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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
by 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 agoIt'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 agoWe would collapse back to a subsistence-level economy, but sure.
- scotty79 7y agoWhy? Is the fear of starvation the only thing that makes people do things?
- QuesnayJr 7y agoI 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.
- scotty79 7y ago> If you don't pay people to do jobs, then most jobs that make up a complex society won't get done. I'm advocating for paying people enough to not die even if they don't do any job. And I'm not saying that it will immediately do away with all bullshit jobs. But I'm saying that it will reduce supply of work available to those jobs and it will broaden the choice for workers to choose more meaningful jobs by giving them safe harbor.