I 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 michaelochurch's (now sadly inactive) blog [1], and he may well have originated it. Here it is, in a better explanation than I could provide:
"The Marketing and Sales Treadmill
In the modern world [...] there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. [The worker] needs a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary.
[...T]he most common path is that our prospective worker enters the sales and marketing business. [...] Even engineering focused companies like Facebook have more sales people than engineers. [...] So everyone’s energy is focused on imagining some gimmick – a six bladed razor, a beer can that turns blue when [it's] cold, a funny talking gecko – that gives someone a reason to give you money when there is no real differentiation based on product value.
The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. Each business must work harder and harder at new tag lines, gizmos, tricks, and jingles. And when sales guys at the other company work harder, you must work harder too.
Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead [...] we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. [...] The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin."
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 than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get.
So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc.
An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.
Totally agree with Zeteo's assessment - only thing I would add is that people shouldn't assume someone else'e job is 'bullshit' simply because they can't directly see or appreciate the value it creates.
For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking is that the output from some individuals only shows up in the medium to long term... take away great leadership from a company and they will make the numbers for the next few quarters, but in a year they will be out-maneuvered and out-performed by the competition. In today's economy it's not about how many widgets you make, it's about making the right widget in the first place... figuring that out is a lot harder than actually making the thing in the end.
The value some jobs create is more difficult to view directly, but is no less valuable in terms of delivering things people want, that they are willing to pay for - i.e. creating wealth. Investors understand this very well, which is why they are willing to pay huge sums to top leadership.
As a final thought, if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. If you want to enjoy the vast benefits (however small) that our progressive society enjoys, then you also need to live within that system and work in some way to push things forward... however incrementally.
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 spend any energy defending sales/marketing as positive-sum myself, but economists do.
Reminds me of the cigarette advertising ban - as soon as tobacco advertising was banned in the UK profits shot up because the huge ad budget was suddenly unnecessary. They no longer had to compete with each other on that front.
I've said this before in other contexts, but it doesn't have to be a conscious decision or conspiracy.
A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration.
It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature.
In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences.
Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal.
The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it.
The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable.
As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital.
Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism.
Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector.
No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.
I thought that the redundancy in all the engineers working on competing identical products was bad but this is worse. No wonder we're not exploring space. My understanding of free market theory is that the "competition" supposedly drives down price, but I don't think free markets exist.
If you think sales & marketing are a zero sum gimmick, you must not have encountered middle management. The fact that we pay these baby sitters so much money compounds our "need" for them.
It's not economic at all, it's political (whether it is intentional or not is a different question). In evidence is all the violence that is brought to bear in sustaining the current economic status quo (i.e. the piles of regulations and laws).
Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases.
A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance.
This is, I believe, a large part of why working hours aren't going down. You could work less, but then you'd lose out to someone who doesn't.
I've put some effort into circumventing the zero-sum things, though I haven't thought about it this way before. I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own. My living expenses come down to harbour rent, electricity and heating in the winter. Over a year that's an average of $300 a month. I live in the smack middle of Copenhagen. On top of this comes living expenses, clothes, etc. But I'm not very materialistic so that's quite cheap too.
The surprising result (for me at least) is that I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom I've gained. By choice I haven't been working for more than a year, and I can afford it, and don't feel much pressure taking any old job. I'm looking for something interesting, but if it doesn't turn up I can live without. In the meantime I spend time doing all the sideprojects, art things, and hanging out a lot of other people are dreaming about while they slave away.
To quote Fight Club: "the things you own end up owning you"
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but the article isn't really about that, and he also briefly touched on this point:
> The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
We need to distinguish between two separate, tangentially related issues: bullshit jobs and bullshit hours.
Most of the classes of jobs mentioned in this piece are not, in and of themselves, entirely bullshit. Rather, the idea that each of these people actually needs to be in the office, pretending to be continually and evenly busy, for 50+ hours a week -- that's bullshit. Work ebbs and flows in a very different way for each type of job; it is not evenly distributed across the day or week. The belief that it is leads us to create busywork, the dread and bane of all office workers.
We are struggling to unshackle ourselves from the remnants of the old, industrial workweek, which was developed around assembly lines at automobile factories. Most of us aren't building Model T's anymore. And yet, we have laws and/or employment contracts charting mandatory minimum workweeks, mandatory minimum hours per day, etc.
