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The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. _Why_ they believe that is

The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. _Why_ they believe that is a matter of speculation, and will vary from person to person. The political question - what does this fact say about how our society is organized? - is also necessarily speculative, and this is what makes up the polemical part of the book. Graeber has a theory about why work is unfulfilling, and he argues for it. I can't see much that is wrong with this. You might disagree with his conclusions, in which case you can critique them or offer alternatives. This is very different from disagreeing with the claim that there are people who think that their jobs are meaningless. I can't tell which you are disagreeing with.

mjburgess 5y ago
Neither. Perhaps I should have quoted. My issue is with the line, > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else.
- svat 5y ago
  I'm not sure whether you clicked on the link, but note that the line you quote was in response to a comment asking "David Graeber is an anthropologist […] What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs?". You're calling it a rhetorical trick etc: that may make sense if he had employed it in the book, but as a response to the specific comment he was replying to, it seems reasonable. (That's why I included "(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)
simonh 5y ago
>The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. Except that the article shows that this just isn't the case, depending what you mean by 'society at large'. Gerber's question was about a 'meaningful contribution to the world', but if you ask people if they are doing useful work you get completely different statistics. It looks like slipping in the phrase 'the world' in the question sets a completely unrealistic and for most people unattainable standard, but jobs don't have to be world changing to be worthwhile.
- bhaak 5y ago
  How about going backwards from Graeber's line of thought. His conclusion in the book is to introduce a universal basic income to get rid of bullshit jobs. If we turn that around the question becomes: How many jobs (and what kind of jobs) would still be there if people had UBI and wouldn't need to work for a living?
  - simonh 5y ago
    You're assuming the premise implicitly, that there are a large number of bulshit jobs, but Gerber did not show this and his evidence for it is thoroughly discredited. If there are in fact very few bulshit jobs, the 'problem' of how to deal with them is moot. I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls. If you can actually show that many current occupations are in reality not productive, then of course that's something we need to address. However that has not been shown and even if it is true, it's not clear why so many people and companies are willingly funding these roles with their own money. So if you are claiming is that vast numbers of people in the economy are 'wrong' about their spending and hiring habits, you've got a fair bit of work to do to establish that (let's be clear, it has not been established) and come up with a credible plan as to what to do about it, and who gets to decide what the 'right' thing to do is.
    - bhaak 5y ago
      > I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls. Yes. That's exactly the goal of the UBI. That nobody NEEDS to work anymore. How many burger flipper are there that work as burger flipper because they like burger flipping? Your implicit assumption is that only paid work is real work. But if you remove money as the main motivator for work, people will look for more meaningful occupations and that's where we circle back to Graeber's bullshit jobs which don't qualify as meaningful work.

mjburgess 5y ago

Neither. Perhaps I should have quoted. My issue is with the line, > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else.

svat 5y ago
I'm not sure whether you clicked on the link, but note that the line you quote was in response to a comment asking "David Graeber is an anthropologist […] What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs?". You're calling it a rhetorical trick etc: that may make sense if he had employed it in the book, but as a response to the specific comment he was replying to, it seems reasonable. (That's why I included "(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)

simonh 5y ago

>The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. Except that the article shows that this just isn't the case, depending what you mean by 'society at large'. Gerber's question was about a 'meaningful contribution to the world', but if you ask people if they are doing useful work you get completely different statistics. It looks like slipping in the phrase 'the world' in the question sets a completely unrealistic and for most people unattainable standard, but jobs don't have to be world changing to be worthwhile.

bhaak 5y ago
How about going backwards from Graeber's line of thought. His conclusion in the book is to introduce a universal basic income to get rid of bullshit jobs. If we turn that around the question becomes: How many jobs (and what kind of jobs) would still be there if people had UBI and wouldn't need to work for a living?
- simonh 5y ago
  You're assuming the premise implicitly, that there are a large number of bulshit jobs, but Gerber did not show this and his evidence for it is thoroughly discredited. If there are in fact very few bulshit jobs, the 'problem' of how to deal with them is moot. I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls. If you can actually show that many current occupations are in reality not productive, then of course that's something we need to address. However that has not been shown and even if it is true, it's not clear why so many people and companies are willingly funding these roles with their own money. So if you are claiming is that vast numbers of people in the economy are 'wrong' about their spending and hiring habits, you've got a fair bit of work to do to establish that (let's be clear, it has not been established) and come up with a credible plan as to what to do about it, and who gets to decide what the 'right' thing to do is.
  - bhaak 5y ago
    > I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls. Yes. That's exactly the goal of the UBI. That nobody NEEDS to work anymore. How many burger flipper are there that work as burger flipper because they like burger flipping? Your implicit assumption is that only paid work is real work. But if you remove money as the main motivator for work, people will look for more meaningful occupations and that's where we circle back to Graeber's bullshit jobs which don't qualify as meaningful work.