12 ms·

“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

223 points by bootload 12y ago

glaucoma 12y ago
70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workplace.aspx?utm_source=WWWV7HP&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workpla...
getdavidhiggins 12y ago
Honest in places, but overlooks the Tyler Durdens who have a 'rapscallion' element to their character and behind the front of work, they dutifully play to make the day go by quicker. Also see: dossing.
BinaryIdiot 12y ago
I can't say I'm surprised and I much agree with this. I've held many positions in both the private and public sector. While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  > While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments. Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit. That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high. It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry. He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh". Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets"). He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later. There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders." It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense. In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.
  - busterarm 12y ago
    I wonder how much of that "interference" was the other ministers getting tapped by their private industry friends trying to do something about the government competition.
    - EdwardDiego 12y ago
      It may have been that, but from where I sat, most of it appeared to be fiefdom disputes. For example, the head of IT was displeased with this unit because it didn't use Citrix, his mandated solution, for all its needs. Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_. Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it. But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.
  - 12y ago
- busterarm 12y ago
  > It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place. Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of privilege.
  - zobzu 12y ago
    Or minutes, seconds. Simple example. Bank transfers. Take a few days. People actually are involved to push a freaking button in the US. Takes <1s in reality. Takes <1s in Germany because it's enforced by law that operations like that cannot be artificially made longer. Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA. Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automated printing facility. 5 minutes, made into 6 month... The examples are countless.
    - busterarm 12y ago
      And the worst part about that is when somebody is having a bad day, that 5 minutes becomes "SOL - Never"
ExpiredLink 12y ago
We are living in a post-industrial service economy. Many jobs are not unnecessary, just routine and unglamorous.
- np422 12y ago
  I live in Sweden and right now we are automating the service industry as well. You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout. Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits. I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    However, the good part with buying train tickets from a machine is that the machine always knows your local language (in this case, Swedish, and English, and possibly a variety of other languages). This is not necessarily true with low-paid service workers. I'm pretty happy to buy my Arlanda Express tickets from a machine. You'd never have enough service booths if they had to have people in them.
  - polygon5 12y ago
    I work in Sweden to, where do you work 50+ hour weeks and how much money do you make to get 65% tax?
qq66 12y ago
Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less available than it is today. And what does a world with less insurance look like? Insurance lets people trade a small amount of money for protection against a loss of a life-ruining amount of money. Without health insurance or fire insurance, people have to save up as much money as they can in the case of a catastrophic accident which they probably won't have, and possibly declining to spend that money on important things like higher education, etc. And when people are underinsured, they're constantly in a state of baseline anxiety, worry about "what ifs." Is that the world this author wants to live in? One where he's constantly worrying about what might happen if he gets sick? That's not a world I want.
- msh 12y ago
  Much of Europe works perfectly well with out health insurance.
  - jonsen 12y ago
    It is still insurance when administered by the government and payed through taxes.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      I think that differs quite a bit by country. At least in Denmark it's administered in a considerably different manner, more like any other public spending that decides on priorities and allocates resources. Some parts of it do have actuarial elements that parallel what an insurance company would do (pooling risks across the population), but many don't. The cost of many things is well known in advance and has little uncertainty (especially when the whole country is taken in aggregate), and it's just a public-health choice whether to pay for it or not. Routine childhood vaccinations are a clear example, which are just budgeted as a public-health measure, like water purification or whatever. Hospitals have an element of risk-pooling when individual patients are looked at, but at the public level are run more like fire departments or police departments, which also have an element of risk pooling. I guess you could argue that fire departments are really some kind of state-administered fire-response-insurance system, but I'm not aware of that being a common approach. Data and statistics and people to look at them are still needed though, of course, but they are looking at more "real" problems, like which procedures best improve morbidity-adjusted life expectancy. I know in some other countries, like Germany, it is set up much more closely to insurance, in the sense that procedures have prices, are billed out to patients, who are covered by insurance plans that reimburse patients for costs, etc., in which case I imagine the bureaucracy is much more insurance-like.
negamax 12y ago
My takeaway from the article and also based on personal experiences is that governments have shielded themselves from automation. There's just insane fat wherever you look
- zobzu 12y ago
  I'd go as far to say that this isnt only a problem in governmental institutions but also in many private companies. Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction. So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters". Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.
phesse14 12y ago
David Graeber pointed out on his article "The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political" I don't agree. The answer is strictly economic. There are bullshit jobs just because people want to amass fortunes. The problem is not to have a guy working as a "legal consultant" or as a "ska drummer" but to have thousands of them doing the same thing. There's a point when a 101 legal consultant adds no value, but the job still exits. Why? because companies in that industry need to grow and to do so they expand beyond the target to whom they add value. This is it, they expand where the service is not actually needed. So services/products expanded to targets to whom they add no value is when bullshit jobs are created, and the reason behind this is just to make more money instead of solving problems to the world.
zobzu 12y ago
"in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary." Sounds about right actually...
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  Interestingly enough, for most white-collar professions, actual work probably takes about 15-20 hours a week. The rest of the time is spent socializing with coworkers, navigating massive corporate bureaucracies, browsing the web, and so on.
zby 12y ago
The real problem here is complexity - people don't understand what is the goal of what they do, and often there really is no goal because their bosses do not understand the system too. Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?
- frik 12y ago
  Maybe we should simplify law and then translate it to (open) code with the goal to automate and reduce bureaucracy.