Some jobs really do require 40, 50, or even more hours per week. Many, and I'd dare say most, do not. Especially the white-collar administrative and "paper pushing" positions mentioned in this article. The jobs themselves aren't unnecessary (at least not in reasonable quantity), but the idea that all jobs are normalized around the same schedule is absolute lunacy.
(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 it, then those bureaucracies are best understood as a life form, distinct from the homo sapiens individuals which serve it. You need to see them as a whole, for the same reason as why you can't make sense out of an animal if you mainly see it as the sum of its individual cells.
From a biologist's point of view, they need to compete for resources, they show some adaptability, they reproduce themselves with some amount of mutation: they have everything needed to benefit from Darwinian selection, and they do.
The resulting current generation of bureaucracies has evolved a very good effectiveness at diverting resources, from other consumers including humans, towards themselves (that is, maintaining and growing the bureaucracy itself).
As a result, they exhibit many "intelligent" traits, including some selfish sense of purpose. Conspiracy theorists wrongly look for The Man, the mastermind driving bureaucracies. There's none, no more than there's a single neuron nor small group thereof which drives your brains: a complex enough bureaucracy has a non-human mind of its own.
Keynes was right about the amount of work we'd need, what he failed to predict is a phenomenon very similar to eutrophisation: we dream of full employment when we don't need to, so we produce much more "nutrients" (people willing to offer their workforce) than we can use for survival and human enjoyment. So instead of being consumed by/for homo sapiens, this energy is consumed by that competing life form that are bureaucracies.
I think he uses institutional analysis, and rejects conspiracy theory. So even if you replace everyone in them, institutions should pretty much function the same as before.
Whereas conspiracy theorists focus more on individuals with black mustaches, and advocate toppling them. They don't go deep into institutional change.
So, for example from this article: "if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else." This institutional reality occurs even if you and I are in that 1%.
Even when Adam Smith uses the term "conspiracy", it can still really be institutional analysis: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Here, he just means normal planning which people are institutionally incentivized to do. We don't call it a "conspiracy" when a corporation's executives plan how to increase profits.
This kind of discussion always reminds me of the movie Cube[1]. Since watching it years ago, I have often found it to be a fantastical and exaggerated but useful metaphor related to this topic.
I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger". The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least.
The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody who is unemployed as some kind of failure. When a child gets out of school they need to find work or they have failed. If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. This has nothing to do with someone forcing people to work and everything to do with the human brain's need for purpose forcing working - even if that work is pointless. For example, you often hear someone say with pride how they have worked so much they don't have time to eat or sleep even when the work they are doing is something like filling out pointless bureaucratic paperwork.
"How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?"
Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value.
> It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)
We'd probably lead full, rich and happy lives until we were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from an unexpectedly dirty telephone.
Besides, this is a classic game theory example of cooperation vs. competition. Sure, everyone would live rich and happy lives if everyone would cooperate, but that would be for only as long as there are no new lobbyists, etc. Once they appear - they win all the money, and everything goes back to how it is now.
I think what he's suggesting is inverse of the outcome of HGTTG - that the telephone sanitzers wipe out all the ineffectual upper management people who do no or limited real work.
Neither is a plausible solution, although his seems more valid if you would consider decimating the ineffectual upper management class rather than outright removal.
For 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.
I liked the article but there is no conundrum here:
> the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people
Yes, people are not paid in accordance to the direct tangible benefit their work brings. Salaries are broadly determined by the same laws of supply and demand that determine prices for other stuff.
Tube workers are not seen as worthy of high compensation, or high-status in general, because people believe, correctly or not, that it's easy to do the job. On the other hand, programmers usually command high wages, despite being viewed as nerds and rather low-status, because it's hard to replace one.
Some professions may have an artificially constricted supply, through regulations for example, which throws those observations off a bit.
> It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers
I'd argue that if you replaced school teachers with babysitters, the only catastrophe would be all those damaged egos.
"The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"
I don't know what to call this fallacy, but it needs a name. In a way it's similar to saying "nature abhors a vacuum," "this evolutionary strategy aims to", "the market will.." etc. Those are all personifying emergent phenomenons. They are non person things that behave amusingly as if they have a personality. The "ruling class" is different though because it is made of of people. I don't think the author is trying to suggest thousands (or millions) or people conspired to make "the masses" waste 30 hours per week on motivational seminars, but using that language makes it sound like he is, sort of, without committing to it too much.
