"Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty"
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.
>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.
Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.
>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.
Quite a lot of people have died or committed suicide in the UK recently, because the government decided to change the rules around disability and chronic illness. It hired a shill organisation to declare that the disabled, chronically ill, and dying were fit for work.
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.
>That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare.
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?
This seems to me like an employee's opinion, rather than that of a founder. I mean that the worker's view of a company is as a job-creator, whereas a company founder sees a company as a tool to fill a market niche (and usually generate profit).
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.
"There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, 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? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)"
Isn't it interesting that the one example Graeber comes up with is possibly the profession writ large whose demand is largely influenced by a social structure outside of the free-market? Likewise, a over promulgation of workers in finance is suggestive that maybe there is some non-free-market force is incentivising individuals to go into that field...
"A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates, over 75% of all human interactions.
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.
Volunteerism too, providing services or simply comfort to others free of charge, whether they be family, friends, neighbors, the elderly, the sick, the poor, is a non-free-market activity. The less free time a person has though, time away from market-driven, payment-required jobs, the less freedom they have to: work on tasks pro bono, pursue hobbies, interests, contribute to a vibrant caring community, participate in government or petition it, learn new things, experiment, think, write, get creative, explore, and simply pursue their own happiness in life.
Yes, he makes that point in "Debt" - but most free-market people would consider volunteerism, as a 'free-market' activity, because internally an individual makes a choice (based on personal utility) to do activity X versus 'something else' which is a micro-market.
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".
David Graeber is an athropology professor, mostly known for a quite good text "Debt: the first 5000 years" - actually I am probably on the opposite side of the political ideology from Graeber and disagree quite a bit with some of his conclusions[0] but he does bring up a lot of good points and the book is a very swift read (in fact it happens to be sitting on my desk at this very moment).
[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).
> if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?
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:
- 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.
> Every day before dawn, brave men and women of different races and backgrounds rise as one, united by a common cause. They march together in formation, kept in step by their voices joined in song. These workers leave their communal housing arrangements and go toil together “in the field.” While they are out doing their day’s labor, their young are cared for in subsidized childcare programs. If they hurt themselves on the job, they can count on universal health care. Right under your nose, on the fenced-in bases you drive past on your way to work or see on the TV news, a successful experiment in collectivization has been going on for years.
> 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.
(shove the healthcare part aside for a second) to a certain degree, all firms are 'socialist', because they are banding together to not compete with each other. This is the central interesting problem in the 'theory of the firm' which deals with how in a capitalist system groups of individuals band together to not compete. This definition, then is meaningless. Socialism is when a central authority organizes the distribution of labor and resources under the threat of force.
As for the healthcare, universal healthcare for soldiers is a horribly malfunctioning system in the US, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon.
no it's not. The organization is corrupt from the top. My father is a medium-level executive there. Years ago, he reported that there was black mold in the senior care facility and exposed several million dollars of overbilling by doctors. For his troubles, he was rubber-roomed (paid six salaries to sit in a room with no windows and no responsibilities). This is not an incident that made the major media. Other, more publicised problems exist, in the Phoenix office, and notably at Walter Reed, during the Bush tenure and wars in afghanistan and iraq. But if you seriously have such a belief in the VA, GO ASK 5 VETERANS what they think of it.
By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state. Government services like these do not equal socialism.
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.
It's endlessly bizarre to see Americans throw around the word "socialist" as if it was a curse. Western Europe is made of social democracies. Northern Europe in particular has made the choice to live with high taxes and better social services. It does not mean that they are governed by unelected oligarchs, they get the same kind of elected oligarchs as the rest.
There has been a concerted campaign in the US to convince people that other countries' social services are inefficient, dangerous, and hated by their populations.
"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).
"Government services like these do not equal socialism."
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).
That seems so completely misguided. Why is it the government's responsibility to fix your vacation for you? Isn't it just a matter of earning enough money to afford a vacation? I doubt rich people worry as much about little vacation time - they buy those expensive yachts and then have only two weeks per year to ride them?
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.
In Hungary (which is considered a shitty place to live) I get 23 days of paid vacation (with weekends considered it can be more than a month). I also don't have to work overtime.
> Why is it the government's responsibility to fix your vacation for you?
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
Isn't it also the responsibility of the individual to gain skills that are valuable? I don't think what you describe is true for Software Developers in Sillicon Valley, for example. How much vacation do Software Developers in the Valley usually get?
