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Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
And academics don’t have a monopoly on making criticism.
As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa's bannermen and "inner" families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted "as long as the waves roll" - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords.
Because they couldn't just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai something to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn't just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household themselves created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone's fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son's grandson was your sixth retainer, and you couldn't destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him.
When I hear politicians talking about "creating jobs", I think of the shogunate.
Edwardian-era mansions employed whole teams of butlers whose sole job was replacing candles. Not everyone is in a position to make a discernible impact on society. 20% of society will always drive 80% of progress. Think hard how you want the remaining 80% to support their families.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
You’ve employed some sort of inverse ad hominem here. Credentials don’t mean we should take someone seriously. Their words should stand for themselves.
This is a level of cognitive dissonance I’m not prepared to commit to arguing against. I’m not capable of issuing the bar to every lawyer I require the services of, nor the board to every presumed doctor, nor a thesis defense to every academic.
Credentials aren’t perfect, but they are superior to the time required for everyone to judge everything on their own. For example, almost all scientists agree that climate change is human caused. Do I spend my time digging through climate data, verifying this? No. I rely on the expertise of experts.
That was somewhat of a rant, and I don't really have any kind of solution to all of it. America is several thousand tragedies of the commons, from a neighbor-to-neighbor level all the way up to the federal government.
Most jobs -- teachers, auto workers, plumbers, farmers -- have a natural ceiling on employment related to demand, but goon jobs don't because when one side hires more goons, the other side has to also. Militaries have created millions of jobs this way.
Goon jobs are not just blue-collar. A growing category of goon that allows unlimited highly paid professional job creation is inter-governmental lawyers. For example, the CA government is suing the EPA about vehicle emissions limits. Both sides can justify a big budget for hiring lawyers. Metropolitan areas like the Bay Area provide lots of opportunities for cities to sue each other, transit authorities, and the state. I don't see any upper limit to the number of jobs this can create.
All this is only a bad thing if you care about efficiency. If you let go of that axiom, there are unlimited jobs to be created.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
Then just ignore the comment! We don’t need any more HN comment policing. And academics don’t have a monopoly on making criticism.
Keep HN high signal to noise!
Edit: The crowd is free to use downvotes judiciously if calling out the disingenuous is frowned upon. That’s what they’re there for.