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  That would presume we are all collectively interested in reducing complexity and work. Too often these complexities exist to benefit a small minority at the expense of the majority. For example: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to-lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...
  - zby 12y ago
    Agreed - this will not be that easy to fix, but still if we want to fix it than we need to think about reducing the complexity. I have also a very tentative idea that this might actually lead for more democratic organizations - because removing the inefficiencies that come from the complexity will bring a lot of advantage for the companies that would do it - and this will require more creative thinking and good will from everyone in the organization. This is just like science would not thrive in a too autocratic institution - so the universities had a lot more internal democracy than for example production companies. And today production companies will have the same need for creativity and good will as the universities had in the past.
fsloth 12y ago
The way I understand it is this (sorry,a bit long winded): The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason. Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs. One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling. The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting. Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century. I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states. Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic". I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.
kokey 12y ago
I read this as a rant from someone saying technology hasn't come far enough, but spent decades of his own time not doing anything about improving technology for society himself. He sounds like a consumer, complaining about the service he is receiving. The fact that he could have lived his bohemic lifestyle shielded from this so long is evidence of how well it has been working. There is certainly a problem with inefficiency, but usually that is driven by the humans inside of an organisation, people, like him, who get comfortable with their position and who only think about their here and now and not about the long term impact on themselves and society in general. Now, at this age, he comes up with theories and ideas of that sounds like that of a student with a naive understanding of the world, with 'better' ways of doing things and blaming 'the powers out there' on the problems, it's no wonder that he gets widespread support from the student age populations of social networks.
- gtz62 12y ago
  instead of insulting Graeber, what do you think about his ideas? For example, do people think their jobs are worthwhile?
heathermiller 12y ago
I found very little meat in that article... Right when I had been excited about points that seemed like they were about to be made, the article unfurled into a biography and promotion of Graeber's next book :/
ddeck 12y ago
The entire asset management industry is a candidate for the bullshit job title. Within the equity asset class for example, aggregate performance is worse than passive investments and there is ample evidence that substantially all managers are unable to actually provide the service they are selling. As an industry, it effectively taxes savings and distributes those taxes to the employees within the industry, sometimes as eye watering salaries and bonuses. One may argue that the consumer is free to choose not to consume the service, but the reality is that most countries have mandated retirement savings mechanisms that efficiently funnel employee pensions and savings into the industry. [1] http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/PickingWinners.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Picki... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm
- mdda 12y ago
  Wow, I'm surprised to see a comment so critical of Venture Capitalists on HN. But I guess it's fair: The VC industry as a whole badly underperforms the S&P index on a risk-adjusted basis. Or aren't those the asset managers you were talking about?
  - ddeck 12y ago
    Well VC is a very small part of the asset management industry and you are correct that that's not really the area I was referring to. The bulk of asset management is in listed equities and government/corporate bonds and this is what I was primarily referring to.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    But VC's are investing in very high risk investments not the sort of mature companies that big generalist funds/trusts invest in.
  - jes5199 12y ago
    VCs don't exist because it's the most profitable way to use that money. VCs exist because certain people think it's a fun game to play.
getdavidhiggins 12y ago
Form filling is like a muscle you have to flex. If you insulate yourself from the well oiled machine of the postal system for too long, it has a habit of reminding you of its presence. Usually this reminder comes when you least expect it. When you have a caffeine headache, when you cut down the enormous tree in the garden, when you've finished a Sudoku puzzle, or when you've just finished a lofty tome ― the letter will arrive when you have brain fog, and you better be prepared. This is why we have 'busy body' types who have nothing better to do than play with the postal system. They fill out those surveys you get to bulk up broadsheet newspapers, and send away for competitions. Their form filling muscle will not be allowed to atrophy.
bernardlunn 12y ago
A more humorous/playful take on bullshit jobs http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-their-jobs/ http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-thei...
aerocapture 12y ago
Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a very few people. Maybe it's time to redefine what we mean by "work" and why we do it. https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500001b https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500...
- zo1 12y ago
  >"If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?" I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate". I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like. (Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Yes. If everyone had the privilege to laze around like I do, I can guarantee there would be more startups / art / culture.
- sktrdie 12y ago
  Wouldn't a UBI simply be inflationary? That is, rather than making 0 you make 1500 (say). But since everybody is making 1500, then it would be the same as making 0 again. So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.
  - glennsl 12y ago
    I've heard this argument several times before, but I've never understood the reasoning behind it. No matter how you look at it, a basic income is redistribution of wealth. If we finance a basic income by just printing money, then yes it would be inflationary, and the value of the basic income, along with the currency as a whole, would depreciate. But it certainly wouldn't be eliminated, and wealth would have been redistributed. Printing money isn't the only way to finance a basic income, however. A much more sane approach is through effectivization, by eliminating bullshit jobs and (most) existing means-tested benefits, as well as increased taxation. There's nothing inflationary about this approach.
throwawayaway 12y ago
The supporting material mentioned in the article make for exceptional reading: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-... http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...
jchrisa 12y ago
The interesting point that no one is discussing here is his assertion that the research program was changed in reaction to the hippies, to focus on tools of social control instead of ways to reduce time in wage labor.
Tycho 12y ago
An interesting thing to ponder is how people employed in imminently-automatable jobs will react. Bearing in mind that no one can openly oppose automation when it makes business sense. So barring retraining to a still-needed skill, what might they do instead? I feel like there is some interesting application of game theory to be had here.
Animats 12y ago
Here's a possible cure for user-facing Government bureaucracy - you should never have to tell the Government something it already knows. This requires that government agencies get their data interconnection act together. Most companies already do this. It's basically what Salesforce does.

223 points by bootload 12y ago

70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workplace.aspx?utm_source=WWWV7HP&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workpla...

getdavidhiggins 12y ago

Honest in places, but overlooks the Tyler Durdens who have a 'rapscallion' element to their character and behind the front of work, they dutifully play to make the day go by quicker. Also see: dossing.

BinaryIdiot 12y ago

I can't say I'm surprised and I much agree with this. I've held many positions in both the private and public sector. While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place.

EdwardDiego 12y ago
> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well. I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments. Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit. That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high. It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry. He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh". Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)
- justincormack 12y ago
  Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets"). He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later. There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders." It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense. In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.
- busterarm 12y ago
  I wonder how much of that "interference" was the other ministers getting tapped by their private industry friends trying to do something about the government competition.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    It may have been that, but from where I sat, most of it appeared to be fiefdom disputes. For example, the head of IT was displeased with this unit because it didn't use Citrix, his mandated solution, for all its needs. Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_. Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it. But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.
- 12y ago
busterarm 12y ago
> It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place. Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of privilege.
- zobzu 12y ago
  Or minutes, seconds. Simple example. Bank transfers. Take a few days. People actually are involved to push a freaking button in the US. Takes <1s in reality. Takes <1s in Germany because it's enforced by law that operations like that cannot be artificially made longer. Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA. Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automated printing facility. 5 minutes, made into 6 month... The examples are countless.
  - busterarm 12y ago
    And the worst part about that is when somebody is having a bad day, that 5 minutes becomes "SOL - Never"

ExpiredLink 12y ago

We are living in a post-industrial service economy. Many jobs are not unnecessary, just routine and unglamorous.

np422 12y ago
I live in Sweden and right now we are automating the service industry as well. You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout. Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits. I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.
- ptaipale 12y ago
  However, the good part with buying train tickets from a machine is that the machine always knows your local language (in this case, Swedish, and English, and possibly a variety of other languages). This is not necessarily true with low-paid service workers. I'm pretty happy to buy my Arlanda Express tickets from a machine. You'd never have enough service booths if they had to have people in them.
- polygon5 12y ago
  I work in Sweden to, where do you work 50+ hour weeks and how much money do you make to get 65% tax?

