4 ms·

This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?

by api 15y ago

ThomPete 15y ago
most of this is computer generated no? I mean look for popular headlines, terms etc construct nonsense pages and you will have a good chance of getting up there.
Joakal 15y ago
Useless is subjective. If they are being paid, then it's not considered useless work is it?
- staticshock 15y ago
  No, read the linked AOL content farmer testimonial (http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/ http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-co...). He was one of many people hired by AOL to write this stuff by hand, at night, for $28k.
  - ssharp 15y ago
    If he was being paid $28,000, he had to be producing at least $28,000 worth of value to AOL. In trying to be neutral, the articles the AOL farmer wrote had to of be of some value to produce that return (the actual required return is probably some percentage higher than the $28k)-- eyes were reading the content and there was some demand for that content. The ultimate issue should lie with the mechanisms used to drive that $28k+%return in value. If that mechanism is the Google organic funnel -> AdSense revenues, and if your demand is for quality content, isn't Google more of the problem than AOL? AOL is trying to survive and compete in a landscape where bad articles written on the cheap produce a higher aggregate value than quality articles written by authors who command a higher wage.
    - AlisdairO 15y ago
      YOu're characterising value differently. I think the point being made is that the practical value of the articles is usually negligible - few who read them will get anything out of them. They're successful only because they game the existing system - essentially parasitic articles.
      - ssharp 15y ago
        I'd agree, but isn't it somewhat unrealistic to expect companies to operate altruistically in a market where you have to dumb down writing in order to maximize profit on a large scale? I wouldn't want to operate a business the way AOL does or the way Demand Media does, but if there is such a huge area of Google and search engines available for gaming, it's going to be gamed. There is too much incentive for some entity not to step in and profit.
        AlisdairO 15y ago
        Right, but nobody (well, probably a few people...) is asking human nature to change, much as we might find it distressing. I'd instead advocating changing the rules of the system to encourage actual value as opposed to the parasitic value generated by these articles. (getting on a soapbox here) I think it's easy to forget that we don't use the capitalist system because it is somehow morally right and pure - it's because so far as we know, it's what works best to motivate people to generate real value for humanity as a whole. If the system stops working, then you tweak it - which is why we have regulation on things like monopolies, for example. In this case, google has changed the system for us, and for that I'm very glad - incentives are now more aligned with producing quality content that's actually useful to someone.
    - Retric 15y ago
      Institutions are not strictly rational. It's not hard to find cases where people have been payed 6+ months without actually doing anything other than showing up and reading a book.
nickolai 15y ago
Do you define the usefulness of a piece of work as "fulfills a percieved need for the individual paying for it" or as "brings added value to our society"? In the former case - every employee is doing useful work. The latter definition is way more restrictive.
- api 15y ago
  The latter. Useful means that it provides value that somehow improves the human condition. Everything from food to fuel to art to architecture is that. Random junk on the net is not. A central fallacy of present-day economics is the assumption that all economic activity is of equal value. GDP is a good example: A million dollars spent on healthcare increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on war increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on rubber dog crap increases GDP by a million. But these transactions are not of equal value. I personally think that economic central planners and GDP growth targets are a major underlying cause of all this useless make-work. I call it the gerbil wheel economy. Run, gerbil, run! Gotta make the opaque meaningless numbers bigger! You can see it very clearly in very centrally planned economies that worship GDP growth, like China. They have entire abandoned cities-- things built for nobody, just to make opaque numbers bigger.
  - JoelSutherland 15y ago
    Are you sure? The millionaire rubber dog crap inventor just died and gave everything he had to malaria vaccines. My point isn't that all dollars spent are equal, but that the world is so complicated that it is not easy to make a snap judgement about where the next big difference will come from.
    - 5l 15y ago
      And the glazier who fixed all the broken windows also left his money to good causes.
    - api 15y ago
      That's a low probability event, and doesn't affect the thesis much. We're talking overall here.
SandB0x 15y ago
You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary is here: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.html http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.ht... and the approximate origins are here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the-speed-of-labor-market-adjustment.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07... "I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."
- api 15y ago
  A solution might be forthcoming: peak oil. Put them to work making biofuels at a large scale.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    I don't believe that's a very manpower-intensive production system though, unless we're going for the Soylent Green option...
    - lukeschlather 15y ago
      Still sounds like a negligible amount of biofuels.
    - eftpotrm 15y ago
      Though, I should say, that masks another contingency with possibly the same effect. We have an economy which is predicated on cheap energy. As such it's frequently cheaper to produce goods by comparitively inefficient automated processes due to the reduction in manpower required, or to produce goods at distance from their end user as the reduction of labour costs from a remote supplier outweights the transportation costs. It seems plausible that an energy scarce world could reverse the economics of both situations. It would have enough other consequences that I'm not at all suggesting it as some sort of worker's utopia, but greater employment may be an interesting side-effect.
  - dstein 15y ago
jellicle 15y ago
It's not useless; it's mostly actively harmful. It has a negative worth, not zero worth.
- bastiat 15y ago
  Go fuck yourself. You do not know.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
bastiat 15y ago
You have no idea of what you speak. It's all good because I will be gone from HN in under 12 hours
- nonrecursive 15y ago
  Is this some kind of HN meltdown? What is your deal?
kds 15y ago
In my humble opinion the Global Situation roughly is: -> 80 % Survival mode, Struggling to meet ends (The so-called 3rd World, mostly) -> 15 % Semi-Ok, Hired hands in private and governmental institutions of various size (in-debted wage slaves, mostly) -> 5 % Ok, successful business owners, top managers, political leaders, rich and super-rich (various business sizes, amounts, market caps, etc... imagine any metric indicating financial and social success) If this picture is mostly right => Perhaps, the really useless work isn't something which is rightly measured as the global number of humans busy with it.
- bborud 15y ago
  I believe your estimates are overly optimistic. Then again, if you look at just the US, there is a huge gap between how people think wealth is distributed and reality. The distribution is only going to get worse. I don't see the 0.1% at the top suddenly growing altruistic -- nor do I think any sort of political disruption can change this tendency in the long term. Such disruptions now seem to, more often than not, result in more assets being secured by those of means. Whatever illusions of a democratic and fair society the 1900s instilled in us are just that: illusions. I predict that within my lifetime western society will indeed continue a trend towards the sci-fi predicions of the privately owned corporate state. To a large degree, this is already reality.

