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> It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may al

> It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless. It's important to remember that asking people about stuff like this—the pointlessness of their job, their perception of safety, how happy they are—is problematic because in the end it just comes down to how they choose to define the meaning of a concept to themselves, how they are feeling on a particular day, how the question is asked, and so many other factors. Ask the same person again under different circumstances, or present the question differently, and you may very well get a different response. I don't take studies like this with a grain of salt, I assume they are packed in salt, like barrels of cod on a transatlantic sailing voyage in the 18th century.

mike_hearn 3y ago
It's not just the methodology that's silly, this whole line of "research" is silly and the press release is misrepresenting the paper's results. It's perhaps a useful jumping off point for people to complain about their own jobs but as a work of scholarship it has negative value. The author claims he wasn't funded by anyone, and hopefully that's true but it sounds unlikely given that the university is apparently happy to advertise it for him. Although their announcement states that "employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society" this is highly deceptive. If we look at Figure 1 on page 12 ("percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation") then we see that the winner is Transportation and Material Moving. Second top category: Production Occupations. Well it sure doesn't get more useless than those jobs! Who needs people who make things or move stuff around? Management actually does much better than Computer/Mathematical and Food Preparation/Service. Business and Financial apparently has the same number of socially useless jobs as Installation/Maintenance/Repair. That result directly contradicts his primary claim, so he just ignores it and announces what he wanted to be true instead. Right at the bottom with the second lowest percentage of useless jobs is, of course, social science. This sort of scientific fraud is unfortunately way too common in academic research. In some fields you can't assume the abstract or press release matches what the data says. This specific paper also reinforces the narrative that academia has a high tolerance for Marxists. It cites Marx and then discusses several other sociology papers that are built directly on Marxist theory (p7)! It's not often you see a citation from 1844 in something claiming to be modern science. The premise of the paper is also pure Marxism - words like price, wage, salary and market don't appear at all, and it takes as axiomatic that there's no objective way to judge how useful a job is.

mike_hearn 3y ago

It's not just the methodology that's silly, this whole line of "research" is silly and the press release is misrepresenting the paper's results. It's perhaps a useful jumping off point for people to complain about their own jobs but as a work of scholarship it has negative value. The author claims he wasn't funded by anyone, and hopefully that's true but it sounds unlikely given that the university is apparently happy to advertise it for him. Although their announcement states that "employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society" this is highly deceptive. If we look at Figure 1 on page 12 ("percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation") then we see that the winner is Transportation and Material Moving. Second top category: Production Occupations. Well it sure doesn't get more useless than those jobs! Who needs people who make things or move stuff around? Management actually does much better than Computer/Mathematical and Food Preparation/Service. Business and Financial apparently has the same number of socially useless jobs as Installation/Maintenance/Repair. That result directly contradicts his primary claim, so he just ignores it and announces what he wanted to be true instead. Right at the bottom with the second lowest percentage of useless jobs is, of course, social science. This sort of scientific fraud is unfortunately way too common in academic research. In some fields you can't assume the abstract or press release matches what the data says. This specific paper also reinforces the narrative that academia has a high tolerance for Marxists. It cites Marx and then discusses several other sociology papers that are built directly on Marxist theory (p7)! It's not often you see a citation from 1844 in something claiming to be modern science. The premise of the paper is also pure Marxism - words like price, wage, salary and market don't appear at all, and it takes as axiomatic that there's no objective way to judge how useful a job is.