The Silicon Valley is not indicative of jobs in the US. What some developer there gets has little/no bearing on what happens elsewhere.
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.
Because most new businesses fail. So the people best suited to start ones are people with a safety net: a lot of cash saved up, or a well off family to support them.
In short, the people who can't afford to lose their jobs also cannot afford to fail in business.
Have you tried getting a loan from the bank to start a business? Fat chance. And if your business fails, you still gotta pay the bank back its loan (which doesn't solve the problem in the original post. The underprivileged still can't afford to fail).
Still, how much vacation time do Sillicon Valley developers get? If they also only get two weeks, it would invalidate the theory that people get no vacation because they are so much under pressure to not lose their jobs.
not everyone can be a software developer, and frankly we can't have a society of people who only have specialist skills. There will always be a need for people with minimal skills to do low-skill jobs. They're doing work that has to get done too.
> frankly we can't have a society of people who only have specialist skills.
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.
For my first 10 yrs out of school there was no job market for network operators specializing in BGP. Then I did that for a bit less than a decade. Then due to consolidation and mergers there's no work in that field anymore (other than the stereotypical "move to SV/NYC").
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.
You're not really disagreeing, except on terminology. You're defining "specialist skills" as "narrowing down your work away from (do everything that allows me to live on my own)", whereas your parent meant "specialist as opposed to <easy>". For example, someone working the checkout in a shop is technically a specialised job (by the definition you're using), but in the context of our current culture it's easy enough that a vast majority of people could "become specialised" in it almost immediately.
> Why is it the government's responsibility to fix your vacation for you?
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.
Yeah, I guess something like unions could work for that. Oh wait, apparently those are bad, too.
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 have trouble taking seriously a post "educating" us about history that asserts Russia was part of the Axis Powers up until Germany attacked Russia. The pact that grew into the Axis was specifically created to oppose communism. Germany attacked Russia in violation of an agreement, but that agreement hardly made Russia part of the Axis.
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?
I think he's talking about jobs where this is arguable (though never entirely provable) from any perspective: employee, employer or consumer.
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?
Leisure doesn't have to be indulgent. It simply gives a lot more possibilities. If you could work on any project or interest or hobby you wanted to right now, what would you work on? If you could learn any new thing you wanted, what would you learn about? Any family, friends, neighbors, or others going through a hard time right now, how would you like to help them? This is the sort of stuff we should be teaching kids in schools too, about the possibilities of free time. It can be about a lot more than just recovering from the exhaustion of work.
I think we might be talking about different things. My understanding of this articles is:
(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.
In the US, what about a state-level constitutional amendment lowering full-time hours from 40 to 35? It just seems to me that public support isn't even there right now for something like that, but that support is necessary for getting there.
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.
How is this weak political agitation on top of HN? It reads like a paroody.
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.
Actually, he's a well known anthropologist and author of an excellent book, which you should maybe read before labelling him as a political agitator...[1]
A funny thing about this story is the photo is of the SSE. The very same place where I worked on the trading system and got down voted for '2300 a second sustained. I was doing that on PA RISC under HPUX in 1995. BFD'. More relevant to the story at hand, when the bell went for lunch, most of those people crossed their arms and put their heads down on them for a nap. I am sure many never left their desk.
Did you find working there meaningful?
Half of the time I found playing with cool HFT tech fun just for the tech part of it and no thoughts about meaning at all.
But when there is a boring patch, the meaningful/meaningless question is tantalising.
I just had a great trip to a cousins wedding and saw a lot of family. My Parents' generation are now just past the 'age of retirement' and are in their late 60s and early 70s.
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.
- 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).
Great points - but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs. Want to be a translator, or a teacher, or an open source developer? We can all do those things alone, sure. But going (or remoting) to a workplace gives us a collaborative experience. And not to mention, not all people can easily motivate themselves to keep something going on their own, and need external pressure and motivation. The vibe I was getting was that my elders were afraid of devolving into couch potatoes, were they to leave the jobs they enjoyed.
> but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs.
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".
For perhaps 10% of the population, maybe less, what OPs parents said is true.
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 agree with you. But only if you are a motivated person. It saddened me when I had to give up on them by founding out that they (most people, even the close ones) are not motivated due to fear, laziness, and disbelief in own powers and possibilities of improvement.
To put it bluntly: "it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks".
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.
Well, maybe you and and your family don't. Not me. There's plenty I like and want to do when I have spare time. There are different types of people in the world. Don't let one person's personality define the system.
