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No. The problem is more that Graeber didn't refine the concept enough. Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they

No. The problem is more that Graeber didn't refine the concept enough. Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't. 2) are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible. 3) are socially, politically, and/or environmentally toxic. These are all different kinds of bullshit. They are bullshit jobs for reasons that should be obvious. The bullshit is about far more than alienation. It happens when the jobs lower net social stability, longevity, and prosperity, and promote short-term inequality over long-term opportunity. Since that's the opposite of The Economist's ethical system - the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea. Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically. Fortunately this created a memorable meme which helped people question what they were doing. If The Economist has started printing rebuttals, that suggests the meme was effective.

simonh 5y ago
Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I know in America there's a species of free market puritan that believes regulation is always bad, and truly free markets are some sort of anarchist paradise of unfettered freedom. I blame Ayn Rand*. There are a lot of such people, I have worked for several American companies so I've met some of them. That's not the Economist though, look up one of it's withering critiques of the American health care system for example. * Social welfare recipient Ayn Rand, to give her full title.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  >Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I think maybe you are looking at the situation and thinking that both the Economist and Graeber are "on the left", which from a US political standpoint would be somewhat accurate. Looked at in other context though, compared to Graeber, and Sahlins, who he studied under, the Economist would be better viewed as free market apologists offering helpful criticism whereas Graeber and Sahlins' work often questioned economic activity from a different perspective and has been used by people who question the very basis of modern economics and markets. For example, Sahlins' work was referenced extensively in Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work. And Graeber published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. From that perspective, the idea that the Economist is on the left is a bit simplistic and not very relevant.
  - simonh 5y ago
    I think you have to be pretty far on the right for the Economist to be at all left of you. They're very much liberal yes, in the old school sense Milton Friedman used when he described himself as a liberal. Nowadays in American political discourse liberal is a code word for socialist, and that's not the Economist at all. Not that I have any particular hostility to socialism either. I think it's generally wrong and misguided, but mostly in a well meaning, bumbling Sir Kier Starmer sort of way. Occasionally in a pernicious, righteous, nasty minded Jeremy Corbyn sort of way. I can often work with socialists though, but I'm European so you get used to it. I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. Spoiler - not much.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      >I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. I think that is the misinterpretation. Graeber and Sahlins' work seems to me to be interpreting things from outside a left/right capitalist/communist framework entirely, at least as much as possible, considering how much we have been trained to think within those frameworks.
      - simonh 5y ago
        That's fair enough, but I think the same criticisms I have of Marxist theories of value also apply to Graeber.
    - SaberTail 5y ago
      > I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarchist[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033208/http:/www.villagevoice.com/2005-05-31/people/take-it-from-the-top/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033208/http:/www.village...
      - SyzygistSix 5y ago
        Wow. Thanks for that. That is interesting that he even mentions Bob Black. From what little I have read from Graeber I got the impression that he, like Black, considers communism/Marxism as authoritarian and irreconcilable with anarchy as capitalism.
dalbasal 5y ago
Problem for what? Graeber discusses and speculates about different flavours of bullshit, that explicitly are not intended to represent different versions of the same thing. For definition/measurement, he takes an anthropologist's approach: let people define it themselves. Both you and this article are imposing another definition of bullshit. That's fine, but it just isn't the subject of the book. He purposely chose a playful dissenting term like bullshit. He didn't say "productivity," because he wasn't writing a book on economics. He didn't say "alienation" because it wasn't a book about psychology. He does talk about those things, but they don't define it. The reason the book is compelling is precisely because it isn't an economics or psychology book. Economics is pretty bad at measuring economic output of accounting, advertising, HR and most of the jobs that have a high rate of "my job is bullshit" takes associated with them. That means that we don't have empirical knowledge to discuss and the "argument" keeps devolving into the same theoretical (now ideological) one that Marx and Ricardo had 200 years ago... just like this article does. No one would be making these comments if the subject was "am I a good person?"
originalvichy 5y ago
Did you read the book or just the essay? I listened to the audionook and I’m pretty sure he went into great depth on the different flavours of bullshit jobs you mentioned.
pizzazzaro 5y ago
We could almost flip the premise of who predominately considers their job "bullshit". And while criticizing Graeber usually puts me on the defensive? I take this point well. Beaurocrats and financiers will find a way to justify their work as "useful". Its as if the abstraction from the reality of their (lack-of) work has removed them from the alienation. Meanwhile, down here with the formerly-described "Essential Workers"? The alienation is palpable. We're over-managed, under-paid, and just told to "get a better job" that might not exist, or an education that is a serious financial risk. Too many of us already have those degrees, those skills. And we're paid in practically peanuts while the rent skulyrockets. Thanks financiers, passing our empty homes around as "investment commodities" is getting people left out in the cold. So when those jobs go unfilled for months, even as employers completely neglect that their shit wages demand we subsidize the ability to work? Good, subsidize your own needs, same as we've done.
VHRanger 5y ago
This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science. For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it. This isn't what an academic should be doing. And don't get me started on his debt book
- dools 5y ago
  Debt was his good one, bullshit jobs is bullshit.
- jfengel 5y ago
  You have to be careful about quantifying things, because you can't measure all the things you'd like to measure, but that doesn't mean they're not important. The pinnacle of science measures very simple things very rigorously, like in physics, and even there you get the occasional revolution where you realize that you've been measuring the wrong things all along. That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't. But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms. That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.
