8 ms·

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation. As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse. It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.

majewsky 8y ago
> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. There is no purely rational way to redistribute wealth (or, really, no rational way to actually do anything). Rationality is a tool that allows you to choose the path of action that best fits your goals/values. It does not prescribe any values. What we (as a society) do right now to redistribute wealth may very well be "the rational way" relative to some set of values. So what you're actually saying is: Society hasn't found a way to redistribute wealth that fits your value system.
- thomasahle 8y ago
  Some people believe that it is possible to derive values. But even if you don't, it is still very possible that the way most things are done is inconsistent with most peoples values. Simply because using rationality to go from values to policies is computationally hard and can give counter-intuitive results.
- lmm 8y ago
  The efficient frontier is large, but a lot of the things we do are just dead-weight losses. There are cases of incompatible values where we have to make trade-offs, sure, but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system I think the set of possible value systems is much larger than you appreciate. For example, nuclear war is perfectly rational when your value system is "KILL ALL HUMANS".
- kepler425b 8y ago
  I would argue that we have figured out a way to distribute wealth (planet resources really) but the capitalistic economy system that we are tangled makes changing anything almost impossible unless it was a global change. Many philosophers and scientists that actually do something came up with various ideas, main one is resource based economy coupled with technology. The idea is that we set our values to waste as less resources as possible and make products according to our actual needs, no chocolate taste toothpase or any other nonsense. You put scientific method into play and set goal values to most optimal for our well being, psychology (no meaningless jobs, since almost everything can be automized, instead provide people with whatever tools they need to do anything they want.), health and the planet itself - no rape needlessly. Anyone interested have a look at Peter Jospeh video series - culture in decline.
- perfmode 8y ago
  the way we redistribute wealth right now is through busy work. this is incredibly irrational. once we recognize that, we can start thinking about alternatives in earnest.
gepi79 8y ago
It is not just social status but also real financial constraints for survival that lead to wage slavery. IMO poverty and austerity and military and wars imposed or tolerated because of greed and lack of empathy and foolish voters are the main reasons for needless misery. The kind words for John McCain were shocking and disgusting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA&t=356s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA&t=356s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--joNde92k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--joNde92k
ekianjo 8y ago
You have a bleak perspective on things. As human beings we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food, and we ha e never had as much disposable income as now to be able to enjoy more things out of work. And your view can be easily reverted. We have never had as many interesting jobs as now. And centuries before us you had to do what your parents did and you had a miserable life anyway. Lets stop with the Lost Eden false nostalgia.
- mumin-abu-jamal 8y ago
  "we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food" We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html
  - feverfew 8y ago
    But what was there to do with this free time?
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      Rest. Socialize. Make babies. Goof off, make others laugh. I'm gonna guess that some folks had games, and children likely invented them.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        You forgot die in pain because your food was contaminated or your water has bacteria. Can we stop with the happy savages myth for a second?
        eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        This is a false dichotomy.
        Broken_Hippo 8y ago
dantheman 8y ago
I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
- minipci1321 8y ago
  > It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations. Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer. IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations. The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over. Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
- PavlikPaja 8y ago
  I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful. Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
- a_bonobo 8y ago
  Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor! Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.
kamaal 8y ago
>>There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; One of the real reasons why languages like Lisp and Perl had a short life in MegaCorps is they were anti-dote to large people hierarchies. You can disproportionate work with small teams. Execs and VPs openly boast in company all hands about their 'team sizes' and numbers almost as the biggest accomplishment of their lives. No one is going to buy any technology or methodology which shrinks their head count.
- kahoon 8y ago
  If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? E.g. developing a website in assembly would keep more people occupied than HTML/JS/CSS.
  - kamaal 8y ago
    >>If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? 'Assembly' is a abstraction. To a Perl programmer. Java's verbosity would look like Assembly.
  - dasmoth 8y ago
    If one were being cynical and thinking that optimising for (maximum) headcount is a major driver here, one might want to avoid technologies with substantial barriers to entry, since that might clear the market of qualified people and make further recruitment very hard. The "ideal" technology would be one where almost anyone can pick it up quickly and at least look like they're being vaguely productive, but where even a 0.01-%ile expert will struggle to achieve really exceptional things.
guptarohit 8y ago
100% agree!!
- guptarohit 8y ago
  I believe all this is part of evolution.. thing to come after the current(human).
sophistication 8y ago
An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail because they do not take such possibly hardwired mechanisms account. E.g. a male who foregoes meat and excessive life style appears to have it harder [0], not easier in his romantic life. [0]: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-26154-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-26154-001
- guskel 8y ago
  I've made this observation as well. It goes further than diet, of course. Cars and clothes is another example. The only thing that could change this behavior is if women selected for mates practicing sustainability.
  - checkyoursudo 8y ago
    Other cultural pressures can overcome people's strong desires to please/attract mates, so I'm not sure that's the only way. Cars and clothes as status are a themselves a consequence of culture. If culture moved away from that to something else then it would just be that other thing that mates selected for. But your general point is well taken.
  - slimshady94 8y ago