Interesting article and a strong feeling that there is something there that we all know but we don't say, declare to ourselves and to the others. So I think there another point to add here: everything manages to stick together not because of an not well explained hate for 'real workers' (I can see that it exists, but how does it contribute to keep everyone in its place?).
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.
The author himself notices half way through the text that he might have gone out on a limb. If his description of "bullshit jobs" was at least followed by some statistics on marginal valued added (to a product, service) by that particular job (and how this margin has become lower and lower) then we could start a serious discussion about it. But now his extraordinary claims just stand there as a shallow rant, more like a romantic anecdote to Victorian economics than a fundamental analysis of capitalism.
So, essentially he has to add some bullshit statistics to his description of bullshit jokes...
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").
Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims. Eloquent deductive reasoning can easily lead to wrong conclusions, which is why we need to test them with empirical results. This author in particular appears to put a prohibitively large value on physical goods over any kind of service. He dismisses the fundamental transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, simply labeling most of the new jobs as pointless. while his arguments might be convincing for a few jobs such as telemarketing, he appears to forget about the highly increased complexity of a modern economy, which requires people working in corporate law, financial services and the administrative sector. in my opinion those regulations weren't just invented because
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.
>Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims.
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.
His point is that there is no way to provide statistics on the number of bullshit jobs.
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.
Reading this, I was reminded of the "B Ark" from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: (1)
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.
I hate that particular joke because of how it so casually blames the victim. Awful jobs exist in the system and people are crammed into them by economic force.
They are vindicated by the fact that all of the smug high achievers and those they let live are wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone, since they killed off the telephone sanitizers.
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.
No, they are still awful. Just awful on different levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If your job leaves you insecure for basic survival and safety, then merely having your esteem and self actualization trashed looks like heaven.
Are you sure it was the "height of her ambition"? Sounds like she was primarily focused on practising her English and didn't mind too much about the work.
From personal conversation (in Chinese) with another person:
> 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).
Ah, I disagree. I think that if you are in one of those jobs and continue to justify your existence and the existence of the job, you are just reinforcing it.
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.
Except I am married with three kids (all under 5) and a mortgage, so it can be done. I think it's an easy cop-out to say you can't do things because of your family. Yes it's hard, and there is a lot of pressure, but if you are worth something you will make it work.
I think a lot of the point of the "B Ark" joke is lost if you forget what comes next: the rest of the Golgafrincham people were wiped out shortly after the departure of the B Ark by a virulent disease contracted from an unsanitized telephone. (The first B-Arker you meet in the story is a telephone sanitizer.)
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)
* 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.
Not to mention basic income is not a comfortable living. Folks will not work unless they can get paid enough to notice. Will that drive down entry-level salaries, or drive them up? Hm.
>There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful.
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?
I'm skeptical that we have a significant number of useful projects today at which throwing unskilled labor would be useful. We saw a form of this in the last stimulus, where "shovel-ready" turned out not to be a thing.
I think you've set up a dichotomy where you can have the PWA or basic income.
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.
Politically it kind of is a dichotomy. I see very little hope for Basic Income politically because the A) protestant work ethic is too deeply embedded in American culture and B) for many Americans the only outcome they would notice would be very high inflation.
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.
That as a society we don't have enough useful work for everybody to do today.
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.
>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.
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 think most people would continue to work and the people who are currently unemployed would largely remain unemployed.
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.
"the people who are currently unemployed would largely remain unemployed."
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.
> What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money?
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.)
> 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)
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).
I don't know that dragonwriter meant to exclude government employment from "the market". If we include it, the question remains approximately as strong. If there is useful work to be done, we should employ them to do that work, but we should do that based on the work we see to be done, not based on some notion that people having freedom to choose how they spend their time is bad.
>no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs
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".
I see no claim in the parent that everything done by the PWA was make-work. Also, while creating jobs was an important motivation of the PWA, to the best of my knowledge it never included any guarantee.
That's not what you said. You said, "This is preferable to a Basic Income", and linked both the PWA and a page on a job guarantee. I don't think dragonwriter's response would have been the same to the above. A job guarantee necessarily involves possibility of make-work, or it's not a guarantee.
> 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".
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.
>Coupling the two creates inefficiency, as individuals receiving the income support are then compelled to devote time to an economically-inefficient job
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?
>What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money?
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 money is currently costing more for the administration than the money given out.
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.
