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David Graeber is a stupid person, and the thesis of that book is stupid. There are boring jobs, and there are jobs that wouldn't exist in utopia, but he has no

David Graeber is a stupid person, and the thesis of that book is stupid. There are boring jobs, and there are jobs that wouldn't exist in utopia, but he has no idea why jobs exist or what function they serve. His book is paradoxically feel-good, in that just because we can imagine a world in which nobody has to shovel shit that we can eliminate all shit-shoveling jobs today. Shit, I actually worked at the kinds of jobs he calls "flunkies" as a temp, and it wasn't a big mystery to me what the jobs were for. When I had a temp job as a receptionist, my job was literally answering the phone. People would call, and I would answer. It did not require a Ph.D. in anthropology to figure out the function of the job, or why someone would pay me to do it.

loopz 7y ago
I don't know this person, but many today strike me as cynical, short-sighted and narrow-minded, when they portray a world where nobody needs you, as some kind of utopia.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Bullshit jobs are the job market equivalent of software bloat. They have the same issues: you can take a popular modern webapp or "desktop" app and notice that it's 80% of fat that isn't necessary for it to deliver all its value, but if you zoom in, almost every single piece of that fat can justify its existence because of other pieces. So you can't just start cutting it out piece by piece, you'd have to redesign the whole application. Same with the job market: a lot of jobs are just fixing the damage done by other jobs, or implementing a distributed consensus algorithm through zero-sum competition. Every job is justifiable in terms of other jobs it serves, even though a whole lot of them could be pruned with no loss in value created for the society.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Sometimes you can, but more often you end up with a system as complicated at the current system. In utopia, we wouldn't need any lawyers. But we have lawyers now because we have disputes. Utopian planners always skip to the part where all the disputes are magically settled, or invent a mechanism only tested within their own minds. They leave the messy work of actually making working systems to the rest of us.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's hard, but I don't think it's impossible. Layers of bullshit accrue, much like layers of bloat. We could do more to combat the incentive structures that lead to those layers. For instance, European countries have lawyers too, but they're not used or involved anywhere near as much as in the US. Societies there run fine without lawsuits as the default method of conflict resolution.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    > Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Or you can change one requirement and suddenly you can delete huge chunk of cruft because it no longer serves any useful function. For the economy this requirement would be "You need to do any job anyone can be persuaded to pay for, to have an excuse to not to starve to death." If you mostly remove this requirement a lot of bullshit jobs will disappear just by removing work supply.
    - QuesnayJr 7y ago
      We would collapse back to a subsistence-level economy, but sure.
      - scotty79 7y ago
        Why? Is the fear of starvation the only thing that makes people do things?
        QuesnayJr 7y ago
        I don't get what you are advocating. If you don't pay people to do jobs, then most jobs that make up a complex society won't get done. We have complex institutions, that involve lots of people doing boring tasks that keep the institutions running. Without the institutions, society will in fact return to subsistence-level. If you just mean that we should guarantee a certain level of income, like a UBI, then that will make no difference whatsoever for this question. We don't have lawyers and middle managers because otherwise they will starve, because those jobs pay more than any plausible minimum.
dang 7y ago
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN regardless of how stupid someone is or you feel they are. Even if you don't owe David Graeber better (though you do), you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it. Comments like this add rotational momentum to the downward spiral. It's a pity, because your comment also makes some good points. But adding poison to the commons is more significant. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  So calling jobs of many people here "bullshit", like the original comment did, is okay? Apparently so.
  - knolax 7y ago
    This is HackerNews, you can literally advocate for genocide on here and be upvoted but don't you dare be slightly rude to some humanities charlatan.
    - dang 7y ago
      That's untrue, of course. There's a reason why such shocking and grandiose claims never come with links.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  And I definitely don't owe David Graeber better. He is a public menace who actively removes understanding from the world.
  - dang 7y ago
    Ok, but please don't miss the main point: you owe the community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

loopz 7y ago

I don't know this person, but many today strike me as cynical, short-sighted and narrow-minded, when they portray a world where nobody needs you, as some kind of utopia.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Bullshit jobs are the job market equivalent of software bloat. They have the same issues: you can take a popular modern webapp or "desktop" app and notice that it's 80% of fat that isn't necessary for it to deliver all its value, but if you zoom in, almost every single piece of that fat can justify its existence because of other pieces. So you can't just start cutting it out piece by piece, you'd have to redesign the whole application. Same with the job market: a lot of jobs are just fixing the damage done by other jobs, or implementing a distributed consensus algorithm through zero-sum competition. Every job is justifiable in terms of other jobs it serves, even though a whole lot of them could be pruned with no loss in value created for the society.

QuesnayJr 7y ago
Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Sometimes you can, but more often you end up with a system as complicated at the current system. In utopia, we wouldn't need any lawyers. But we have lawyers now because we have disputes. Utopian planners always skip to the part where all the disputes are magically settled, or invent a mechanism only tested within their own minds. They leave the messy work of actually making working systems to the rest of us.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's hard, but I don't think it's impossible. Layers of bullshit accrue, much like layers of bloat. We could do more to combat the incentive structures that lead to those layers. For instance, European countries have lawyers too, but they're not used or involved anywhere near as much as in the US. Societies there run fine without lawsuits as the default method of conflict resolution.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Or you can change one requirement and suddenly you can delete huge chunk of cruft because it no longer serves any useful function. For the economy this requirement would be "You need to do any job anyone can be persuaded to pay for, to have an excuse to not to starve to death." If you mostly remove this requirement a lot of bullshit jobs will disappear just by removing work supply.
  - QuesnayJr 7y ago
    We would collapse back to a subsistence-level economy, but sure.
    - scotty79 7y ago
      Why? Is the fear of starvation the only thing that makes people do things?
      - QuesnayJr 7y ago
        I don't get what you are advocating. If you don't pay people to do jobs, then most jobs that make up a complex society won't get done. We have complex institutions, that involve lots of people doing boring tasks that keep the institutions running. Without the institutions, society will in fact return to subsistence-level. If you just mean that we should guarantee a certain level of income, like a UBI, then that will make no difference whatsoever for this question. We don't have lawyers and middle managers because otherwise they will starve, because those jobs pay more than any plausible minimum.

dang 7y ago

Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN regardless of how stupid someone is or you feel they are. Even if you don't owe David Graeber better (though you do), you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it. Comments like this add rotational momentum to the downward spiral. It's a pity, because your comment also makes some good points. But adding poison to the commons is more significant. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987.

QuesnayJr 7y ago
So calling jobs of many people here "bullshit", like the original comment did, is okay? Apparently so.
- knolax 7y ago
  This is HackerNews, you can literally advocate for genocide on here and be upvoted but don't you dare be slightly rude to some humanities charlatan.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's untrue, of course. There's a reason why such shocking and grandiose claims never come with links.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
QuesnayJr 7y ago
And I definitely don't owe David Graeber better. He is a public menace who actively removes understanding from the world.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, but please don't miss the main point: you owe the community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]