    I agree. If the women in my generation viewed sustainability and a low ecological footprint as attractive, all I'd do is work on global warming and poverty rather than study algorithms to make money.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  I forwent meat and most of my excessive lifestyle after I got married--but before I had my children--and I don't think I could possibly be happier (in areas that I perceive to be so related). Under your theory maybe you just need to let boys be boys until they snag a mate and then, via cultural pressures and norms, convert them to sustainability. Though I think I would have been fine if I stopped eating meat etc before I shacked up, but maybe I just have a high opinion of myself, which is itself a main reason why my wife said she was attracted to me in the first place... Personally, I'd be surprised if meat eating and peacocking and resource hoarding and excessiveness really makes a difference if a man lacks other redeeming qualities, but I honestly have NFC.
mattowen_uk 8y ago
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures. These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation; good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30% actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt from the employment queue. However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers, errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly. These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs. 10% actual work. People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble. Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product output. There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works, but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.
dnomad 8y ago
> As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. It's actually the opposite that is the case. As technology progresses you will see more and more and more speculative waste because the entire market becomes more efficient at producing speculative waste. Another name for "speculative waste" by the way is "Capitalism." Before you worry about "bullshit job" you might want to consider the thousands of businesses that fail everyday, the books and movies and cartoons and the mountains of media that is produced that will never be read or consumed, the endless containers of products -- everything from Squirrel Girl teeshirts to satellite networks to cryptocurrencies -- that get made and then quickly discarded. All of it is speculative waste and all of it is absolutely necessary for a free market to function. The concept of "bullshit jobs" is stupid but it's the "common sense" stupidity that is really just a lack of imagination. In a global economy filled with billions of independent actors the vast majority of economic activity will be variously inefficient, useless and often down right harmful. This speculative waste will expand to consume all of the speculative capital available. The vast majority of this economic activity will only be minimally profitable and much of it will generate no returns whatsoever. But every once in a while you get a "10 bagger", an investment that yields order of magnitude returns, and this changes everything. The author should be concerned not that most people are engaged in ultimately pointless economic activity but that, perhaps like himself, so many in the West are profoundly underemployed.
vorg 8y ago
Bullshit jobs also 4) keep a country's population occupied so they don't self-organize and revolt against the country's entrenched power structures.
- adamjc 8y ago
  I think this is a side-effect rather than intentional.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    History proves otherwise. In many cultures, including ancient Greece, China and the roman empire, scholars described that artificially creating employment to prevent social unrest was not uncommon.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Maybe in the past, but these days, it would require unprecedented (in western democracies) levels of direct influence. On the other hand, the market is itself extremely good at keeping people occupied, chasing ever diminishing salaries.
      - pixl97 8y ago
        >levels of direct influence Um... isn't that exactly what a 'jobs program' is. The US government has a lot of programs with private industry along those lines.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      sure, but is the revolt prevented by keeping them busy or by giving them an (albeit bullshit) means of keeping food on their tables? i'm not a historian, but most of the revolts i've learned about were immediately preceded by severe scarcities of essential items.
- branchless 8y ago
  Spot on. Spare time would allow us to conclude we can expunge rentiers. Here is a video on land value tax, which would fix our messed up feudal economies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0 Posting here as shadow banned after two posts because Hacker News hates any kind of free speech.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bgie 8y ago
A company doing X has as its main goal not being good at doing X, but making profit. This is the essence, and reason why companies need a hierarchy of managers: the owners are at the top, their instructions (make us profit) are delegated down, then profit goes back up. The people in charge are not there because they are experts at doing X. They are there because they are experts at making sure profits go to the top. All bullsh*t jobs and most inefficiencies can be traced back to people not caring enough about doing X. Because that is not what the company is about, its about making profit.
tim333 8y ago
>3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. I'm all in favour of us having a life of leisure or fun jobs (actor, ski explorer etc) and everyone having a basic income from the state. Sadly though the AI robots are not here and getting someone to fix your plumbing is still a pain, plus many other jobs. Maybe in the future we can go that way.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  AI is not a binary event. Technological progress gradually removes the need for labor. Consider simple unsexy things such as automatic cashiers at supermarkets, McDonald's, etc. How many jobs have they made redundant? And do you know that "computer" used to be a profession? Do you know that the majority of blue collar work in 2018 will be made redundant by self-driving vehicles? And so on. You say I am overestimating technological progress. Ok, then explain to me why work hours are increasing. They should at the very least be staying the same right?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Work hours are increasing because of the decline in unions, and along with it, worker bargaining power.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      They are not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?country=BEL+FRA+ITA+CHE+USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?count...
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        They are for the US, while they're declining for the EU countries you selected (which your graph shows).
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Plumbing and other trades like it are the opposite of bullshit jobs, though. They require specific training and skill. They have tangible results that clearly improve the world (even if they're reactionary and small-scale, i.e., fixing a broken sink drain).
skate22 8y ago
> "A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation." Destruction of jobs in our current society would mean bad things for many people. I understand what you were going for, but society is not at that point yet imo
- annabellish 8y ago
  Our current society is definitely not rational, which I inferred as the point. Our economic system is a good 80% complete nonsense, where we're essentially playing a very complicated and meaningless game with ourselves, except one with meaningful consequences for real people.
  - that_jojo 8y ago
    You're making me so happy, because the most frustrating thing for me is that, with how tied up in personal and cultural identity and self-worth it all is, few people are willing to admit or recognize this. Economy, at its core, is a network of transaction predicated on value. Value, at its core, is nothing more than a perception.
jbrun 8y ago
There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are small and profitable (or that they are solo entrepreneurs), then all companies can be like that. You need to look at the "real world". Modern civilization requires very, very large organizations that are very complex. Keeping these organizations running is not all sunshine and lollipops. There are a lot of boring, but necessary jobs. See large airlines, mining companies, electrical utilities,... etc. THe modern world is big, complicated and has lots of tedious tasks that ensure your airplane (for which you got a cheap ticket) is built safely, takes off, landes, has fuel, and whose passenger tickets are priced at an insanely cheap level. As a straightforward example, just look at the complexity of producing and distributing fossil fuels. Read Vaclav Smil. Are there boring jobs that may one day be automated, yes. But the thing with automation is that it will not eliminate jobs, because we will just buy more stuff - this is exactly what has happened since the Industrial revolution.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Citation needed. What is "market economy" and how does it remove bullshit jobs?
  - smolder 8y ago
    It's a theoretical model of how markets work, but substituting the people for omniscient spherical cows because real people make the modelling too difficult to be useful.
- rout39574 8y ago
  I think you're letting your desire, your "belief" in a market economy, dictate your interpretations. Belief is a key term here: if it were observation, we wouldn't need to believe; we would point out how the theory functions in _this_ case just like we can demonstrate the function of an internal combustion engine. Nobody talks about "believing" in PV=NRT. :) I have a suggestion: Every time you start talking, to yourself or others, about what a market economy does by definition, add to your statement the concept of perfect information. That's a cornerstone of market theory. So if we just stipulate the theoretical function of a market economy is everything you believe, we are left with concrete implementations which will vary from that perfection by the degree to which information is imperfect. How do you measure that imperfection? That's a doozy. But if someone managing a $1T company has information imperfect by a percent... wouldn't that leave room for $10B of bullshit? Even if every actor in the company was operating in good faith? How completely do you think your nearest C-level executive understands the function of their organization? 99%? 80%? So... I think "By definition bullshit jobs would be removed" is treating economics with a precision that would make physics blush, and is usually only attempted by philosophers.
biggusdickus 8y ago
It is much better than global wars.
dood 8y ago
I think there is a simpler explanation, that has nothing to do with technology, productivity, or society: big companies are naturally inefficient internally (due to complexity) but as a whole are best optimized for capturing and retaining markets/regulators.
make3 8y ago
this reasoning doesn't work. most jobs aren't created by politicians anything like directly, and companies have direct incentive to not be wasteful in their spending. I'm of the opinion that it's just a failing of management, which is hard.
bena 8y ago
Let's break it down to something simple: I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational? Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem rational? Ok, but what if we had the same job. Build a widget. And due to being good at widget building, I only needed an hour to build my widget while you needed three. Now, the output of our work is the same. Should you be rewarded for simply taking longer? I could build three widgets in the time it took you to build one. Well, if we're paying by output, then shouldn't we go back to a 50/50 split of the money? But what if widgets make a profit of $1 for each sold? And we each worked three hours building and selling widgets. And you made one and I made three and the all sold. I was more productive. Is it rational for me to split the money with you 50/50 because you don't have the same? Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  Literally zero percent of the economy works like this in reality.
  - ci5er 8y ago
    Some people do not start out with different starting conditions? Some people are not more productive than others? In what way are varying starting conditions and varying productivity levels (cost structures) not realistic? If I were to guess, GPs point is that post-hoc redistribution is not fair (or can not be made to be fair?). Do you disagree with this conclusion?
    - bena 8y ago
      It's close. My point is that we need a clear definition of what's fair to start from. And it has to be a definition that is satisfactory to most people.
dominotw 8y ago
> Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. What can replace this though. There is needs to be something that creates a social hierarchy. We can only operate in an hierarchy.
geodel 8y ago
As Dr Ford from WestWorld said something like 'Human are very predictable and run in tight loops' while explaining there is not much difference between man and machine. As I reflect on my life it does seem very predictable outside work. At office it is still a bit interesting due to all sort of random issues crop up in a work day.
LarryDarrell 8y ago
In regards to your second point, I often wonder what it would be like today had Reagan not started the trend of not enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. We are in a situation where we may end up having to break up AT&T, for instance, twice in a 40 year period.
ken 8y ago
> 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress I would disagree, but this depends entirely on how you define "actual work". Is building and maintaining Facebook actual work? Is composing and playing new music actual work? If we had automated every mechanical task so 100% of human effort every day was spent creating art, would you consider that 100% employment, or 100% unemployment? I don't think there's one correct answer here. We've never in the past had to use terms like "work" and "employment" in the context of a world where nobody had to work, so it's ambiguous. There's some kinds of jobs (like creating art) which seem literally bottomless. There's other kinds of jobs (like inventing technology) that create new kinds of work. We may well run out of manual labor, but I don't see us ever running out of work. > 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. Agreed -- or rather, "wealth" is another one of those words which starts to lose its clear definition in a post-scarcity, post-labor world. It was a good abstraction for a couple thousand years, but no abstraction can survive indefinite growth of both technology and scale.
- softawre 8y ago
  Yes, building Facebook is actual work. But there are lots of people who work at Facebook who don't actually build the site, or test it, or do something that is important to delivering the website to customers.
Chathamization 8y ago
>) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; I don't think that's actually true. Here's a quick list I threw together on another post: >Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars. But as people pointed out, those things need collective action and political will. Our current mentality is that we should have minimal collective action, and the vast majority of our resources should go towards what can bring us the largest personal profit returns, no matter the impact on humanity in general. I think we're seeing some of the limits to that approach.
swah 8y ago
Isn't my smartphone redistribution of wealth?
rhacker 8y ago
Similar feelings, but slightly different list: 1) TLDR: We don't have a mission beyond population management. Long version: The population is too large to have any consensus about what humanity should be doing. We can never be on the same page at this point. We're constantly just struggling to manage growing populations. 2% of the population is capable of actually thinking through and carrying out any possible reason of existing beyond putting new technology in front of people. While new technology does in fact help humanity, our application of it is totally misplaced - it goes into military or just entertaining people.. Until a massive number of people are dedicated to extra-planetary research, we're wasting time on a doomed planet. 2) We have had a general movement from - people helping others to everyone is out for themselves. This changes the social contract from grand parents moving in with their children to everyone better get their 15 kinds of insurance in order early. If someone lost a house and the neighborhood pooled together to re-build them a house, and there was no need to "buy in" to that, then we would be both richer, and more comfortable with each other. 3) People have become mean. Streets are filled with angry drivers. People only seem to care about their friends for what they can be provided with. If shit hit the fan, most of those people would kill you to steal your food. 4) All of this leads to the house of cards. All these bullshit jobs are supported through various special conditions humanity has set up (insurance companies, banking industry, food industry, military industry) - which means that the bullshit jobs are paid for in the slight tweaks we keep making to our collective society to be more and more a dog-eat-dog world. It's sad that most people probably don't understand any of this. The only fix would be for humanity to have a mission beyond our individual mission to keep supporting the current structure.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
Either the survival processes are "basic and monkey-like" or they are what motivated the production of microchips... How can it be both ways? Why is what you're describing not just cultural collapse? The books describing the rise & fall of empires describe historical stages very similar to what is going on today. There is lots of room for innovation, but with high taxes and restrictive regulation there is less upside for entrepreneurs. The middle class being so weak has clear causes and effects. It is government and its lack of free market virtues that reinforce the need for so many bullshit jobs. Just look at all of non-STEM academia... With the tools we have today, if the average middle class man were more stable economically - and wasn't brainwashed into going to school until he's nearly 30 - then many of them could innovate enough to make a living in a reliable way. Local services, infrastructure creation & upkeep, artisan crafts, and apprenticeship models have lots of potential headroom. But there are also lots of historical strikes against the middle class - and high rent is a good example of one - which is a bubble created by fraudulent market regulation. We are constantly inundated by "free markets don't work" propaganda. How can we say the markets are free when all of the favorite examples of the propaganda: ISP, telecom, pharma, education, etc - are all the most highly regulated and conjoined with government! That's the definition of over-regulation... Then when "deregulating," there is a wave of opportunistic action which the propaganda calls "free market greediness" - which would never happen if government stayed out of market-making in the first place. And of course this propaganda promotes the idea that we need even more government regulation - and we must never de-regulate... It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
tomc1985 8y ago
This is a tricky one, because society also shares that burden in providing jobs just as politicians do. Society could provides these jobs in positions some might consider "pointless" or "bullshit": using gas station attendants instead of self-serve pumps, for example, or giving local mentally disabled folks a job sweeping floors and cleaning trays at McDonald's, or giving local homeless jobs hawking newspapers instead of self-serve vending machines. The difference with these positions is that the person is performing real, if only a little, service to other people. Some bullshit or pointless jobs can still give someone meaning. I think it's important to find a way to keep the population busy, even if it calls for society hiring tons more gas-pumpers or walmart-greeters
MadcapJake 8y ago
> This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. Such an interesting moment that we find ourselves in: Humans have taken over the planet and are upset that daily lives now revolve around trite and petty bs rather than predators, scarcity and violence.
- L_Rahman 8y ago
  No we're upset that we can't cut out the trite and petty bs and be free to make ourselves happy while not worrying about predators, scarcity and violence. I find these arguments in defense of the existing system to to be the actually trite thing because it reveals an inability to truly look at the system at large and ask what outcomes we want and instead mounts a defense of it as is.
  - MadcapJake 8y ago
    Hey I'm all for social change when it comes to repressed/marginalized people and even wealth redistribution, but I just don't think we can escape BS as discussed in TFA.
WiltedSpinach 8y ago
'Rational' can only come about once one has chosen a goal to achieve or a social group to adhere to, because ANY set of logically developed statements must derive from axioms, logic itself included. You just happen to believe that (If I read your point "1)" correctly) that there is a limited amount of work to be done in any society. One could just as easily state that a 'rational' society should celebrate: a stable number of jobs (if one is anti-technologically inclined, or if one happens to believe that society is harmed by rapid change); or a growing number of jobs (the rapid change view + population growth, or a belief that more jobs mean people have found more problems to be solved). But one could also move away from the direct 'jobs' concern and argue that a 'rational' society would be better at finding ways to address the need humans have for being valuable to their society (often expressed here in the US in terms of having a job) and ensuring that people have enough capital to live on a year-to-year basis, whether by changing the expression of those needs and giving a universal basic income or by finding better jobs or perhaps even by going with a strongly progressive income tax and actually supporting small businesses. Many of the examples I have provided have been argued in the past at some point or another (and my short list is by NO means complete), and one could certainly talk about whether empirical evidence seems to support or contradict each of these points (though note that there are likely multiple interpretations of the data!), but ultimately our society is made of people and articles such as this suggest that we have built a society that systematically fails to support the values of its members. So maybe we should start talking about those values and quit going on rants about 'oh, everyone else is irrational'. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
pdonis 8y ago
> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. Actually, we have: a free market. The problem is keeping it.

majewsky 8y ago

> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. There is no purely rational way to redistribute wealth (or, really, no rational way to actually do anything). Rationality is a tool that allows you to choose the path of action that best fits your goals/values. It does not prescribe any values. What we (as a society) do right now to redistribute wealth may very well be "the rational way" relative to some set of values. So what you're actually saying is: Society hasn't found a way to redistribute wealth that fits your value system.

thomasahle 8y ago
Some people believe that it is possible to derive values. But even if you don't, it is still very possible that the way most things are done is inconsistent with most peoples values. Simply because using rationality to go from values to policies is computationally hard and can give counter-intuitive results.
lmm 8y ago
The efficient frontier is large, but a lot of the things we do are just dead-weight losses. There are cases of incompatible values where we have to make trade-offs, sure, but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system I think the set of possible value systems is much larger than you appreciate. For example, nuclear war is perfectly rational when your value system is "KILL ALL HUMANS".
kepler425b 8y ago
I would argue that we have figured out a way to distribute wealth (planet resources really) but the capitalistic economy system that we are tangled makes changing anything almost impossible unless it was a global change. Many philosophers and scientists that actually do something came up with various ideas, main one is resource based economy coupled with technology. The idea is that we set our values to waste as less resources as possible and make products according to our actual needs, no chocolate taste toothpase or any other nonsense. You put scientific method into play and set goal values to most optimal for our well being, psychology (no meaningless jobs, since almost everything can be automized, instead provide people with whatever tools they need to do anything they want.), health and the planet itself - no rape needlessly. Anyone interested have a look at Peter Jospeh video series - culture in decline.
perfmode 8y ago
the way we redistribute wealth right now is through busy work. this is incredibly irrational. once we recognize that, we can start thinking about alternatives in earnest.

gepi79 8y ago

It is not just social status but also real financial constraints for survival that lead to wage slavery. IMO poverty and austerity and military and wars imposed or tolerated because of greed and lack of empathy and foolish voters are the main reasons for needless misery. The kind words for John McCain were shocking and disgusting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA&t=356s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA&t=356s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--joNde92k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--joNde92k

ekianjo 8y ago

You have a bleak perspective on things. As human beings we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food, and we ha e never had as much disposable income as now to be able to enjoy more things out of work. And your view can be easily reverted. We have never had as many interesting jobs as now. And centuries before us you had to do what your parents did and you had a miserable life anyway. Lets stop with the Lost Eden false nostalgia.

mumin-abu-jamal 8y ago
"we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food" We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html
- feverfew 8y ago
  But what was there to do with this free time?
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    Rest. Socialize. Make babies. Goof off, make others laugh. I'm gonna guess that some folks had games, and children likely invented them.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      You forgot die in pain because your food was contaminated or your water has bacteria. Can we stop with the happy savages myth for a second?
      - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        This is a false dichotomy.
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago

dantheman 8y ago

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.

minipci1321 8y ago
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations. Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer. IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations. The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over. Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
PavlikPaja 8y ago
I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful. Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
a_bonobo 8y ago
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor! Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.

kamaal 8y ago

>>There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; One of the real reasons why languages like Lisp and Perl had a short life in MegaCorps is they were anti-dote to large people hierarchies. You can disproportionate work with small teams. Execs and VPs openly boast in company all hands about their 'team sizes' and numbers almost as the biggest accomplishment of their lives. No one is going to buy any technology or methodology which shrinks their head count.

kahoon 8y ago
If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? E.g. developing a website in assembly would keep more people occupied than HTML/JS/CSS.
- kamaal 8y ago
  >>If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? 'Assembly' is a abstraction. To a Perl programmer. Java's verbosity would look like Assembly.
- dasmoth 8y ago
  If one were being cynical and thinking that optimising for (maximum) headcount is a major driver here, one might want to avoid technologies with substantial barriers to entry, since that might clear the market of qualified people and make further recruitment very hard. The "ideal" technology would be one where almost anyone can pick it up quickly and at least look like they're being vaguely productive, but where even a 0.01-%ile expert will struggle to achieve really exceptional things.

guptarohit 8y ago

100% agree!!

guptarohit 8y ago
I believe all this is part of evolution.. thing to come after the current(human).

sophistication 8y ago

An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail because they do not take such possibly hardwired mechanisms account. E.g. a male who foregoes meat and excessive life style appears to have it harder [0], not easier in his romantic life. [0]: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-26154-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-26154-001

guskel 8y ago
I've made this observation as well. It goes further than diet, of course. Cars and clothes is another example. The only thing that could change this behavior is if women selected for mates practicing sustainability.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  Other cultural pressures can overcome people's strong desires to please/attract mates, so I'm not sure that's the only way. Cars and clothes as status are a themselves a consequence of culture. If culture moved away from that to something else then it would just be that other thing that mates selected for. But your general point is well taken.
- slimshady94 8y ago
  I agree. If the women in my generation viewed sustainability and a low ecological footprint as attractive, all I'd do is work on global warming and poverty rather than study algorithms to make money.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
I forwent meat and most of my excessive lifestyle after I got married--but before I had my children--and I don't think I could possibly be happier (in areas that I perceive to be so related). Under your theory maybe you just need to let boys be boys until they snag a mate and then, via cultural pressures and norms, convert them to sustainability. Though I think I would have been fine if I stopped eating meat etc before I shacked up, but maybe I just have a high opinion of myself, which is itself a main reason why my wife said she was attracted to me in the first place... Personally, I'd be surprised if meat eating and peacocking and resource hoarding and excessiveness really makes a difference if a man lacks other redeeming qualities, but I honestly have NFC.

mattowen_uk 8y ago

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures. These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation; good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30% actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt from the employment queue. However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers, errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly. These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs. 10% actual work. People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble. Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product output. There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works, but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

dnomad 8y ago

> As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. It's actually the opposite that is the case. As technology progresses you will see more and more and more speculative waste because the entire market becomes more efficient at producing speculative waste. Another name for "speculative waste" by the way is "Capitalism." Before you worry about "bullshit job" you might want to consider the thousands of businesses that fail everyday, the books and movies and cartoons and the mountains of media that is produced that will never be read or consumed, the endless containers of products -- everything from Squirrel Girl teeshirts to satellite networks to cryptocurrencies -- that get made and then quickly discarded. All of it is speculative waste and all of it is absolutely necessary for a free market to function. The concept of "bullshit jobs" is stupid but it's the "common sense" stupidity that is really just a lack of imagination. In a global economy filled with billions of independent actors the vast majority of economic activity will be variously inefficient, useless and often down right harmful. This speculative waste will expand to consume all of the speculative capital available. The vast majority of this economic activity will only be minimally profitable and much of it will generate no returns whatsoever. But every once in a while you get a "10 bagger", an investment that yields order of magnitude returns, and this changes everything. The author should be concerned not that most people are engaged in ultimately pointless economic activity but that, perhaps like himself, so many in the West are profoundly underemployed.

vorg 8y ago

Bullshit jobs also 4) keep a country's population occupied so they don't self-organize and revolt against the country's entrenched power structures.

adamjc 8y ago
I think this is a side-effect rather than intentional.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  History proves otherwise. In many cultures, including ancient Greece, China and the roman empire, scholars described that artificially creating employment to prevent social unrest was not uncommon.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Maybe in the past, but these days, it would require unprecedented (in western democracies) levels of direct influence. On the other hand, the market is itself extremely good at keeping people occupied, chasing ever diminishing salaries.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      >levels of direct influence Um... isn't that exactly what a 'jobs program' is. The US government has a lot of programs with private industry along those lines.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    sure, but is the revolt prevented by keeping them busy or by giving them an (albeit bullshit) means of keeping food on their tables? i'm not a historian, but most of the revolts i've learned about were immediately preceded by severe scarcities of essential items.
branchless 8y ago
Spot on. Spare time would allow us to conclude we can expunge rentiers. Here is a video on land value tax, which would fix our messed up feudal economies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0 Posting here as shadow banned after two posts because Hacker News hates any kind of free speech.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bgie 8y ago

A company doing X has as its main goal not being good at doing X, but making profit. This is the essence, and reason why companies need a hierarchy of managers: the owners are at the top, their instructions (make us profit) are delegated down, then profit goes back up. The people in charge are not there because they are experts at doing X. They are there because they are experts at making sure profits go to the top. All bullsh*t jobs and most inefficiencies can be traced back to people not caring enough about doing X. Because that is not what the company is about, its about making profit.

tim333 8y ago

>3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. I'm all in favour of us having a life of leisure or fun jobs (actor, ski explorer etc) and everyone having a basic income from the state. Sadly though the AI robots are not here and getting someone to fix your plumbing is still a pain, plus many other jobs. Maybe in the future we can go that way.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago
AI is not a binary event. Technological progress gradually removes the need for labor. Consider simple unsexy things such as automatic cashiers at supermarkets, McDonald's, etc. How many jobs have they made redundant? And do you know that "computer" used to be a profession? Do you know that the majority of blue collar work in 2018 will be made redundant by self-driving vehicles? And so on. You say I am overestimating technological progress. Ok, then explain to me why work hours are increasing. They should at the very least be staying the same right?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Work hours are increasing because of the decline in unions, and along with it, worker bargaining power.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    They are not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?country=BEL+FRA+ITA+CHE+USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?count...
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      They are for the US, while they're declining for the EU countries you selected (which your graph shows).
wool_gather 8y ago
Plumbing and other trades like it are the opposite of bullshit jobs, though. They require specific training and skill. They have tangible results that clearly improve the world (even if they're reactionary and small-scale, i.e., fixing a broken sink drain).

skate22 8y ago

> "A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation." Destruction of jobs in our current society would mean bad things for many people. I understand what you were going for, but society is not at that point yet imo

annabellish 8y ago
Our current society is definitely not rational, which I inferred as the point. Our economic system is a good 80% complete nonsense, where we're essentially playing a very complicated and meaningless game with ourselves, except one with meaningful consequences for real people.
- that_jojo 8y ago
  You're making me so happy, because the most frustrating thing for me is that, with how tied up in personal and cultural identity and self-worth it all is, few people are willing to admit or recognize this. Economy, at its core, is a network of transaction predicated on value. Value, at its core, is nothing more than a perception.

