Did anyone else have a strong feeling of Douglas Adams while reading the OA?
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
151–160 of 357 posts
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#152Reading economic discussions on this board is like reading Congressional debates of SOPA.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was with you until the end. Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?
The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.
Depends on level.
I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder.
Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#154To make it simple, the jobs exist because people need money to trade for things they need (including the vital food/shelter/health care). Since it's a capitalistic world, nobody gets paid/given stuff for doing nothing, that's considered parasitism. So the jobs exist, even though pointless, because the people need and want them.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#155I've found myself thinking about this a lot lately. I don't know about corporate law, but I can certainly see many jobs becoming obsolete in the not-so-distant future. Automation is advancing and accelerating like never before, and that is a good thing. Of course, this means fewer workers are needed. Factor in population growth, and this quickly becomes a major issue. I've seen people bring up basic income when such…
I've seen people bring up basic income when such concerns are raised. I myself am undecided on how effective it would be, but it seems like now is a good time for conversation on the matter to begin.
So am I. It's a fascinating idea that could be the most important improvement to our economy since the introduction of the labour market, drastically reducing poverty and increasing socioeconomic mobility.
Or it could cause widespread inflation and tank the GDP. I'm not sure anyone really knows which way it would go. I think the only way to know is to try it out on a small but representative subset of the population (e.g. 1%), then a larger subset (e.g. 5-10%), before doing a full roll-out.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#156Serious shades of Douglas Adams's Telphone Cleaners in this... That's the result when the BS job class fully decides that anyone who does "menial tasks" should just be discarded.
> That's the result when the BS job class fully decides who does "menial tasks"
Because there's a confusion between the need to dis-incentivise BS work hours (as pointed elsewhere, it's more about BS hours than BS jobs, few jobs are 0% or 100% BS), and the need for a bureaucratic body determining what is BS and what isn't. The former is sorely needed, the latter would quickly turn into a disaster, as illustrated by Adams and many real-life regulation bodies.
The difference between the two is the same as between natural selection and eugenics: the later always fails because you can't effectively prevent metrics from being gamed.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#157In addition to the factors described in the article, in the United States there is an additional and very real incentive to work "bullshit jobs" and that is that health insurance is tied to employment (far less expensive when purchase through or by your employer). Unexpected healthcare costs are one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy, so this creates an unnecessary incentive to have a job.
Sorry if this question sounds dumb to US people, but wasn't "obamacare" supposed to fix exactly that?
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#158I really enjoyed this piece. Very thought provoking. I only have one issue and that is the question of what causes pointless jobs.
Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition. To some extent there is some support for that. One of Hilaire Belloc's complaints about the early welfare state was that it would effectively chain people to corporate work.
But I don't think it is the whole or even the primary driver. One of the most interesting books I think one can read is "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter (another anthropology professor) who suggests that the rise of these sorts of paper pushing jobs is caused not by a desire to keep the poor poor and dependent on work (something early Capitalists like Adam Smith advocated outright) but as an overall measure of complexity. These are coordination jobs. They have become at once pointless and necessary.
Take for example Graeber's example of corporate lawyers. These jobs are needed because we have seen an explosion in the complexity of corporate law. Corporate lawyers thus effectively pilot a corporation through hazardous legal waters (with the officers still nominally at the helm). The job is BS. The job is necessary because we had problems and passed laws, and now everyone needs corporate lawyers.
Interestingly Graeber's view is much more optimistic than Tainter's. If Graeber is right the world will hum along with or without these complexity-related jobs. But if Tainter is right then we are nearing a danger zone where we risk societal collapse when the complexity becomes one level too high. I hope Graeber is right, but in my heart I fear and believe that Tainter is.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try running a company or doing a start up with out a supply of capital.
Is it really so difficult to allocate capital that just about every city needs skyscrapers full of finance people? I'm asking that as a completely legitimate question - I really have no idea of how much work is required to give my small business a line of credit.
For most of history there were not big companies allocating capital, and for most of history it was nearly impossible for most people to obtain capital to start or grow their own business.
Put another way--the modern financial system was created for a reason. The author supposes that it was a big conspiracy theory to give us all shitty jobs, but in counter I would point out that it has likely never been easier for people to start or grow businesses than it is today.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#160(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 assume you'll enjoy the five chapters on human systems, inspired by "Systemantics": http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm