On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

by gu • 13 years ago

546 349 13 years ago

BetaCygni• 13 years ago

Other people clearly don't think your job is worthless or they wouldn't be paying you to do it. The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's. If you're happy with the standard of living from 1930 you could probably achieve that with 10 hours of work per week.

asfasfafwF• 13 years ago

I'm not really up on what the standard of living was like in the 30's, but is it really possible working 10 hours per week? That would barely pay rent in most places.

Filligree4• 13 years ago

Well, you'd need to move somewhere rents are really low. Rents were lower back then because rent is largely a zero-sum game, but they've risen a lot more in city cores.

Actually, you should probably buy your own house. In a lot of places that's quite cheap; if there's low competition for space, it wouldn't take very long at 40 hours/week (living a cheap place) before you can afford your own.

Jach• 13 years ago

The trick is getting into a government subsidized housing program, making use of food stamps, and taking as many other handouts as you can get. A former friend does this and works about 10 hours a week as a dishwasher (sometimes more if they have a busy week) spending the rest of his time playing video games or reading Objectivist literature.

Spooky232• 13 years ago

In rural areas, 1930's living did not include amenities like plumbing or electricity in most places. In urban areas, you're looking at an interior room in a cold water tenement or a boarding house type situation.

It would be tough to do it in the city without becoming a victim of crime, but you can pull it off in many rural areas. Note that the 10 hours of work would be paid work. You'd be doing all sort of tasks on your own behalf. If you lived in the northern US, for example, right now you'd be chopping wood and preserving food in preparation for winter, for example.

randallsquared• 13 years ago

You can have home, land, and installation of home on land for about 25K, if you're willing to settle for small values of each. Ebay has cheap land in rural places. You can buy a new manufactured home for less than 20K: https://www.factoryexpomobilehomes.com/micro.asp . You can get ten years' supply of basic food for probably $3000, depending on exactly what you get, from Costco: http://www.costco.com/emergency-kits-supplies.html . After property taxes and septic installation and other miscellaneous niceties, if you round up to 36K, that's basically $250 a month that you'd need to clear after taxes.

Edit: for 10 years; I'm assuming you'll have to replace such a cheap home after 10 years, but if not, the amortized cost is considerably lower.

rubinelli2• 13 years ago

On a micro scale, your job clearly isn't worthless. A large tech company needs patent lawyers, or it will be completely destroyed by its competitors. But what if all patent lawyers suddenly resigned and started their rock bands, or became carpenters?

So, "bullshit jobs" are essentially jobs where you are playing a zero-sum game. Like SEO: your site goes up, another site goes down by the same amount. And you have to keep spending on it, otherwise your site will fall off the first page.

sz4kerto• 13 years ago

The world is not going to drift towards the global optima.

Nash wins, idealists lose. Sad, but inevitable. :)

dasil003• 13 years ago

Other people clearly don't think your job is worthless or they wouldn't be paying you to do it

That's true on its face, but the problem the article is trying to put its finger on is that money earned does not necessarily equate to value created. GDP grows every time money changes hands, but that is only a proxy for actual value delivered to human beings. As the economy grows more complex this proxy becomes more abstract and provides more opportunity for arbitrage and siphoning of wealth through clever manipulation.

dageshi• 13 years ago

They're paying people to have the specific domain knowledge that can be applied quickly in emergencies.

I suppose it's a bit like being a fireman at an airport, the chances of having a plane need your services are I would've thought pretty rare, but you still need to be there and you've still got to be ready because you've got to react incredibly quickly if something goes wrong.

Can't have an airport without firemen even though an incident requiring their services may never happen, I guess companies feel the same way about corporate lawyers, HR departments and PR people.

walshemj2• 13 years ago

But the cost of "luxury" items has declined a lot since the 30's how much did a TV or a Car cost in the 30's compared to today.

rpwilcox• 13 years ago

The reason we don't work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930's

I wouldn't blame entirely blame consumerism for why we won't work less.

A lot of things have gone up drastically in price in the '30s: higher education (which "everyone" is encouraged to get, from "every" adult figure in their life, from about 6th grade on. Wasn't like that in the '30s); housing; medicine.

In the '30s my great uncle was given a house as a wedding present. His siblings also got houses when they got married. Can you imagine something like that today? Gifting your children something that, in today's age, costs $100,000 (and sometimes 2x-3x more)?!

Of course we buy more things, and I know my grandparents didn't spend money on a smartphone every 2 years or have a $100/month cable bill. But blowing $2K on a TV is a drop in the bucket when you have a $200K mortgage (aka: debt).

I'm willing/able to live cheaply, and buy less things, but my creditors (the big three, above) want their bills paid. So I can't "just" work half time at the code factory and get paid 50% less, because I have debts the like which people in the '30s would have no idea about.

("You mean going to the doctor could be 1-2 months worth of take home pay, even with this 'insurance' that costs 10% of your take home pay??")

Filligree4• 13 years ago

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.

coldtea• 13 years ago

The problem is a lot of what "people want" they are actually indoctrinated to want.

mixmax4• 13 years ago

This is a good observation.

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"

RyanZAG6• 13 years ago

I think you're discounting that most people really don't want to live on a boat. An alternative is living in the countryside, but most people don't want to live there either.

It's not just materialism or a status symbol at play here, but the preferences of the majority of society pushing people into zero-sum. If people suddenly decided that living on a boat isn't that bad (not going to happen), then the price of docking your boat in the middle of Copenhagen would be through the roof in short order. Still zero sum.

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

You are my hero. I keep telling people (friends and parents) that a life like yours is possible. Not necessarily a boat, but something outside the box. But here in Flanders (Belgium), that's unthinkable. Every Fleming should have a house and very Fleming has a massive debt because of it. We love building so much, that there's almost no space left!

thyrsus• 13 years ago

That sounds wonderful, but the line I'd always heard was "A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into" - that is, they are expensive to maintain. How do you avoid that?

singingfish8• 13 years ago

I do something similar, but I live in the rat race. I have a job that keeps me going on part time hours nicely, and I just built a house (largely with money).

yread• 13 years ago

I think that almost everybody can do that - cut down a bit on the living expenses, save some money, quit your job and look for something worth doing. I am currently doing it and wasn't such a trouble

hedgew• 13 years ago

I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom

They probably envy your newfound status.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own.

