7 ms·

This is what I've been suspecting. It can't be true in competitive markets.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
handrous 5y ago
I'm really curious about the perspective and life experience of posters who didn't read Greaber's book and go "yep, I've been that person a couple times, and almost everyone I know has complained to me at one time or another that one of their jobs was bullshit and didn't need to exist, usually with a nice, long explanation of all the nothing they do". That such jobs exist—and yes, in the private sector, not just government—was in no way the interesting part of that book, for me, but just an obvious fact of life. The cataloguing of why, and the exploration of trends and consequences, was the interesting part. There must be very little overlap between my place in the world and the people whose reaction is, "nah, that can't possibly be true".
bottled_poe 5y ago
To some extent sure, but the market isn’t perfectly competitive either.
Rygu 5y ago
A competitive market may become efficient, companies therein not always.
- RivieraKid 5y ago
  The idea is that if most jobs were bullshit, it should be quite easy for a new business to capture market share. There are many people who have the capital and are looking for such opportunities.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    This ignores the possibility that it’s difficult to avoid winding up with at least bullshit jobs in any organization.
  - mustafa_pasi 5y ago
    If you read the book, it mostly contends with this idea, that competition is supposed to root out these inefficiencies, and it claims that it doesn't. Maybe it is intrinsic to human nature, to create these bullshit jobs. In fact, isn't this exactly the same argument against so called "socialism"? That once you have a big government bureaucracy, public sector employees start working for themselves, rather than to serve the public. Well the same is true of big corporate bureaucracies.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Big government doesn't have competition.
  - Rygu 5y ago
    Yes that's the theory, yet currently any company with sufficient capital or geopolitical advantage can be an effective market leader, while at the same time operating inefficiently at a loss.
  - WJW 5y ago
    This would only be true if the market share of a company is inversely correlated to the number of bullshit jobs in said company. There might be such a link because less money spent on bullshit job salaries means more money available for the marketing budget but it's not at all clear IMO that such a correlation exists and if so, how strong it is. Case in point: We can observe that there are many extremely profitable companies (say, Disney or Oracle) that nonetheless do not have a reputation for being all that bullshit-free. In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Among other things this idea ignores (and which other commenters mentioned), there's also time factor. The one thing that's often forgotten wrt. the market. The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it. If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing. (Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.) In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
    - andrekandre 5y ago
      constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium apologies to ask such a naive question, but im trying to understand, what is the basis that it is thought 'a market is "trying" to reach an equilibrium'... maybe im too hung up on the semantics/wording, but im genuinely curious because in my mind "the market" isnt really "trying" to reach anything.... maybe its agents are (gain a profit, hoodswink someone, make a fair exchange, etc etc)... so in aggregate there may be some result over time, but i find it hard to imagine its trying to reach an equilibrium per se...?
neel_k 5y ago
Sure it can. Actual competitive markets are made of competing firms, and firms can't (in general) optimise. 1. Holmstrom's theorem tells us that no payment system for a team of agents can have a budget in balance, be in Nash equilibrium, and be Pareto efficient. 2. Since firms are definitionally teams of people, and since you don't get a choice whether the budget balancing or the workers optimise, this means that firms must sacrifice Pareto efficiency. 3. If firms can't always seek out the Pareto frontier, then a competitive market composed of firms will not satisfy the conditions for Walras' theorem to hold, and so competitive markets can't necessarily reach equilibrium.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Holmatrom theorem can have a budget surplus, With Nash Equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. Businesses are (ideally) run with a budget surplus, with profit extracted.
incrudible 5y ago
A market can be perfectly competitive and still revolve around the buying and selling of bullshit. For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. Just because something is bullshit doesn't mean it's useless. For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways: - Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. - Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands. And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
  - danaris 5y ago
    It's worth noting that this isn't unique to online advertising: the quote "Half of all advertising is worthless; the trouble is, we don't know which half" is over a century old.
  - falcor84 5y ago
    >Advertising is mostly zero sum I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.
trabant00 5y ago
That is if you believe something can be done about the existence of bullshit jobs. From my experience and in my opinion, when an organization pushes past the point where everybody knows everybody else and where one person can understand the whole apparatus there's absolutely nothing that can you can do but accept the reality of losing complete control and oversight. Another aspect: the increasing number and depth of rules and regulations imposed by laws on organizations creates the need of bureaucrats that simply sign checklists without actually checking anything. You can know the jobs are bullshit but can't simply choose not to comply. Some whole departments are there just for show. In this age you have to look like you care about the environment, social issues, etc. And while really caring would be quite expensive and in some cases completely debilitating for the business a few people making powerpoints and social media posts do the trick. And then there's government jobs, markets ruled by monopolies, corruption, nepotism, and a million other things.
neilwilson 5y ago
We don't have a competitive market in jobs. There are always systemically fewer jobs than there are people that want them - deliberately so as a matter of policy. For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market. In the UK we currently have 3.5 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work, but only 0.6 million unfilled vacancies.
- gruez 5y ago
  >For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market. Why should both sides be equal? Easy counter-example: I'm sure everyone on earth would like an iphone (demand of 8 billion) but the supply is far less than that.
  - neilwilson 5y ago
    They should be roughly equal over time. The purest markets we have are the financial markets and level 2 data tends to exhibit this quality. Demand is desire plus ability to pay - which is why your iPhone example is deficient. That’s why billions go without and why people go for the alternatives. However everybody needs a job to be able to live. There is no alternative to selling your labour hours in a modern world. Extracting from others is a fallacy of composition.
captainbland 5y ago
Huge amounts of the economy are not competitive markets, even ignoring state enterprises. For instance: large companies and monopolies can stand to sustain a lot of "bullshit" as anticompetitive pressures and just economics of scale and generally just social inertia (e.g. "well competitor X might be cheaper but do they represent higher risk?") let them get away with inefficient practices. They have to do a lot of bullshit before this becomes a risk to them. Most companies have some elasticity on this also when what they can spend is not directly tied to their revenue and their competitive position in the market. I.e. they can raise more money than their competitive position might suggest through either loans or investment. Loans and investments cannot be perfectly efficient because there is always incomplete information when awarding finance. This may occur in some types of startups but it's true for many established companies as well. It's not necessarily the case either that bullshit jobs have to be stable in order to represent a large chunk of the labour market either. They may be wiped out by competitive pressures in one area only to open up in another. Charities/non-profits may also provide another place for bullshit jobs to hide. Not all charities are perfectly efficient and they do not operate competitively. In almost every corner of the economy there are inefficiencies where bullshit jobs can hide.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I'm really curious about the perspective and life experience of posters who didn't read Greaber's book and go "yep, I've been that person a couple times, and almost everyone I know has complained to me at one time or another that one of their jobs was bullshit and didn't need to exist, usually with a nice, long explanation of all the nothing they do". That such jobs exist—and yes, in the private sector, not just government—was in no way the interesting part of that book, for me, but just an obvious fact of life. The cataloguing of why, and the exploration of trends and consequences, was the interesting part. There must be very little overlap between my place in the world and the people whose reaction is, "nah, that can't possibly be true".

