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This is a 2018 book review of David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs.' It seems like an exceedingly interesting time to revisit this book, though! Keynes in the 1930's

This is a 2018 book review of David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs.' It seems like an exceedingly interesting time to revisit this book, though! Keynes in the 1930's predicted fewer of us would be working today, but we still struggle to maintain low unemployment rates, presumably with lots of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs filling the gaps in people's times, and producing a huge amount of collective grief along the way. And now in the midst of a truly epic global slowdown, the food systems are still functioning, and people still have shelter, so long as we have laws to protect against evictions... Why not get rid of a lot of the bullshit: deploy Basic Income and live freer lives? What if we were working 10 hours a week to cover life's niceties, and had an extra 30 hours to write more music, invent more math, write our novels (and read the new deluge thereof), or truly master starcraft? Or pass on our skills to the next generation with a fraction of the class sizes?

perfunctory 6y ago
> What if we were working 10 hours a week Funny but this is the exact number of hours I am working per week at the moment.
- omosubi 6y ago
  How do you do that? Are you able to pay all your bills?
YinglingLight 6y ago
An extra 30 hours to teach our children ourselves. The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. The number one way to prevent people from seeking the truth is to saddle them with financial stress.
- vore 6y ago
  > The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. What does this even mean?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    A generous interpretation: The "nuclear family" allows children to spend more time receiving personalized education from adult family members. Single parents working 3 jobs don't really have time to help with homework.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    An alternate interpretation: It makes it so that the school board doesn't get to decide what "true" is.
mjfl 6y ago
I think this will lead to inflation. Why should essential workers keep working if everyone else can stay home and do poetry? The natural response is to raise prices for their labor. Obviously if the same amount of money is obtainable with 1/4th the work (by "non-essential" people), the money is worth 1/4 of its former value.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Was watching the first few sessions of Great Courses The Black Death. The Black Death essentially led to the end of Feudalism, the rise of the merchant class and the rise of cities. Since there were a lot less serfs (in some hard hit areas 50% less) to do the farming Feudal lords raised wages to attract serfs from neighboring serfdoms.
bena 6y ago
Because slavery is immoral. And that's what you essentially need to do this. Even with extra steps, it's slavery. That's the big question about automation that I always ask that just gets handwaved away with "We'll pay a lot" or "People will want to". There's going to be a job gap, if there's not one now, where we have far more people than jobs that are needed. So the answer for the unemployment situation is basically accepting the post-scarcity nature of the world and just kind of let people live. No means-testing, no qualifications, just people getting X because it's the right thing to do. So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done? Right now the system is rolling due to inertia and the promise that this is temporary. Just because something can be tolerated temporarily, it doesn't mean we can sustain it indefinitely. And I'm not saying things should stay the same. I'm saying that we are not prepared for the changes that are coming. We do not know the answers to the questions we're about to face. It's going to get difficult.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  I would argue that for the workers lowest on the totem pole, we're already in a situation not far from what you're calling slavery: people stuck in jobs they hate, with no flexibility, and the threats of crushing debt and eviction to keep them in place. Treatment of low-skill labor is already immoral under our pseudo-capitalist system; can we do better?
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    More on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery One quibble though: I would extend this to basically everybody who wasn't born wealthy.
  - bena 6y ago
    We can probably do a lot better, but we are on the road to making it worse. And I know people like to talk about "wage slavery" and to a large degree, they have a point. However, we didn't call what our ancestors did "subsistence slavery". They had to work to subsist. They had to grow or forage their own food, build their own shelter, etc. So the concept of "working to survive" is pretty much the norm and not the exception already. And as hard as that can be, we are approaching the time when we will be past that. Where the vast majority of people won't have to work to survive. And, hooray for them, but I'm still concerned for the minority.
dougmwne 6y ago
Another way to look at this is that maybe our current economic system is failing to find productive ways to put us to work, even though the world is unfinished. We have a world on a collision course with climate change and instead of bullshit, hundreds of millions of people could be diverted to geoengineering and green energy projects. We have housing crises in dozens of cities, but our economies are not putting enough people to work building housing. Children are being left under-educated, elderly under-cared for. Billions live in poverty, but our economies are not creating material comfort for them. And once we take care of all that, we have a system full of dead planets and moons that could be turned into gardens. There is plenty to do, but a failure of incentives to do it.
- omosubi 6y ago
  I have often thought we should have a military style group that teaches kids the discipline and self respect of the military but without the killing aspects and then out them to use rehabbing natural areas, cleaning up manufacturing sites, teaching kids, etc. It's sort of like the civilian conservation corps of the new deal but with a wider scope.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Curiously, a lot of the big problems you mention can be mitigated by slowing things down. We're seeing directly what happens to emissions when we reduce the number of people commuting and flying on a daily basis. And getting rid of bullshit jobs frees up a lot of people for child and elder care, for people they care about beyond their economic relationship.
- abj 6y ago
  All of these tasks seem like more useful than assigning jira tickets. How do we fix the incentive structure to incentivize all these tasks? I'm genuinely interested in helping, but I'm not sure how except through some effective charity. I feel like you've done a great job of summing up what a large percentage of white collar workers are thinking.
  - dougmwne 6y ago
eezurr 6y ago
UBI will never be successful because it short-circuits the innate need to survive. Many people are not self-leaders and some will turn to drugs when they have no purpose to live. In this case, you've taken away their ladder to climb which is used to measure self-worth. Think about how many people struggle to find the discipline to exercise. People need structure, it's a fundamental part of being a pact mammal.
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  Surely there are nicer ways for people to find structure in their lives than the threat of utter ruin if they don’t perform the mandatory sacrifice?
  - eezurr 6y ago
    That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. With UBI, you'd need to replace that system-structure to reproduce those rewards[1]. This is not possible (or rather, the implications are disturbing). The inability for many people to put the work ethic effort into building their own rewards is evident by the present time. People will take the easiest path possible to soften the realities of surviving[2]. This is also evident from the design choices behind successful, addicting platforms and video games. [1] (ownership growth, material gains, physical gains (or rather, losses, since we are talking about fat/cholesterol, et. al), emotional growth, social network growth, personal network growth (trust)) [2] (economically, emotionally; all people, not just the poor) UBI is also dangerous because it cannot be removed without wrecking havoc on society. It must remain successful, especially once the next generation is born into it.
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      > That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. No, especially jobs at the low end are not rewarding people for their hard work. At best most of these jobs just allow people to subsist. And even at higher levels of income there is lots of work that's just meaningless. Yeah, they might be getting some financial rewards, but it might not be far off from just giving people financial rewards for playing some video game - I'm not necessarily saying we should do that, but that it would essentially have the same societal effect.
the-dude 6y ago
The majority of people have so little imagination, they would have no idea what to do with their time.

