As a struggling musician this hits close to home. I've worked over a dozen jobs in four states since leaving home at 18. I went into debt for college but dropped out as my older friends reported back from the "real world" that the promises of higher education were mostly empty. I camped out at Occupy Portland to try to wrap my head around this propaganda-fueled global enterprise. Thank you, David, for tirelessly speaking the truth.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
131–140 of 357 posts
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#132I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…
I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those.
But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question?
So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get.
So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc.
An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
Exceptions don't make rules, it's the other way around
Except when its an "Exception that proves the rule" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#134I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…
I disagree that ... the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs.
But the author denies this explicitly.
The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics ... more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them.
It's sort of odd to appeal to economics on the one hand and then characterize sales/marketing as zero-sum on the other. I wouldn't spend any energy defending sales/marketing as positive-sum myself, but economists do.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#135I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…
Totally agree with Zeteo's assessment - only thing I would add is that people shouldn't assume someone else'e job is 'bullshit' simply because they can't directly see or appreciate the value it creates. For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking…
Bullshit jobs certainly exist, and in great numbers. The proof is in the fact that many of the people who "do" these jobs actually goof off a significant part of their working day and yet things still march on as if nothing is different.
In places I've done contracting work I've seen vast offices full of these folks, and it almost feels to me as if their bosses are sort of covering for them. Cubes full of people browsing Facebook at least half the day.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#136What I find bizarre about this is that where I live, India, this seems more prevalent than anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Its as if the vestiges of British bureaucracy have left behind a middle class with such a sense of entitlement that they seem to have no problem with the obvious fact that their job is meaningless. Apparently the official policy is that government employees cannot be fired so are simp…
It's not just government employees. . .this also happens in private industry. . .especially in those companies that provide services to the government and have cost-plus contracts with the government.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#137The core cause of bullshit jobs is not conspiracy, it's political economy. We currently choose (IMO a terrible choice) to have a money based society where "don't work" == "don't eat". And so work must be found. This is what it means when politicians talk of "creating jobs".
Just how do you propose eating without working? Someone has to work so she or others can eat.
Only 1.2% of the American labour force is in the agricultural sector. The remaining 98.8% of workers are not directly involved in food production.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Really? Or do they secretly worry that it isn't? > Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. "No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might b…
While a pithy thing to say with some truth in it, I have experienced people asserting things of the order of 2 + 2 = 5, and given the right situation it can have the potential to make people pretty mad.
Which is why they revoked your math license, we know the story.
No, when you say 2 + 2 = 5, you can put it off as "He can't be serious", and then it's off your mind. But if the person keeps asserting it till you can't brush it off anymore, that's when heads tend to roll. It goes against what you believe, and subconsciously, that goes against you as a person.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#139Other people clearly don't think your job is worthless or they wouldn't be paying you to do it. The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's. If you're happy with the standard of living from 1930 you could probably achieve that with 10 hours of work per week.
> The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's
I wouldn't blame entirely blame consumerism for why we won't work less.
A lot of things have gone up drastically in price in the '30s: higher education (which "everyone" is encouraged to get, from "every" adult figure in their life, from about 6th grade on. Wasn't like that in the '30s); housing; medicine.
In the '30s my great uncle was given a house as a wedding present. His siblings also got houses when they got married. Can you imagine something like that today? Gifting your children something that, in today's age, costs $100,000 (and sometimes 2x-3x more)?!
Of course we buy more things, and I know my grandparents didn't spend money on a smartphone every 2 years or have a $100/month cable bill. But blowing $2K on a TV is a drop in the bucket when you have a $200K mortgage (aka: debt).
I'm willing/able to live cheaply, and buy less things, but my creditors (the big three, above) want their bills paid. So I can't "just" work half time at the code factory and get paid 50% less, because I have debts the like which people in the '30s would have no idea about.
("You mean going to the doctor could be 1-2 months worth of take home pay, even with this 'insurance' that costs 10% of your take home pay??")
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#140I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…
I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those. But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question? So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more…
kind of like an asymptotic line, optimizing for efficiency - we spend more and more time making less and less of a difference. The problem is, with companies the size we have nowadays, even a small percentage improvement leads to runaway success, so every company is incentivized to continue optimizing.
Maybe we should limit the maximum size of a company?