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It's quite a different thing when up to 40% of the workers themselves think their own jobs are unneeded: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bulls

It's quite a different thing when up to 40% of the workers themselves think their own jobs are unneeded: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...

SideQuark 4y ago
... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions." And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane. The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena. And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it. For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense? I believe reality. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
- yunwal 4y ago
  > For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    The invisible hand of the market works if everyone has perfect information and fair terms.
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    > Awesome to see a person in real life.... Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :) This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?". And you jumped right in on cue. None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies. So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time. Congrats. It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies. So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.

SideQuark 4y ago

... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions." And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane. The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena. And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it. For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense? I believe reality. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067

yunwal 4y ago
> For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  The invisible hand of the market works if everyone has perfect information and fair terms.
- SideQuark 4y ago
  > Awesome to see a person in real life.... Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :) This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?". And you jumped right in on cue. None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies. So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time. Congrats. It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies. So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.