perfunctory 6y ago

> What if we were working 10 hours a week Funny but this is the exact number of hours I am working per week at the moment.

omosubi 6y ago
How do you do that? Are you able to pay all your bills?

YinglingLight 6y ago

An extra 30 hours to teach our children ourselves. The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. The number one way to prevent people from seeking the truth is to saddle them with financial stress.

vore 6y ago
> The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. What does this even mean?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  A generous interpretation: The "nuclear family" allows children to spend more time receiving personalized education from adult family members. Single parents working 3 jobs don't really have time to help with homework.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  An alternate interpretation: It makes it so that the school board doesn't get to decide what "true" is.

mjfl 6y ago

I think this will lead to inflation. Why should essential workers keep working if everyone else can stay home and do poetry? The natural response is to raise prices for their labor. Obviously if the same amount of money is obtainable with 1/4th the work (by "non-essential" people), the money is worth 1/4 of its former value.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
Was watching the first few sessions of Great Courses The Black Death. The Black Death essentially led to the end of Feudalism, the rise of the merchant class and the rise of cities. Since there were a lot less serfs (in some hard hit areas 50% less) to do the farming Feudal lords raised wages to attract serfs from neighboring serfdoms.

bena 6y ago

Because slavery is immoral. And that's what you essentially need to do this. Even with extra steps, it's slavery. That's the big question about automation that I always ask that just gets handwaved away with "We'll pay a lot" or "People will want to". There's going to be a job gap, if there's not one now, where we have far more people than jobs that are needed. So the answer for the unemployment situation is basically accepting the post-scarcity nature of the world and just kind of let people live. No means-testing, no qualifications, just people getting X because it's the right thing to do. So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done? Right now the system is rolling due to inertia and the promise that this is temporary. Just because something can be tolerated temporarily, it doesn't mean we can sustain it indefinitely. And I'm not saying things should stay the same. I'm saying that we are not prepared for the changes that are coming. We do not know the answers to the questions we're about to face. It's going to get difficult.

