4 ms·

> At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here) If the COVID-19 lockdown ha

by JackFr 6y ago

> At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here) If the COVID-19 lockdown has taught us anything, it's that probably a full third of our economy is bullshit jobs. We're at best self-perpetuating economic 'nice-to-haves', at worst parasitic rent seekers, probably somewhere in between, whose real role is simply to distribute GDP more widely, while pretending to add value to society.

saalweachter 6y ago
I suppose that is a third way to deal with automation. I usually say, there are two ways to deal with productivity increases (from automation and industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4 day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc). I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so everyone is still "working" 40+ hours a week without actually doing anything.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I believe your third answer is indeed the reason that despite so many things being automated, we're not seeing benefits of that in terms of reduced workloads on people. The way I see it, as long as creating bullshit jobs is easy, the market will force everyone to work 40+ hour a week to survive. And as long as creating bullshit jobs that just shuffle money around is easier than creating socially valuable jobs, we won't see any Moon bases either.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Look at it from another angle: would people work bullshit jobs if they didn't have to? Fix the incentives, pay people a minimum income where they don't have to work, and if you absolutely need labor you're going to have to pay someone who doesn't have to be there if they don't want to. If people's basic needs were met, I think you'd see a lot of labor shift to work that is valuable, but currently not compensated for. Also, you have to adjust constraints to deal with legacy systems: the Federal Reserve works to maximize employment through monetary policy. This is suboptimal, when work will expand to consume the time allowed for it [1]. You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever. The feasibility of this (in the US) is strongly dependent on health insurance not being tied to having a full-time job (often defined as just under 40 hours a week). Plenty of employers have demonstrated that they can be organized to use mostly part-time labor, but their incentive to do this has been avoiding the obligation and expense of contributing to health insurance and other benefits, rather than giving employees a productivity dividend.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        I agree. Healthcare must no longer be tied to employment.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It's not just a matter of, is creating bullshit jobs easy? On the one side we have supply constraints on necessities. If there isn't enough good housing for everyone and we're not allowed to build more then people will have to work 40 hours so they can outbid other people on the good housing and not get stuck in the bad housing. We could solve this by building more good housing, but only if we actually do that. On the other side it's a question of where the surplus goes. You have a company that makes billions of dollars -- far more than it needs to operate. What happens to the rest of the money? If the managers get to use it for empire building, you get bullshit jobs. That happens a lot. Ideally we'd solve both, but even just one would be progress. If you don't have to work 40 hours to afford necessities then you're not going to choose a 40 hour bullshit job. You're either going to choose a real job or a job with lower hours so that you can spend more of your time doing something you want to do, which might very well itself be a real job (i.e. starting your own business). Whereas if we can figure out how to transfer more wealth away from organizations and into the hands of real people, that gets rid of bullshit jobs too, because most of them come from the principal-agent problem and the misalignment between managers and owners/taxpayers. Transferring the money to any person or entity without middle management would be a net improvement.
WJW 6y ago
There's a ton of nice-to-have professions that are not strictly necessary, like musicians and decorative fountain builders. That is a good thing! It's clearly possible to live in a giant grey barrack and eat nothing but soylent but it's not what 99% of the population would prefer. If anything, it would be good for society to make the percentage of not-essential-but-nice-to-have as high as possible.
- mlyle 6y ago
  There's various kinds of "unnecessary work" jobs. Some do really contribute directly to the common welfare: artisans and producers of culture; providers of small conveniences, etc. There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial, make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    To be fair, nobody knows which parts of a complex bureaucracy are useless and which are important. There is a pretty decent chance that the truly useless parts of an organisation are linked in to complying with regulations. Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective.
    - mlyle 6y ago
      > Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective. When we look at e.g. higher education, for a place that's particularly guilty of this: Administrative costs have grown to be approximately equal to instructional costs at universities, from about a quarter of expenditures in 1980. In essence, our desire to prevent waste and to ensure that money is spent the way we'd like has created an ever-ballooning set of administrative work. It might be better to tolerate a somewhat greater share of instructional and research expenditures being wasted or spent in non-ideal ways. Any time there's a small bit of waste or money spent in ways we don't approve of, the impulse is to create rules and administrative procedures to prevent it from happening again. But this effectively creates a perpetual overhead for what may have been a one-time, very minor problem.
wolfd 6y ago
The current losses in public education will be felt on the decades timescale. I think the perspective here on HN is probably shifted due to the tech demographic, where VC and ads have provided a buffer. Systems have inertia, stuff continues working until it hits a wall. The unemployment systems written in COBOL kept churning until now, for example. I think the cuts in jobs might give the impression that "we never needed them in the first place," and maybe that's true in some cases, but it's hard to distinguish right now from the effects that take years to surface.
majormajor 6y ago
I don't really understand what COVID would tell us about "bullshit jobs." It tells us that restaurants and bars and concerts, etc, aren't "necessary." Duh? Leisure activity has never been necessary, but it's still something we enjoy and value. The existence of those leisure jobs and the venues they operates certainly adds value to my life.
- waheoo 6y ago
  A lot of businesses have used revenue loss to justify layoffs.
BariumBlue 6y ago
I think it's a little unfair - you will always have jobs that are important in the immediate, short, medium, long terms. Society can function perfectly fine without teachers, engineers, scientists... For a bit. Some teams can function fine with reduced manning, but long term need full or more manning, for training, taking care of admin, ensuring sanity, and doing more than the bare minimum. Not that I disagree that some jobs are for expensive seat warmers to ensure warm fuzzies

by JackFr 6y ago

saalweachter 6y ago

I suppose that is a third way to deal with automation. I usually say, there are two ways to deal with productivity increases (from automation and industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4 day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc). I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so everyone is still "working" 40+ hours a week without actually doing anything.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I believe your third answer is indeed the reason that despite so many things being automated, we're not seeing benefits of that in terms of reduced workloads on people. The way I see it, as long as creating bullshit jobs is easy, the market will force everyone to work 40+ hour a week to survive. And as long as creating bullshit jobs that just shuffle money around is easier than creating socially valuable jobs, we won't see any Moon bases either.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Look at it from another angle: would people work bullshit jobs if they didn't have to? Fix the incentives, pay people a minimum income where they don't have to work, and if you absolutely need labor you're going to have to pay someone who doesn't have to be there if they don't want to. If people's basic needs were met, I think you'd see a lot of labor shift to work that is valuable, but currently not compensated for. Also, you have to adjust constraints to deal with legacy systems: the Federal Reserve works to maximize employment through monetary policy. This is suboptimal, when work will expand to consume the time allowed for it [1]. You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever. The feasibility of this (in the US) is strongly dependent on health insurance not being tied to having a full-time job (often defined as just under 40 hours a week). Plenty of employers have demonstrated that they can be organized to use mostly part-time labor, but their incentive to do this has been avoiding the obligation and expense of contributing to health insurance and other benefits, rather than giving employees a productivity dividend.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I agree. Healthcare must no longer be tied to employment.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's not just a matter of, is creating bullshit jobs easy? On the one side we have supply constraints on necessities. If there isn't enough good housing for everyone and we're not allowed to build more then people will have to work 40 hours so they can outbid other people on the good housing and not get stuck in the bad housing. We could solve this by building more good housing, but only if we actually do that. On the other side it's a question of where the surplus goes. You have a company that makes billions of dollars -- far more than it needs to operate. What happens to the rest of the money? If the managers get to use it for empire building, you get bullshit jobs. That happens a lot. Ideally we'd solve both, but even just one would be progress. If you don't have to work 40 hours to afford necessities then you're not going to choose a 40 hour bullshit job. You're either going to choose a real job or a job with lower hours so that you can spend more of your time doing something you want to do, which might very well itself be a real job (i.e. starting your own business). Whereas if we can figure out how to transfer more wealth away from organizations and into the hands of real people, that gets rid of bullshit jobs too, because most of them come from the principal-agent problem and the misalignment between managers and owners/taxpayers. Transferring the money to any person or entity without middle management would be a net improvement.

WJW 6y ago

There's a ton of nice-to-have professions that are not strictly necessary, like musicians and decorative fountain builders. That is a good thing! It's clearly possible to live in a giant grey barrack and eat nothing but soylent but it's not what 99% of the population would prefer. If anything, it would be good for society to make the percentage of not-essential-but-nice-to-have as high as possible.

mlyle 6y ago
There's various kinds of "unnecessary work" jobs. Some do really contribute directly to the common welfare: artisans and producers of culture; providers of small conveniences, etc. There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial, make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.
- roenxi 6y ago
  To be fair, nobody knows which parts of a complex bureaucracy are useless and which are important. There is a pretty decent chance that the truly useless parts of an organisation are linked in to complying with regulations. Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    > Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective. When we look at e.g. higher education, for a place that's particularly guilty of this: Administrative costs have grown to be approximately equal to instructional costs at universities, from about a quarter of expenditures in 1980. In essence, our desire to prevent waste and to ensure that money is spent the way we'd like has created an ever-ballooning set of administrative work. It might be better to tolerate a somewhat greater share of instructional and research expenditures being wasted or spent in non-ideal ways. Any time there's a small bit of waste or money spent in ways we don't approve of, the impulse is to create rules and administrative procedures to prevent it from happening again. But this effectively creates a perpetual overhead for what may have been a one-time, very minor problem.

wolfd 6y ago

The current losses in public education will be felt on the decades timescale. I think the perspective here on HN is probably shifted due to the tech demographic, where VC and ads have provided a buffer. Systems have inertia, stuff continues working until it hits a wall. The unemployment systems written in COBOL kept churning until now, for example. I think the cuts in jobs might give the impression that "we never needed them in the first place," and maybe that's true in some cases, but it's hard to distinguish right now from the effects that take years to surface.

majormajor 6y ago

I don't really understand what COVID would tell us about "bullshit jobs." It tells us that restaurants and bars and concerts, etc, aren't "necessary." Duh? Leisure activity has never been necessary, but it's still something we enjoy and value. The existence of those leisure jobs and the venues they operates certainly adds value to my life.

waheoo 6y ago
A lot of businesses have used revenue loss to justify layoffs.

BariumBlue 6y ago

I think it's a little unfair - you will always have jobs that are important in the immediate, short, medium, long terms. Society can function perfectly fine without teachers, engineers, scientists... For a bit. Some teams can function fine with reduced manning, but long term need full or more manning, for training, taking care of admin, ensuring sanity, and doing more than the bare minimum. Not that I disagree that some jobs are for expensive seat warmers to ensure warm fuzzies