>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.
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.
I think the main benefit of an unconditional basic income, however small, is exactly to help us getting over the worst of protestant work ethic. Do we really need to make existential threats to people who don't accept the work that the government thinks they should be doing? If something really needs to be done, you can increase the pay until somebody does it.
>I think the main benefit of an unconditional basic income, however small, is exactly to help us getting over the worst of protestant work ethic.
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.
>Who decides what jobs are available? Who decide who gets which jobs?
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.
> 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
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.
I don't object to PWA style projects when we find things that we want to do. I don't think it's a sensible way to guarantee a job. As orangecat said downthread a bit, "shovel-ready" often isn't. I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles, which will be increasingly hard to avoid if we structurally have to keep pushing out projects whether or not we have anything that's actually 1) a good idea, and 2) ready to go.
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.
Certainly not, but requiring any purchase decision be backed up by someone wanting the thing helps quite a bit. That's something that naturally follows in the private sector when we give people cash, and frequently happens in the public sector when things are working right, but is undermined by pressure to build out projects to "provide jobs" - and a guarantee makes that worse.
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.
I think something does not qualify as "work", in the sense thedufer was using it, if you don't stand an appreciable chance of being paid for it. I think that's an important sense, but I agree that we need to be careful that this does not cause us to overlook or undervalue productive efforts where that isn't the case.
I was using some implicit assumptions made by crdoconnor (without which the `"need to work" -> PWA > BI` implication falls apart). The first, that "work" implies something you can reasonably be paid for. And the second, that there's some dependence on others in order to do the work.
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.
>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.
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.
>Your argument seems to hinge on this, but I see no reason to believe it.
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.
> 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.
As far as I know, the job market is not demand driven. So, the number of people who work isn't really determined by how many people need money. It is determined by how many jobs there is.
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.
That doesn't seem entirely true. If most people didn't need money to live, they would be less willing to sign up for "bullshit jobs", meaning employers would have to provide more enticing compensation, potentially resulting in a reduction in people working such meaningless jobs.
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.
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.
My SO has recently been on a kick about basic income, and I admit I have been skeptical. Could you elaborate on the pros/cons of basic income as you understand it please?
The main downside, in a nutshell, is inflation. There's simply no way to distribute the same amount to everyone in an economy and not have proportional inflation occur--because basically what you've done is dilute the value of every dollar in the economy. This is essentially what has happened with the cost of college. The more aid we give students, the more colleges soak it up...which leads to those who needed assistance still needing assistance as much as before, but the absolute cost of education has just risen.
Basic income sounds like a great idea until you realize the above.
I don't think any of the BI proponents suggested to finance it by printing new money. More likely taxes, but keep in mind that they wouldn't be spent by the government. But speaking of inflation, in the eurozone, they can't seem to figure out how to increase it. Everyone seems to be anxious about the possibility of deflation. Which seems strange, because if they just printed money and distributed it to everyone, you'd think this would both produce inflation and increase consumption, no?
Careful. Aid to students isn't something we can turn around and spend on something else when prices go up. That is a very different dynamic than "dollars I can spend like anything else". People bidding on status symbols with someone else's money, versus people trading off their various wants against each other from their increased-but-still-limited pool of resources.
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.
That's true, but when I said decoupling I meant "break the common misconception that one cannot happen without the other". It's more about breaking the idea than actually separating them. I don't think we can introduce Basic Income as a full income directly anyway, it will most certainly be gradual (start with e.g. a BI equal to the level of poverty, and go up from there)... but the most important part will be achieved: people will stop thinking that in order to live there is no other way but work, even in useless jobs.
What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on.
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.
I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.
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.
The simple social rule that explains this is pecking order. One of the most basic human desires is dominance over others. When you have the money, you hire as many submissive minions as you can. "Bullshit jobs" are just an entourage. Then you display dominance over them by making them do meaningless work - the more humiliating the better. If you hired people that were actually useful, you'd be reliant on them so only get as many as you actually need to keep your organization from going under.
While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo.
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.
I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe your missing an important "fact"(maybe).
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.
It is possible and commonplace in jobs where you physically work. Construction, any of the trades, factory work, food service... if you work 40 hours you have actually worked very close to 40 hours. There isn't any real opportunity to slack off or stand around in those jobs.
Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.
I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning.
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.
Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work.
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 is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.
Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.
Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."
How curious! I've always thought it will be the other way around.
