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Bullshit jobs and productive jobs that do not pay enough to outbid bullshit jobs is the same problem - misallocation of resources.
by lotsofpulp 3y ago
Bullshit jobs and productive jobs that do not pay enough to outbid bullshit jobs is the same problem - misallocation of resources.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThe market is allocating; to allocate more efficiently, move towards central planning where you can allocate more intelligently. Otherwise, this is the economy you've got. Big fan of Graeber, agree there's lots of bullshit jobs.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoAre you suggesting the government does not have bullshit jobs? Surely there are bullshit white collar government jobs while at the same time the government is not paying teachers and bus drivers enough.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoNo, bullshit jobs are everywhere (gov, private industry, etc). I'm suggesting that the metrics we have currently to evaluate if a job is bullshit or not are insufficient to capture the true value of a job and its outcomes, leading to the inefficiencies of bullshit jobs. Central planning is likely the wrong phrase, I just don't have something better cooked up at the moment to describe, "Should this job really exist? Is it creating value in some way? Or is it just existing for some other suboptimal purpose?" Clearly, the market itself is not allocating efficiently if bullshit jobs exist in such great number. What is the solution? I don't know.
- gottorf 3y ago> move towards central planning where you can allocate more intelligently My understanding is that there's a lot of historical evidence to suggest that central planning would do the opposite of better allocating resources. Besides, with US government spending at around a third of the GDP[0] now, plenty of that is going on, already. [0]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP