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The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

economist.com

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Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#111

Post by EthanHeilman »

ScottBurson wrote: post #102
EthanHeilman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more…

Somewhere, in the last few months -- alas, I don't recall where -- I read about a company that rates its managers on how much their teams accomplish, divided by the size of the team. They claimed, plausibly I think, that this system effectively discouraged such fiefdom-building.

That is an excellent idea, if you find the article send it my way.

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#112

Post by zo1 »

warfangle wrote: post #94
zo1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no problem with that, that looks perfectly legal. Democracy and legislation has decided that certain forms of income are to be taxed at a lower rate than others. And the CEO does lots of that "other" form of income, hence the lower rate. Why, what problem do you have with Democracy, err, I mean this tax-rate?

s/Democracy and legislation/vested interests and cronyism/

I beg to differ, democracy and legislation allowed vested interests and cronyism to occur/take place/take hold. So it is also to blame for what most, including you, blame on "vested interests and cronyism".

Of course, this sort of thing would never happen in a "True Democracy". Maybe they have it in Scotland, run by the Scots, perhaps?

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#113

Post by danmaz74 »

zo1 wrote: post #47
danmaz74 wrote: post #3

Very interesting analysis. But they don't consider at all one very relevant change that happened during the last 30 years in most wealthy economies, especially the USA: That the taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered. This contributed a lot to the concentration of wealth and capital in fewer hands.

Your point has one tacit component that you failed to mention. If what you say is true, then before "taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered" occurred, the concentration of wealth stayed constant. So, if we've now reduced the transfer from the rich to the power a-la the taxes you mention, then that must mean that before, and now after, wealth has always been naturally (if you wan…

> If what you say is true, then before "taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered" occurred, the concentration of wealth stayed constant

Actually, it only means that with that taxation system, the concentration of wealth was slower than without that taxation system.

Regarding the wealth "naturally flowing towards the already rich", define "naturally".

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#114

Post by yourapostasy »

Houshalter wrote: post #103
digi_owl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example i recall Graeber using for such jobs are call center cold call marketing. Rooms filled with people who sit there all day calling number after number with the hope that whoever answers have any interest in their product.

But is that really a make-work job? I doubt they would pay people to do that if it doesn't make more money than it costs (or at least they believe it does.)

Most of people commenting like this ("'they' can't possibly pay for that unless it makes some kind of ROI") have not experienced business at scale.

Beyond a certain scale of business, sales and marketing management at those levels sometimes becomes very abstract, and relies as much upon suppositions as actual data. This is why brand marketing still exists, even though far more accurate and precise quantitative methods are available now.

Call center cold calling has a miserable return rate, but for some at scale businesses, it need not actually yield a measurable, tangible, positive return to justify its existence. For some businesses, simply the act of making the cold call itself is sufficient justification, because it puts the business' name "top of mind" in the public.

One of Graeber's points is that businesses engage in these activities because the management in decision-making positions at these businesses believe that if they do not engage in these activities, their competitor who does will gain a competitive edge. Most such activities are to generate some kind of constant, dim awareness of the brand name in the buying public.

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#115

Post by detaro »

nradov wrote: post #95
josephschmoe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas. Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?

Some simpler financial news articles are now written by zero journalists. A program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.

Sports as well. You can't have journalists cover all lower league games, but an aide has to write a log about plays, which you can use to generate some metrics and generate something that fits roughly the right tone. (example that does advertise it: http://statsheet.com/ does this for basketball)

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#116

Post by yourapostasy »

ScottBurson wrote: post #102
EthanHeilman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more…

Somewhere, in the last few months -- alas, I don't recall where -- I read about a company that rates its managers on how much their teams accomplish, divided by the size of the team. They claimed, plausibly I think, that this system effectively discouraged such fiefdom-building.

That's an awful recipe for overworked employees within a short time, unless the formula was only one small part of how managers were ranked. Anonymous management satisfaction surveys getting factored in would be a good start.

I've always wondered if a very broad range of metrics gathered at all times, and a constantly changing formula picked at the last moment, coupled with an explicitly-written policy that if everyone hit the selected high mark then everyone would get rewarded Lake Woebegone-like, would avoid people working towards the formulae.

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#117

Post by dllthomas »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #55
walshemj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to replace a fire fighter would require order of magnitude discoveries in several fields you would effectively need true AI and a self powered robot with as good strength and endurance as a human.

Don't assume that the robotic solution will look anything like the human solution. A fitbit does not look like a "robotic personal trainer" and a roomba does not look like a person with a broom. I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into th…

And for that matter, better fireproofing.

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#118

Post by angersock »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #10
anon4 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying the future is in robotics.

The future is monitoring and surveillance. That's what these systems do. That and a few data-driven suggestions here and there.

To midnightreactor: You've been shadowbanned by the HN hivemind. Better luck next account. :(

Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

#119

Post by philwelch »

gregpilling wrote: post #63

I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ru…

You, as a rational individual who owns and operates a business, will not hire people to do bullshit jobs.

However, a company with professional managers and systems that are somewhat separated from ownership or the putative goals of the business itself will, in an unintended-consequences sort of way, end up creating a bunch of bullshit jobs. The company is too big for a single, rational, human owner to comprehensively supervise, and meanwhile there are legions of middle managers who want to increase their relative importance in the company by having more direct and indirect reports.

I don't think it's a conspiracy to keep control over the lives of others, although there are probably a lot of pathological managers who would be motivated by that that. I think it has more to do with unintended consequences. What Graeber is arguing is essentially a conspiracy theory, and it shares the same weakness of every conspiracy theory, which is that it underestimates just how bad things can get purely out of unintended consequences. Managing large organizations is hard. The difference between doing it right and doing it poorly is literally what creates and destroys most large fortunes. And even if you do it well, you're going to get some inefficiencies that smaller organizations just don't have. It's essentially a scaling problem.

Haven't you ever wondered why companies lay people off when they're in trouble? You'd think they wouldn't hire someone in the first place unless they were pretty sure that hiring that person would somehow contribute to improved profitability, and if it turned out that they didn't do so, they would just be fired in the normal course of their work. No, aside from redundancies created by merger and acquisitions, layoffs are a means of clearing out these backlogs of bullshit jobs.

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