8 ms·

I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more e

by zeteo 13y ago

I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on michaelochurch's (now sadly inactive) blog [1], and he may well have originated it. Here it is, in a better explanation than I could provide: "The Marketing and Sales Treadmill In the modern world [...] there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. [The worker] needs a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary. [...T]he most common path is that our prospective worker enters the sales and marketing business. [...] Even engineering focused companies like Facebook have more sales people than engineers. [...] So everyone’s energy is focused on imagining some gimmick – a six bladed razor, a beer can that turns blue when [it's] cold, a funny talking gecko – that gives someone a reason to give you money when there is no real differentiation based on product value. The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. Each business must work harder and harder at new tag lines, gizmos, tricks, and jingles. And when sales guys at the other company work harder, you must work harder too. Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead [...] we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. [...] The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin." [1] http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-economy/ http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom...

richardjordan 13y ago
I've said this before in other contexts, but it doesn't have to be a conscious decision or conspiracy. A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration. It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature. In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences. Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal. The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it. The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable. As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital. Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism. Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector. No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.
- r00fus 13y ago
  The continued push to remove regulations on policy-buying is the conspiracy. The US confluence of money and politcs hasn't always been as "free flowing" in the past, ie, prior to the overturning of McCain-Feingold and establishment of Moneyed interests have been hard at work trying to push this country over a cliff so they can swoop in afterwards and profit off the wreckage. That's well documented and one party (the GOP) has been brazen and proud of it's efforts to increase corruption, while the other (Dems) has been ineffectual and also culpable.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Moneyed interests have been hard at work trying to push this country over a cliff so they can swoop in afterwards and profit off the wreckage. Citation needed (and appreciated).
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  Since compounding interest demonstrates geometric growth, areas of allocation that match the investment rate must go up in either risk or must go down in reward or a new form of efficiency must be found that was previously unattainable. In practice this leads to concentrated wealth being misallocated (high risk) or hemorrhaged (inflationary loss) or effectively applied to the growth of a new technology (successfully invested), probably in that order of likelihood.
  - discodave 13y ago
    I thought that the phenomenon of risk aversion and evidence from the investment markets (stocks having higher returns than bonds) showed that people, on the whole, did not take enough risk in their investments.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Das Kapital in 11 paragraphs! Wow, good writing! My only addition would be to note that insofar as the capitalist system has active support from powerful people, it is not merely a natural accumulator, it is, in a sense, intelligent, and perverting every aspect of our society into its own service. Isn't ideology wonderful?
maratd 13y ago
> The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
- FatalBaboon 13y ago
  Exceptions don't make rules, it's the other way around
  - ricardoz17 13y ago
    Except when its an "Exception that proves the rule" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
    - FatalBaboon 13y ago
      What I meant is you don't turn an exception into a generally applicable rule, but rules can infer exceptions.
cnorgate 13y ago
Totally agree with Zeteo's assessment - only thing I would add is that people shouldn't assume someone else'e job is 'bullshit' simply because they can't directly see or appreciate the value it creates. For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking is that the output from some individuals only shows up in the medium to long term... take away great leadership from a company and they will make the numbers for the next few quarters, but in a year they will be out-maneuvered and out-performed by the competition. In today's economy it's not about how many widgets you make, it's about making the right widget in the first place... figuring that out is a lot harder than actually making the thing in the end. The value some jobs create is more difficult to view directly, but is no less valuable in terms of delivering things people want, that they are willing to pay for - i.e. creating wealth. Investors understand this very well, which is why they are willing to pay huge sums to top leadership. As a final thought, if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. If you want to enjoy the vast benefits (however small) that our progressive society enjoys, then you also need to live within that system and work in some way to push things forward... however incrementally.
- calibraxis 13y ago
  The author does state: "I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?" Personally, quite often my jobs have been meaningless or worse. The worse they paid, probably the more meaningful they were.
- sfjailbird 13y ago
  > if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. What if you owned the home you live in, though? Lately, I've become a bit obsessed with this idea. The reason the 'wage slave' concept exists is that most of us have to do the 9-to-5, or we would unsettlingly quickly find ourselves homeless - the ultimate social catastrophe. I sometimes compare this with the lifestyle I see in some 'less developed' countries, where it is still customary for a family to own the house they live in. The result is that even when the breadwinner is frequently un- or underemployed, and with parts of the household staying at home exclusively without generating an income, their lives seem a lot less stressful. Even when they worry about money and basic necessities, they survive, turning down consumption to a minimum in financially challenging times. The equivalent for us, with regards to the subject at hand, would be to work 15 hours of productive, enjoyable work and still get by. Or alternatively, to work 40 hours of really interesting, challenging stuff that might not pay well or at all for a while. The conclusion would seem to be to work single-mindedly on owning your home. As you said, one option is to move to Colorado and buy a barren plot in the middle of nowhere. But a more reasonable alternative might be to work your freaking ass off to pay off your property as soon as humanly possible. If you are really scrappy, you should be able to do that in around 15 years, depending on where you live and what your salary is. The problem is that people don't want to live like that. We want to live comfortably, with the biggest car we can afford the monthly payments on, with nice vacations, consumer goods etc. etc. Well you pay for that - the price is working 9-to-5 in a job you hate.