jbrun 8y ago

There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are small and profitable (or that they are solo entrepreneurs), then all companies can be like that. You need to look at the "real world". Modern civilization requires very, very large organizations that are very complex. Keeping these organizations running is not all sunshine and lollipops. There are a lot of boring, but necessary jobs. See large airlines, mining companies, electrical utilities,... etc. THe modern world is big, complicated and has lots of tedious tasks that ensure your airplane (for which you got a cheap ticket) is built safely, takes off, landes, has fuel, and whose passenger tickets are priced at an insanely cheap level. As a straightforward example, just look at the complexity of producing and distributing fossil fuels. Read Vaclav Smil. Are there boring jobs that may one day be automated, yes. But the thing with automation is that it will not eliminate jobs, because we will just buy more stuff - this is exactly what has happened since the Industrial revolution.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Citation needed. What is "market economy" and how does it remove bullshit jobs?
- smolder 8y ago
  It's a theoretical model of how markets work, but substituting the people for omniscient spherical cows because real people make the modelling too difficult to be useful.
rout39574 8y ago
I think you're letting your desire, your "belief" in a market economy, dictate your interpretations. Belief is a key term here: if it were observation, we wouldn't need to believe; we would point out how the theory functions in _this_ case just like we can demonstrate the function of an internal combustion engine. Nobody talks about "believing" in PV=NRT. :) I have a suggestion: Every time you start talking, to yourself or others, about what a market economy does by definition, add to your statement the concept of perfect information. That's a cornerstone of market theory. So if we just stipulate the theoretical function of a market economy is everything you believe, we are left with concrete implementations which will vary from that perfection by the degree to which information is imperfect. How do you measure that imperfection? That's a doozy. But if someone managing a $1T company has information imperfect by a percent... wouldn't that leave room for $10B of bullshit? Even if every actor in the company was operating in good faith? How completely do you think your nearest C-level executive understands the function of their organization? 99%? 80%? So... I think "By definition bullshit jobs would be removed" is treating economics with a precision that would make physics blush, and is usually only attempted by philosophers.

biggusdickus 8y ago

It is much better than global wars.

dood 8y ago

I think there is a simpler explanation, that has nothing to do with technology, productivity, or society: big companies are naturally inefficient internally (due to complexity) but as a whole are best optimized for capturing and retaining markets/regulators.

make3 8y ago

this reasoning doesn't work. most jobs aren't created by politicians anything like directly, and companies have direct incentive to not be wasteful in their spending. I'm of the opinion that it's just a failing of management, which is hard.

bena 8y ago

Let's break it down to something simple: I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational? Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem rational? Ok, but what if we had the same job. Build a widget. And due to being good at widget building, I only needed an hour to build my widget while you needed three. Now, the output of our work is the same. Should you be rewarded for simply taking longer? I could build three widgets in the time it took you to build one. Well, if we're paying by output, then shouldn't we go back to a 50/50 split of the money? But what if widgets make a profit of $1 for each sold? And we each worked three hours building and selling widgets. And you made one and I made three and the all sold. I was more productive. Is it rational for me to split the money with you 50/50 because you don't have the same? Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?

crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Literally zero percent of the economy works like this in reality.
- ci5er 8y ago
  Some people do not start out with different starting conditions? Some people are not more productive than others? In what way are varying starting conditions and varying productivity levels (cost structures) not realistic? If I were to guess, GPs point is that post-hoc redistribution is not fair (or can not be made to be fair?). Do you disagree with this conclusion?
  - bena 8y ago
    It's close. My point is that we need a clear definition of what's fair to start from. And it has to be a definition that is satisfactory to most people.

dominotw 8y ago

> Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. What can replace this though. There is needs to be something that creates a social hierarchy. We can only operate in an hierarchy.

geodel 8y ago

As Dr Ford from WestWorld said something like 'Human are very predictable and run in tight loops' while explaining there is not much difference between man and machine. As I reflect on my life it does seem very predictable outside work. At office it is still a bit interesting due to all sort of random issues crop up in a work day.

LarryDarrell 8y ago

In regards to your second point, I often wonder what it would be like today had Reagan not started the trend of not enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. We are in a situation where we may end up having to break up AT&T, for instance, twice in a 40 year period.

ken 8y ago

> 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress I would disagree, but this depends entirely on how you define "actual work". Is building and maintaining Facebook actual work? Is composing and playing new music actual work? If we had automated every mechanical task so 100% of human effort every day was spent creating art, would you consider that 100% employment, or 100% unemployment? I don't think there's one correct answer here. We've never in the past had to use terms like "work" and "employment" in the context of a world where nobody had to work, so it's ambiguous. There's some kinds of jobs (like creating art) which seem literally bottomless. There's other kinds of jobs (like inventing technology) that create new kinds of work. We may well run out of manual labor, but I don't see us ever running out of work. > 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. Agreed -- or rather, "wealth" is another one of those words which starts to lose its clear definition in a post-scarcity, post-labor world. It was a good abstraction for a couple thousand years, but no abstraction can survive indefinite growth of both technology and scale.

softawre 8y ago
Yes, building Facebook is actual work. But there are lots of people who work at Facebook who don't actually build the site, or test it, or do something that is important to delivering the website to customers.