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 thought I was taking an optimistic view? Software is a tool like fire or the wheel. Barring a "Doomsday" (which I don't envision), our descendants won't give it up, even if they use vats of bacteria or lattices of anti-quarks or something even less recognizable as "hardware". One can imagine them giving up humanity and civilization. Eventually, both of those will seem pointless to anyone who isn't an antiquarian weirdo.
you seem to be conflating observation with arrogance. what, pray tell, makes you believe software will vanish? will there be a civilization post-agriculture or literacy? software is bigger than both.
I don't have a car but I haven't existed long before cars. Home Depot may have existed without using software, but a company created more recently than unix wasn't around "long before software"
This is why started to build web projects on the side. I have one these white collar jobs and I don't get to create things. I work closely with construction workers and get to see how satisfying it is for them to build something real.
Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.
> I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun
To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.
I know what you're getting at, but I'd be reasonably confident in speculating that there is just as much slacking off on construction projects as any other employment. Some of it maybe genuinely waiting for something to happen (crane to move something, cement truck to arrive etc). I'm not sure whether you'd count that as slacking off but it's certainly not working.
It probably varies. In my experience working construction this was absolutely not true. There was definitely some down time here and there but the majority of days we worked close to flat out from 7-4:30 (2 15min breaks + 30min lunch). Ditto for summer I spent working on an assembly line where there was even less downtime (although it was not nearly as physically demanding).
Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a lot of white collar workers.
Definitely, and probably better for their health, too. Government workers should IMO also have worked a physically demanding job at the same (low) pay rates, to go a bit off-topic here. People shouldn't be allowed to decide for others if they haven't stood in their shoes IMO.
I've done blue collar work (construction was one) without much slacking at all, stops just to light a cigarrette o drink a beer, but it was mostly a continuous stream of little tasks. It made sense to not rush but neither stop, so it 'flows': you're never to tired and keep "the engine" warm.
It was a minor work: building a wall, over two or three days, in an individual's house. It was considered basic hospitality to offer some beverage to workers (sherry or beer) on top of the negotiated pay.
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.
Having worked construction jobs, a lot of it is waiting. Waiting for someone else to finish their job, waiting for materials to arrive, etc. While it could sometimes be non-stop (once what you were waiting for is done, now someone is waiting on you), even then you'd pace yourself. No one goes all out for 16 hours.
It seems that the answer should be, at least in the shot term, for good managers to recognize the 40 hours "available" concept and provide more flexible schedules. No one gains from having an office full of workers surfing Facebook on friday afternoon. Let people be someplace else if it their queue is empty.
From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.
> 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 was surprised to find so much discussion around the concept of the 15-20 hour actual productive week here, because Hacker News is such a startup friendly environment.
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.
Perhaps "better than most" isn't the right way to say it. My less than clear point was that there is less idle time at a startup than in traditional offices and when you don't have anything to do you do not need to be in the office.
I agree. Maybe the solution would be to be paid per task completed. I.e. create a bug tracking system (just like JIRA) where employees (working from home) would bid for how much they could do the task in what timeframe. Something like desk but only company's employees could take part in bidding.
That's not true. Some jobs may be too taxing to do for 40h but most are not. Even those that are extremely taxing still require the employee to do other tasks as part of their work (eg documentation / paperwork) that reduce the amount of intense work they must do.
For sure, that's certainly one of the things that he misses. The midnight pizza deliveryman has a 'bullshit' job where he does nearly nothing because the 1 hour of real work over an 8 hour period is worth it to his boss. Most professional/service work has a large component of this type of availability.
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.
My google-fu is failing me, but I believe there's a study out there that postulates that the most efficient utilization rate for a secretary is about 40% -- in other words, they should be idle about 60% of the time.
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.
The two delivery driver jobs that I had both paid per delivery. I was not paid to wait around. I would expect that if a delivery driver was paid per hour, that they would be given other tasks if deliveries were slow.
I've done a couple of food delivery jobs prior to college - as a pizza delivery driver, I was paid to be available (I made boxes, did light cleaning and tried to look busy while I was waiting for a delivery) and got consistent ($4) tips per delivery (not to mention all the pizza my midnight b-ball crowd could eat).
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.
I've worked agricultural jobs. We worked 8 hours a day, with a 15 minute "smoko" break after 2 hours, 1/2 hour lunch break after 4 hours, and another 15 minute break after 6. (This is in Australia, and was these were the award conditions)
Except when we were on breaks we were continually working.