mbesto 13y ago
Right on! Or as Seth Godin puts it:[0] > Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value. [0]- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-attention-to-the-attention-economy.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-atten...
- conjectures 13y ago
  Except that the world population is increasing (more of us), proportionally fewer people live in grinding poverty (more time) and more of us have access to diverse communications technology (more access). Seems to me attention isn't much like real estate.
  - api 13y ago
    It is within mature markets. It is orders of magnitude more difficult for an American firm -- especially a small one -- to market in South America or Asia due to language and culture barriers.
api 13y ago
I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those. But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question? So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get. So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc. An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.
- AutoCorrect 13y ago
  kind of like an asymptotic line, optimizing for efficiency - we spend more and more time making less and less of a difference. The problem is, with companies the size we have nowadays, even a small percentage improvement leads to runaway success, so every company is incentivized to continue optimizing. Maybe we should limit the maximum size of a company?
- burgreblast 13y ago
  Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected. The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box. Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky. My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. Consumption is easier than creation.
Lagged2Death 13y ago
I disagree that ... the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. But the author denies this explicitly. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics ... more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. It's sort of odd to appeal to economics on the one hand and then characterize sales/marketing as zero-sum on the other. I wouldn't spend any energy defending sales/marketing as positive-sum myself, but economists do.
- zeteo 13y ago
  >The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
  - ddeck 13y ago
    Yes, he contradicts himself. Your quote clearly implies design, and then he concludes with this: >If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job... ...Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. There are some good points in the analysis, but it would be more compelling if it didn't hint at some sort of elite conspiracy.
    - aidenn0 13y ago
      The usage of "as if" like that means to me that he doesn't thinl k it's really what happened. He is using a similie.
    - richardjordan 13y ago
      Just like when scientists use words like design and God - it's not literal it's figurative. The author's pretty clear he doesn't think a committee of plotters sat down and mapped out our road to ruin. See my earlier comment. He's merely describing a stable attractor. A feature of the system which creates local maxima which are hard to escape from. An involuntary alignment of interests which means that individuals acting on their own behalf reinforce a system which has less than ideal characteristics, without themselves either thinking through the larger collective consequences or supporting them.
tkellogg 13y ago
If you think sales & marketing are a zero sum gimmick, you must not have encountered middle management. The fact that we pay these baby sitters so much money compounds our "need" for them.
- icedchai 13y ago
  could you please send me your status report? thanks!
ams6110 13y ago
I think it sounds like the author is experiencing angst about his own bullshit job.
wissler 13y ago
It's not economic at all, it's political (whether it is intentional or not is a different question). In evidence is all the violence that is brought to bear in sustaining the current economic status quo (i.e. the piles of regulations and laws).
eliasmacpherson 13y ago
I thought that the redundancy in all the engineers working on competing identical products was bad but this is worse. No wonder we're not exploring space. My understanding of free market theory is that the "competition" supposedly drives down price, but I don't think free markets exist.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  I wish Graeber had reiterated his "1% market" idea another time in full, but the basics are as he implied here. A market reflects the preferences of the people who have the money. If you have a market economy with deeply built-in and extreme inequalities, then you can get a "free market" that, yes, reflects the preferences of about 1% of the population.
toomuchtodo 13y ago
http://archive.is/gXy2n http://archive.is/gXy2n Archived version in the event that blog page disappears.
whiddershins 13y ago
What I get from your comment is that any time anyone even references a ruling class, you believe they are claiming conspiracy.
Nursie 13y ago
Reminds me of the cigarette advertising ban - as soon as tobacco advertising was banned in the UK profits shot up because the huge ad budget was suddenly unnecessary. They no longer had to compete with each other on that front.
- mdt 13y ago
  Wow, that's brilliant. Wonder what the effect on advertising agencies, TV, etc was.
- purplelobster 13y ago
  That makes me wonder what would happen if we banned advertising in general.

by zeteo 13y ago

richardjordan 13y ago

I've said this before in other contexts, but it doesn't have to be a conscious decision or conspiracy. A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration. It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature. In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences. Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal. The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it. The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable. As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital. Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism. Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector. No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.