sdenton4 6y ago
I would argue that for the workers lowest on the totem pole, we're already in a situation not far from what you're calling slavery: people stuck in jobs they hate, with no flexibility, and the threats of crushing debt and eviction to keep them in place. Treatment of low-skill labor is already immoral under our pseudo-capitalist system; can we do better?
- pmiller2 6y ago
  More on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery One quibble though: I would extend this to basically everybody who wasn't born wealthy.
- bena 6y ago
  We can probably do a lot better, but we are on the road to making it worse. And I know people like to talk about "wage slavery" and to a large degree, they have a point. However, we didn't call what our ancestors did "subsistence slavery". They had to work to subsist. They had to grow or forage their own food, build their own shelter, etc. So the concept of "working to survive" is pretty much the norm and not the exception already. And as hard as that can be, we are approaching the time when we will be past that. Where the vast majority of people won't have to work to survive. And, hooray for them, but I'm still concerned for the minority.

dougmwne 6y ago

Another way to look at this is that maybe our current economic system is failing to find productive ways to put us to work, even though the world is unfinished. We have a world on a collision course with climate change and instead of bullshit, hundreds of millions of people could be diverted to geoengineering and green energy projects. We have housing crises in dozens of cities, but our economies are not putting enough people to work building housing. Children are being left under-educated, elderly under-cared for. Billions live in poverty, but our economies are not creating material comfort for them. And once we take care of all that, we have a system full of dead planets and moons that could be turned into gardens. There is plenty to do, but a failure of incentives to do it.

omosubi 6y ago
I have often thought we should have a military style group that teaches kids the discipline and self respect of the military but without the killing aspects and then out them to use rehabbing natural areas, cleaning up manufacturing sites, teaching kids, etc. It's sort of like the civilian conservation corps of the new deal but with a wider scope.
sdenton4 6y ago
Curiously, a lot of the big problems you mention can be mitigated by slowing things down. We're seeing directly what happens to emissions when we reduce the number of people commuting and flying on a daily basis. And getting rid of bullshit jobs frees up a lot of people for child and elder care, for people they care about beyond their economic relationship.
abj 6y ago
All of these tasks seem like more useful than assigning jira tickets. How do we fix the incentive structure to incentivize all these tasks? I'm genuinely interested in helping, but I'm not sure how except through some effective charity. I feel like you've done a great job of summing up what a large percentage of white collar workers are thinking.
- dougmwne 6y ago

eezurr 6y ago

UBI will never be successful because it short-circuits the innate need to survive. Many people are not self-leaders and some will turn to drugs when they have no purpose to live. In this case, you've taken away their ladder to climb which is used to measure self-worth. Think about how many people struggle to find the discipline to exercise. People need structure, it's a fundamental part of being a pact mammal.

wolfgang42 6y ago
Surely there are nicer ways for people to find structure in their lives than the threat of utter ruin if they don’t perform the mandatory sacrifice?
- eezurr 6y ago
  That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. With UBI, you'd need to replace that system-structure to reproduce those rewards[1]. This is not possible (or rather, the implications are disturbing). The inability for many people to put the work ethic effort into building their own rewards is evident by the present time. People will take the easiest path possible to soften the realities of surviving[2]. This is also evident from the design choices behind successful, addicting platforms and video games. [1] (ownership growth, material gains, physical gains (or rather, losses, since we are talking about fat/cholesterol, et. al), emotional growth, social network growth, personal network growth (trust)) [2] (economically, emotionally; all people, not just the poor) UBI is also dangerous because it cannot be removed without wrecking havoc on society. It must remain successful, especially once the next generation is born into it.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    > That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. No, especially jobs at the low end are not rewarding people for their hard work. At best most of these jobs just allow people to subsist. And even at higher levels of income there is lots of work that's just meaningless. Yeah, they might be getting some financial rewards, but it might not be far off from just giving people financial rewards for playing some video game - I'm not necessarily saying we should do that, but that it would essentially have the same societal effect.

the-dude 6y ago

The majority of people have so little imagination, they would have no idea what to do with their time.