qq66 12y ago

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less available than it is today. And what does a world with less insurance look like? Insurance lets people trade a small amount of money for protection against a loss of a life-ruining amount of money. Without health insurance or fire insurance, people have to save up as much money as they can in the case of a catastrophic accident which they probably won't have, and possibly declining to spend that money on important things like higher education, etc. And when people are underinsured, they're constantly in a state of baseline anxiety, worry about "what ifs." Is that the world this author wants to live in? One where he's constantly worrying about what might happen if he gets sick? That's not a world I want.

msh 12y ago
Much of Europe works perfectly well with out health insurance.
- jonsen 12y ago
  It is still insurance when administered by the government and payed through taxes.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    I think that differs quite a bit by country. At least in Denmark it's administered in a considerably different manner, more like any other public spending that decides on priorities and allocates resources. Some parts of it do have actuarial elements that parallel what an insurance company would do (pooling risks across the population), but many don't. The cost of many things is well known in advance and has little uncertainty (especially when the whole country is taken in aggregate), and it's just a public-health choice whether to pay for it or not. Routine childhood vaccinations are a clear example, which are just budgeted as a public-health measure, like water purification or whatever. Hospitals have an element of risk-pooling when individual patients are looked at, but at the public level are run more like fire departments or police departments, which also have an element of risk pooling. I guess you could argue that fire departments are really some kind of state-administered fire-response-insurance system, but I'm not aware of that being a common approach. Data and statistics and people to look at them are still needed though, of course, but they are looking at more "real" problems, like which procedures best improve morbidity-adjusted life expectancy. I know in some other countries, like Germany, it is set up much more closely to insurance, in the sense that procedures have prices, are billed out to patients, who are covered by insurance plans that reimburse patients for costs, etc., in which case I imagine the bureaucracy is much more insurance-like.

negamax 12y ago

My takeaway from the article and also based on personal experiences is that governments have shielded themselves from automation. There's just insane fat wherever you look

zobzu 12y ago
I'd go as far to say that this isnt only a problem in governmental institutions but also in many private companies. Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction. So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters". Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.

phesse14 12y ago

David Graeber pointed out on his article "The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political" I don't agree. The answer is strictly economic. There are bullshit jobs just because people want to amass fortunes. The problem is not to have a guy working as a "legal consultant" or as a "ska drummer" but to have thousands of them doing the same thing. There's a point when a 101 legal consultant adds no value, but the job still exits. Why? because companies in that industry need to grow and to do so they expand beyond the target to whom they add value. This is it, they expand where the service is not actually needed. So services/products expanded to targets to whom they add no value is when bullshit jobs are created, and the reason behind this is just to make more money instead of solving problems to the world.

zobzu 12y ago

"in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary." Sounds about right actually...

enraged_camel 12y ago
Interestingly enough, for most white-collar professions, actual work probably takes about 15-20 hours a week. The rest of the time is spent socializing with coworkers, navigating massive corporate bureaucracies, browsing the web, and so on.

zby 12y ago

The real problem here is complexity - people don't understand what is the goal of what they do, and often there really is no goal because their bosses do not understand the system too. Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?

frik 12y ago
Maybe we should simplify law and then translate it to (open) code with the goal to automate and reduce bureaucracy.
mtbcoder 12y ago
That would presume we are all collectively interested in reducing complexity and work. Too often these complexities exist to benefit a small minority at the expense of the majority. For example: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to-lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...
- zby 12y ago
  Agreed - this will not be that easy to fix, but still if we want to fix it than we need to think about reducing the complexity. I have also a very tentative idea that this might actually lead for more democratic organizations - because removing the inefficiencies that come from the complexity will bring a lot of advantage for the companies that would do it - and this will require more creative thinking and good will from everyone in the organization. This is just like science would not thrive in a too autocratic institution - so the universities had a lot more internal democracy than for example production companies. And today production companies will have the same need for creativity and good will as the universities had in the past.

fsloth 12y ago

The way I understand it is this (sorry,a bit long winded): The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason. Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs. One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling. The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting. Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century. I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states. Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic". I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.

kokey 12y ago

I read this as a rant from someone saying technology hasn't come far enough, but spent decades of his own time not doing anything about improving technology for society himself. He sounds like a consumer, complaining about the service he is receiving. The fact that he could have lived his bohemic lifestyle shielded from this so long is evidence of how well it has been working. There is certainly a problem with inefficiency, but usually that is driven by the humans inside of an organisation, people, like him, who get comfortable with their position and who only think about their here and now and not about the long term impact on themselves and society in general. Now, at this age, he comes up with theories and ideas of that sounds like that of a student with a naive understanding of the world, with 'better' ways of doing things and blaming 'the powers out there' on the problems, it's no wonder that he gets widespread support from the student age populations of social networks.