Fair enough, but can you do that until you're 80? And what happens when you have a serious knee problem or a pregnancy?
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.
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.
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.
I haven't heard this before - where are you getting your data?
I disagree somewhat. Repetitious physical work can make you lose focus quite easily and that is when most accidents occur. On the contrary, office employees that drink lots of coffee and being drowsy doesn't have to do with work necessarily, but with the their bodies being immune to the caffeine.
Exactly - I've come to peace with it that I'm being paid to be available for my 37 hours a week. As others have touched on, "knowledge economy" jobs aren't all-out work, so whilst my brain is foggy (especially after lunch) and I'm not accomplishing much, it's easy to think, for me, I'd be better screwing off outta here and doing something else.
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.
It's most definitely possible to put in 40 hours of work. This mainly happens in more labor-intensive jobs. Note that it doesn't have to be construction work. Even your primary care physician's job might be described as "labor-intensive," just because they have so many patients to meet with and so much administrative work to do for each one. I'm sure many (most?) doctors do put in a legitimate 40 hours of work a week.
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.)
I'm the same I'm a night person. When I was younger I operated the same as you. Chatting on irc during worktime and in the night do the work at home. But after marrying and getting kids I need the night time to rest...
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.
I used to very strongly feel this way, but recently I'm definitely been choosing to put in that much time (and I mean actual productive time), despite being at a company/team that puts a strong emphasis on work-life balance (there are a lot of parents on my team and they're out the door at ~4:45 to pick up kids, etc). I think it might have something to do with the fact that I happen to be particularly motivated and excited about what I'm working on right now (more so than basically ever before in my short working life). As you said, it may not be sustainable, but I've been doing it for about 8 months now.
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.
I don't think so. I've worked kitchen jobs working 70 hours a week—so long as you don't have to think critically the entire time, it's definitely doable.
White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours
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!
Can't that kind of "work" be done just as well while doing yardwork or cooking or similar things? I don't see a strong reason to confine employees for 40 hours a week for that.
This relates to a personal pet issue of mine -- schools like to run surveys asking how much time you spend on homework. But, as far as I can see, the question is ill-posed.
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.
> 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.
“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”
– Dave Barry
> 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.
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.
As someone who recently shifted from an academic, paper writing position to a bigCo 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.)
Thanks for your input. Actually, I've been considering making this shift, at least temporarily. I'd like to do something different for a while. But it probably won't happen anyway.
This echoes a lot of the sentiment that I had when I moved, and frankly I regret it. I can't obviously know that all of our variables are the same, but for me, I lost the ability to work in a place that had a friendly work environment, with nearly full control over how and what I worked on, the ability to publish, AND work on a full stack, in exchange for a doubled paycheck and losing all of the above, this was simply not worth it and I spend most days here counting down until I've "paid my dues" and can go back into an area I feel more passionate about without burning any bridges.
I was able to spend the last 5 years or so working almost 100% from home (that's changed as I've switched jobs recently). I would say I easily did the same amount of work from home as I had in the previous jobs, but I probably really only spent 12-20 hours doing it in any given week.
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.
Only having a few productive hours during a day does not imply even distribution. You go even further and softly assume it's the first X hours that are productive. Doesn't sound likely.
There was massive outrage a month or so ago when some conservative pundit got hold of information that salaried IRS employees working from home had been doing personal business (laundry, childcare, etc.) during their 40 hours.
I don't think our culture will ever come to grips with this.
The payload of conservative pundits is outrage as entertainment product. That might generalize to "all pundits"; perhaps the conservative ones just innovated and got there first.
I see more and more people taking Randall Noe's tone in blogs and stuff. Here's hoping.
Probably some of this is down to certain jobs requiring a lot more time than others. Some jobs may only require 15-20 hours week, but others like mine (building and maintaining a database for an organization), will never run out of work. If someone else were getting paid the same as me for half the amount of work, I would be asking for more pay. If they sit there bored for 20 hours, then I at least don't feel as short changed.
In more professional settings certain job titles seem pointless but actually add a diversity of thinking that would otherwise be lacking. For example, you may not really need a lawyer to check something. But good lawyers have a knack of identifying logical inconsistancies and always find spelling mistakes which is useful. Or an IT expert operating in an office of social scientists will think about problems in an entirely different way. Sometimes maintaining a multi disiplinary team is more important than being 100% efficient on an individual level.
This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.
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.
> There are more musicians employed in this country than there are people 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.
