Can't believe no one mentioned the best work on 'bullshit jobs' out there - "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. Back in 1952 he already guessed it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
221–230 of 357 posts
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#222This is basically cooperation vs. competition, not much more to be said.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#223Earlier 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.
How does one go about eating the sun or the trillion trillion watts produced by sun? You need all that energy converted to something edible - that means there is at least one job, agriculture. If you can automate that, then there is the job of automation engineer. And so it goes...
It's called photosynthesis, and it requires zero human intervention.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#224I 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 think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those. But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question? So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more…
Although I agree not a direct creation of "the ruling class" in the sense of the 1% wealthy, it's interesting to think about the Sociopaths in the classic RibbonFarm posts:
The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#225What I find bizarre about this is that where I live, India, this seems more prevalent than anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Its as if the vestiges of British bureaucracy have left behind a middle class with such a sense of entitlement that they seem to have no problem with the obvious fact that their job is meaningless. Apparently the official policy is that government employees cannot be fired so are simp…
It's not just government employees. . .this also happens in private industry. . .especially in those companies that provide services to the government and have cost-plus contracts with the government.
I know what you mean, have seen the same thing - I just wonder if it is a culture that started in govt? It surprises me for a country that is supposedly struggling to gather the resources to meet the needs of its less fortunate people that there is obviously a mountain of resources being supplied to those that are contributing very little economically but could actually contribute a lot given the motivation/opportunity/incentive
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#226I 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…
http://archive.is/gXy2n
Archived version in the event that blog page disappears.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#227For those that don't know, this is the same David Graeber [1] who wrote "Debt: The first 5000 years" [2]. "Debt" is a pretty great book, and I recommend others read it. At least, I found it illuminating to the popular concept of debt, the historical idea, and its ramifications. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
I thought it was a great and edifying book, but towards the end he did the same thing as in this article. He went off preaching half baked ideas about morality like a hippy. His list of bullshit jobs here is so slippery it undermines his basic point. If private equity and all the corporate lawyers vanished there would be serious ramifications. Nothing capital intensive would get done, unless you instituted fiat capit…
> Nothing capital intensive would get done...
I would like to see the categorization of capital-intensive projects, because I wonder if most (not all, but most) of the value of such intensive uses of capital today are related more to financialization than actual leveraging of the sum total knowledge and effort of the species towards a more comfortable future. From my limited vantage point, I think what is happening is not just an alteration of time preferences (time horizon) for capital-intensive projects, but an aversion that leads to an alteration of the "risk horizon" as well.
Where is our generation's Hoover Dam? Or Manhattan Project? Or reaching further back in time, where is our Age of Exploration if you are into more private venture-backed efforts? For every LHC or Tesla, we have dozens of regional wars, hundreds of make-work programs, thousands of financial engineering projects at various Global Fortune 1000 syndicates, and millions of highly-leveraged real estate speculative ventures around the world. Our state-of-art in residential shelter have major subsystems that are still largely recognizable to someone from a century and a half ago; where is the work on cheap aerogel SIPs, more self-maintaining homes, lower energy footprint communities? Why are we generating a giant pile of waste BTUs from air conditioners and not recapturing that back into our water heaters? There appears to be a large disconnect between what we as a civilization know and what we deploy (my personal theory is this has something to do with available energy).
It is not clear to me that all those PE and corporate attorneys are actually allocating capital in the furtherance of general comfort for all, but rather instead they appear to be mini-max'ing for their interests at the relative expense of slowing our current state of advancement. Adam Smith had some warnings about a dominant capital-holding class overriding the "invisible hand" (which my first time through TWoN decades ago I didn't appreciate, and I still have my doubts), and I wonder if he wasn't on to something.
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think you're connecting all the wrong dots.
Things Graeber says:
* The ruling class could not wish for a better system (hyperbole of course)
* The ruling class has figured out threats to its position
* Such systems arise organically
Things he does not say:
* The ruling class has engineered this system after figuring out what threatens its position, and made it seem organic
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#229I haven't seen the terms come up in this discussion yet, but the concepts of post-scarcity economy or abundance economy are relevant. This article is more focused on the gap of why we aren't in a post-scarcity economy now, and I think there is weight to the thought that we all work so much now because the ingrained philosophy & assumptions of a old system that makes increasingly less sense in the modern world.
On a pure technology basis, does the world have sufficient resources to feed and house every living person? Or are the problems that prevent that economic, political factors?
Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does one go about eating the sun or the trillion trillion watts produced by sun? You need all that energy converted to something edible - that means there is at least one job, agriculture. If you can automate that, then there is the job of automation engineer. And so it goes...
It's called photosynthesis, and it requires zero human intervention.
Photosynthesis is ridiculously inefficient at anything but building physical materials. And it would require a whole lot of human intervention to capture more than the pinprick of insolation that happens to fall on the non-arctic, non-desert parts of planet Earth (rather than waste off into space).