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

theguardian.com

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

#201

Post by prograhmma »

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…

Having worked as an actuary who prices insurance, you are wrong. Most clients already know what they want there prices to be. It is is common to calculate insurance rates based on statistics then hit everything by a constant varying anywhere from .5 to 2 to get the rates to be competitive with the market. It's all about the government mandated signature.

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

#202

Post by yummyfajitas »

adventured wrote: post #126
yummyfajitas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rent captured by us workers is the price delta between a competitive market and one with barriers to trade. Only part of their wage is rent - if deepika earns 10k rs/month and Danielle earns 100k rs, the rent is 90k. As for income (not wages, which is a subse of income), data is easily googleable. http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=COMPRNF...

Your equation leaves out the technological contribution to making the jobs possible in the first place; the innovation, the science / R&D, etc. The rent is not 90k in that case. The rent is negative, in favor of the US; the US economy has benefited most other countries far more than those countries have benefited it. Most of the world gets a vast free rider benefit from what the US economy accomplished in the last ~1…

It's far from clear that the rent would be negative. It's not as if Danielle costs 10x what Deepika costs simply due to the fact that Danielle pays a few hundred rs/month to fund the NSF/NIH/DOD science orgs. Could you justify this claim?

The fact that the US benefits most other countries a lot (primarily due to trade) doesn't mean that anyone collects a rent.

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

#203

Post by bruceboughton »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #197
rayiner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry? This is naive techno-optimism.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1425 ; "The title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay…

The DARPA Grand Challenge started in 2004 [1], and now we have autonomous vehicles on the road in select locations. While still not fully unmanned, we've gone from nothing to a great deal of automation in ~11 years. Spacex was founded in 2002 [2], and is expected to have a successful first stage powered vehicle recovery this year. 13 years from incorporation to revolution. IBM's Watson diagnoses cancer better than a…

The 80/20 rule will be in full force when it comes to driverless cars.

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

#204

Post by nathan_long »

aerocapture wrote: post #92

Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a…

> If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?

We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings.

"What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link between supply and demand.

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

#205

Post by Chinjut »

nathan_long wrote: post #204
aerocapture wrote: post #92

Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a…

> If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings. "What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link bet…

Perhaps we will just find that the wages paid for scrubbing toilets will increase, till we find that people are indeed willing to scrub toilets. Why shouldn't a job of that sort be well-compensated?

Universal basic income doesn't intrinsically mean less work being done. It just means different leverage in the negotiation process.

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

#206

Post by nathan_long »

Chinjut wrote: post #205
nathan_long wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings. "What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link bet…

Perhaps we will just find that the wages paid for scrubbing toilets will increase, till we find that people are indeed willing to scrub toilets. Why shouldn't a job of that sort be well-compensated? Universal basic income doesn't intrinsically mean less work being done. It just means different leverage in the negotiation process.

But it does mean that it's much easier for a person not to do anything that benefits others. There would certainly be people who say "I can get drinking money without working" and do nothing but drink. If you need to work to eat, it gives you some incentive to sober up.

I think people have a natural need to work and contribute things, but we also have laziness tugging at us. Enabling someone to waste their life is not doing them a favor; it impoverishes them in a way that lacking money alone cannot.

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