"Bullshit jobs"

ITT I post some excerpts from David Graeber's article, "Bullshit Jobs" - jobs the author believes are created just to keep people busy and have no real impact on society.

>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 marshaled, 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.

Other urls found in this thread:

evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

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>So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

>But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. 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. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

>While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

>The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

I will not post the rest of the article; link is below

evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/

Very thought provoking, thank you.

>I will not post the rest of the article; link is below
Is that because you already spammed on /pol/?

>I'm going to post an article by a non-economist with no education in economics to prove a point about economics
Why do people always do this? No one does this shit with doctors. Well, they do, but it's not as common.

>But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas
Lol this doesn't work when you have masses of white trash and niggers. Those type of people need something to occupy their time lest they become a liability to society.

Utopian socialism can only work with civilized populations.

It's true. My female cousin works as some kind of assistant for the HR department in a major company and her job basically consists of distributing coloring books and stuffed animals to other employees (I'm not even kidding).

As if economists other than the random Anwar Shaikh every now and then are anything but high priests of the neoliberal religion.

He needs to demonstrate, and does not seem to, that these mostly administrative jobs are unnecessary. His only criterion seems to be whether or not the individual worker feels their job is useful/necessary/valuable/important, which is idiotic for reasons that should be intuitively obvious, that a worker's assessment of their job's necessity does not correlate, let alone create, reality.

As someone who works as an attorney law (albeit not in corporate law), I have to deal with enormous quantities of information flooding in from every direction. Demographics can affect jury composition, and because juries are almost always drawn locally from every county, and I practice state-wide, I theoretically need to keep on top of 67 different communities, most of which I've never been to. I need to keep abreast in development of laws, both local, statewide, and federal. I need to keep track of community values, things like what people consider an appropriate alimony, (varies enormously across time, place, and economic climate), what sorts of arguments and rhetorical flourishes will persuade people, what a good way of evaluating property, especially sentimental property, etc. While I theoretically could do some of my job without this information, I cannot do it with nearly the proficiency or accuracy I perform at now without it.

And for most of that gathering of information, I have no fucking clue who does it. I work at a reasonably large firm, and I know that we don't do much in the way of ground up data gathering, we just buy it from parties that do. Even shuffling around the information of which attorneys get which cases based on their specialties and workload is a bitch and a half to do, as well as aligning all the time and effort of the clerks and paralegals.
1/2

I could very much see someone gathering all this information that he or she never personally uses thinking that task is worthless, because it is neither (on its own) necessary nor sufficient for a litigation or settlement process; and because the person gathering the information probably only has the haziest idea of what it's ultimately being used for. That doesn't mean that it's useless, and that doesn't mean the overall situation of one microcosm of the economy is wallowing in inefficiency.

>the actually educated people disagree with me
>therefore they're wrong
This is your brain on anarcho-communism. Or any sufficiently radical ideology really.

There is literally nothing wrong with this. If employers want to pay people to work bullshit jobs, why shouldn't they? What, we should take that money they would be paying a "redistibute" it, sending those people home?

>WAAGH Y I HAF TO WORK WAAAGH

What a fucking faggot.

>neoliberal “”””argumentation””””

That would be an argument if white trash and nuggets were not largely unemployed.

The writer provides no argument.

Okay, now try making an argument against the points in the OP instead of appealing to authority.

You have to actually read the article.

>spic-nig cycle
laughed harder than I should

Not like the failures of Neoliberalism are pointed out from discipline to discipline across academia.

Birth of the service industry following the deathknell of industrialisation in the first world is a very simple phenomena that has had a uniform affect across the Western world, and has lead to the entrenchment of Oligarchies in the postcolonial East.

You seem to be mistaken on one thing : that a bullshit job must necessarily be without results.
That's not the case, in most situations there is a final output. What makes them bullshit jobs is that the output itself isn't worth the time and resources spent on it.

Yes. Waste not.

His """argument""" is
>WAAGH MY ASS
>WAAGH in my expert opinion these jobs are useless
>WAAGH that means evildumb CRAPITALISM amirite?
>WAAAGH under gommunism everyone would live like a king!"
>WAAAGH trust me goyim, I'm a liberal Jew, would I lie to you???

...

>Okay, now try making an argument against the points in the OP
The OP doesn't actually make an argument at all, he just says "i say these jobs are useless, so they're useless."

>HURR

That's nice, retard. Have an actual point to make, or would you just like to keep shitting the bed like the frustrated little faggot you are?

Doctors have a proven track record of success, economists despite all of their math don't actually achieve anything

But that evaulation is not easy to make at the best of times, and a methodology of

>Let's ask the person doing it if the job is worth the time and effort invested

A seriously shit one.

Because their field of study is so complex, not because they're as clueless as the moron in OP. Weather forecasters have a pretty dismal record of accuracy, does this mean you may as well ask a """journalist""" about how the weather works rather than a meteorologist?

You say, while living in the result of economists' work.

