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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century's end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes' promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the '60s – never materialise? 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.
[...] And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs."
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 exactly what is not supposed to happen.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Ed Note: Link to John Maynard Keynes was NOT in the original article.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Popeidol on Monday October 03 2016, @12:40PM
Yeah, the article is disappointing. I was hoping for a discussion about some of the inefficiencies inherent in capitalism, but instead they took a look at the state of the world and made some weird assumptions. Some of the problems he lists (corporate lawyers? stock market gaming?) are less problems with capitalism and more about capitalism-government interaction. Capitalism wants to maximize benefit in whatever situation it's in, and the structures and rules surrounding it currently benefit those behaviors. If killing puppies gave a measurable benefit to a company you can bet there'd be more corporate puppy murder, but legislating a penalty for puppy killings would sort it out fast.
Capitalism does create a lot of pointless jobs. Jobs in marketing and advertising don't contribute core value, they're the exoskeleton and mandibles of the corporate organism - you could survive without them but another corporation would probably come along and devour you.
The fact they're kind of pointless doesn't mean they're useless. Capitalism can still be more efficient than other options while containing inherently inefficient elements.
(Disclaimer: I'm not talking about pure capitalism, but neither is the author)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by number11 on Monday October 03 2016, @02:00PM
"Capitalism wants to maximize profit in whatever situation it's in, and the structures and rules surrounding it currently benefit those behaviors. "
Let's not confuse "profit" with "benefit".
(Score: 2) by migz on Tuesday October 04 2016, @07:24AM
Don't confuse "profit" with "money". Classical economics is based on maximizing utility, and this is not inherently monetary in nature. Economics does not require money, and capitalism does not require it either.
This how economics can explain philanthropy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by dingus on Monday October 03 2016, @05:01PM
It's a mistake to think that Capitalism and the State can ever remain distinct.
Anyway, I think what the author was trying to say was something like the tree scenario. Suppose you start with a flat bed of moss. Each little patch of moss gets the same amount of sunlight, and pretty much gets it for free. However, one patch of moss starts to grow higher than all the others in an attempt to get more light. This costs significantly more energy, to the point where it might even be inefficient to begin with. But it doesn't matter, just one moss has to do it, and they might have made the wrong choice. In response, all the other moss has to grow higher to make sure they don't get outcompeted. Repeat. Eventually you have a mighty forest, each tree growing ever higher to get just a little more sunlight. By now most of their energy is going towards maintaining their huge trunks and complicated leaf systems. It's a monumental waste of energy. If the moss had all just decided to stay flat(or perhaps had agreed upon an optimal pattern of growth), things would have been better for everyone.
I think that's why corporations tend to move in ways that generate the bullshit jobs that the author is talking about. Your competitors have a division for Armadillo research? Well, better get one, and make it bigger and better so you can poach their researchers. Your competitors are selling financial constructs so complex you have to hire expensive consultants to understand what they are? Better get on the bandwagon. And then those little pointless outgrowths solidify due to internal politics and then the process repeats itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @03:32PM
...this list of 50 work-making strategies, many negative: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Here is a list of possible ways to deal with joblessness. Some "cures" emerge mostly on their own; some require political action to start or to prevent. This list is intended to be complete in order to help in understanding the interaction between social changes and job creation; not all possibilities are desirable by most societies. The ones in the first half of the list (like wage subsidies, a shorter work week, or a basic income) in general would usually be considered more positive and adaptive responses than the ones in the second half of the list (like war, escapism, and luddism), although actual preferences or ordering of desirability and acceptability may vary depending on political beliefs and feelings about things like government intervention and taxation. Many of the items in the second half of the list have profit-making aspects for some individuals within the current economic system, although usually directly at the cost of others in society (like crime). Not all items on this list are compatible with each other. Not all might be considered moral or would be legal under international law or existing trade agreements. Some of these "cures" create new jobs (like public works), others make it easier to survive without a job (like frugality), others eliminate the unemployed individuals from the official statistics in various ways (like prisons), others in some way destroy abundance which has a side effect of creating jobs to build it back up (war), and some allow someone unemployed to take a job that someone else was doing but who no longer can do the job anymore for various reasons (like mandatory retirement). Some of the "cures" that help individuals survive without a job may actually increase the unemployment rate as they reduce demand for items in the market place produced by paid employment, contributing to overall increased joblessness even as the individual may be helped locally. Because these items may interact in unexpected ways, and people have many different feelings about them as different groups may benefit or be harmed in different ways, and many vested interests are involved, it is challenging for any economist, political scientist, politician or private citizen to make sense of all these issues or to pick a best way forward, even though people are trying in various ways to do that. New approaches in social science involving computer simulation and agent-based modelling may also help in understanding the way these issues interact to gain insight into them. ..."
I'm suprised no one has mentioned Bob Black's essay from 1985: "The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."