  - unishark 5y ago
    It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments. Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.
ushouldrtfa 5y ago
> Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations, and a resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour. I think you 1) share the resentment the author describes here, and it's why you've written this emotional and fact-free rebuttal and 2) didn't read the article
notahacker 5y ago
The other problem is that other people already wrote extensively on better refinements of the concept, coming up with theories of positional goods, conspicuous consumption, signalling, information asymmetry within bureaucratic organizations, economic rent extraction etc. As well as explaining why a lot of jobs which in an ideal world filled with ideally-behaving people wouldn't exist could actually be necessary and useful in the real world, and why professions often seen (especially by their participants) as extremely meaningful and impactful like the arts are often funded by those that aren't, like advertising. Graeber's definition of a "bullshit" job as one the worker didn't feel was meaningful - the canonical example being his lawyer friend who would rather people paid him for his hobby of making music - and his claim that the private sector was creating them as some sort of workfare program feels comparatively naive.
- js8 5y ago
  I think you're right, but I also think what Graeber was legitimate in the sense that he went at it from the other end. Yes, economists (especially the non-neoclassical ones) came up with all sorts of market failures. But they can seem to be a bit theoretical, as in, well, maybe these things happen in the wild, but maybe mostly not. In other words, they treat it as interesting, but disconnected, phenomena. Graeber, as an anthropologist, just noticed lots of people being unhappy even in the situation of material abundance. And he looked for an unifying explanation. I think there definitely is a connection, but it will have to wait for somebody to analyze it in more detail.
js8 5y ago
> Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically. Really? I thought he actually did divide "bullshit jobs" into different categories (5 of them total) in his book. But I am not even sure that your 1,2,3 is so separate. Isn't creating jobs that nobody needs and nobody would notice if they went away also alienating and, consequently, toxic? Isn't that just a matter of extent? Anyway, I agree that free markets cannot be a solution to any moral problem, because participation in markets is by definition symmetric and voluntary, and so they cannot consistently impose any values. (But the people who push the markets do want them to, for ideological reasons, appear as if they are inevitable, and this requires the capability to resolve moral ambiguity.)
CityOfThrowaway 5y ago
> even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea. Damming the concept of “markets” as “self-harming” and “unstable” is an asinine statement. Of course not every instantiation of a market is flawless and without trade offs. Any sufficiently large-scale social system is rife with weird second order effects. We can only analyze the efficacy of markets by comparing them against their alternative. Ironically – given one of your complaints about markets is monopolism – the most common alternative to markets is monopolism by the government. Yet, governments suffer from the same bureaucratically-induced problems that you are attributing to organizations operating in markets. Indeed, they have it worse because they don’t have the external pressure of competition to keep their bad behavior in check. Accountability in the public sector is significantly worse than in the private sector. History is filled with state-owned monopolies that failed to adapt to changing situations and degrade into obsolescence while still bleeding the public of money. Every social system over-produces some things and under-produces other things, in constantly shifting proportions as time goes on. Of all systems, sufficiently competitive markets are the best at dynamically adjusting to minimize both surpluses and shortages. State-owned monopolies are truly abysmal at matching supply and demand. There’s textbooks worth of material as to why this is the case. And perhaps, you may be referring to some notion of “totally free markets”. But there are no totally free markets. All markets are subject to the formal laws of their various operating jurisdictions and the norms that come from operating in society. The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior. There are notable counter examples where there isn’t consumer choice, but those organizations get dragged in the media and are forced to change in the court of public opinion. So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?
- rStar 5y ago
  > So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”? idk, whatever we have right now?
  - 5y ago
xibalba 5y ago
Ok, where's your data? This article cites the work of Soffia, Wood, and Burchell[1] who "use representative data from the EU to test five of [bullshit jobs theory]'s core hypotheses" and find them to be nonsense based upon opinion and conjecture. > instead of analysing them more clinically Can you point to a clinical analysis supporting your claims? You may be falling prey to what you accuse the Economist of: ideology over evidence. Additionally,your viewpoint seems internally inconsistent. On the one hand, bigcorps are profit obsessed and will stop at nothing to juice margins. But also, they somehow allow jobs (ie labor cost) which produce nothing to proliferate. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  Bigcorpos aren't omnipotent individuals. We've all heard the apocryphal stories of people who've slipped between the gaps and kept being paid. Companies don't need to be perfect to beat the competition, they just need to be good enough.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Is it possible corporations, being large and complex organisms, can be obsessed with margins--yet also may harbor BS jobs? Political kingdom building, hire to fire, and over fitting to poorly chosen metics are just a few ways I can see margin obsessed companies also maintaining BS jobs.
dnautics 5y ago
> are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible This is purely subjective. I've worked at a tech company where they paid me 1.5x what they could have and I STFU so the checks would keep coming (they thought they were getting a bargain), but generally the firms will try to negotiate with you for the lowest price they can get you at. That said, the aformention job where i was overpaid was a bullshit job because the product (was there even a product? I can't tell) would not have noticed if I wasn't there (maybe the morale would have gone down? I certainly wasn't worth that much).
- fock 5y ago
  that's why it said "either: 1,2,3". "Was there even a product" sounds very much like "might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't."
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
"the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies" The Economist regularly argues against giving markets free rein, they will talk about the negative impacts of monopolies and call for policies aimed at stopping climate change.