My point is that you don’t understand his argument and don’t want to. Just keep blabbing about jews and how anything criticizing capitalism is communist.

>while living in a result of their work

>nihilistic, androgynous, atheistic now liberal consumerist capitalism

Pretty shit desu

I literally just gave you my argument you simple-minded moron. He thinks, in his expert opinion, that there are many "useless" jobs in society, and that these exist because evildumb capitalists want to keep us busy for no good reason. This is simply a conspiracy theory, one based on the incredibly arrogant belief that he is some kind of god-appointed expert on economic matters, when in fact he is literally a lit grad with ZERO real life experience.

There is such a vast array of literature that explains the mechanics of capitalism. Whether the necessary exploitation is worth it for the "greater good" is a method of debate, not the basic economic processes that neoliberal ideologues who have never opened a book exploring economics try to argue are not the case.
The wonderful irony of the "whaaa why everything cost money" response is that under communism a far greater percentage of the population would be involved in manual labour. and extremely menial tasks. The job would not be "bullshit" however, as it would, in theory, but ostensibly adding value into a product that would be "fairly" shared. This is an incredibly basic notion that appears in the very famous manifesto that takes all of 30 minutes to read. The correct response would obviously be to suggest that this too would swiftly end up being "bullshit", but this would entail a basic understanding of the proposed ideology.

Defenders of Neoliberalism are cuckolds who like slurping the semen of a ever-entrenching financial elite. YES EXPLOIT ME AND EVERYONE I LOVE'S LABOUR HARDER. MAKE ME HAVE LESS OF A SHARE IN THE PROFITS OF SOCIETY. Multicultralism and the importing of cheap labour are Neoliberal ideologies par excellence, yet somehow "cultural marxism" is to blame for this.

Economics is not a science, what a stupid comparison.

>exploitation

Kek. Opinion disregarded :^)

Go move to rural Pakistan or China then. Or anywhere in the world that doesn't subscribe to modern liberalism and is incredibly as rich as a result.

Neither is medicine you retard.

...

>incredibly rich
Talking to materialists is like talking to a wall, holy shit.

>capitalists never exploited anyone dey good boys

Ever hear of unions kid

>thread about material wealth
>HURR Y U DUMB DUMB MATERIALISTS TALK ABOUT WEALTH LMAO

>>exploitation

Yeah, bend me over, Daddy, make £20 an hour off my labour and pay me £7. Oh sorry I should be thankful you are an entrepreneur and have made a job for me. Of course I'll classify myself as "self-employed" for you big boy so you don't have to pay me pension contributions or holiday pay ;)

>oh no this evildumb crapitalist is exploiting me by giving me money to do work I don't think is useful or needed!
>oh woe is me, if only I could live on welfare or go inna woods and live off rabbits, but no, those laws the evildumb crapitalisst passed have literally and unmetaphorically chained me to my desk like a literal slave!
>if only gommunism could happen so I could work like an actual slave in a field for literally no money, that would be ideal tbqh

be glad you weren't made to starve peasant. God still walks the earth, and more die to his blights than ever before.

It’s about the exact opposite, retard. About how better off society and individuals would be if the economy was setup to pursue real, meaningful jobs and not busy work shit that helps pad some corporations financials. Fuck off back to /pol/ already

Protip dummy: If you think you can do better than your boss, then guess what? You can be self-employed! Imagine that, no boss but yourself! Of course then you'd have to actually produce something of value, and your property would be on the line if your business fails, but thats irrelevant because something something muh exploitation!

If you had ever been out in the real world and seen how it is run, you would know for an absolute fact that many people spend very little of their time at work actually working.

t. Been working for 15 years

Except that society is setup to make it almost impossible to live on your own. Look at how many legal exceptions the Amish have to be given, and they had to fight court battles. In some states it’s literally illegal to collect rainwater on land you own.

If you want a "meaningful job", then go get one. It's not hard to get a job working in a field for pennies an hour someplace, so why don't you? Could it be because you actually want MONEY?

you are very dumb

The vast majority of people are born into money and die with even more money. "Entrepreneurialism" is a way of detracting away from actual social issues.

But under communism, you'd be free to do as you wish, amirte? No central planners telling you "no, you have to work in the mines", amirite? Non evildumb crapitalist making you PAY to buy your pokemon trading cards in the market, everything will be free and plentiful, and amirite?

>Any criticism of Capitalism is an endorsement of communism, the post

>The vast majority of people are born into money and die with even more money.

Nope. Most people who have lots of cash were NOT born that way, try again. Also, weren't you whining about "meaningful work", NOT about "becoming rich"?

The OP is literally about replacing capitalism with communism you fucktarded spastic.

And that's a problem.

They aren't pointless jobs, people are happy to trade their money for the service, leading to a happier outcome. Having more shit really does make us happier. I know Im glad I can watch netflix in my bed.

fucking retard
you're too steeped in ideology to live, just fucking end yourself

>everyone is indoctrinated except me!

Not an argument, I'm reasonably left wing aswell.

No, not everyone

>I know Im glad I can watch netflix in my bed.

HAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Real question is then how well do you sleep knowing your comfort is based on illegal immigrants doing shit jobs for £4 in third world conditions in this very country, let alone the other side of the world?

Just all non-communists, amirite?
>HURR my ideology is true and the people who follow it are intelligent free-thinkers, but everyone ELSE is evildumb indoctrinated sheeple, lmao

Is it wrong to want more stuff and to have other people want more stuff
I should very much like for there to be a general reduction in working hours, but not if it means a decline in the total circulating mass of stuff.

This image makes me sad as hell. I don't even like black people, what the fuck? Like a dog being tortured or something

Illegal immigrants should be rounded up and shot, they depress wages for natives.

Go look at the Forbes list and see what % were non-bourgeois, go look at uni attendance figures and see what % attendees have parents who went, go see Ivy League or equivalent % in senior positions.

The idea that most people "make it" through hard work and not having capital or cultural capital to make their endeavours work is laughable.

>medicine is not a science
oh my lord

HE LITERALLY NEVER SAYS THIS

NEVER

NEVER ONCE IN THE ARTICLE

YOU DIDNT EVEN READ IT GO THE FUCK BACK TO /POL/

Thank New Labour BOYS

Wow you're fucking retarded. You could have looked it up, but no, you double down ion the arrogant assumption that you know best, and now you've revealed yourself not only as an ignorant prick, but as a lazy spastic, too.

fuck off with your binaries
yes

>HURR i call people who disagree with me "indoctrinated" but FUCK YOU if you do the same to me!

Pathetic faggot.

Thats just not true, also Im not from Britain. There are obviously some illegally poorly teated immigrants in the supply chain somewhere on something I consume but to say that I rely on them is just wrong.

Maybe he's going down the "most science is logical positivism" rabbit hole in a sort of nihilistic kamikaze

No, I'm going on the "medicine is not a branch of science" route. Because, you, know, it isn't a branch of science.

>medical science
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

They perform functions ESSENTIAL to the survival of our society. You do rely on them, not necessarily because you want to, but you do - we all do. You can only be so comfy with your netflix knowing that. My "political action" of posting on this shitty image board and standing up to HR over petty things at work doesn't absolve me of this guilt either. We rely on their suffering, no matter which way you play it.

Hahah oh wow, really? It uses scientific findings, so it MUST be a science, right? Guess that means photography is science! Hell, so is literature, it's written using pens, afterall! Hell, economics is a science too by your """reasoning""", making your objection even more stupid! Congrats, you are probably the thickest cunt on this board.

>What is the scientific method

You're just embarrassing yourself now

Economics is a science yes. You seem confused as to what a science is. Here let me help you.
>>>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

Holy shit you're a moron. So you do legitimately think photography is a science? Wow, just wow. I knew you "people" were fucking retarded but I didn't think you were THIS stupid.

What essential functions do illegal immigrants getting paid pennies complete in Ireland? They are obviously used and thats wrong but to say we couldnt survive with a similar standard of living is just wrong.

Economics is not a science because it makes the continued and fatal assumption that humans act rationally. Experiments cannot be effectively replicated to the degree necessitated by the scientific method because too many variables fluctuate. Game theory is not a science.

Would Zizek or Lacan want less stuff

We could certainly have a similar status quo without their labour, but it would require a shift that happily consuming will not make happen.

Is anthropology a science

...

yes

>Economics is not a science because it makes the continued and fatal assumption that humans act rationally.

No, that would be Austrian """economics""", which rejects empiricism and the scientific method. Actual real economics don't make these idiot assumptions because they honestly think people are robots, like Austrians do, but because they are a useful abstraction. Most people don't behave rationally, but in aggregate they do tend to act in the "rational" way. The phenomena is called "the wisdom of crowds".

>too many variables fluctuate

Oh so biology can't be a science either, right? Nor can meteorology, I mean just LOOK at all those variables, clearly nothing scientific about it, right?

Do you have an argument that isn't filled with spooks?

>im such a moron that i think medicine is a science!

Ask me how I know you dropped out of highschool.

how

You didnt answer my question. What area is illegal migrants used en masse that I rely heavily on? The only area I could think of is trawler fishing, and I usually eat frmed fish. Ireland isn't America, there aren't tonnes of illegal immigrants getting systematically abused in every workplace.

It's a trick question, I already told you how I know.

>Economics is not a science because it makes the continued and fatal assumption that humans act rationally. Experiments cannot be effectively replicated to the degree necessitated by the scientific method because too many variables fluctuate. Game theory is not a science.
You are more just arguing that economics is just completely wrong irrespective of what a science is or not. There is an entire vranch of economics that investigates the systematic irrationality of humans and its effect on the economy.
science
ˈsʌJəns/Submit
noun
the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
Economics does that, therefore it is a science.

Yeah its a social science.