[LinchZhang]

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless, and we can get rid of (almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN to people doing real work, and society would be much better off.

Like many populist intuitions, this intuition is completely backwards. Middlemen are extremely important! Coordination problems are real problems, and the bottlenecks to global wealth and flourishing.

The post goes into details for why.

[ToucanLoucan]

These examples are not good, almost none of those are what most people would call middlemen. A perfect example of an actual middleman would be the type of hustle grindset loser who sets up an Amazon store that sells merchandise from Alibaba at steep price hikes while contributing nothing to the product or its delivery. That’s a middle man.

[LinchZhang]

Why fixate on a specific word rather than the overall idea? If the idea is clear enough I don't think it's worth fighting over semantics.

[kykat]

Yep, you can't just "redefine" a noun to get a clickbait title

[AndrewDucker]

In which case they're contributing discoverability. Because clearly the buyer didn't discover the original store themselves, but did find it on Amazon.

[vlovich123]

The problem is the value tends to be ephemeral and single use. Once the connection is established, the parties are better off communicating directly.

That’s why marketplaces like TaskRabbit struggle to generalize and grow. Contracting firms often struggle in similar ways and try to put clauses in their contracts to retain their relevance.