simonh 5y ago

Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I know in America there's a species of free market puritan that believes regulation is always bad, and truly free markets are some sort of anarchist paradise of unfettered freedom. I blame Ayn Rand*. There are a lot of such people, I have worked for several American companies so I've met some of them. That's not the Economist though, look up one of it's withering critiques of the American health care system for example. * Social welfare recipient Ayn Rand, to give her full title.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
>Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I think maybe you are looking at the situation and thinking that both the Economist and Graeber are "on the left", which from a US political standpoint would be somewhat accurate. Looked at in other context though, compared to Graeber, and Sahlins, who he studied under, the Economist would be better viewed as free market apologists offering helpful criticism whereas Graeber and Sahlins' work often questioned economic activity from a different perspective and has been used by people who question the very basis of modern economics and markets. For example, Sahlins' work was referenced extensively in Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work. And Graeber published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. From that perspective, the idea that the Economist is on the left is a bit simplistic and not very relevant.
- simonh 5y ago
  I think you have to be pretty far on the right for the Economist to be at all left of you. They're very much liberal yes, in the old school sense Milton Friedman used when he described himself as a liberal. Nowadays in American political discourse liberal is a code word for socialist, and that's not the Economist at all. Not that I have any particular hostility to socialism either. I think it's generally wrong and misguided, but mostly in a well meaning, bumbling Sir Kier Starmer sort of way. Occasionally in a pernicious, righteous, nasty minded Jeremy Corbyn sort of way. I can often work with socialists though, but I'm European so you get used to it. I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. Spoiler - not much.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    >I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. I think that is the misinterpretation. Graeber and Sahlins' work seems to me to be interpreting things from outside a left/right capitalist/communist framework entirely, at least as much as possible, considering how much we have been trained to think within those frameworks.
    - simonh 5y ago
      That's fair enough, but I think the same criticisms I have of Marxist theories of value also apply to Graeber.
  - SaberTail 5y ago
    > I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarchist[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033208/http:/www.villagevoice.com/2005-05-31/people/take-it-from-the-top/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033208/http:/www.village...
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      Wow. Thanks for that. That is interesting that he even mentions Bob Black. From what little I have read from Graeber I got the impression that he, like Black, considers communism/Marxism as authoritarian and irreconcilable with anarchy as capitalism.