Man, you're living the dream. I'm in Brazil, real estate prices in the big cities are on par with US or Europe, but credit is worse (interest rates are 9-10%). I'm starting to entertain this option, which would be perfect since we have such a long coast. I also love to be in contact with nature. The price of a decent 30 feet sailboat is half the price of a 1 bedroom downtown apartment (plus, you don't have land tax), so it also makes sense financially.

Do you have any experiences to share?

vanderZwan3• 13 years ago

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.

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

Your post seems to boil down to: products manufactured on cheap in China cost much less than real estate in London and car from Munich.

The problem is that before globalization happened you could afford stuff manufactured locally without working 60 hour weeks super-sophisticated high end jobs requiring sacrificing your youth to study and hard work.

msh• 13 years ago

I think this depends on where you are, in my experience north Americans tend to work far more hours than people from northen europe.

The normal working hours where I come from is around 37 hours. I have a 36 hours work week with all overtime must be taken as time off at some other time. (of cause there are also people who work more).

baseraid2• 13 years ago

There are negative sum jobs as well. Pharma people, promoting harmful drugs, soldiers or criminals.

polymatter• 13 years ago

soldiers do not belong in that group. they generally do significant good just as a sitting deterrent. much more than yet another mediocre web developer. how their political masters choose to use them however ...

a3voices• 13 years ago

Not all criminals are negative sum. For example, digital piracy is positive sum.

mason240• 13 years ago

This is exactly it. On a related note, look at how fast food restaurants no longer sell fast, cheap food. Instead they sell experiences. McDonalds has the McCafe thing, and even KFC is trying to rebrand itself as something more like Panera Bread.

We have moved beyond the point where the item itself is readily available, so what is desired now is the experience that goes with it.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

I think you overstate the case with fast food -- lots of their marketing still seems to be about fast and cheap -- but to the extent that it is less focussed than that in the past I think it is because fast food outlets are marketing to differentiate themselves from each other because they are ingrained enough on culture that they don't need as much to differentiate from traditional restaurants.

keithpeter5• 13 years ago

I like the positive/zero sum analysis. Alas, in the UK, living near a viable job is actually regarded as sum positive!

rwallace• 13 years ago

Which is why I, a moderate libertarian, have reluctantly acknowledged the need for a legal maximum 30 hour working week; the evidence for market failure in this area is sufficiently overwhelming that I can no longer ignore it.

objclxt• 13 years ago

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.

singingfish8• 13 years ago

Thank you. I was waiting for a telephone sanitizer reference.

zdw2• 13 years ago

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.

cLeEOGPw4• 13 years ago

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.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

Ok, so how do you create an enforcement mechanism to keep the capitalistic bullshit from coming back once you've gotten rid of it?

bilalq3• 13 years ago

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.

a-priori2• 13 years ago

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.

bilalq3• 13 years ago

Yeah, I can see it swinging either way. However, the alternative of not doing anything could be just as catastrophic. Politicians always talk about creating jobs as if it were the goal. Jobs are just a means to an end, and creating jobs for their own sake is not only inefficient, but something that can't hold out in the long run.

FrojoS• 13 years ago

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.

bilalq3• 13 years ago

Interesting. I hadn't heard of that until now. It may not pass, but it's amazing to see it even being considered for a vote.

And I agree, this thread has been a great read.

blackdogie• 13 years ago

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

fab13n6• 13 years ago

(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.

Patient0• 13 years ago

Exactly. You don't need a conspiracy to describe a stable but sub-optimal outcome: you just need it to be a Nash equilibrium.

fab13n6• 13 years ago

It's stronger than a Nash equilibrium. It's not even an equilibrium actually, because we keep improving humans' productivity, and bureaucracies keep eating the freed workforce.

It's really easier to make sense out of it from an ecologist's PoV than from an economist's or a game theoretician's, because the two competing agents (humans and bureaucracies) are hard to formally separate.

gaelian• 13 years ago

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.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)

theorique2• 13 years ago

The phrase "inverted totalitarianism" describes this phenomenon.

fab13n6• 13 years ago

"inverted totalitarianism" describes this phenomenon.

I believe it doesn't. Inverted totalitarianism supposes that a master class keeps the plebeian one controlled through apathy and deception, rather than open brute force as in classical totalitarian states. But it fundamentally frames the struggle as one group of humans against another.

My point is that it's not humans versus humans, it's humans versus bureaucracies, a bureaucracy being an autonomous agent without any human mastermind thinking on its behalf, i.e. much more than the sum of its employees, the way a human being is much more than the sum of its cells.

We're treating bureaucracies (as per the definition above, "entities that consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth") as allies helping us producing wealth, because we think salaries still are a good way to create and distribute wealth. Even entrepreneurs are often primarily incensed as "job creators", although when you think about it, it would be better for them to create wealth out of thin air rather than out of sweat and tears. We ought to treat them (bureaucracies, not entrepreneurs!) as a parasitic species instead.

jk4930• 13 years ago

I assume you'll enjoy the five chapters on human systems, inspired by "Systemantics": http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm

calibraxis2• 13 years ago

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.

shin_lao2• 13 years ago

"Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" --Oscar Wilde

fbeans• 13 years ago

The site seems to be experiencing problems. Here is an archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130818200653/http://www.strikem...

RyanZAG6• 13 years ago

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.

impendia4• 13 years ago

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?

RyanZAG6• 13 years ago

That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required.

Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.

olefoo2• 13 years ago

Derrida.

And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.

singingfish8• 13 years ago

One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work?

Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged.

To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.

ZeroGravitas3• 13 years ago

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.

vanderZwan3• 13 years ago

The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least.

I think the implication is that that is largely a form of Stockholm syndrome.

They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value.

How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?

RyanZAG6• 13 years ago

"How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?"

I was not arguing against the idea of bullshit jobs. It's not even possible to argue against that! I was arguing against the reason for having bullshit jobs. He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves.

cabalamat• 13 years ago

Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary.

Really? Or do they secretly worry that it isn't?

Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry.

"No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true." -- PG, http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

kybernetikos• 13 years ago

While a pithy thing to say with some truth in it, I have experienced people asserting things of the order of 2 + 2 = 5, and given the right situation it can have the potential to make people pretty mad.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

I've certainly caught myself doing this.

Of course, that means nothing other than that I'm dumb sometimes, which was a known fact.

shin_lao2• 13 years ago

If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide.

I agree with this, but I think the real reason is more profound.

I think working is a "need" and then became a social value, not the other way around.

Creating tools and weapons is what gave us an edge as a species, so it wouldn't be that surprising that the need to work is not just a response to social stimuli (although it probably is aswell).

beat2• 13 years ago

The concept that everyone must have a "job" (that is, work for someone else for a wage) is deep in the psyche of both the ruling class and the majority, so both reinforce it through culture and propaganda. It's no different from how previous societies believed that Jews controlled the banks, or children got sick and died because they were suffocated in their sleep by witches. It's rank idiocy, but it's rank idiocy that almost everyone believes.

Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes?

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

Regarding those theories about the Jews... what do you mean, previous societies? Lots of people today actually, really believe that the faults of capitalism come from Jewish finance.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

I wonder how much people we really need to replicate, sustain and exceed present levels of technology and culture (on another planet perhaps)?

Given that we allow every person to develop their talents of contributing to the productivity of the society. Not just being a wage drone or an unemployed drone.

My guess is: as few as a few million people today, hundred thousands when we figure out robotics.

vanderZwan3• 13 years ago

I recall a reading very fascinating comment on Reddit a few years ago on this subject: if you want to maximise for maximum biological diversity at the lowest cost, the best option would be to have a small all-female crew, and as much diverse frozen sperm as possible (which is the most compact form of proto-human we got).

Then upon reaching the intended planet, fertilise every female with a unique cell. Repeat every generation until you run out of frozen sperm. Hey presto, biological diversity for cheap.

Of course, if anything this shows the problems with optimising for one variable at the expense of ignoring of all others.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

I wasn't talking about diversity, rather about how much people are needed to sustain and industrial civilization. Perhaps this number is much greater than number of people you need for diversity (several hundred people populated the whole pre-Columbian americas and they didn't have terrible problems with diversity)

singingfish8• 13 years ago

A few african males from different parts of africa.

zanny• 13 years ago

By the threshold of technology you mention (intersteller travel to habitable planets) you would certainly have the technology to grow and maintain an artificial womb. So you just stock the ship with self-replicating printing machines that can deploy artificial wombs, and have millions of frozen egg / sperm to populate them.

Really though, at that point, you might as well send the learning AI robots instead. Fleshy emotional meat bags with difficult to replicate reproduction are a liability.

ap222136• 13 years ago

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

a8da6b0c91d• 13 years ago

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 capital allocation, but we know that doesn't work. And what's not bullshit about modern doctoring and nursing? 90% of the time they're treating lifestyle ailments for which the treatments don't actually do very much. What's not bullshit about being a teacher of tenth graders who can barely read?

ap222136• 13 years ago

What would be the serious ramifications of vanishing corporate law and private equity?

yourapostasy• 13 years ago

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.

mathattack• 13 years ago

It's hard for me to believe in grand conspiracies of a ruling class that is in competition with itself. I'm more inclined to believe that bullshit jobs exist because there is bullshit work to be done, and more of it piles on when there isn't a market incentive pushing the bullshit out.

JulianMorrison5• 13 years ago

The core cause of bullshit jobs is not conspiracy, it's political economy. We currently choose (IMO a terrible choice) to have a money based society where "don't work" == "don't eat". And so work must be found.

This is what it means when politicians talk of "creating jobs".

twoodfin5• 13 years ago

Just how do you propose eating without working? Someone has to work so she or others can eat.

dvanduzer2• 13 years ago

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.

JulianMorrison5• 13 years ago

That was the case before automation. Right now, though, humans are

1. under-bidding automation (this will be decreasingly successful)

2. politically suppressing automation (AKA "creating jobs")

…because nobody wants to abandon the "work = eat" rule.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

It would probably had to be heavily subsidized by the state. If you could turn solar energy to food, cheaply and reliantly enough you could never have to starve, and food price would plummet.

Just plop a solar panel and eat your manufactured cucumber. Problem is that agriculture today doesn't create it reliably enough (drought, heavy weather can destroy your crops).

a-priori2• 13 years ago

Only 1.2% of the American labour force is in the agricultural sector. The remaining 98.8% of workers are not directly involved in food production.

baseraid2• 13 years ago

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.

vasilipupkin• 13 years ago

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

lmm2• 13 years ago

It bears saying that working hours have gone down, at least here in Europe. But it took unions and laws to make it happen, and at every stage employers have screamed blue murder - "oh noes, we couldn't possibly maintain productivity with only a 60/50/40/35 hour work week". Of course, once the law is introduced it turns out the company can remain just as productive.

I don't know what the figures are for the US, with its hatred of organized labour and social legislation.

ZeroGravitas3• 13 years ago

Some of those reductions were actually pushed by companies themselves (Ford in the US being a commonly cited example), who measured productivity and found it dropped as work hours increased.

This only makes the standard US position on work crazier, however.

huherto• 13 years ago

Reducing work hours may even have the benefit of creating jobs due to people having more leisure time.

lmm2• 13 years ago

Possibly, but it could equally well go the other way - shorter hours means smaller offices, less need for onsite canteens etc.

Attocs3• 13 years ago

What 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 simply given something, anything, to do until they retire - don't quote me on this.

The strange thing is that you have a non-english speaking, poorer, class beneath this (of around 600 million people) that simply MUST make an economic contribution in order to survive because no one will pay them anything unless their economic contribution is undeniable.....

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

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.

Attocs3• 13 years ago

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

dccoolgai• 13 years ago

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?".

baggachipz• 13 years ago

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.

cygwin98• 13 years ago

Sounds like communist countries used to be.

zeteo2• 13 years ago

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."

