bit from a big company or government? (Who in the Federal government has ever paid for any of the bad things that you can name in the past 14 years? It's not an empty list, but it's a short one for such a massive entity and long time.) And there's a township full of people now keeping a closer eye on what financial commitments it makes.
So, with that foundation, I'd submit a lot of these bullshit jobs are themselves an expression of the fantastic, astonishing wealth we've generated as a society. We have them because we can afford to have them. And don't forget the fact that the people with bullshit jobs are applying their full human intelligence to the task of looking busy, whether they are doing it on purpose or otherwise. When an entity is large and flush with cash, it lacks the motivation to push through the fog of deception and start ensuring that people are actually generating value.
It's fascinating to me how executives are so often enamored with large mergers and acquisitions, while it seems very rare for such transactions to result in greater overall growth or profitability. I suspect the real reason is to increase the buffer between the CEO and real world feedback. At some level, I suspect the executives instinctively know the real reason to increase the size of the organization is to further insulate them from market feedback.
Certainly makes more sense than the underlying financials in most cases, as far as I can tell.
But the advantage of describing it in the terms that I did is that, yes, government subsidy can be a way that an entity generates more wealth than it is spending to obtain it. But it is only one way. If that particular way is special, it is only due to its especially feedback-isolating effects (being beholden to voluntary customers for money provides more direct feedback than being beholden to another over-large entity), rather than any special "government" badness.
Many capitalists (myself included) tend to not support corporatism. Capitalism assumes individuals owning smallish businesses. The minute a business becomes large enough to influence the federal government, things get weird and I'm not sure the system works as intended.
Your approach therefore winds up changing the use of the term, to make it more useful for your side of the debate. That's not an especially valid debating tactic...
You have misunderstood. It is not that it is what "capitalism" means because it was what the term was first coined for, its because it was both what the term was first coined for and what it has been used predominantly for since -- both in criticism of that system and other systems sharing its salient features, and in describing (with or without criticisms) actual current systems by how they differ or continue capitalism (both aspects are frequently seen in the descriptions of modern mixed economies.)
The use of "capitalism" for either some other real system that has existed (other than by reference to shared features with the original capitalism) or for some idealized utopian objective that does not exist and has not existed -- whether one in which, as in Marx's Communism, the State has withered away, or one which has a active State with narrowly-circumscribed functions and goals -- is a distinct minority use, and any particular ideal is an even smaller minority use.
I don't believe you that this is inherent to capitalism. Do you have anything this century (21st, not 20th)? An actual citation, not just a claim that this is what they said? Some kind of a study of the degree of cronyism in capitalism, preferably across countries? Something besides just an un-evaluatable claim that depends on the "everybody knows" and the definitions used by unspecified people two centuries ago?
I feel your pain, but we've got to let go of this word. "Capitalism" has meant exactly "tax-funded corporations", and all the other bullshit that you and I don't like, for such a long time, that this is the accepted meaning now. I don't think the phrase "free market" has been spoiled yet, but if we have to have an -ism then we need to come up with a new one. Avoid the adjective "true", because that just opens one to Scotsman accusations.
Giving them ground is precisely why you, and others think that we've lost the term "capitalism". For so long, we let individuals use it in bastardized terms to refer to grey-area capitalism, and allowed its use to be in the form of a pejorative.
The idea that capitalism was ever anything else was an attempt by defenders of that system to whitewash it, distract from the cronyism inherent in it, and discredit critics. But its part of what "capitalism" has meant from day one -- and part of what every actual capitalist system in practice has featured prominently.
Take something everyone thinks and talks about (Like all childish thought games) put a crappy explanation on it and people buy in.
> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
Seriously... and man didn't land on the moon.
Conspiracy's happen, but it's about broken processes and complicated feedback.
This is a interesting topic, it's a real shame people are fooled so easily by essays like this.
Funny to see all the hn readers advocating for more welfare and central planning. Typical neckbeard communism.
You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.)
Yes, yes, if you disagree with our good professor here then you must be a tabloid-reading simpleton. A person of any sophistication would easily recognize the value of this largely fact-free critique of capitalism. Where capitalism is represented by the academia, the most competitive of industries.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments
The whole thing is nothing but ideological signalling.
if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market”
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers
Let me just say (before I go back to reading Daily Mail and bashing teachers) that I can totally understand why he spent so much time thinking about bullshit jobs.
[1] and given it's freely available, it won't cost you anything... http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years