r00fus 13y ago
The continued push to remove regulations on policy-buying is the conspiracy. The US confluence of money and politcs hasn't always been as "free flowing" in the past, ie, prior to the overturning of McCain-Feingold and establishment of Moneyed interests have been hard at work trying to push this country over a cliff so they can swoop in afterwards and profit off the wreckage. That's well documented and one party (the GOP) has been brazen and proud of it's efforts to increase corruption, while the other (Dems) has been ineffectual and also culpable.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Moneyed interests have been hard at work trying to push this country over a cliff so they can swoop in afterwards and profit off the wreckage. Citation needed (and appreciated).
3pt14159 13y ago
Since compounding interest demonstrates geometric growth, areas of allocation that match the investment rate must go up in either risk or must go down in reward or a new form of efficiency must be found that was previously unattainable. In practice this leads to concentrated wealth being misallocated (high risk) or hemorrhaged (inflationary loss) or effectively applied to the growth of a new technology (successfully invested), probably in that order of likelihood.
- discodave 13y ago
  I thought that the phenomenon of risk aversion and evidence from the investment markets (stocks having higher returns than bonds) showed that people, on the whole, did not take enough risk in their investments.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Das Kapital in 11 paragraphs! Wow, good writing! My only addition would be to note that insofar as the capitalist system has active support from powerful people, it is not merely a natural accumulator, it is, in a sense, intelligent, and perverting every aspect of our society into its own service. Isn't ideology wonderful?

maratd 13y ago

> The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...

FatalBaboon 13y ago
Exceptions don't make rules, it's the other way around
- ricardoz17 13y ago
  Except when its an "Exception that proves the rule" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
  - FatalBaboon 13y ago
    What I meant is you don't turn an exception into a generally applicable rule, but rules can infer exceptions.

cnorgate 13y ago

Totally agree with Zeteo's assessment - only thing I would add is that people shouldn't assume someone else'e job is 'bullshit' simply because they can't directly see or appreciate the value it creates. For example: in the case of corporate leadership, it is easy and appealing to suggest they aren't creating any direct value... i.e. fire the leadership and 'widgets' will still get made. The problem with this thinking is that the output from some individuals only shows up in the medium to long term... take away great leadership from a company and they will make the numbers for the next few quarters, but in a year they will be out-maneuvered and out-performed by the competition. In today's economy it's not about how many widgets you make, it's about making the right widget in the first place... figuring that out is a lot harder than actually making the thing in the end. The value some jobs create is more difficult to view directly, but is no less valuable in terms of delivering things people want, that they are willing to pay for - i.e. creating wealth. Investors understand this very well, which is why they are willing to pay huge sums to top leadership. As a final thought, if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. If you want to enjoy the vast benefits (however small) that our progressive society enjoys, then you also need to live within that system and work in some way to push things forward... however incrementally.

calibraxis 13y ago
The author does state: "I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?" Personally, quite often my jobs have been meaningless or worse. The worse they paid, probably the more meaningful they were.
sfjailbird 13y ago
> if you really want to 'reap the benefits' or our more productive society, you can work 15 hours starting today. The tradeoff is that you'll need to move to the middle of Colorado, buy a small plot of land, build your own house and purchase a straight edge razor. What if you owned the home you live in, though? Lately, I've become a bit obsessed with this idea. The reason the 'wage slave' concept exists is that most of us have to do the 9-to-5, or we would unsettlingly quickly find ourselves homeless - the ultimate social catastrophe. I sometimes compare this with the lifestyle I see in some 'less developed' countries, where it is still customary for a family to own the house they live in. The result is that even when the breadwinner is frequently un- or underemployed, and with parts of the household staying at home exclusively without generating an income, their lives seem a lot less stressful. Even when they worry about money and basic necessities, they survive, turning down consumption to a minimum in financially challenging times. The equivalent for us, with regards to the subject at hand, would be to work 15 hours of productive, enjoyable work and still get by. Or alternatively, to work 40 hours of really interesting, challenging stuff that might not pay well or at all for a while. The conclusion would seem to be to work single-mindedly on owning your home. As you said, one option is to move to Colorado and buy a barren plot in the middle of nowhere. But a more reasonable alternative might be to work your freaking ass off to pay off your property as soon as humanly possible. If you are really scrappy, you should be able to do that in around 15 years, depending on where you live and what your salary is. The problem is that people don't want to live like that. We want to live comfortably, with the biggest car we can afford the monthly payments on, with nice vacations, consumer goods etc. etc. Well you pay for that - the price is working 9-to-5 in a job you hate.