[1] http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom...

maratd• 13 years ago

The sales and marketing economy is zero sum.

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...

FatalBaboon2• 13 years ago

Exceptions don't make rules, it's the other way around

cnorgate• 13 years ago

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.

calibraxis2• 13 years ago

The author does state: "I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?"

Personally, quite often my jobs have been meaningless or worse. The worse they paid, probably the more meaningful they were.

sfjailbird• 13 years ago

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.

What if you owned the home you live in, though? Lately, I've become a bit obsessed with this idea. The reason the 'wage slave' concept exists is that most of us have to do the 9-to-5, or we would unsettlingly quickly find ourselves homeless - the ultimate social catastrophe. I sometimes compare this with the lifestyle I see in some 'less developed' countries, where it is still customary for a family to own the house they live in. The result is that even when the breadwinner is frequently un- or underemployed, and with parts of the household staying at home exclusively without generating an income, their lives seem a lot less stressful. Even when they worry about money and basic necessities, they survive, turning down consumption to a minimum in financially challenging times. The equivalent for us, with regards to the subject at hand, would be to work 15 hours of productive, enjoyable work and still get by. Or alternatively, to work 40 hours of really interesting, challenging stuff that might not pay well or at all for a while.

The conclusion would seem to be to work single-mindedly on owning your home. As you said, one option is to move to Colorado and buy a barren plot in the middle of nowhere. But a more reasonable alternative might be to work your freaking ass off to pay off your property as soon as humanly possible. If you are really scrappy, you should be able to do that in around 15 years, depending on where you live and what your salary is. The problem is that people don't want to live like that. We want to live comfortably, with the biggest car we can afford the monthly payments on, with nice vacations, consumer goods etc. etc. Well you pay for that - the price is working 9-to-5 in a job you hate.

api9• 13 years ago

Bullshit jobs certainly exist, and in great numbers. The proof is in the fact that many of the people who "do" these jobs actually goof off a significant part of their working day and yet things still march on as if nothing is different.

In places I've done contracting work I've seen vast offices full of these folks, and it almost feels to me as if their bosses are sort of covering for them. Cubes full of people browsing Facebook at least half the day.

consultant23522• 13 years ago

At one of my previous jobs this was the network admin for me. It's not that I felt that network administrator was a useless job. It's that there are 5 of them and only one of them doesn't have their head up their ass. If anyone in the building ever needs anything done they know the 1 person in that department that can do the work. The rest are barely capable of staying up late to push the "go" button, calling the competent one if anything goes wrong. But it's a big corporation with egregious HR policies, and the manager is valued by how many people he oversees, and we value tenure over usefulness.

mbesto• 13 years ago

Right on! Or as Seth Godin puts it:[0]

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...

conjectures• 13 years ago

Except that the world population is increasing (more of us), proportionally fewer people live in grinding poverty (more time) and more of us have access to diverse communications technology (more access). Seems to me attention isn't much like real estate.

api9• 13 years ago

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.

AutoCorrect2• 13 years ago

kind of like an asymptotic line, optimizing for efficiency - we spend more and more time making less and less of a difference. The problem is, with companies the size we have nowadays, even a small percentage improvement leads to runaway success, so every company is incentivized to continue optimizing.

Maybe we should limit the maximum size of a company?

burgreblast• 13 years ago

Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected.

The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box.

Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky.

My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. Consumption is easier than creation.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

I think a simpler explanation is that people enjoy being productive. Otherwise, why would people have a problem with meaningless jobs?

6cxs2hd6• 13 years ago

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...

Lagged2Death• 13 years ago

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.

zeteo2• 13 years ago

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger

tkellogg• 13 years ago

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.

icedchai4• 13 years ago

could you please send me your status report? thanks!

ams6110• 13 years ago

I think it sounds like the author is experiencing angst about his own bullshit job.

wissler• 13 years ago

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).

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

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.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

I wish Graeber had reiterated his "1% market" idea another time in full, but the basics are as he implied here. A market reflects the preferences of the people who have the money. If you have a market economy with deeply built-in and extreme inequalities, then you can get a "free market" that, yes, reflects the preferences of about 1% of the population.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

http://archive.is/gXy2n

Archived version in the event that blog page disappears.

whiddershins• 13 years ago

What I get from your comment is that any time anyone even references a ruling class, you believe they are claiming conspiracy.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

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.

r00fus• 13 years ago

The continued push to remove regulations on policy-buying is the conspiracy.

The US confluence of money and politcs hasn't always been as "free flowing" in the past, ie, prior to the overturning of McCain-Feingold and establishment of

Moneyed interests have been hard at work trying to push this country over a cliff so they can swoop in afterwards and profit off the wreckage. That's well documented and one party (the GOP) has been brazen and proud of it's efforts to increase corruption, while the other (Dems) has been ineffectual and also culpable.

3pt14159• 13 years ago

Since compounding interest demonstrates geometric growth, areas of allocation that match the investment rate must go up in either risk or must go down in reward or a new form of efficiency must be found that was previously unattainable. In practice this leads to concentrated wealth being misallocated (high risk) or hemorrhaged (inflationary loss) or effectively applied to the growth of a new technology (successfully invested), probably in that order of likelihood.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

Das Kapital in 11 paragraphs! Wow, good writing!

My only addition would be to note that insofar as the capitalist system has active support from powerful people, it is not merely a natural accumulator, it is, in a sense, intelligent, and perverting every aspect of our society into its own service.

Isn't ideology wonderful?

Nursie• 13 years ago

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.

purplelobster• 13 years ago

That makes me wonder what would happen if we banned advertising in general.

netcan• 13 years ago

"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.

pcrh• 13 years ago

I think the word you are looking might be "teleology".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

ap222136• 13 years ago

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to quantify the social value of failure. So, a lot of people opt to take the easy path and do more busy work. At least, then they may show that their busy work had some productivity and output.

I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?

It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.

Let's say you're a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.