Worse, it absolves one from exploring the most interesting part of this argument. If There is a literal conspiracy, who? how? details, please. If it's a metaphor for some sort of emergent phenomenon, explore that. What are the forces at work that make this happen. Is it the proliferation of zero (or small) sum games like litigation or advertising? Is it about opaque performance in modern snowflake jobs? This is the most interesting part of the discussion and "The ruling class has" just absolves the writer of addressing it.
Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
http://paste.ie/view/de115ebd Cached version (black on back text was all that was show from Googel Cache, this is a bit more readable ) as strikermag seems to be having issues at the moment
I'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 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.
One place to look for that discussion is Switzerland. They collected over 130,000 signatures on a law proposal for basic income. So now there will be a direct vote on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Switzerland
After the swiss people voted against an extension of mandatory vacation, from four to six weeks, recently, I highly doubt that this law has a chance to pass. However, it sure will be an interesting and passionate discussion that will force everyone to ask the right questions. In fact its already going on. If you speak German you can e.g. read the comments on all the major newspaper articles, like here
http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/schweiz/schweizer-koennen-wohl-ueb...
(I suppose the same is true for French and Italian.)
PS: This is the best HN thread in a long time. There are opposing views and intelligent, passionated discussion about what could be boiled down to the question "What is the meaning of life?" for each participant.
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.
I 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.
"Silicon Valley" (as a euphamism for our industry) has a chance to lead the culture here, and also to respond to an emerging criticism of itself in a way that is socially positive.
I'm seeing more and more articles to the effect that high-tech destroys jobs. Our response should be: "good, now we should move to a four-day work week." If high-tech work destroys jobs, it should leave people more time for friendship, family, art, learning, play, ...
Attack the Puritan bullshit-work ethic and the associated economic broken window fallacy directly. Make it a "culture war" issue if necessary.
That would be the first step: a four-day work week, a three-day weekend. More jobs for those who don't have them, less work for those who do. The energy savings in transportation would also be immense.
Tech industries would be largely unaffected. Why? Because our work is largely intellectual in nature, and intellectual work does not come in continuous streams. It comes in bursts of productivity. I bet removing one day from the work week would negligibly impact productivity in our field. It might even increase it in some cases.
I find it funny that the author states that "the ruling class" essentially decides to keep people busy. Let's not forget that there are other factors at play here: unions are the first one that come to mind. Any union shop is going to have a major problem on their hands the day they decide to cut one job (not saying it's right or wrong, just that unions defend their jobs rigorously, as they should). Unions typically aren't what I think of when I think "ruling class".
However, I do tend to think of politicians as that "ruling class". And for better or for worse, people love to hear the phrase "job creation". Politicians can't "create" jobs in the same way that private companies can. They can certainly foster an environment wherein companies can flourish (and ruin it). But any politically-created job is either an oversight job (finance industry is littered with jobs that should be automated but in the interest of being able to point fingers at people, exist) or a bureaucratic job (in my opinion).
Politicians make unions and "bullshit jobs" possible by creating the incentives for companies to hire people they don't need. Unions then make it impossible to get rid of the deadwood. In the case of pure government jobs we're doubly damned.. they create bullshit jobs for paper pushers and then governmentt unions make sure those jobs exist for as close to forever as they possibly can. It's not conspiracy, it's stupidity.
An enduring image for me is of the kind of bullshit jobs that you really can only find in certain parts of East Asia these days.
For example, drive to a parking garage at a shopping mall and there will be a guy who's entire 8 hour work day is spent wearing an over elaborate bell hop uniform and bowing to cars as they drive in. That's it...his entire job is bowing to cars. If he disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, it wouldn't affect a single thing. People would still come to the mall, cars would still manage to park, not one thing would change.
Or how about the nice costumed sales ladies standing in every aisle in the grocery store, not giving out promotional samples (a la Costco), but simply holding up gift packages of cheap processed food items. My favorite is the gift package for your salaryman husband, a beautifully wrapped container of instant coffee. That's actually two BS jobs, the lady holding the package (which you were going to buy anyway), and the person who packaged up the $20 container of instant coffee in an overly elaborate gift package that will go directly into the trash 10 seconds after it's received.
I remember travelling in Russia, and going into one of those amazing Stalanist subway stations, and there was a booth with a person in it. They didn't do anything, they weren't really an attendant, didn't help anybody or have any particular function, they just sat there for a 8 hours.
Of course for the really unbelievably useless jobs you have to look inside the U.S. government.