mbesto 13y ago

Right on! Or as Seth Godin puts it:[0] > Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value. [0]- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-attention-to-the-attention-economy.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-atten...

conjectures 13y ago
Except that the world population is increasing (more of us), proportionally fewer people live in grinding poverty (more time) and more of us have access to diverse communications technology (more access). Seems to me attention isn't much like real estate.
- api 13y ago
  It is within mature markets. It is orders of magnitude more difficult for an American firm -- especially a small one -- to market in South America or Asia due to language and culture barriers.

api 13y ago

I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology. Complex systems are full of those. But that doesn't answer the question as to why we never read articles like this. Why doesn't anyone ask this question? So I also blame the Puritan work ethic. "Idle hands are the devils tools," we're told, and work is (like Soviet Russia) both a duty and a right. Nothing offends our ultimately Puritan-rooted morality more than someone "sitting around doing nothing," even if that nothing happens to be art or philosophy or caring for their children. The latter is a great illustration: look at the crap that stay-at-home parents sometimes get. So I do believe there is an ideological basis for this. It causes us to see the perverse treadmill you describe as a good thing rather than as the cancerous tumor of waste that it is. It's a tumor that makes us tremendously poorer, especially in ways that are not readily measured by money: friendship, family health, intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, etc. An analogy: it's sort of like if we had this weird moral belief that high-crime ghettoes were a good thing. They "make people into men," etc. So imagine if we let the "projects" pathology that evolved in many cities in the 20th century go completely unchecked because we semi-secretly liked it that way. The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.

AutoCorrect 13y ago
kind of like an asymptotic line, optimizing for efficiency - we spend more and more time making less and less of a difference. The problem is, with companies the size we have nowadays, even a small percentage improvement leads to runaway success, so every company is incentivized to continue optimizing. Maybe we should limit the maximum size of a company?
burgreblast 13y ago
Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected. The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box. Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky. My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. Consumption is easier than creation.

Lagged2Death 13y ago

I disagree that ... the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. But the author denies this explicitly. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics ... more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. It's sort of odd to appeal to economics on the one hand and then characterize sales/marketing as zero-sum on the other. I wouldn't spend any energy defending sales/marketing as positive-sum myself, but economists do.

zeteo 13y ago
>The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
- ddeck 13y ago
  Yes, he contradicts himself. Your quote clearly implies design, and then he concludes with this: >If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job... ...Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. There are some good points in the analysis, but it would be more compelling if it didn't hint at some sort of elite conspiracy.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    The usage of "as if" like that means to me that he doesn't thinl k it's really what happened. He is using a similie.
  - richardjordan 13y ago
    Just like when scientists use words like design and God - it's not literal it's figurative. The author's pretty clear he doesn't think a committee of plotters sat down and mapped out our road to ruin. See my earlier comment. He's merely describing a stable attractor. A feature of the system which creates local maxima which are hard to escape from. An involuntary alignment of interests which means that individuals acting on their own behalf reinforce a system which has less than ideal characteristics, without themselves either thinking through the larger collective consequences or supporting them.

tkellogg 13y ago

If you think sales & marketing are a zero sum gimmick, you must not have encountered middle management. The fact that we pay these baby sitters so much money compounds our "need" for them.

icedchai 13y ago
could you please send me your status report? thanks!

ams6110 13y ago

I think it sounds like the author is experiencing angst about his own bullshit job.

wissler 13y ago

It's not economic at all, it's political (whether it is intentional or not is a different question). In evidence is all the violence that is brought to bear in sustaining the current economic status quo (i.e. the piles of regulations and laws).

eliasmacpherson 13y ago

I thought that the redundancy in all the engineers working on competing identical products was bad but this is worse. No wonder we're not exploring space. My understanding of free market theory is that the "competition" supposedly drives down price, but I don't think free markets exist.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
I wish Graeber had reiterated his "1% market" idea another time in full, but the basics are as he implied here. A market reflects the preferences of the people who have the money. If you have a market economy with deeply built-in and extreme inequalities, then you can get a "free market" that, yes, reflects the preferences of about 1% of the population.

toomuchtodo 13y ago

http://archive.is/gXy2n http://archive.is/gXy2n Archived version in the event that blog page disappears.

whiddershins 13y ago

What I get from your comment is that any time anyone even references a ruling class, you believe they are claiming conspiracy.

Nursie 13y ago

Reminds me of the cigarette advertising ban - as soon as tobacco advertising was banned in the UK profits shot up because the huge ad budget was suddenly unnecessary. They no longer had to compete with each other on that front.

mdt 13y ago
Wow, that's brilliant. Wonder what the effect on advertising agencies, TV, etc was.
purplelobster 13y ago
That makes me wonder what would happen if we banned advertising in general.