As a society we need a better way of 'paying' people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

What counts as a wildly challenging idea in applied computer science? A new programming paradigm? I actually can't think of anything I would drop everything to pursue right now, and I suspect most people are the same way. I think it's naive to assume everyone would do something wonderful if only they were unfettered by corporate shackles. For most people writing a good ORM or programming language would be an achievement.

ap222136• 13 years ago

I could probably make a list of things, but they'd be specific to my particular needs. Generally, each week, I think of one or two services or products that I wish I had.

At this very moment, I wish I had a service that would crawl the web and extract recipes and save them in a standard format with standardized ingredients, units of measure, equipment, and procedures. But, that's just me.

ahomescu1• 13 years ago

How many programming languages do we really need?

Considering how bad some of the current ones are, more. For example, a lot of current software is written in C++, which is a bloated mess. IMHO, we need a new systems language like Go or Rust.

spindritf• 13 years ago

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.

chernevik2• 13 years ago

The productivity of London tube workers results from their work on an enormous and unique capital asset.

craigyk4• 13 years ago

I'd argue that if you replaced school teachers with babysitters, the only catastrophe would be all those damaged egos.

The keyword you used is "replaced", not "do away with". Actually I think an argument could be made that teacher pay does already treat them somewhat as babysitters. Babysitters would likely be more expensive on an hour * kids basis than teachers given current babysitter rates.

Anyways, you are right, wages are determined by "supply and demand", unfortunately collective bargaining is seen as a bad thing, whereas I see it just as another way for a truly "free market" to communicate the value of a job.

adventured• 13 years ago

"It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen"

Which is fitting, as America hasn't been a Capitalist nation in nearly a century.

JonFish85• 13 years ago

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).

doctorwho• 13 years ago

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.

zdw2• 13 years ago

Serious 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.

fab13n6• 13 years ago

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.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

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.

twistedpair• 13 years ago

But then how do we organize the productive capacity? We need the course bins to blindly assign human "resources" to, otherwise we'd need to recognize the heterogeneity of the positions and people that fill them. Do you want the IT support techs in the office 60 hours a week and the managers for just 20 hours a week?

tbrownaw• 13 years ago

A significant part of my job is being available. I can leave a few minutes early if I check my email before the next day starts (ignoring social pressure; nobody's usually going to have questions at the very end of the day that can't wait for morning) or come in a half hour to occasionally an hour and a half late (nobody has immediate questions that early in the day), but mostly I need to be around during the times that everyone else is working.

If I'm having a slow period, or if I'm stuck and need time to percolate, I'll bring a book or spend more time than usual on HN.

LOSindignados2• 13 years ago

As a struggling musician this hits close to home. I've worked over a dozen jobs in four states since leaving home at 18. I went into debt for college but dropped out as my older friends reported back from the "real world" that the promises of higher education were mostly empty. I camped out at Occupy Portland to try to wrap my head around this propaganda-fueled global enterprise. Thank you, David, for tirelessly speaking the truth.

api9• 13 years ago

"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.

pge• 13 years ago

In 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.

fab13n6• 13 years ago

Sorry if this question sounds dumb to US people, but wasn't "obamacare" supposed to fix exactly that?

cliffu• 13 years ago

Well at least you don't think it was supposed to create death panels :) it was indeed supposed to make healthcare affordable and force insurers to cover everyone, but it also makes health insurance mandatory. There's subsidies for people that cannot afford it, but it's still potentially more of a financial burden to lower income earners than a Socialist-style healthcare system. The US has basically the worst cost:success ratio of anywhere and the insurance rates reflect that.

drivers99• 13 years ago

You're speaking as if it's been implemented already. The Affordable Healthcare Act has a long timeline.[1]

[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/timeline-of-the-health-care-law/#...

samatman• 13 years ago

Not surprised that the top four comments at the moment disagree with the author. I strongly recommend that anyone who was affected by the 2008 economic crisis read his best-known book: Debt, the first 5000 years.

You may still disagree with his conclusions, but you're more likely to do so in an informed way. It is the only treatise on the subject of debt, which I have been able to find, that actually makes sense. I say that as someone who has read far more Hayek and Rothbard than Marx or Bakunin.

keithpeter5• 13 years ago

Did anyone else have a strong feeling of Douglas Adams while reading the OA?

chernevik2• 13 years ago

Reading economic discussions on this board is like reading Congressional debates of SOPA.

jotm• 13 years ago

To 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.

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

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.

davidgerard• 13 years ago

<i>"Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition."</i>

He explicitly states this is not what he thinks. The reading comprehension in this thread is very selective.

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

I reread, and I can't see where he explicitly says this is not what he thinks. He claims that this is a fairly accurate picture of he moral state of our economy. I would be interested in what you are seeing that I am not.

circa• 13 years ago

For a quick second i thought this was a review of the new movie

dhimes• 13 years ago

For anybody who wants a lighter view of the subject, I recommend Stanley Bing's book:

http://www.amazon.com/100-Bullshit-Jobs-How-Them/dp/00607348...

zacinbusiness• 13 years ago

I have been lucky enough to have a few jobs that paid the bills (though barely) that gave me some perspective on this. Before college, I worked at a gambling parlor where I was effectively paid to take other people's money from them and to give it to my boss. The potential for a financial gain was there as the establishment was...quasilegal at best...but it never happened that one stranger would walk in and take the house, never to return. Instead, older men and women would come in night after night and spend the majority of their disposable income hoping to break even though they usually never did. This was a bullshit job, and worse it was a job that directly contributed to the detriment both of the local economy and to that of the greater economy. They could have cut my job entirely by simply direct depositing money into the bank account of my employer and it would have cost them less in the long run (counting for gas and "concessions" consumed while gambling). However, the majority of the customers were older, uneducated, and lonely. Thus, they paid more for the social interaction than for the hope of winning big money. At the time, I worked maybe 70 hours a week and though I always had a little pocket money I was by no means "financially stable." What's more, the job in no way contributed to my long-term financial well being. Luckily, this was my last job before college, and since then I've been fortunate enough not only to find a decent job, but a job that works to optimize customer-commercial interactions - we try to help businesses actually figure out what their customers want to buy and to help the customers buy it more easily - and at the same time I have a roughly 20 hour work week that allows me to support my family and to give us a fair amount of recreational time. Still, I know that I am in the minority with my good fortune, and that makes me sad for others who are less fortunate than I.

arh68• 13 years ago

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at

So, as a young person who might end up in a bullshit job, what are the best ways to enjoy it? It's not all bad, after all

shaydoc• 13 years ago

I wrote this song as a response to a bullshit job I was doing for a period of time, thankfully I got my ass out because it drove me to write such thoughts....

