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A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing professions are useless and only exist because

by xzel 7y ago

A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing professions are useless and only exist because there is manufactured bureaucracy. Bullshit Jobs is a great book looking into to this. Also UBI shouldn't be disincentivizing work, it should be allowing people to explore more fulfilling pursuits.

space_fountain 7y ago
I hear people say this, but I'm never clear on the mechanism by which we A) have bullshit jobs now and B) we will stop having them once UBI is implemented. It seems to me like capitalists pocketing more money is already a compelling reason to labor used efficiently.
Aunche 7y ago
I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.
- BigBubbleButt 7y ago
  Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for government contracts - just look at almost any military contract where literally billions of dollars go unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the US that are regularly overbudget, late, and oftentimes not even up to the original requirements. And yet - those people still get paid and the people who created those contracts make lots of money. In fact, they usually make more money by being more incompetent, because they have to ask for more money to finish the job. The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
  - Aunche 7y ago
    I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.
    - xzel 7y ago
      Yes it wouldn’t eliminate them. The processes that create them would have to be changed or reformed in some way. The bullshit jobs/UBI argument is more about filling in if/when these jobs are eliminated, that be via automation or process reformation.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  One of the major sources of bullshit jobs are self-annihilating professions, like lawyers or advertising. Monsanto sues Exxon for a billion dollars, Exxon countersues, they spend ten years in court and then settle for 10% of what they each spent on lawyers. Coke and Pepsi each spend a billion dollars on advertising to cancel each other out. If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.
prepend 7y ago
I don’t understand many jobs, but many I thought were bullshit, I changed my mind after learning more about them. I do know that asking people if their job is bullshit is not a good way to truly understand. It’s natural to hate many jobs, that’s why I’m paid to do them. I once shoveled horse stalls. I hated it. It was. Horseshit job. But if the job stopped existing, it would have negative impact. I think it will be cool when we have the luxury of working only fun, happiness creating jobs. But someone has to shovel out the stalls.
- xzel 7y ago
  I don’t think I’ve said all jobs will be rockstar you’re the boss type of jobs, but there are certainly a huge amount of inefficiencies in lots of business. I think asking people if they feel like their work is needed or could be automated away is probably the only gauge one might have until actually removing them or trying to automate it. I agree it’s not a perfect metric but it’s got to be correct within some boundary, right? I think that’s the bigger question here, as well if people are qualified to judge (which I would hope since it’s their job). I actually think we need more “horseshit jobs” (great phrase and pun btw I’m going to steal this) in America where in the last 20 years we’ve pushed a lot of them to China and others, such as recycling.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I think the problem with asking people this question is that most don’t understand automation, almost all are biased toward themselves, and employees frequently think their job is stupid given their imperfect information. I remember years ago I was talking with a friend of a friend who worked for a small 3-4 person software company. In the same conversation ve said ver job was bullshit because the software was written years ago by the two owners, who did nothing now, leaving all customer service to the friend of friend. So the argument was that ve should be paid more since ve creates all the value. So the argument was that the owners had bullshit jobs. There was a counter argument that small bugs had to be fixed, not by owners, but by the friend of friend who thought vis job was bullshit because the owner should fix it since the owner knows the software well. I think it’s hard to get a straight answer because of this limited perspective as well as the natural falseness in responses to “is your job bullshit and we’ll pay you UBI so you can do something cool?” Or “is your job bullshit and we’ll fire you?”
rgblambda 7y ago
Graeber himself acknowledged that most of those job roles were actually well paying and high status. UBI ain't going to disrupt that too much. Also, having read his book, I am highly sceptical of the claims made in it. I believe that there is a certain portion of many jobs that are bullshit but the proportion of fully bullshit jobs is much less than as claimed in the book.

by xzel 7y ago

space_fountain 7y ago

I hear people say this, but I'm never clear on the mechanism by which we A) have bullshit jobs now and B) we will stop having them once UBI is implemented. It seems to me like capitalists pocketing more money is already a compelling reason to labor used efficiently.

Aunche 7y ago

I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.

BigBubbleButt 7y ago
Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for government contracts - just look at almost any military contract where literally billions of dollars go unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the US that are regularly overbudget, late, and oftentimes not even up to the original requirements. And yet - those people still get paid and the people who created those contracts make lots of money. In fact, they usually make more money by being more incompetent, because they have to ask for more money to finish the job. The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
- Aunche 7y ago
  I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.
  - xzel 7y ago
    Yes it wouldn’t eliminate them. The processes that create them would have to be changed or reformed in some way. The bullshit jobs/UBI argument is more about filling in if/when these jobs are eliminated, that be via automation or process reformation.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
One of the major sources of bullshit jobs are self-annihilating professions, like lawyers or advertising. Monsanto sues Exxon for a billion dollars, Exxon countersues, they spend ten years in court and then settle for 10% of what they each spent on lawyers. Coke and Pepsi each spend a billion dollars on advertising to cancel each other out. If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.

prepend 7y ago

I don’t understand many jobs, but many I thought were bullshit, I changed my mind after learning more about them. I do know that asking people if their job is bullshit is not a good way to truly understand. It’s natural to hate many jobs, that’s why I’m paid to do them. I once shoveled horse stalls. I hated it. It was. Horseshit job. But if the job stopped existing, it would have negative impact. I think it will be cool when we have the luxury of working only fun, happiness creating jobs. But someone has to shovel out the stalls.

xzel 7y ago
I don’t think I’ve said all jobs will be rockstar you’re the boss type of jobs, but there are certainly a huge amount of inefficiencies in lots of business. I think asking people if they feel like their work is needed or could be automated away is probably the only gauge one might have until actually removing them or trying to automate it. I agree it’s not a perfect metric but it’s got to be correct within some boundary, right? I think that’s the bigger question here, as well if people are qualified to judge (which I would hope since it’s their job). I actually think we need more “horseshit jobs” (great phrase and pun btw I’m going to steal this) in America where in the last 20 years we’ve pushed a lot of them to China and others, such as recycling.
- prepend 7y ago
  I think the problem with asking people this question is that most don’t understand automation, almost all are biased toward themselves, and employees frequently think their job is stupid given their imperfect information. I remember years ago I was talking with a friend of a friend who worked for a small 3-4 person software company. In the same conversation ve said ver job was bullshit because the software was written years ago by the two owners, who did nothing now, leaving all customer service to the friend of friend. So the argument was that ve should be paid more since ve creates all the value. So the argument was that the owners had bullshit jobs. There was a counter argument that small bugs had to be fixed, not by owners, but by the friend of friend who thought vis job was bullshit because the owner should fix it since the owner knows the software well. I think it’s hard to get a straight answer because of this limited perspective as well as the natural falseness in responses to “is your job bullshit and we’ll pay you UBI so you can do something cool?” Or “is your job bullshit and we’ll fire you?”

rgblambda 7y ago

Graeber himself acknowledged that most of those job roles were actually well paying and high status. UBI ain't going to disrupt that too much. Also, having read his book, I am highly sceptical of the claims made in it. I believe that there is a certain portion of many jobs that are bullshit but the proportion of fully bullshit jobs is much less than as claimed in the book.