On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#161

Post by zeteo » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

Lagged2Death wrote: post #134

zeteo wrote: post #75

I 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 sp…

>The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#162

Post by icedchai » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

sfjailbird wrote: post #127

cnorgate wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. What if you owned the home you live in, though? Lately, I've become a bit obsessed with this idea. The reason the 'wage slave' concept exists is that most…

15 years? you need to be more ambitious.

i paid off my home in less than 7 years (small condo, under 200k) in my early 30's.

i had a friend do the same thing, except his house cost a bit more.

the key is living below your means. you don't buy the biggest house you can afford, because you probably don't need that extra space anyway.

for anyone with a decent job and some discipline, it's possible. finding the job is the easy part...

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#163

Post by JulianMorrison » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #124

JulianMorrison wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the case before automation. Right now, though, humans are 1. under-bidding automation (this will be decreasingly successful) 2. politically suppressing automation (AKA "creating jobs") …because nobody wants to abandon the "work = eat" rule.

I can buy 2[1], but what's your evidence for 1? I mean, look at the decline in U.S. agriculture jobs over the past century in inverse proportion to agricultural output. Sure, China employs a lot of manpower to perform the kind of manufacturing that in more developed economies was automated long ago, and that's profitable for them (for the moment). But that's not in the guise of any "make work" scheme, it's because it…

What under-bidding means is: offering a cheaper price (in this case by accepting third-world wages). In other words, humans are working for less money than it would cost to automate. This will become less successful as the cost to automate goes down and automation tech gets more capable.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#164

Post by polymatter » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

baseraid wrote: post #69

Filligree wrote: post #3

Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases. A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance. This is, I believe…

There are negative sum jobs as well. Pharma people, promoting harmful drugs, soldiers or criminals.

soldiers do not belong in that group. they generally do significant good just as a sitting deterrent. much more than yet another mediocre web developer. how their political masters choose to use them however ...

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#165

Post by doctorwho » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

JonFish85 wrote: post #103

I find it funny that the author states that "the ruling class" essentially decides to keep people busy. Let's not forget that there are other factors at play here: unions are the first one that come to mind. Any union shop is going to have a major problem on their hands the day they decide to cut one job (not saying it's right or wrong, just that unions defend their jobs rigorously, as they should). Unions typically…

Politicians make unions and "bullshit jobs" possible by creating the incentives for companies to hire people they don't need. Unions then make it impossible to get rid of the deadwood. In the case of pure government jobs we're doubly damned.. they create bullshit jobs for paper pushers and then governmentt unions make sure those jobs exist for as close to forever as they possibly can. It's not conspiracy, it's stupidity.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#166

Post by randallsquared » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

asfasfafwF wrote: post #4

BetaCygni wrote: post #2

Other 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.

I'm not really up on what the standard of living was like in the 30's, but is it really possible working 10 hours per week? That would barely pay rent in most places.

You can have home, land, and installation of home on land for about 25K, if you're willing to settle for small values of each. Ebay has cheap land in rural places. You can buy a new manufactured home for less than 20K: https://www.factoryexpomobilehomes.com/micro.asp . You can get ten years' supply of basic food for probably $3000, depending on exactly what you get, from Costco: http://www.costco.com/emergency-kits-supplies.html . After property taxes and septic installation and other miscellaneous niceties, if you round up to 36K, that's basically $250 a month that you'd need to clear after taxes.

Edit: for 10 years; I'm assuming you'll have to replace such a cheap home after 10 years, but if not, the amortized cost is considerably lower.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#167

Post by tkellogg » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #75

I 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…

If you think sales & marketing are a zero sum gimmick, you must not have encountered middle management. The fact that we pay these baby sitters so much money compounds our "need" for them.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#168

Post by circa » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

For a quick second i thought this was a review of the new movie

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#169

Post by JulianMorrison » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:34 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #128

dvanduzer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun generates nearly 400 trillion trillion watts per second but don't let that fool you into thinking there's such a thing as a free lunch for more than a few billion years.

And without someone doing at least some work, you will starve no matter how many of those watts warm your reclined body. Sure, the amount of that work is going down, and has been going down for centuries, but that's not an inevitable, natural process: The technological innovation to make food easier and cheaper to produce also requires work.

Dividing work into:

1. stuff people would do for free, for patriotism, for fun, or for kudos

2. stuff it takes economic coercion to make people do

I can't offhand think of any #2 that couldn't in principle either be automated away, or harmlessly abandoned.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#170

Post by calibraxis » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 2:36 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #17

(wanted to post this on the website, but the comments system is off) I've found this article both entertaining and insightful; there's one big hypothesis in it which I find unnecessary, though: the conspiracy theory, making it a fight between dominant classes and actual wealth producers. If we call "bureaucracies" the collectives which consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth out of…

I think he uses institutional analysis, and rejects conspiracy theory. So even if you replace everyone in them, institutions should pretty much function the same as before.

Whereas conspiracy theorists focus more on individuals with black mustaches, and advocate toppling them. They don't go deep into institutional change.

So, for example from this article: "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." This institutional reality occurs even if you and I are in that 1%.

Even when Adam Smith uses the term "conspiracy", it can still really be institutional analysis: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Here, he just means normal planning which people are institutionally incentivized to do. We don't call it a "conspiracy" when a corporation's executives plan how to increase profits.