Title: The Ballad of a 30 something Office Worker

https://soundcloud.com/swampscott/the-ballad-of-a-30-somethi...

Yeah, I was in an environment (as a result of consulting) that sucked the very life from my creative nature...

burgerz• 13 years ago

Part of the explanation lies in the hiring process. At the company I work we have a ton of useless people - 'office manager', 'coordinator' and other titles that don't mean anything - which make you wonder how they got the job in the first place. Usually answer is they are hired because they know someone at the company, and it's so easy to get somebody who has no skills to fit into paper pushing jobs. Of course there isn't anybody to oversee all this. The chief executives aren't checking if some guy in the building is really needed there. At every step down from CEO somebody is getting hired by someone because they need a job.

kunle• 13 years ago

We ARE working essentially 15 hour weeks (or trending towards that). But instead of each person working 15hour weeks, most people will just be unemployed. The average will end up around 15 hours.

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

I don't understand the alternative world that is being proposed. If all these bullshit jobs could be magically eliminated, then most people would sit around doing...what, exactly?

Eating pizza and playing videogames, maybe? But who's going to make the pizza and video games?

iopq3• 13 years ago

Robots and Indian engineers.

beat2• 13 years ago

This is like a proper academic-language version of Bob Black's largely superior text, The Abolition of Work, which was posted here a few days ago and promptly disappeared.

Google it. Read Bob Black's essay, which is shorter and more blunt than this one.

no_wave• 13 years ago

This fails to engage with any economic reality.

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.

ombro• 13 years ago

How many of those pointless, time wasting bullshit jobs are directly linked to the gross expansion of government in the 20th century? Finance, law, health care, education... almost all of the jobs he complains about are built around the requirements of bureaucracies and laws, and the exploitation thereof.

quadrangle3• 13 years ago

ok, I'll bite. Interesting hypothesis. What's the control? Given that government exists and has a significant role in the system, how can we control for that in order to identify whether it is cause, correlation, or mere coincidence?

For the record, I think the issue with government isn't government per se but the extreme levels of regulatory capture.

eru5• 13 years ago

You can try and compare different countries. Some have much bigger governments than others. (E.g. Singapore's government lives of ~15% of GDP. European governments are typically closer to ~50% of GDP.)

bulhitter• 13 years ago

I find it cute that he thinks teaching is mostly not a bullshit job. apart from the first 4 years it is as bullshit as any of his other examples. He just fails to recognize that due to personal bias.

craigyk4• 13 years ago

Not as bullshit when you think of it as daycare that has allowed the two parent working family to be possible. So while the parents may be off doing "bullshit" reasonably well-paying work, the "real work" of raising the next generation has been moved to teachers. The real reason "regular" people freak out when teachers strike is because they think they can't afford not being able to goto work.

dkrich• 13 years ago

I think there is an inherent assumption at the heart of this logic that, when questioned and revealed as false, causes the entire argument to fall apart. The assumption is that because somebody believes that their job is "bullshit" or pointless, that their own assessment is actually correct.

Usually when people I know moan about how useless they are and how boring and pointless their jobs are, they are reflecting on inter-office politics, easier methods that could and should be employed, and a host of solutions that could render them useless. The only problem is that for whatever reason, those solutions have not been pursued and somebody is willing to pay them for their services.

It doesn't really matter whether you as the employee see the point in your job if the person paying you sees the need. It's important to remember that when you assume that your job could even be eliminated, you are making an assumption without necessary data. After all, you were hired because a need existed. In other words, I think people in many jobs underestimate their actual economic value to society. Like it or not, most artists don't actually contribute a whole lot of economic value. That is, they don't create wealth for other people. Those who do are usually compensated accordingly.

cbenkendorf• 13 years ago

Where do I start with this half-baked article?

1) I've been through layoffs that disproportionately hit "paper-pushers"

2) Many of the "paper-pusher" jobs are extremely useful to society (e.g., actuaries), while the "manual" jobs may not be (e.g., why do we really need dock workers? Can't technology eventually replace them all in the future?)

Now economic usefulness is definitely not linked with personal satisfaction / some altruistic notion of "societal value".

At the end of the day, economic usefulness seems to always win out, because it takes money to do most anything, and generally money goes to the places with the highest potential economic ROI.

Insurance companies hire actuaries to help them manage their risk, while record labels aren't signing a bunch of unknown bands to ensure we have enough jazz musicians around.

rarw2• 13 years ago

(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.

craigyk4• 13 years ago

The legal industry is mostly "bullshit" work. To think otherwise you'd have to believe both: (1) the system is perfect at making good laws which have the precise consequences desired. (2) the average number of laws decreases, rather than increases over time (barring major overthrows, revolutions)

rarw2• 13 years ago

I don't even know how that argument makes any sense.

marvdm• 13 years ago

“Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.” —Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“Suppose the people around here decide that instead of having more consumer goods they’d like to have more leisure. The market system doesn’t allow you that choice. It drives you to having more consumer goods because it’s all driven to maximizing production. But is the only human value to have more and more goods you don’t need? In fact the business world knows that it’s not. That’s why they spend billions of dollars in advertising, to try to create artificial wants.” —Noam Chomsky

I strongly agree with the author, Russell, and Chomsky. I think Jacque Fresco also has interesting thoughts regarding this matter.

cLeEOGPw4• 13 years ago

Competition.

This article is wrong. I'd go even as far as say he is a failure as an anthropology professor. The answer is as simple as this - competition.

Survival is not enough for living organisms - they must also reproduce. Every organism tries to maximize it's own rate reproduction and minimize others. Any other behavior will drive it to extinction.

