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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 VLM on Monday October 03 2016, @02:29PM
Marx labor theory of value at its finest.
People spend money on all kinds of things not just raw labor.
Money grubbing dude could have rented or sold property or product, organized some financial time value of money scheme (presumably there exists a labor market for A to hire B in just as much as B to hire A in if there was a scheme to raise capital first). The whole arena of Public Social signalling aka charity and religion. Purchase of political power/votes. Buy/Sell imaginary property (aka intellectual property)
A lot of Marx labor theory of value works pretty well when making widgets and gets confusing when talking about haircuts and other service industries. Labor theory of value makes sense when a farmer harvests 50 bushels of WTF annually. Its very fuzzy math indeed when an actuary sets up and runs a marginally profitable car insurance company. "Sign me the Happy Birthday song and please pay ASCAP so you do it legally"
Marxian thinking made a lot of sense when 99% of the economy was dudes sitting on an assembly line tightening the same bolt for 40 years, but most money isn't there anymore in the economy. Its elsewhere. And needs a model that fits elsewhere, not 1850s urban very early industrial era assembly lines in Germany.