bottled_poe 5y ago

To some extent sure, but the market isn’t perfectly competitive either.

Rygu 5y ago

A competitive market may become efficient, companies therein not always.

RivieraKid 5y ago
The idea is that if most jobs were bullshit, it should be quite easy for a new business to capture market share. There are many people who have the capital and are looking for such opportunities.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  This ignores the possibility that it’s difficult to avoid winding up with at least bullshit jobs in any organization.
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  If you read the book, it mostly contends with this idea, that competition is supposed to root out these inefficiencies, and it claims that it doesn't. Maybe it is intrinsic to human nature, to create these bullshit jobs. In fact, isn't this exactly the same argument against so called "socialism"? That once you have a big government bureaucracy, public sector employees start working for themselves, rather than to serve the public. Well the same is true of big corporate bureaucracies.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Big government doesn't have competition.
- Rygu 5y ago
  Yes that's the theory, yet currently any company with sufficient capital or geopolitical advantage can be an effective market leader, while at the same time operating inefficiently at a loss.
- WJW 5y ago
  This would only be true if the market share of a company is inversely correlated to the number of bullshit jobs in said company. There might be such a link because less money spent on bullshit job salaries means more money available for the marketing budget but it's not at all clear IMO that such a correlation exists and if so, how strong it is. Case in point: We can observe that there are many extremely profitable companies (say, Disney or Oracle) that nonetheless do not have a reputation for being all that bullshit-free. In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Among other things this idea ignores (and which other commenters mentioned), there's also time factor. The one thing that's often forgotten wrt. the market. The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it. If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing. (Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.) In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium apologies to ask such a naive question, but im trying to understand, what is the basis that it is thought 'a market is "trying" to reach an equilibrium'... maybe im too hung up on the semantics/wording, but im genuinely curious because in my mind "the market" isnt really "trying" to reach anything.... maybe its agents are (gain a profit, hoodswink someone, make a fair exchange, etc etc)... so in aggregate there may be some result over time, but i find it hard to imagine its trying to reach an equilibrium per se...?