dalbasal 5y ago

Problem for what? Graeber discusses and speculates about different flavours of bullshit, that explicitly are not intended to represent different versions of the same thing. For definition/measurement, he takes an anthropologist's approach: let people define it themselves. Both you and this article are imposing another definition of bullshit. That's fine, but it just isn't the subject of the book. He purposely chose a playful dissenting term like bullshit. He didn't say "productivity," because he wasn't writing a book on economics. He didn't say "alienation" because it wasn't a book about psychology. He does talk about those things, but they don't define it. The reason the book is compelling is precisely because it isn't an economics or psychology book. Economics is pretty bad at measuring economic output of accounting, advertising, HR and most of the jobs that have a high rate of "my job is bullshit" takes associated with them. That means that we don't have empirical knowledge to discuss and the "argument" keeps devolving into the same theoretical (now ideological) one that Marx and Ricardo had 200 years ago... just like this article does. No one would be making these comments if the subject was "am I a good person?"

originalvichy 5y ago

Did you read the book or just the essay? I listened to the audionook and I’m pretty sure he went into great depth on the different flavours of bullshit jobs you mentioned.

pizzazzaro 5y ago

We could almost flip the premise of who predominately considers their job "bullshit". And while criticizing Graeber usually puts me on the defensive? I take this point well. Beaurocrats and financiers will find a way to justify their work as "useful". Its as if the abstraction from the reality of their (lack-of) work has removed them from the alienation. Meanwhile, down here with the formerly-described "Essential Workers"? The alienation is palpable. We're over-managed, under-paid, and just told to "get a better job" that might not exist, or an education that is a serious financial risk. Too many of us already have those degrees, those skills. And we're paid in practically peanuts while the rent skulyrockets. Thanks financiers, passing our empty homes around as "investment commodities" is getting people left out in the cold. So when those jobs go unfilled for months, even as employers completely neglect that their shit wages demand we subsidize the ability to work? Good, subsidize your own needs, same as we've done.

VHRanger 5y ago

This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science. For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it. This isn't what an academic should be doing. And don't get me started on his debt book

dools 5y ago
Debt was his good one, bullshit jobs is bullshit.
jfengel 5y ago
You have to be careful about quantifying things, because you can't measure all the things you'd like to measure, but that doesn't mean they're not important. The pinnacle of science measures very simple things very rigorously, like in physics, and even there you get the occasional revolution where you realize that you've been measuring the wrong things all along. That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't. But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms. That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.
- unishark 5y ago
  It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments. Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.

ushouldrtfa 5y ago

> Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations, and a resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour. I think you 1) share the resentment the author describes here, and it's why you've written this emotional and fact-free rebuttal and 2) didn't read the article

notahacker 5y ago

The other problem is that other people already wrote extensively on better refinements of the concept, coming up with theories of positional goods, conspicuous consumption, signalling, information asymmetry within bureaucratic organizations, economic rent extraction etc. As well as explaining why a lot of jobs which in an ideal world filled with ideally-behaving people wouldn't exist could actually be necessary and useful in the real world, and why professions often seen (especially by their participants) as extremely meaningful and impactful like the arts are often funded by those that aren't, like advertising. Graeber's definition of a "bullshit" job as one the worker didn't feel was meaningful - the canonical example being his lawyer friend who would rather people paid him for his hobby of making music - and his claim that the private sector was creating them as some sort of workfare program feels comparatively naive.