(1) As a lawyer I love how to non-lawyers the legal industry (usually BigLaw) is always the go to example for things that cost a lot but do nothing.
(2) All these lofty ideas and conspiracy theories are great but bullshit jobs exist for one reason - most people suck at their job and are perfectly O.K. with it.
It's nice to think of labor as a machine. A system where everyone tries to be efficient and strive to do the best work possible. In reality that just doesn't exist. Most people go to work for a paycheck. Their one goal - keep getting that paycheck. In that context it's easy to see how what could be accomplished in 15 hours suddenly takes 40. If there is no incentive to work hard, better, faster, or stronger, why bother? Anyone here ever work a union job? You don't exactly get to leave early if you finish early. You don't exactly get a raise either.
Additionally most people don't have a passion that they'd rather get back to. Very few people think of anything besides (a) work (b) family (c) friends (d) misc. rec. activ. (sleep, sex, vacation, whatever). So this idea that the Bullshit Job is somehow preventing people from doing something more productive is, well, bullshit. Most people would do nothing with their time if not for work.
It's nice to dream the world works otherwise but at least in my experience it does not.
Realistically, the reason that bullshit jobs exist is because it is possible for a low amount of work to result in a good amount of profit. Let's look at Microsoft Office, for example - you can charge $200 per copy for effectively zero cost. Therefore, if somebody can manage to sell 1000 copies of it, their job is justified, along with an assistant or two. This could take a very short amount of time.
The reason there are "bullshit jobs" is because profit margins can be so high. The higher the margins, the more bullshit jobs, and the lower the margins, the fewer. Restaurants have few to no bullshit jobs because there simply isn't enough money to be made with labor that isn't running at 100% most of the time.
If you want a world without bullshit jobs, you'll want a version of the world where products are NOT sold at 4x markup from their cost of production, and instead a 1.5x to 2x markup. Then, companies will HAVE to be lean, because a marginal increase in sales/support will not translate to an enormous increase in profits.
Look at companies with low margins and high costs of production, and you may see inefficiency (it happens everywhere), but there will not be many bullshit jobs.
I live and work in Washington DC. If you ever want to visit a living museum of bullshit jobs, come visit this city. One of my favorite anecdotes is when my friend worked for a defense contractor who hired a "requirements manager". On her first day of work, she popped into my buddy's office and whispered: "what are requirements?".
I remember being contracted out for IT support to a government agency whose sole purpose was representing workers in government agencies. The entirety of its existence astonished me, and as you can imagine, absolutely nothing was accomplished in the 3 weeks I was around. One employee spent most of her time procuring special furniture and equipment for a self-perceived disability (she was perfectly capable), others whiled the day away in "meetings" and water cooler discussions. They could not, however, be bothered to observe that the reason their office server was not functioning was due to its power cord not being plugged in. I wish I was making this up.
The author has a very interesting point. Still he oversimplifies and so I didn't find the article very insightful.
For example lawyers are there for good reason. Modern society needs a way to officially settle conflicts. But our law system creates arms races and draws more and more resources this way.
I think few jobs are as zero sum as SEO from their beginning. The problem is that when we start arms races and pour more and more resources into them, they become almost zero sum.
So the interesting question would be how to avoid arms races. But that is not even mentioned.
the arms races are essentially competition - and competition often creates positive externalities which are not immediately obvious to a naked eye, such as new technologies, etc. Perfect example is Jane Street Capital pouring resources into O'Caml libraries because they feel it gives them an edge in the high frequency trading arms race
[+] [-] zeteo|12 years ago|reply
To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on michaelochurch's (now sadly inactive) blog [1], and he may well have originated it. Here it is, in a better explanation than I could provide:
"The Marketing and Sales Treadmill
In the modern world [...] there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. [The worker] needs a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary.
[...T]he most common path is that our prospective worker enters the sales and marketing business. [...] Even engineering focused companies like Facebook have more sales people than engineers. [...] So everyone’s energy is focused on imagining some gimmick – a six bladed razor, a beer can that turns blue when [it's] cold, a funny talking gecko – that gives someone a reason to give you money when there is no real differentiation based on product value.
The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. Each business must work harder and harder at new tag lines, gizmos, tricks, and jingles. And when sales guys at the other company work harder, you must work harder too.
Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead [...] we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. [...] The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin."
[1] http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom...
[+] [-] api|12 years ago|reply
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 than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get.
