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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 migz on Tuesday October 04 2016, @07:42AM
Er. You still get to check the theories against reality. The Austrian epistemological constraints are on what is acceptable as a theory, not on whether or not it should be compared to reality.
In physics you can use maths to make a model using classical mechanics and prove a certain outcome. Then you can test it against reality. The physics part is empirical, the maths part is like Austrian economics.
Empiricism in economics says you can take any crap model, test it, and if it passes, then it's good enough to use (The Chicago School). The Austrians say that your model must be valid from first principles.
It is a question of rigor.
Empiricists have no problem taking Austrian theories and testing them. It is the Austrians that believe testing is not sufficient.
The empiricists have been taking Keyne's theories for ages and saying, good enough. But those theories are falling apart at the moment, since they are being tested on the global economy. The Austrians predicted these outcomes (as did some Neo-Classicists), and they both have ugly predictions for what is going to happen. Mainstream economics has lead us into an economic crisis and has no way out. Perhaps you should consider the theories that predicted this crisis, and have a clear rational way forward.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:03PM
How exactly has Keynesianism failed in the most recent test? Keynes' central idea was that government austerity measures during a recession would make things worse, and the best fiscal policy for government was to take on debt in bad times and engage in austerity in good times. And he had both empirical and theoretical reasons for believing that was the case. In 2008, the counter-argument was put to the test when the UK, Spain, Greece, and several other countries were pushed (largely by German banks, their biggest creditors) to engage in austerity measures in a recession. And lo and behold, unemployment went up and the budget problems got worse. Which isn't surprising, because Herbert Hoover had (on the advice of all the economists at the time) tried the exact same policy idea in 1929 with exactly the same results.
The real failure of Keynesianism wasn't during the 2008 crisis, but in the late 1970's when there was a wage-price spiral that Keynesian policy proved unable to stop. However, when the Fed applied Milton Friedman's ideas, that solved that problem, and the Keynesians also duly revised their theories to account for how the 1970's "stagflation" had happened and what could be done about it.
The reason the Austrian theories haven't been disproven is that they haven't been put to the test.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by migz on Tuesday October 04 2016, @08:05PM
The ABCT explains why there are booms and busts. Further they explain why austerity is the only way to rectify the distortions created by the mis-allocation of capital produced by profligate government largess in favored sectors of the economy.
The bust must come, and it will come, and the further the Keynesians kick the can down the road the worse the correction will inevitably be. That is what the Austrian theory says. The bust is unavoidable, the only questions are when and how rapid it will be.
Austrian theories are true by derivation, they do not require implementation to be proved. They do not require implementation to make predictions, they can make predictions based on past and current policy. And they have reliably predicted the crises of Keynsianism and the Friedmanites.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:43PM
Yes, they do. Because even if the logic and the math are perfect, they can still be flawed if the axioms they started with were incorrect. That's why deductive reasoning is insufficient when trying to describe real-world phenomena. And conveniently, you describe what implementation of Austrian School policies would look like in your first paragraph:
Which means that I was mistaken when I said Austrian School theory wasn't put to the test, because their preferred austerity policies were in fact implemented by several nations in Europe.
Let's take, for example, Spain: In 2007, they were running a slight budget surplus, with pretty typical tax rates for a Western nation (low 40% range) and unemployment at about 7%. Pretty good, not great, and nothing that suggests some sort of major problem. In 2009, in response to financial crisis and the resulting budget crisis, they implemented austerity, and over the next 4 years unemployment skyrocketed upwards to a completely overwhelming 27% while GDP per capita fell 18%, and while both those numbers are starting to recover it's still far below pre-crisis level.
Meanwhile, take the US, where they were in 2007 running a large budget deficit with somewhat unusually low tax rates for a Western nation but unemployment at about 5%. Again, not great, but not terrible either. In 2009, in response to the financial crisis and the resulting budget crisis, they doled out a large government stimulus package, and over the next 4 years unemployment shot up to 10% at first but slowly worked back down to around 8% while GDP per capita recovered and rose to about 1% over pre-crisis levels. Now, unemployment is down to around pre-crisis levels, GDP per capita is up to 4% above pre-crisis level.
And other numbers you look at, like labor force participation and poverty levels tell the same basic story: Austerity made things much worse, not better, and neither Spain as a nation nor your average Spaniard are better off for having tried Austrian-inspired policies. Meanwhile, the basically Keynesian-inspired policies in the US managed to start turning things around right away in 2009.
Which means Austrian School economics had its test, and failed badly. I'll pass.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.