Chathamization 8y ago

>) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; I don't think that's actually true. Here's a quick list I threw together on another post: >Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars. But as people pointed out, those things need collective action and political will. Our current mentality is that we should have minimal collective action, and the vast majority of our resources should go towards what can bring us the largest personal profit returns, no matter the impact on humanity in general. I think we're seeing some of the limits to that approach.

swah 8y ago

Isn't my smartphone redistribution of wealth?

rhacker 8y ago

Similar feelings, but slightly different list: 1) TLDR: We don't have a mission beyond population management. Long version: The population is too large to have any consensus about what humanity should be doing. We can never be on the same page at this point. We're constantly just struggling to manage growing populations. 2% of the population is capable of actually thinking through and carrying out any possible reason of existing beyond putting new technology in front of people. While new technology does in fact help humanity, our application of it is totally misplaced - it goes into military or just entertaining people.. Until a massive number of people are dedicated to extra-planetary research, we're wasting time on a doomed planet. 2) We have had a general movement from - people helping others to everyone is out for themselves. This changes the social contract from grand parents moving in with their children to everyone better get their 15 kinds of insurance in order early. If someone lost a house and the neighborhood pooled together to re-build them a house, and there was no need to "buy in" to that, then we would be both richer, and more comfortable with each other. 3) People have become mean. Streets are filled with angry drivers. People only seem to care about their friends for what they can be provided with. If shit hit the fan, most of those people would kill you to steal your food. 4) All of this leads to the house of cards. All these bullshit jobs are supported through various special conditions humanity has set up (insurance companies, banking industry, food industry, military industry) - which means that the bullshit jobs are paid for in the slight tweaks we keep making to our collective society to be more and more a dog-eat-dog world. It's sad that most people probably don't understand any of this. The only fix would be for humanity to have a mission beyond our individual mission to keep supporting the current structure.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

Either the survival processes are "basic and monkey-like" or they are what motivated the production of microchips... How can it be both ways? Why is what you're describing not just cultural collapse? The books describing the rise & fall of empires describe historical stages very similar to what is going on today. There is lots of room for innovation, but with high taxes and restrictive regulation there is less upside for entrepreneurs. The middle class being so weak has clear causes and effects. It is government and its lack of free market virtues that reinforce the need for so many bullshit jobs. Just look at all of non-STEM academia... With the tools we have today, if the average middle class man were more stable economically - and wasn't brainwashed into going to school until he's nearly 30 - then many of them could innovate enough to make a living in a reliable way. Local services, infrastructure creation & upkeep, artisan crafts, and apprenticeship models have lots of potential headroom. But there are also lots of historical strikes against the middle class - and high rent is a good example of one - which is a bubble created by fraudulent market regulation. We are constantly inundated by "free markets don't work" propaganda. How can we say the markets are free when all of the favorite examples of the propaganda: ISP, telecom, pharma, education, etc - are all the most highly regulated and conjoined with government! That's the definition of over-regulation... Then when "deregulating," there is a wave of opportunistic action which the propaganda calls "free market greediness" - which would never happen if government stayed out of market-making in the first place. And of course this propaganda promotes the idea that we need even more government regulation - and we must never de-regulate... It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

tomc1985 8y ago

This is a tricky one, because society also shares that burden in providing jobs just as politicians do. Society could provides these jobs in positions some might consider "pointless" or "bullshit": using gas station attendants instead of self-serve pumps, for example, or giving local mentally disabled folks a job sweeping floors and cleaning trays at McDonald's, or giving local homeless jobs hawking newspapers instead of self-serve vending machines. The difference with these positions is that the person is performing real, if only a little, service to other people. Some bullshit or pointless jobs can still give someone meaning. I think it's important to find a way to keep the population busy, even if it calls for society hiring tons more gas-pumpers or walmart-greeters

MadcapJake 8y ago

> This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. Such an interesting moment that we find ourselves in: Humans have taken over the planet and are upset that daily lives now revolve around trite and petty bs rather than predators, scarcity and violence.

L_Rahman 8y ago
No we're upset that we can't cut out the trite and petty bs and be free to make ourselves happy while not worrying about predators, scarcity and violence. I find these arguments in defense of the existing system to to be the actually trite thing because it reveals an inability to truly look at the system at large and ask what outcomes we want and instead mounts a defense of it as is.
- MadcapJake 8y ago
  Hey I'm all for social change when it comes to repressed/marginalized people and even wealth redistribution, but I just don't think we can escape BS as discussed in TFA.

WiltedSpinach 8y ago

'Rational' can only come about once one has chosen a goal to achieve or a social group to adhere to, because ANY set of logically developed statements must derive from axioms, logic itself included. You just happen to believe that (If I read your point "1)" correctly) that there is a limited amount of work to be done in any society. One could just as easily state that a 'rational' society should celebrate: a stable number of jobs (if one is anti-technologically inclined, or if one happens to believe that society is harmed by rapid change); or a growing number of jobs (the rapid change view + population growth, or a belief that more jobs mean people have found more problems to be solved). But one could also move away from the direct 'jobs' concern and argue that a 'rational' society would be better at finding ways to address the need humans have for being valuable to their society (often expressed here in the US in terms of having a job) and ensuring that people have enough capital to live on a year-to-year basis, whether by changing the expression of those needs and giving a universal basic income or by finding better jobs or perhaps even by going with a strongly progressive income tax and actually supporting small businesses. Many of the examples I have provided have been argued in the past at some point or another (and my short list is by NO means complete), and one could certainly talk about whether empirical evidence seems to support or contradict each of these points (though note that there are likely multiple interpretations of the data!), but ultimately our society is made of people and articles such as this suggest that we have built a society that systematically fails to support the values of its members. So maybe we should start talking about those values and quit going on rants about 'oh, everyone else is irrational'. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/

pdonis 8y ago

> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. Actually, we have: a free market. The problem is keeping it.