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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 03 2016, @11:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the describing-a-lot-of-jobs dept.

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:31PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:31PM (#409954)

    The difference is, a company that allowed Smiths to reign for too long would go out of business.

    Not necessarily. If the revenue of the company is high enough, and their market position dominant enough, they can have all sorts of middle managers playing these kinds of games and get away with it. For example, if there were a company that just happened to sell the dominant operating system installed on nearly every desktop or laptop (to use a completely theoretical example that surely couldn't have happened a couple of decades ago), they could waste millions and still be raking in enough to keep investors happy.

    --
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