To talk in human terms, those who control technology and machines that could provide 15 h work week, have no interest in doing so. It's the opposite. They don't need others neither to survive, nor to breed. You need them. You must prove them that you are worthy of him giving money to you.

Besides, the bigger the population, the bigger the competition. It is seen very clearly in big cities like New York. There's even saying "If you can make it in NY, you can make it anywhere", because the competition makes it harder and harder as the human count increases.

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

So in your estimation, 'bullshit jobs' exist because the majority of people need to battle it out amongst each other in order to be rewarded by the elite controllers of 'technology and machines'?

I think you have unwittingly restated the author's thesis.

cLeEOGPw4• 13 years ago

Author simply stated this and made it look like it's a bad thing, while I explained why it is as it is and why it is not bad.

wuliwong• 13 years ago

Today's economy produces goods far more efficiently than ever before. Although it might seem like there are lots of unproductive workers, the average worker today vs. the average worker in 1930 is far more productive.

alexakarpov• 13 years ago

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)

cLeEOGPw4• 13 years ago

This is basically cooperation vs. competition, not much more to be said.

digikata• 13 years ago

I 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?

mesozoic• 13 years ago

Stopped reading when I realized the author was making broad sweeping generalizations about things he didn't understand like capitalism. He claims that firms won't employ unnecessary workers, when the truth is firms will employ as many workers as they deem profitable to employ. A misunderstanding that would go on to explain every one of his other "mysterious" claims.

gray-shine• 13 years ago

Stopped reading when...

So you're explicitly stating that you're basing this comment on only a partial understanding of the article?

You wish to state that you're ignorant of a number of the points made in it. Okay. Thanks for the warning, I'll disregard any point you're trying to make.

protonfish• 13 years ago

Well, if Parkinson's law is correct http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 and bureaucracies expand by 6% every year regardless of the amount of work, more and more of us will end up with useless jobs.

pegas123• 13 years ago

All the time reading this discussion I was thinking about Parkinson. What if overgrown beaurocracies created a system that protects their existence? Self organized megabeurocratic society?

Another thought: the resistance to any corporate software that would considerably increase efficiency is explained by selfpreservation of the system.

retube• 13 years ago

On the phenomenon of bullshit articles....

His thesis is the ideology of someone young and niave. I can assure you that no company employs anyone unless they have to, and/or they see a return on their investment (ie payroll) in that person.

He may think a corporate law job is "bullshit" but I imagine that the law firm's clients value and rely on the collective work that this person and his colleagues are doing.

icedchai4• 13 years ago

You obviously never worked at a startup company during the dot-com boom.

kenster07• 13 years ago

Why do we continue to work 40+ hour weeks when 15 would suffice? The answer is quite simple -- over the past tens of thousands of years, the primary survival pressure on our gene pool has been scarcity, and thus we are genetically -- not socially -- programmed to want to work.

iopq3• 13 years ago

I spent several years working 40 hours a month. I am not programmed to work. I hate working 40 hours a week.

-written from work

gdulli• 13 years ago

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

It doesn't say much more than that a lawyer can only serve a small number of people, but a musician can entertain millions at once. A less talented musician, tens of millions.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/justinbieber

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

This resonates particularly wrt what has happened in the UK to the health, electricity and rail sectors, where privatisation, or movement thereto, has created a vast class of white collar jobs whose only function is to administer the labyrinth of utterly pointless complexity that imposing a market model onto these sectors has introduced.

squozzer• 13 years ago

I think the author makes a good point, to which I would add a couple of thoughts -

1) The danger of too much free time isn't because all of that brainpower would somehow figure out how to topple the system or at least replace its' current occupants -- but would be spent licentiously. Exhibit A - Jerry Springer show guests.

2) The choice of more trinkets over less work has a very strong sponsor -- business itself.

jacob019• 13 years ago

Thought provoking article, we all want a better world. Seems arrogant to think that most people believe their jobs are meaningless, I get no sense of that here in Indianapolis. The last sentence really turned me off, "We’re an anti-profit, radical publisher."

rza• 13 years ago

In a modern society, you will have complex systems where the individual worker is so abstracted away from the concrete value that they will not be able to see the immediate effect of their actions, but this does not make them pointless. To an investment banker, all they see are numbers growing larger, but that does take away from the fact that they're moving millions of dollars, which invariably comes from somewhere.

This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then by definition, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.

Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn't understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better 'PR researcher' to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives will revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.

0xdeadbeefbabe3• 13 years ago

Although Einstein worked in the patent office, didn't he?

Some jobs don't matter and on top of that freedom is hard to manage, but the idea that we're all doomed sounds like something an anthropologist would imply in 400-1000 words.

beefxq• 13 years ago

Gotta keep the people busy so they don't focus on the real issues.

javert• 13 years ago

The LSE should be deeply embarassed that this person is one of their professors. His assumptions are incredibly juvenile.

kephra• 13 years ago

Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.

Those toys just create a high tech low life paradox. The problem is the iron law of wages: "real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker."

This minimum is based on housing costs, health insurance, tax, and saving for pensions. The main toy, a car, fuel, and car insurance, is often a requirement for working, because of stupid zoning laws. The cost of food is nearly negligible, compared to the above costs.

If you look at places that have high wages and low tax, then you can expect high housing costs. So there will be always some days left end of the month, when a typical family runs in danger of running out of money for food and the like.

So regardless how much you work, the land lord or the bank in case of house ownership, will eat the big part, forcing the average family to work 8 at least hours.

iopq3• 13 years ago

So then if we eliminate government assistance for workers, the corporations will be forced to pay them more? That means Walmart will be forced to pay above minimal wage.

DividesByZero• 13 years ago

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."

johnmacintyre• 13 years ago

"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."

Are you freak'n kidding me? The 99% is the market not the 1%. Who do you think is buying what the 1% is selling? It's the 99% who determine what is being made by buying what they buy!

I've had a few jobs like this, not many though, and I can tell you that none of them were at companies small enough for an owner to know who I was.