So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc.
An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.
[+] [-] cnorgate|12 years ago|reply
For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking is that the output from some individuals only shows up in the medium to long term... take away great leadership from a company and they will make the numbers for the next few quarters, but in a year they will be out-maneuvered and out-performed by the competition. In today's economy it's not about how many widgets you make, it's about making the right widget in the first place... figuring that out is a lot harder than actually making the thing in the end.
The value some jobs create is more difficult to view directly, but is no less valuable in terms of delivering things people want, that they are willing to pay for - i.e. creating wealth. Investors understand this very well, which is why they are willing to pay huge sums to top leadership.
As a final thought, if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. If you want to enjoy the vast benefits (however small) that our progressive society enjoys, then you also need to live within that system and work in some way to push things forward... however incrementally.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|12 years ago|reply
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 spend any energy defending sales/marketing as positive-sum myself, but economists do.
[+] [-] mbesto|12 years ago|reply
> Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.
[0]- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-atten...
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratd|12 years ago|reply
This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
[+] [-] richardjordan|12 years ago|reply
A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration.
It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature.
In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences.
Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal.
The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it.
The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable.
As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital.
Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism.
Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector.
No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.
[+] [-] eliasmacpherson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|12 years ago|reply
Archived version in the event that blog page disappears.
[+] [-] tkellogg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wissler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Filligree|12 years ago|reply
A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance.
This is, I believe, a large part of why working hours aren't going down. You could work less, but then you'd lose out to someone who doesn't.
[+] [-] mixmax|12 years ago|reply
I've put some effort into circumventing the zero-sum things, though I haven't thought about it this way before. I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own. My living expenses come down to harbour rent, electricity and heating in the winter. Over a year that's an average of $300 a month. I live in the smack middle of Copenhagen. On top of this comes living expenses, clothes, etc. But I'm not very materialistic so that's quite cheap too.
The surprising result (for me at least) is that I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom I've gained. By choice I haven't been working for more than a year, and I can afford it, and don't feel much pressure taking any old job. I'm looking for something interesting, but if it doesn't turn up I can live without. In the meantime I spend time doing all the sideprojects, art things, and hanging out a lot of other people are dreaming about while they slave away.
To quote Fight Club: "the things you own end up owning you"
[+] [-] vanderZwan|12 years ago|reply
> The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|12 years ago|reply
Most of the classes of jobs mentioned in this piece are not, in and of themselves, entirely bullshit. Rather, the idea that each of these people actually needs to be in the office, pretending to be continually and evenly busy, for 50+ hours a week -- that's bullshit. Work ebbs and flows in a very different way for each type of job; it is not evenly distributed across the day or week. The belief that it is leads us to create busywork, the dread and bane of all office workers.
We are struggling to unshackle ourselves from the remnants of the old, industrial workweek, which was developed around assembly lines at automobile factories. Most of us aren't building Model T's anymore. And yet, we have laws and/or employment contracts charting mandatory minimum workweeks, mandatory minimum hours per day, etc.
Some jobs really do require 40, 50, or even more hours per week. Many, and I'd dare say most, do not. Especially the white-collar administrative and "paper pushing" positions mentioned in this article. The jobs themselves aren't unnecessary (at least not in reasonable quantity), but the idea that all jobs are normalized around the same schedule is absolute lunacy.
[+] [-] fab13n|12 years ago|reply
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 it, then those bureaucracies are best understood as a life form, distinct from the homo sapiens individuals which serve it. You need to see them as a whole, for the same reason as why you can't make sense out of an animal if you mainly see it as the sum of its individual cells.
From a biologist's point of view, they need to compete for resources, they show some adaptability, they reproduce themselves with some amount of mutation: they have everything needed to benefit from Darwinian selection, and they do.
The resulting current generation of bureaucracies has evolved a very good effectiveness at diverting resources, from other consumers including humans, towards themselves (that is, maintaining and growing the bureaucracy itself).
As a result, they exhibit many "intelligent" traits, including some selfish sense of purpose. Conspiracy theorists wrongly look for The Man, the mastermind driving bureaucracies. There's none, no more than there's a single neuron nor small group thereof which drives your brains: a complex enough bureaucracy has a non-human mind of its own.
