“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary” • Hacker News Board

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#41

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 9:51 AM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #16

EdwardDiego wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government f…

Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets"). He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.

In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later.

There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders."

It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense.

In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#42

Post by calibraxis » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 9:51 AM UTC

qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

The current HN title: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.”

It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#43

Post by fab13n » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 9:58 AM UTC

qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

Bullshitness is not an all-or-nothing quality for jobs, that's part of why they're so hard to get rid of. You can find some justification to every job, but this justification can be dubious, or can not be worth the cost in human energy or social side effects.

Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption.

To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe.

There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies).

More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#44

Post by crdoconnor » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:03 AM UTC

blfr wrote: post #20

danparsonson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect he wants the world to change more fundamentally than that - per your example, if you have a good state-provided health service then the health insurance question is simply no longer an issue. There are of course countries that do this already. I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance pr…

Single payer still acts as an insurer and needs actuaries (even if they're not called that) to figure out which procedures make sense with their limited resources.

Not really. There is no need to price the cost of insuring a 30 year old white male living in Croydon. If he is ill, he gets treatment. If he is not ill, he doesn't.

The only thing close to actuarial science that the NHS actually needs is QALYS calculations. This is only really used for calculating how worthwhile very expensive treatments that target the very old or very disabled.

The number of people needed to do that is very small, compared to the number needed to calculate prices in a non-single payer context.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#45

Post by _delirium » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:05 AM UTC

jonsen wrote: post #34

msh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of Europe works perfectly well with out health insurance.

It is still insurance when administered by the government and payed through taxes.

I think that differs quite a bit by country. At least in Denmark it's administered in a considerably different manner, more like any other public spending that decides on priorities and allocates resources. Some parts of it do have actuarial elements that parallel what an insurance company would do (pooling risks across the population), but many don't. The cost of many things is well known in advance and has little uncertainty (especially when the whole country is taken in aggregate), and it's just a public-health choice whether to pay for it or not. Routine childhood vaccinations are a clear example, which are just budgeted as a public-health measure, like water purification or whatever. Hospitals have an element of risk-pooling when individual patients are looked at, but at the public level are run more like fire departments or police departments, which also have an element of risk pooling. I guess you could argue that fire departments are really some kind of state-administered fire-response-insurance system, but I'm not aware of that being a common approach. Data and statistics and people to look at them are still needed though, of course, but they are looking at more "real" problems, like which procedures best improve morbidity-adjusted life expectancy.

I know in some other countries, like Germany, it is set up much more closely to insurance, in the sense that procedures have prices, are billed out to patients, who are covered by insurance plans that reimburse patients for costs, etc., in which case I imagine the bureaucracy is much more insurance-like.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#46

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

_abattoir wrote: post #19

qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job…

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program...If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job...

What, exactly, do you think actuaries do during their 9-5? Do you think they manually compute actuarial tables with a TI-89?

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#47

Post by fsloth » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:15 AM UTC

msh wrote: post #8

qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

Much of Europe works perfectly well with out health insurance.

Weeel now. As an example Finland - while there is a fairly functional state paid health service, most affluent people take the health insurance anyway and go to private clinics for day-to-day needs to avoid the public queues. Most eployees have a compulsory medical coverage by the employers, which is a bought service from the private clinics. Thus the medical scene is a bit more complex than "state pays it all". It can require quite a bit of effort to get proper medical attention in the public side unless one is ill in a critical, easy-to-diagnose form. Best places in the world to have a cancer or such though, since the state pays most of the treatment (thus Breaking Bad creates quite strong cultural dissonance initially).

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#48

Post by cssmoo » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:17 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #40

cssmoo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Court appointed bailiffs have been used by myself to recover owed cash on a couple of occasions so they serve a purpose and a good one. If people enter a contract they can't fulfil then there needs to be a method to obtain appropriate compensation. As for the rest, I agree.

Sure, that was good for you . I don't think anybody would argue that these jobs aren't good for somebody. The real question is whether they are contributing to society at large. I know somebody who hired a lobbyist too. Worked out great.

Yes. It was good for me and it was good for the other person too. Why? Because it enforces society's moral standards upon everyone. If there is no common ground it descends into anarchy because if someone owes me £1500 I'm going to pay £200 to smash his kneecaps if there wasn't a court and bailiff option...

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#49

Post by crdoconnor » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:18 AM UTC

_abattoir wrote: post #19

qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job…

>When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine".

What Graeber seems to mean is jobs that serve the interests of some people at the expense of others and overall contribute very little, nothing, or actively work against the interests of society at large.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#50

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:21 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #33

WalterBright wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take Private Equity CEOs. The bottom line of what they do is try to reallocate capital away from less productive investments and towards more productive investments.

Which is why we have off-shoring, and stagnant or dropping real income for that segment of the population that still has a job. Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?

Off-shoring is a wonderful example of private equity types reducing global inequality, helping the poor, and helping consumers. It's true that the wealthy Americans who formerly collected rents due to an accident of their birth might not be happy about it, but so what?

Real income is rising, BTW. It's only real wages (i.e. income excluding benefits) in the US which have not due to a shift of comp from wages to non-wage benefits (the total is also rising).