js8 5y ago
I think you're right, but I also think what Graeber was legitimate in the sense that he went at it from the other end. Yes, economists (especially the non-neoclassical ones) came up with all sorts of market failures. But they can seem to be a bit theoretical, as in, well, maybe these things happen in the wild, but maybe mostly not. In other words, they treat it as interesting, but disconnected, phenomena. Graeber, as an anthropologist, just noticed lots of people being unhappy even in the situation of material abundance. And he looked for an unifying explanation. I think there definitely is a connection, but it will have to wait for somebody to analyze it in more detail.

js8 5y ago

> Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically. Really? I thought he actually did divide "bullshit jobs" into different categories (5 of them total) in his book. But I am not even sure that your 1,2,3 is so separate. Isn't creating jobs that nobody needs and nobody would notice if they went away also alienating and, consequently, toxic? Isn't that just a matter of extent? Anyway, I agree that free markets cannot be a solution to any moral problem, because participation in markets is by definition symmetric and voluntary, and so they cannot consistently impose any values. (But the people who push the markets do want them to, for ideological reasons, appear as if they are inevitable, and this requires the capability to resolve moral ambiguity.)

CityOfThrowaway 5y ago

> even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea. Damming the concept of “markets” as “self-harming” and “unstable” is an asinine statement. Of course not every instantiation of a market is flawless and without trade offs. Any sufficiently large-scale social system is rife with weird second order effects. We can only analyze the efficacy of markets by comparing them against their alternative. Ironically – given one of your complaints about markets is monopolism – the most common alternative to markets is monopolism by the government. Yet, governments suffer from the same bureaucratically-induced problems that you are attributing to organizations operating in markets. Indeed, they have it worse because they don’t have the external pressure of competition to keep their bad behavior in check. Accountability in the public sector is significantly worse than in the private sector. History is filled with state-owned monopolies that failed to adapt to changing situations and degrade into obsolescence while still bleeding the public of money. Every social system over-produces some things and under-produces other things, in constantly shifting proportions as time goes on. Of all systems, sufficiently competitive markets are the best at dynamically adjusting to minimize both surpluses and shortages. State-owned monopolies are truly abysmal at matching supply and demand. There’s textbooks worth of material as to why this is the case. And perhaps, you may be referring to some notion of “totally free markets”. But there are no totally free markets. All markets are subject to the formal laws of their various operating jurisdictions and the norms that come from operating in society. The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior. There are notable counter examples where there isn’t consumer choice, but those organizations get dragged in the media and are forced to change in the court of public opinion. So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?

rStar 5y ago
> So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”? idk, whatever we have right now?
- 5y ago

xibalba 5y ago

Ok, where's your data? This article cites the work of Soffia, Wood, and Burchell[1] who "use representative data from the EU to test five of [bullshit jobs theory]'s core hypotheses" and find them to be nonsense based upon opinion and conjecture. > instead of analysing them more clinically Can you point to a clinical analysis supporting your claims? You may be falling prey to what you accuse the Economist of: ideology over evidence. Additionally,your viewpoint seems internally inconsistent. On the one hand, bigcorps are profit obsessed and will stop at nothing to juice margins. But also, they somehow allow jobs (ie labor cost) which produce nothing to proliferate. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
Bigcorpos aren't omnipotent individuals. We've all heard the apocryphal stories of people who've slipped between the gaps and kept being paid. Companies don't need to be perfect to beat the competition, they just need to be good enough.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
Is it possible corporations, being large and complex organisms, can be obsessed with margins--yet also may harbor BS jobs? Political kingdom building, hire to fire, and over fitting to poorly chosen metics are just a few ways I can see margin obsessed companies also maintaining BS jobs.

dnautics 5y ago

> are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible This is purely subjective. I've worked at a tech company where they paid me 1.5x what they could have and I STFU so the checks would keep coming (they thought they were getting a bargain), but generally the firms will try to negotiate with you for the lowest price they can get you at. That said, the aformention job where i was overpaid was a bullshit job because the product (was there even a product? I can't tell) would not have noticed if I wasn't there (maybe the morale would have gone down? I certainly wasn't worth that much).

fock 5y ago
that's why it said "either: 1,2,3". "Was there even a product" sounds very much like "might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't."

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

"the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies" The Economist regularly argues against giving markets free rein, they will talk about the negative impacts of monopolies and call for policies aimed at stopping climate change.