Keynes was right about the amount of work we'd need, what he failed to predict is a phenomenon very similar to eutrophisation: we dream of full employment when we don't need to, so we produce much more "nutrients" (people willing to offer their workforce) than we can use for survival and human enjoyment. So instead of being consumed by/for homo sapiens, this energy is consumed by that competing life form that are bureaucracies.
[+] [-] calibraxis|12 years ago|reply
Whereas conspiracy theorists focus more on individuals with black mustaches, and advocate toppling them. They don't go deep into institutional change.
So, for example from this article: "if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else." This institutional reality occurs even if you and I are in that 1%.
Even when Adam Smith uses the term "conspiracy", it can still really be institutional analysis: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Here, he just means normal planning which people are institutionally incentivized to do. We don't call it a "conspiracy" when a corporation's executives plan how to increase profits.
[+] [-] Patient0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaelian|12 years ago|reply
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
[+] [-] shin_lao|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theorique|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jk4930|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody who is unemployed as some kind of failure. When a child gets out of school they need to find work or they have failed. If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. This has nothing to do with someone forcing people to work and everything to do with the human brain's need for purpose forcing working - even if that work is pointless. For example, you often hear someone say with pride how they have worked so much they don't have time to eat or sleep even when the work they are doing is something like filling out pointless bureaucratic paperwork.
"How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?"
Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value.
[+] [-] objclxt|12 years ago|reply
We'd probably lead full, rich and happy lives until we were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from an unexpectedly dirty telephone.
[+] [-] cLeEOGPw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdw|12 years ago|reply
Neither is a plausible solution, although his seems more valid if you would consider decimating the ineffectual upper management class rather than outright removal.
[+] [-] singingfish|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|12 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] spindritf|12 years ago|reply
> the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people
Yes, people are not paid in accordance to the direct tangible benefit their work brings. Salaries are broadly determined by the same laws of supply and demand that determine prices for other stuff.
Tube workers are not seen as worthy of high compensation, or high-status in general, because people believe, correctly or not, that it's easy to do the job. On the other hand, programmers usually command high wages, despite being viewed as nerds and rather low-status, because it's hard to replace one.
Some professions may have an artificially constricted supply, through regulations for example, which throws those observations off a bit.
> It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers
I'd argue that if you replaced school teachers with babysitters, the only catastrophe would be all those damaged egos.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
I don't know what to call this fallacy, but it needs a name. In a way it's similar to saying "nature abhors a vacuum," "this evolutionary strategy aims to", "the market will.." etc. Those are all personifying emergent phenomenons. They are non person things that behave amusingly as if they have a personality. The "ruling class" is different though because it is made of of people. I don't think the author is trying to suggest thousands (or millions) or people conspired to make "the masses" waste 30 hours per week on motivational seminars, but using that language makes it sound like he is, sort of, without committing to it too much.
Worse, it absolves one from exploring the most interesting part of this argument. If There is a literal conspiracy, who? how? details, please. If it's a metaphor for some sort of emergent phenomenon, explore that. What are the forces at work that make this happen. Is it the proliferation of zero (or small) sum games like litigation or advertising? Is it about opaque performance in modern snowflake jobs? This is the most interesting part of the discussion and "The ruling class has" just absolves the writer of addressing it.
[+] [-] DividesByZero|12 years ago|reply
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
[+] [-] blackdogie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilalq|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FrojoS|12 years ago|reply
After the swiss people voted against an extension of mandatory vacation, from four to six weeks, recently, I highly doubt that this law has a chance to pass. However, it sure will be an interesting and passionate discussion that will force everyone to ask the right questions. In fact its already going on. If you speak German you can e.g. read the comments on all the major newspaper articles, like here http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/schweiz/schweizer-koennen-wohl-ueb... (I suppose the same is true for French and Italian.)
PS: This is the best HN thread in a long time. There are opposing views and intelligent, passionated discussion about what could be boiled down to the question "What is the meaning of life?" for each participant.
[+] [-] a-priori|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] einhverfr|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidgerard|12 years ago|reply
He explicitly states this is not what he thinks. The reading comprehension in this thread is very selective.
[+] [-] api|12 years ago|reply
I'm seeing more and more articles to the effect that high-tech destroys jobs. Our response should be: "good, now we should move to a four-day work week." If high-tech work destroys jobs, it should leave people more time for friendship, family, art, learning, play, ...
Attack the Puritan bullshit-work ethic and the associated economic broken window fallacy directly. Make it a "culture war" issue if necessary.