> 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?
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.
all share an element of arms-race components to them
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.
>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?
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.
What always surprises me about articles like this, and the discussions they produce, is how so many engineers and builders-of-things discard the evidence of their years of experience and see the world through the eyes of people who've never built a complex system.
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.
And that is when stops being an anarchist: when one is mature enough to realise that there are reasons, if not excuses, for the present situation (no matter how odd it may be), and mature enough to realise that changing the present situation will necessarily involve its own compromises, pains and oddities.
Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking medical software.
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.
It's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about these things, but they're hard to reason about.
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.
Graeber makes no distinction between "useful" as in: a) creator of exchange value to it's maker; b) creator of utility to it's holder; b) psychologically "meaningful" to the worker. And while the core of the article deals with the latter, by not making this distinction he dangerously suggests the two former.
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's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no social value.
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.
Do you really consider the work corporate lawyers do can be summed up by the plotlines to Hollywood movies like "A Civil Action" and "Erin Brockovich"?
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.
Of course. The point is that it's an absurd Hollywood-fed cliche to think that this represents all corporate lawyers and thus that they have no social value as a profession.
Some corporate lawyers also persuade upper management they're going to be in serious trouble if they don't drop the unfair terms from their employment contracts, prevent their companies from being taken advantage of by predatory rivals, kill off patent trolls and prevent utterly frivolous lawsuits from ever seeing the light of day.
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.
>It's really easy to believe that certain corporate lawyer jobs have no social value, or negative social value.
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.
Here's Graeber's answer to this argument. [1] His answer is phrased indelicately because the question he was answering was also phrased much more indelicately than yours was:
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.
> If an employee generated no additional income to it's employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place.
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".
Glad that it's shared, the Economist talked about it last year, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m.... Don't think these jobs exist because there's some scheme to keep people free and happy "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)." Just that not many people actually build things. Currency and paper money also has a role to play here. I'd like to see that many people are encouraged to build things on a level playing field.
Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks, now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours.
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.
I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by "overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.
> 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.
I believe he is implying that the goal, "keep the general population employed/occupied to prevent unrest" is consciously held by some 'oligarchs'.
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.
As always the written word is open for interpretations and that statement is no exception.
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.
A group collectively realizing something and individually acting to prevent it, and those individual actions aligning, doesn't require much pre-existing organization (or even much after-the-fact organization, though if they are aware of each other, you'd expect some organizations as they also recognize the alignment of interests.)
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.
You need a lawyer because the laws are so complicated. The laws were made complicated by lawyers. I would much rather have a few simple laws, worded in plain English much like the first ten amendments, so that I could represent myself in legal matters.
This may be roughly equivalent to saying, “I would rather have a programming language that describes what I want in plain english, so I can program myself without hiring a programmer to do it for me.“
Even the first ten amendments, "simple" as they are, have mountains of debate and legalese surrounding them.
>Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks, now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours.
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.
Right. For the dream to happen, we have to actively push for it, instead of just assuming it will happen on its own. There are plenty of powerful forces with incentives to maintain the status quo.
Let's not forget about how much bullshit government adds to non-bullshit jobs...
My Typical 8 hour day
1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):
7 hours: code
1 hour: overhead
2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley):
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: code
The snarky response is cool and all, but honestly I would be VERY interested in seeing any kind of actual measured statistics on the overhead created by Sarbanes-Oxley, while the snark just kinda leaves me cold.
Sarbanes Oxley was created to prevent executives from looting their own companies (a la Enron) and then feigning ignorance and blaming their underlings when everything blew up.
The 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.
Has it worked? I'm not supporting any opposition to SOX, however we all know of many processes that offer no real checks or value, but we have to do it...just because why not, you're getting paid for it. In the case of SOX and the like, the argument can be "well everyone else has to do the same illusion of control work, so the drag is similar".
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 it's not enforced. Obama could slam half of the CEOs of Wall Street in jail with Sarbanes Oxley violations for wilfully looting their own firms exactly as was done to Enron, but he made an executive decision not to (a quick glance at who pays Clinton's $500,000 post presidential speaking fees might give a hint as to why).
Unfortunately the lack of any real enforcement means that it hasn't been all that successful.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadWell, 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":
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.” – Dave Barry
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".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
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.
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.
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".
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.
My Typical 8 hour day
1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):
2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley):The 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.
http://www.bullshitjob.com/
Some of these are pretty amazing.