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Eh, I think that a pretty huge portion of labor in the USA is spent on things that are not at all necessary for things people need or want for their quality of

Eh, I think that a pretty huge portion of labor in the USA is spent on things that are not at all necessary for things people need or want for their quality of life. (Including the jobs of much of HN readership). cf David Graeber Bullshit Jobs. I don't think it's at all true that those people didn't understand the labor that is needed to create food (especialy this; they correctly predicted that agricultural labor has gone down drastically), housing, or even entertainment. I think they actually had it right, and that we don't work less is not about material necessity but just about the way our present economic structure works.

barry-cotter 4y ago
Graeber was no more careful or truth seeking with Bullshit Jobs than with the rest of his work. Other, better scientists have tested his bullshit and found b it lacking. > Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001702110150...

barry-cotter 4y ago

Graeber was no more careful or truth seeking with Bullshit Jobs than with the rest of his work. Other, better scientists have tested his bullshit and found b it lacking. > Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs > David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001702110150...