That would be the first step: a four-day work week, a three-day weekend. More jobs for those who don't have them, less work for those who do. The energy savings in transportation would also be immense.
Tech industries would be largely unaffected. Why? Because our work is largely intellectual in nature, and intellectual work does not come in continuous streams. It comes in bursts of productivity. I bet removing one day from the work week would negligibly impact productivity in our field. It might even increase it in some cases.
[+] [-] JonFish85|12 years ago|reply
However, I do tend to think of politicians as that "ruling class". And for better or for worse, people love to hear the phrase "job creation". Politicians can't "create" jobs in the same way that private companies can. They can certainly foster an environment wherein companies can flourish (and ruin it). But any politically-created job is either an oversight job (finance industry is littered with jobs that should be automated but in the interest of being able to point fingers at people, exist) or a bureaucratic job (in my opinion).
[+] [-] doctorwho|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
For example, drive to a parking garage at a shopping mall and there will be a guy who's entire 8 hour work day is spent wearing an over elaborate bell hop uniform and bowing to cars as they drive in. That's it...his entire job is bowing to cars. If he disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, it wouldn't affect a single thing. People would still come to the mall, cars would still manage to park, not one thing would change.
Or how about the nice costumed sales ladies standing in every aisle in the grocery store, not giving out promotional samples (a la Costco), but simply holding up gift packages of cheap processed food items. My favorite is the gift package for your salaryman husband, a beautifully wrapped container of instant coffee. That's actually two BS jobs, the lady holding the package (which you were going to buy anyway), and the person who packaged up the $20 container of instant coffee in an overly elaborate gift package that will go directly into the trash 10 seconds after it's received.
I remember travelling in Russia, and going into one of those amazing Stalanist subway stations, and there was a booth with a person in it. They didn't do anything, they weren't really an attendant, didn't help anybody or have any particular function, they just sat there for a 8 hours.
Of course for the really unbelievably useless jobs you have to look inside the U.S. government.
[+] [-] rarw|12 years ago|reply
(2) All these lofty ideas and conspiracy theories are great but bullshit jobs exist for one reason - most people suck at their job and are perfectly O.K. with it.
It's nice to think of labor as a machine. A system where everyone tries to be efficient and strive to do the best work possible. In reality that just doesn't exist. Most people go to work for a paycheck. Their one goal - keep getting that paycheck. In that context it's easy to see how what could be accomplished in 15 hours suddenly takes 40. If there is no incentive to work hard, better, faster, or stronger, why bother? Anyone here ever work a union job? You don't exactly get to leave early if you finish early. You don't exactly get a raise either.
Additionally most people don't have a passion that they'd rather get back to. Very few people think of anything besides (a) work (b) family (c) friends (d) misc. rec. activ. (sleep, sex, vacation, whatever). So this idea that the Bullshit Job is somehow preventing people from doing something more productive is, well, bullshit. Most people would do nothing with their time if not for work.
It's nice to dream the world works otherwise but at least in my experience it does not.
[+] [-] no_wave|12 years ago|reply
Realistically, the reason that bullshit jobs exist is because it is possible for a low amount of work to result in a good amount of profit. Let's look at Microsoft Office, for example - you can charge $200 per copy for effectively zero cost. Therefore, if somebody can manage to sell 1000 copies of it, their job is justified, along with an assistant or two. This could take a very short amount of time.
The reason there are "bullshit jobs" is because profit margins can be so high. The higher the margins, the more bullshit jobs, and the lower the margins, the fewer. Restaurants have few to no bullshit jobs because there simply isn't enough money to be made with labor that isn't running at 100% most of the time.
If you want a world without bullshit jobs, you'll want a version of the world where products are NOT sold at 4x markup from their cost of production, and instead a 1.5x to 2x markup. Then, companies will HAVE to be lean, because a marginal increase in sales/support will not translate to an enormous increase in profits.
Look at companies with low margins and high costs of production, and you may see inefficiency (it happens everywhere), but there will not be many bullshit jobs.
[+] [-] dccoolgai|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baggachipz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baseraid|12 years ago|reply
For example lawyers are there for good reason. Modern society needs a way to officially settle conflicts. But our law system creates arms races and draws more and more resources this way.
I think few jobs are as zero sum as SEO from their beginning. The problem is that when we start arms races and pour more and more resources into them, they become almost zero sum.
So the interesting question would be how to avoid arms races. But that is not even mentioned.
[+] [-] vasilipupkin|12 years ago|reply