This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?

by api 15y ago

This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?

most of this is computer generated no? I mean look for popular headlines, terms etc construct nonsense pages and you will have a good chance of getting up there.

Joakal 15y ago

Useless is subjective. If they are being paid, then it's not considered useless work is it?

staticshock 15y ago
No, read the linked AOL content farmer testimonial (http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/ http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-co...). He was one of many people hired by AOL to write this stuff by hand, at night, for $28k.
- ssharp 15y ago
  If he was being paid $28,000, he had to be producing at least $28,000 worth of value to AOL. In trying to be neutral, the articles the AOL farmer wrote had to of be of some value to produce that return (the actual required return is probably some percentage higher than the $28k)-- eyes were reading the content and there was some demand for that content. The ultimate issue should lie with the mechanisms used to drive that $28k+%return in value. If that mechanism is the Google organic funnel -> AdSense revenues, and if your demand is for quality content, isn't Google more of the problem than AOL? AOL is trying to survive and compete in a landscape where bad articles written on the cheap produce a higher aggregate value than quality articles written by authors who command a higher wage.
  - AlisdairO 15y ago
    YOu're characterising value differently. I think the point being made is that the practical value of the articles is usually negligible - few who read them will get anything out of them. They're successful only because they game the existing system - essentially parasitic articles.
    - ssharp 15y ago
      I'd agree, but isn't it somewhat unrealistic to expect companies to operate altruistically in a market where you have to dumb down writing in order to maximize profit on a large scale? I wouldn't want to operate a business the way AOL does or the way Demand Media does, but if there is such a huge area of Google and search engines available for gaming, it's going to be gamed. There is too much incentive for some entity not to step in and profit.
      - AlisdairO 15y ago
        Right, but nobody (well, probably a few people...) is asking human nature to change, much as we might find it distressing. I'd instead advocating changing the rules of the system to encourage actual value as opposed to the parasitic value generated by these articles. (getting on a soapbox here) I think it's easy to forget that we don't use the capitalist system because it is somehow morally right and pure - it's because so far as we know, it's what works best to motivate people to generate real value for humanity as a whole. If the system stops working, then you tweak it - which is why we have regulation on things like monopolies, for example. In this case, google has changed the system for us, and for that I'm very glad - incentives are now more aligned with producing quality content that's actually useful to someone.
  - Retric 15y ago
    Institutions are not strictly rational. It's not hard to find cases where people have been payed 6+ months without actually doing anything other than showing up and reading a book.