neel_k 5y ago

Sure it can. Actual competitive markets are made of competing firms, and firms can't (in general) optimise. 1. Holmstrom's theorem tells us that no payment system for a team of agents can have a budget in balance, be in Nash equilibrium, and be Pareto efficient. 2. Since firms are definitionally teams of people, and since you don't get a choice whether the budget balancing or the workers optimise, this means that firms must sacrifice Pareto efficiency. 3. If firms can't always seek out the Pareto frontier, then a competitive market composed of firms will not satisfy the conditions for Walras' theorem to hold, and so competitive markets can't necessarily reach equilibrium.

alisonkisk 5y ago
Holmatrom theorem can have a budget surplus, With Nash Equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. Businesses are (ideally) run with a budget surplus, with profit extracted.

incrudible 5y ago

A market can be perfectly competitive and still revolve around the buying and selling of bullshit. For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. Just because something is bullshit doesn't mean it's useless. For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!

TeMPOraL 5y ago
My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways: - Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. - Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands. And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
- danaris 5y ago
  It's worth noting that this isn't unique to online advertising: the quote "Half of all advertising is worthless; the trouble is, we don't know which half" is over a century old.
- falcor84 5y ago
  >Advertising is mostly zero sum I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.

trabant00 5y ago

That is if you believe something can be done about the existence of bullshit jobs. From my experience and in my opinion, when an organization pushes past the point where everybody knows everybody else and where one person can understand the whole apparatus there's absolutely nothing that can you can do but accept the reality of losing complete control and oversight. Another aspect: the increasing number and depth of rules and regulations imposed by laws on organizations creates the need of bureaucrats that simply sign checklists without actually checking anything. You can know the jobs are bullshit but can't simply choose not to comply. Some whole departments are there just for show. In this age you have to look like you care about the environment, social issues, etc. And while really caring would be quite expensive and in some cases completely debilitating for the business a few people making powerpoints and social media posts do the trick. And then there's government jobs, markets ruled by monopolies, corruption, nepotism, and a million other things.

neilwilson 5y ago

We don't have a competitive market in jobs. There are always systemically fewer jobs than there are people that want them - deliberately so as a matter of policy. For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market. In the UK we currently have 3.5 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work, but only 0.6 million unfilled vacancies.

gruez 5y ago
>For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market. Why should both sides be equal? Easy counter-example: I'm sure everyone on earth would like an iphone (demand of 8 billion) but the supply is far less than that.
- neilwilson 5y ago
  They should be roughly equal over time. The purest markets we have are the financial markets and level 2 data tends to exhibit this quality. Demand is desire plus ability to pay - which is why your iPhone example is deficient. That’s why billions go without and why people go for the alternatives. However everybody needs a job to be able to live. There is no alternative to selling your labour hours in a modern world. Extracting from others is a fallacy of composition.

captainbland 5y ago

Huge amounts of the economy are not competitive markets, even ignoring state enterprises. For instance: large companies and monopolies can stand to sustain a lot of "bullshit" as anticompetitive pressures and just economics of scale and generally just social inertia (e.g. "well competitor X might be cheaper but do they represent higher risk?") let them get away with inefficient practices. They have to do a lot of bullshit before this becomes a risk to them. Most companies have some elasticity on this also when what they can spend is not directly tied to their revenue and their competitive position in the market. I.e. they can raise more money than their competitive position might suggest through either loans or investment. Loans and investments cannot be perfectly efficient because there is always incomplete information when awarding finance. This may occur in some types of startups but it's true for many established companies as well. It's not necessarily the case either that bullshit jobs have to be stable in order to represent a large chunk of the labour market either. They may be wiped out by competitive pressures in one area only to open up in another. Charities/non-profits may also provide another place for bullshit jobs to hide. Not all charities are perfectly efficient and they do not operate competitively. In almost every corner of the economy there are inefficiencies where bullshit jobs can hide.