gtz62 12y ago
instead of insulting Graeber, what do you think about his ideas? For example, do people think their jobs are worthwhile?

heathermiller 12y ago

I found very little meat in that article... Right when I had been excited about points that seemed like they were about to be made, the article unfurled into a biography and promotion of Graeber's next book :/

ddeck 12y ago

The entire asset management industry is a candidate for the bullshit job title. Within the equity asset class for example, aggregate performance is worse than passive investments and there is ample evidence that substantially all managers are unable to actually provide the service they are selling. As an industry, it effectively taxes savings and distributes those taxes to the employees within the industry, sometimes as eye watering salaries and bonuses. One may argue that the consumer is free to choose not to consume the service, but the reality is that most countries have mandated retirement savings mechanisms that efficiently funnel employee pensions and savings into the industry. [1] http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/PickingWinners.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Picki... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

mdda 12y ago
Wow, I'm surprised to see a comment so critical of Venture Capitalists on HN. But I guess it's fair: The VC industry as a whole badly underperforms the S&P index on a risk-adjusted basis. Or aren't those the asset managers you were talking about?
- ddeck 12y ago
  Well VC is a very small part of the asset management industry and you are correct that that's not really the area I was referring to. The bulk of asset management is in listed equities and government/corporate bonds and this is what I was primarily referring to.
- walshemj 12y ago
  But VC's are investing in very high risk investments not the sort of mature companies that big generalist funds/trusts invest in.
- jes5199 12y ago
  VCs don't exist because it's the most profitable way to use that money. VCs exist because certain people think it's a fun game to play.

getdavidhiggins 12y ago

Form filling is like a muscle you have to flex. If you insulate yourself from the well oiled machine of the postal system for too long, it has a habit of reminding you of its presence. Usually this reminder comes when you least expect it. When you have a caffeine headache, when you cut down the enormous tree in the garden, when you've finished a Sudoku puzzle, or when you've just finished a lofty tome ― the letter will arrive when you have brain fog, and you better be prepared. This is why we have 'busy body' types who have nothing better to do than play with the postal system. They fill out those surveys you get to bulk up broadsheet newspapers, and send away for competitions. Their form filling muscle will not be allowed to atrophy.

bernardlunn 12y ago

A more humorous/playful take on bullshit jobs http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-their-jobs/ http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-thei...

aerocapture 12y ago

Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a very few people. Maybe it's time to redefine what we mean by "work" and why we do it. https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500001b https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500...

zo1 12y ago
>"If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?" I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate". I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like. (Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Yes. If everyone had the privilege to laze around like I do, I can guarantee there would be more startups / art / culture.
sktrdie 12y ago
Wouldn't a UBI simply be inflationary? That is, rather than making 0 you make 1500 (say). But since everybody is making 1500, then it would be the same as making 0 again. So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.
- glennsl 12y ago
  I've heard this argument several times before, but I've never understood the reasoning behind it. No matter how you look at it, a basic income is redistribution of wealth. If we finance a basic income by just printing money, then yes it would be inflationary, and the value of the basic income, along with the currency as a whole, would depreciate. But it certainly wouldn't be eliminated, and wealth would have been redistributed. Printing money isn't the only way to finance a basic income, however. A much more sane approach is through effectivization, by eliminating bullshit jobs and (most) existing means-tested benefits, as well as increased taxation. There's nothing inflationary about this approach.

throwawayaway 12y ago

The supporting material mentioned in the article make for exceptional reading: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-... http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...

jchrisa 12y ago

The interesting point that no one is discussing here is his assertion that the research program was changed in reaction to the hippies, to focus on tools of social control instead of ways to reduce time in wage labor.

Tycho 12y ago

An interesting thing to ponder is how people employed in imminently-automatable jobs will react. Bearing in mind that no one can openly oppose automation when it makes business sense. So barring retraining to a still-needed skill, what might they do instead? I feel like there is some interesting application of game theory to be had here.

Animats 12y ago

Here's a possible cure for user-facing Government bureaucracy - you should never have to tell the Government something it already knows. This requires that government agencies get their data interconnection act together. Most companies already do this. It's basically what Salesforce does.