nickolai 15y ago

Do you define the usefulness of a piece of work as "fulfills a percieved need for the individual paying for it" or as "brings added value to our society"? In the former case - every employee is doing useful work. The latter definition is way more restrictive.

api 15y ago
The latter. Useful means that it provides value that somehow improves the human condition. Everything from food to fuel to art to architecture is that. Random junk on the net is not. A central fallacy of present-day economics is the assumption that all economic activity is of equal value. GDP is a good example: A million dollars spent on healthcare increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on war increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on rubber dog crap increases GDP by a million. But these transactions are not of equal value. I personally think that economic central planners and GDP growth targets are a major underlying cause of all this useless make-work. I call it the gerbil wheel economy. Run, gerbil, run! Gotta make the opaque meaningless numbers bigger! You can see it very clearly in very centrally planned economies that worship GDP growth, like China. They have entire abandoned cities-- things built for nobody, just to make opaque numbers bigger.
- JoelSutherland 15y ago
  Are you sure? The millionaire rubber dog crap inventor just died and gave everything he had to malaria vaccines. My point isn't that all dollars spent are equal, but that the world is so complicated that it is not easy to make a snap judgement about where the next big difference will come from.
  - 5l 15y ago
    And the glazier who fixed all the broken windows also left his money to good causes.
  - api 15y ago
    That's a low probability event, and doesn't affect the thesis much. We're talking overall here.

SandB0x 15y ago

You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary is here: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.html http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.ht... and the approximate origins are here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the-speed-of-labor-market-adjustment.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07... "I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."

api 15y ago
A solution might be forthcoming: peak oil. Put them to work making biofuels at a large scale.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  I don't believe that's a very manpower-intensive production system though, unless we're going for the Soylent Green option...
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    Still sounds like a negligible amount of biofuels.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    Though, I should say, that masks another contingency with possibly the same effect. We have an economy which is predicated on cheap energy. As such it's frequently cheaper to produce goods by comparitively inefficient automated processes due to the reduction in manpower required, or to produce goods at distance from their end user as the reduction of labour costs from a remote supplier outweights the transportation costs. It seems plausible that an energy scarce world could reverse the economics of both situations. It would have enough other consequences that I'm not at all suggesting it as some sort of worker's utopia, but greater employment may be an interesting side-effect.
- dstein 15y ago

jellicle 15y ago

It's not useless; it's mostly actively harmful. It has a negative worth, not zero worth.

bastiat 15y ago
Go fuck yourself. You do not know.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

bastiat 15y ago

You have no idea of what you speak. It's all good because I will be gone from HN in under 12 hours

nonrecursive 15y ago
Is this some kind of HN meltdown? What is your deal?

kds 15y ago

In my humble opinion the Global Situation roughly is: -> 80 % Survival mode, Struggling to meet ends (The so-called 3rd World, mostly) -> 15 % Semi-Ok, Hired hands in private and governmental institutions of various size (in-debted wage slaves, mostly) -> 5 % Ok, successful business owners, top managers, political leaders, rich and super-rich (various business sizes, amounts, market caps, etc... imagine any metric indicating financial and social success) If this picture is mostly right => Perhaps, the really useless work isn't something which is rightly measured as the global number of humans busy with it.

bborud 15y ago
I believe your estimates are overly optimistic. Then again, if you look at just the US, there is a huge gap between how people think wealth is distributed and reality. The distribution is only going to get worse. I don't see the 0.1% at the top suddenly growing altruistic -- nor do I think any sort of political disruption can change this tendency in the long term. Such disruptions now seem to, more often than not, result in more assets being secured by those of means. Whatever illusions of a democratic and fair society the 1900s instilled in us are just that: illusions. I predict that within my lifetime western society will indeed continue a trend towards the sci-fi predicions of the privately owned corporate state. To a large degree, this is already reality.