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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: 3, Interesting) by quintessence on Monday October 03 2016, @01:08PM
One of the problems with the conventions of the market is that there is NO distinguishment between paid and unpaid labor. Most people work fairly hard at things that are necessary for them. Problem is most of it is unpaid.
Should I decide that wiping my own ass is too much of a bother, BLAM! I've created a job for someone else supposing I have enough reserves. I've just moved what was previously unpaid work into the market and now someone can get paid.
And it's completely ludicrous, but supposing my current position of kissing someone else's ass pays well enough, I can keep this situation ongoing.
The problem is that with the lack of time, I've moved a great deal of my unpaid labor to the market, if not for someone to cook my meals, then someone to mow my lawn, mend my clothes, etc.
That is the insidiousness of not having a 20 hour work week. I'm now paying for things I would do myself if I had the time.
Much of that "unproductive activity" is just work that still needs to be done, but no one has figured out a way to make it pay, and it becomes a sunk cost Even for the quote unquote bullshit jobs, much of it is actually managing information. None of those cabinet makers would even have the time to fry fish if they are answering the phone all the time and dealing with customers for their cabinets.
That's not to say we couldn't send most middle managers to Mars with little more than a hiccup to productivity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spook brat on Monday October 03 2016, @02:37PM
That's not to say we couldn't send most middle managers to Mars with little more than a hiccup to productivity.
You know, it's lots of fun to dump on middle managers, but in large organizations they serve a useful purpose.
Have you ever tried to coordinate a large project with more than, say, 9 people involved? Metcalfe's law [wikipedia.org] starts to kick in, and keeping everyone informed about everyone else's progress becomes the dominant thing people spend time doing. Productivity goes down, and there's a lot of redundant, wasted effort. This only gets worse the more the organization grows.
In the military a workaround for this is baked into the command structure: each commander directly communicates their intent to 4-8 subordinates, who then do the same all the way down the line until instructions reach the individual soldier. Status and progress reports are filtered back up through the same channels. This allows the general of an army or the president of a nation to effectively lead 100,000 troops or more. Go ahead and plug 4 and 100,000 into the equation n*(n-1)/2; there is no way that an organization that size could operate w/o effective tiered leadership in its structure.
If you want to argue instead that perhaps we'd be simply better off w/o armies, wars, factory farms, and mega-corporations, I could entertain that. It would be a much more entertaining discussion of economies of scale vs craftsmanship, conformity & consistency of product vs anarchy & available variety.
Living in a world where the efficiency gained by creation of large organizations is valued, however, the contributions of a middle manager shouldn't be lightly denigrated.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Monday October 03 2016, @05:25PM
you have put your finger on the nub of the problem: large korporations...
they are only necessary for destroying competition, NOT for the actual making and distributing of widgets ( the supposed goal)...
i know in just about ALL the firms i worked for that got above mom and pop size, there was always mgmt that was/is fucking useless, EXCEPT for the penultimate challenge of keeping the peasants from revolting...
otherwise, they could drop off the face of the earth and productivity would increase...
their function is to keep the patriarchal, authoritarian hierarchy intact so the people ACTUALLY AND REALLY responsible for the productivity dont get any uppity ideas...
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Monday October 03 2016, @06:51PM
you have put your finger on the nub of the problem: large korporations...
they are only necessary for destroying competition, NOT for the actual making and distributing of widgets ( the supposed goal)...
I disagree, there's another function of large corporations: making and distributing of widgets at lower cost, which is why they are able to out-compete smaller rivals. As much as we love the idea of buying local, the price difference compared to buying from WalMart/China is significant. Economy of scale is a real thing, and having the capital to buy/build a machine/factory to mass-produce your widget delivers a real, permanent advantage over small batches and handcrafting. Destruction of competition is at that point a side-effect. The artisan market is thereafter higher cost and likely to become accessible only to the affluent.
Companies become large because that's what allows them to deliver the lowest-price goods at the highest profit margin. As participants in the economy we demand it. It's not good or evil, it simply is.
i know in just about ALL the firms i worked for that got above mom and pop size, there was always mgmt that was/is fucking useless, EXCEPT for the penultimate challenge of keeping the peasants from revolting...
otherwise, they could drop off the face of the earth and productivity would increase...
Bad managers are bad, news at 11. Stay tuned for our follow-up story: bad hiring decisions are hard to undo.
From another perspective, when working in a large group if there is a subset acting at odds to the rest of the group then active sabotage is functionally equivalent to both insubordination and poor coordination. In that context, it can be really hard (especially for many creative types of personalities) to distinguish the message "can we please all just walk in the same direction?" from "BOW, SLAVES! SUBMIT TO YOUR MASTERS!!!" YMMV
their function is to keep the patriarchal, authoritarian hierarchy intact so the people ACTUALLY AND REALLY responsible for the productivity dont get any uppity ideas...
It is not a prerequisite that the authoritarian hierarchy be patriarchal. The authoritarian part is also dependent on the local culture; Scandinavian vs. American vs. Japanese companies will all differ in how they respond to input from the employees working the assembly lines.*
Hierarchy, however, is indispensable in a large organization. It doesn't matter how charismatic the leader is, no one can answer the daily email questions from every employee of even a smallish (1k or so employees) company. Some delegation is going to happen there. Hiring someone just to manage communication and organizational behavior seems wasteful, but if doing so allows for the economies of scale I mentioned earlier (and hence increases profits even after the "wasted" salary) then that middle manager is going to be hired.
*In defense of authoritarianism, it does make things easier; when it's time to change direction, it's simpler and faster to just say "here's the plan, do it... NOW" than taking a poll/listening to/weighing every suggestion from every participant. Metcalf's Law strikes again! Of course, when the order ends up steering you into disaster, [wikipedia.org] it seems like much less of a virtue...
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:35AM
Middle manager I see?
You are under the mistaken impression organization scales infinitely. It does not, and even the law you quote states: "Furthermore, Metcalfe’s law assumes that the value of each node n is of equal benefit. If this is not the case, for example because the one fax machines serves 50 workers, the second half of that, the third one third, and so on, then the relative value of an additional connection decreases". You have diminishing returns with too many chiefs and not enough indians, not to mention you curiously exclude management as a portion of the complexity that reduces productivity, increases redundancy and wasted effort. It would seem the larger something scales the less management you'd want, otherwise you are increasing the entropy of the organization with every new manager.
You are also completely ignoring self-organization in your evaluation, which is more prevalent and more efficient than any hierarchical structure (as an aside, you have Viet Nam vets describing having to contact a commander before returning fire. It got so bad waiting for the okay from Washington that they would actively subvert the entire command structure hence the saying "it is easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").
I already made mention that some information management is inherent to most large undertakings. Whether that comes in the form dilute authority, technology, common practice, or middle managers is arbitrary.
Yes Gladys, your job too can be automated, which is why most managers can be shitcanned without affecting productivity at all.