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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: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday October 03 2016, @12:46PM
The problem, perhaps, is that economics is a "made up" job - and by the terms of this articles, pointless.
Why do I say this? The mathematics used to describe the movement of particles in our simulations are the *bare minimum* to understand the properties of the system. Generally, the predictive power of the model is predicated on the resolution of the input parameters.
So in essence, economics is the "soft" job created when the "hard" job is the mathematics we use to solve *real* problems - handwaving is too good for it.
And in this whole article the author did not have the brains to cite Douglas Adams.
Do you prefer a world without telephone sanitisers or the risk of dying of a virulent disease caught from a telephone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @01:12PM
> And in this whole article the author did not have the brains to cite Douglas Adams.
Lolwut? You complain about the fact the economics is a branch of psychology and not a so-called "hard science" and one of your major criticisms is that this author did not cite Dilbert. Maybe we need a better understanding of the psychology that explains you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @01:29PM
There has even be an economy professor [wikipedia.org] who said that economy has more to do with astrology than astronomy,
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @02:16PM
Wrong Adams...
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rivenaleem on Monday October 03 2016, @01:36PM
I was going to mod you up, but nobody was paying me to do this pointless task, so I did not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @06:34PM
Economics has the idea of 'happiness' and 'utility'. These are real variables in the economic systems.
These are items that fill into the 'math' of these guys. If you could actually measure emotion then yeah their systems *might* work. You can not measure that sort of thing. Hell, today I woke up and feel ok. Last week I was depressed. Yet my average is something else. Something could happen and suddenly I am angry and not happy. You can not measure this accurately at any time. Why? Because the only way to filter it out is through my brain. My brain is not reliable and neither is yours. Your brain tells you that you are reliable. But in practice you and I do funny things that make no sense and have no real use. Yet economics tries to measure it and graph it as a simple 2d point system when it is probably a 20 dimensional fluctuating wave.
There are a few things that economics tends to get right. But they are more guidelines than actual truths. For example the broken window fallacy. The idea that destroying something always destroys value. But you can demonstrate that to be not true. I knock down an old shack and build a million dollar mansion in its place I probably have created value. I destroyed the value of a worthless thing and put in its place something of value. However it is not always true when you say destroying things creates value to others (the actual broken window parable). But only because it took value from somewhere else. There is no real way to measure that. I could build that million dollar mansion but it is in the middle of a swamp and no one wants it. I then destroyed value. But it is in the middle of a city I created value.
Also for example people say monopolies are bad. Yet it is provable that one set of roads (a government monopoly) is a good thing. Yet on the other hand one company making shoes in the world can be proven to be a bad thing. That is the dichotomy of economics.
Economics is a poor 'science'. Anyone who comes at you saying economics proves capitalism or socialism is selling you a belief system. Economics is a good way to judge what a system might do but not to prove one will work. Even then it will probably get it wrong as economics does not know what to measure to get it right in the first place.
Economics is the intersection of pop psychology, philosophy, 1st year algebra, and money.