I'd like to propose a different reason for these jobs; middle manager decision makers who have ulterior motives than to optimize ROI. Like what you ask? Like getting a bigger budget next year. Like empire building. Like maximizing the illusion of importance. I could go on, but since I've never had one of these positions, I'm sure I could never do the list justice.

Law (since it was mentioned) and consulting are slightly different since you might end up doing something pointless where your company is maximizing ROI because the market is paying for you to do something pointless. ... and given that situation, I'd venture to guess that either a) it was one of the non-stakeholders mentioned above that brought you in, or b) an owner who bought into your industry/company's marketing BS and hasn't been disillusioned yet. ... yet.

There may be situations I can't think of, but I'd suggest that it's the 99% who has created this situation in most cases.

btbuildem• 13 years ago

"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"

From the entire article, this stuck out the most for me. It is such a simple explanation.

bane• 13 years ago

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.

Tzunamitom• 13 years ago

First let me start by saying I am someone who has worked almost exclusively doing a "bullshit job", in fact if there were a scale of bullshit jobs, I think that Management Consulting would probably be placed at the apex of bullshit.

I have felt the pain described, and was with the author right up until the point where they started talking about the tube workers, which struck a nerve. Tube drivers can bring the system to its knees because they are highly unionised and can (and do) choose to strike en masse whenever they're not happy with working conditions, salary, proposed changes etc. What is one of their strongest oppositions? Automated tube driving systems. Systems that would make the tube network cheaper to run, increase capacity, improve speed and safety, and yes, make tube drivers redundant.

So here we are, and the TGWU (transport union) et al are basically ruining my day-to-day commute to keep tube drivers in their cushy positions, maintaining an inefficient situation that makes the tube drivers "indispensable". I'm gonna call bullshit on that.

Now let's say that some miracle happens and somehow the TGWU racket is broken and progress is allowed to happen. TfL (Transport for London) decide to replace all of their train drivers (why the hell are humans driving trains in the 21st century anyway???) with computerised systems. Who's gonna do that? Who's gonna plan, design, build, test, implement and maintain such a massively complex system? The tube drivers? Don't think so. I'll give you good odds that you're going to be calling in the Management Consultants to do this. All of a sudden my bullshit job isn't seeming like quite such bullshit when it is saving the taxpayer millions of pounds each year and reducing your morning commute by 20 minutes.

So here we come to the crux of the problem of this article. The yardstick by which you've chosen to determine if a job is "worthwhile" is whether anyone would notice if those workers disappeared. Given this definition, it is unsurprising that those jobs that have a very direct reward will seem the most worthwhile (i.e. nurse treats patient, patient feels better, patient happy, sees value in nurse). This feels right because it fits in nicely with the short-term worlds that most of us humans live in.

Unfortunately, the problem is not necessarily (or just) the bullshit jobs, but our bullshit caveman short-term brains that haven't yet caught up to the 21st century highly-optimised economy in which we live. As Dan Pink notes in Drive, to be motivated, we humans need 3 things - autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Our bullshit jobs are (for the most part) giving us autonomy and mastery more than any grunt jobs since the Industrial Revolution began, but what is lacking is purpose. We feel our jobs are bullshit precisely because they seem to lack purpose. They seem to lack purpose because we are so many levels removed from the output and effect of the things that we do.

I'll give you an example. I worked on a project that improved information security standards at all of the petrol (gas) stations for an oil giant worldwide. This project changed how things worked at 45,000 petrol (gas) stations worldwide, and statistically speaking, likely saved quite a few customers from card or identity fraud while refuelling their cars. Except I have no idea if it did or not - I'll never meet these guys or hear their stories, hell I barely left the office, and most of the things I did were in Excel or PowerPoint.

So there's the problem. Did I make a difference? Yeah probably. Do I emotionally feel like I made a difference? Nope. Not a bit. I was far too detached from the outcome to feel that. Looks great on my CV (resume) though for when I apply for my next bullshit job.

So to me, the answer isn't rushing out to quit our bullshit jobs and becoming tube drivers, or building houses in developing countries, although we'd probably be happier doing so. The answer is re-attaching the purpose element to the highly-productive "bullshit" jobs that we do, and reprogramming our caveman brains to realise that Excel really is mightier than the sword, and that we can be of far more use to the world by adapting our highly-optimised productivity systems to be more meaningful, rather than dismantling them and returning to an enjoyable but unproductive primary-secondary economy.

AndrewKemendo• 13 years ago

I think this is a fantastic interpretation and hits some of the nails on the head.

The yardstick by which you've chosen to determine if a job is "worthwhile" is whether anyone would notice if those workers disappeared.

This is how I judge mine and others' work on a normal basis. As a result, I have always been jealous of those who are ultra-specified because they are the literal choke points of production or whatever effort is happening.

Thinking about it more though, it would seem to me to make sense that people should be fluid between capabilities. Much like you are instructed to diversify your investment portfolio, perhaps you should be diversifying your skill sets.

The trouble there is that you end up a jack of all trades and master of none. This leaves folks like me in a gulch - and generally always dependent on a subject matter expert to get things done in nearly any domain. On the flip side I can move between domains fairly fluidly at a reasonable if not sufficient level of competence to get the job done - making my core skill the skill of persuasion (to hire people onto my teams etc...).

I don't know if there is an answer to this problem here but I think it might be worth thinking about more.

Cheers!

kevinthew• 13 years ago

This article reads like conspiracy-laden bullshit. Not surprisingly, it came from a professor -- ego-driven, vanity jobs for rich white men. Maybe he's projecting based on his probable lifetime experience in the fake-world rat race that is the university syste, just maybe.

shortstuffsushi• 13 years ago

Reading... reading.. oh... it's the Republican's fault; they caused this...

Eventual point invalidated.

I think I've commented on HN before -- I come for tech news, which is where I could see this going. Suddenly it turned into a political discussion, and all hope for some useful resolution immediately gets lost. I really wish it would have turned out differently.

geophile• 13 years ago

Along these lines: https://sites.google.com/site/rulezerorules/

est• 13 years ago

Quote from steve jobs:

So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
.... companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

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