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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

by 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.
  - fsloth 12y ago
    The dynamics of the financial incentives involved are a bit different with goverment provided health care and private clinics funded through medical insurance. Private clinics which are the main receivers of insurance money are often owned by the doctors. Thus, they have an incentive to over-charge, over diagnose and run expensive labs whenever they can. I'm not saying it happens, just that the incentive is there. Government provided healthcare offers no financial incentives for practicioners to over-diagnose - on the contrary this system then incentivizes to be as prudish as possible with the public resources. I'm not saying one or the other is better or worse, just that they are not equal in every way.
- fsloth 12y ago
  Weeel now. As an example Finland - while there is a fairly functional state paid health service, most affluent people take the health insurance anyway and go to private clinics for day-to-day needs to avoid the public queues. Most eployees have a compulsory medical coverage by the employers, which is a bought service from the private clinics. Thus the medical scene is a bit more complex than "state pays it all". It can require quite a bit of effort to get proper medical attention in the public side unless one is ill in a critical, easy-to-diagnose form. Best places in the world to have a cancer or such though, since the state pays most of the treatment (thus Breaking Bad creates quite strong cultural dissonance initially).
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    In Finland, there's not really a compulsory medical coverage by employers. The only compulsory part is planning and processes to prevent work-related health hazards and harms, and to protect and advance workplace safety, ability to work and health. (See law 2001/1383) So, some paperwork is mandatory, no actual health care. The reason many employers voluntarily provide an actual health insurance (or simply reimburse private-sector medical costs directly) is that it is one of the few tax-free benefits that employers can give to people, so it works efficiently as an additional compensation. And of course, because employee absences are costly, it makes good sense to try to keep them in good health. The public sector health care does practically nothing in terms of preventive health care for people between 25-65 and in employment (except for maternity-related things). This is left to employers.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - fsloth 12y ago
      "So, some paperwork is mandatory, no actual health care." The way the law is brought to action is that the private clinics have specific service tiers which they offer to employers, of which even the basic one covers consultation by a general practitioner. The easiest way for employers to fulfill the letter of the law is to buy the service. Which means that working adults seldom tend to the public services unless they are really ill, which means more business for the private clinics and increases the appeal of a health insurance (it's easier). This is getting really obscure for this forum, but as a reference: The specific law is https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2001/20011383 https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2001/20011383 Which in google translate is https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.finlex.fi%2Ffi%2Flaki%2Fajantasa%2F2001%2F20011383&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev...
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Clearly the state budget planners have no need to compute the expected future health care expenses of the state.
- Htsthbjig 12y ago
  Much of Europe has mandatory public health insurance if you work. It also has voluntary private health insurance. What you probably are referring to is that USA has not private health insurance at all. In the US only your employer could give you insurance, so it is not personal and private, but collective, if you try to do on your own it is prohibitively expensive.
sjtrny 12y ago
I think actuary is a poor example. Graeber himself would might correct himself if he was reminded of what he just said. It's probably a waste of time to hone in on that particular off the cuff statement. There are still plenty of jobs which are bullshit though. For example my girlfriend is an auditor. Most of her job would disappear if the infrastructure existed to have her clients financial records completely digitised. A program could then analyse the data (which is mostly done at the moment with a bunch of spreadsheets right now) and with higher audit coverage (they can only check/test a fraction of records and transactions). Her workload could go from 5-6 days a week to 2.
- justincormack 12y ago
  The list was a list of jobs that people self declared as useless, not which Graeber decided were useless.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    Are you sure? In the article it looks like it's a direct quote from Graeber.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      Yes, if you read the original bullshit jobs article it is clearer.
crdoconnor 12y ago
>Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these? * Private equity CEOs * Lobbyists * PR researchers * Telemarketers * Bailiffs Tell us how the world would be worse off without them. You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  Let's take Private Equity CEOs. The bottom line of what they do is try to reallocate capital away from less productive investments and towards more productive investments.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    Which is why we have off-shoring, and stagnant or dropping real income for that segment of the population that still has a job. Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?
    - darawk 12y ago
      a) Off-shoring is a consequence of poorly thought out and even more poorly enforced tax-laws, not private equity firms. b) If you have a private equity investor stomping around your startup, it's because you solicited their investment. If you didn't want it, don't take the money. Simple.
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        a) Private equity has always pushed for off-shoring and for a favourable tax culture. This is only a government failure to the extent that government hasn't resisted lobbying efforts from the PEs. b) So you're saying founders have a choice between accepting bullying or being starved of funding? Perhaps that's not the positive argument for PE it might appear to be. The reality is that PE culture vampirises and kills real businesses and real affluence. It's only investment in the most toxic and predatory sense.
danparsonson 12y ago
I expect he wants the world to change more fundamentally than that - per your example, if you have a good state-provided health service then the health insurance question is simply no longer an issue. There are of course countries that do this already. I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance premiums), would risk-taking increase to the point where the cost to the state became untenable? Then again if we lived in a futuristic society looked after by self-maintaining solar-powered robots then any service would essentially be free so maybe it wouldn't matter.
- blfr 12y ago
  Single payer still acts as an insurer and needs actuaries (even if they're not called that) to figure out which procedures make sense with their limited resources.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    Not really. There is no need to price the cost of insuring a 30 year old white male living in Croydon. If he is ill, he gets treatment. If he is not ill, he doesn't. The only thing close to actuarial science that the NHS actually needs is QALYS calculations. This is only really used for calculating how worthwhile very expensive treatments that target the very old or very disabled. The number of people needed to do that is very small, compared to the number needed to calculate prices in a non-single payer context.
    - jaytagdamian 12y ago
      All you need to know is that you 'maydie' if you go to Croydon's hospitals ;)
    - blfr 12y ago
      Then they need to estimate how many procedures of each kind to contract, or how large facilities to maintain, in Croydon. Which in part depends on the number of 30 year old white males living there. If they get it wrong, he doesn't magically get treatment anyway. He either has to wait, or travel elsewhere (and someone still has to figure out where and when). Otherwise, they waste money on unused capacity.
_abattoir 12y ago
When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry? This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones. The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing. I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program...If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job... What, exactly, do you think actuaries do during their 9-5? Do you think they manually compute actuarial tables with a TI-89?
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    I personally see a lot of potential for automation, -just tonight I was out working for a non-profit that saves a lot of hassle because I learned them a few Excel tricks back in 2012. Another place I was paid for less than 20 hours and it shaved two hours of preparations for the run of a machine, meaning they could keep it for several years more.
calibraxis 12y ago
The current HN title: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.” It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.
fab13n 12y ago
Bullshitness is not an all-or-nothing quality for jobs, that's part of why they're so hard to get rid of. You can find some justification to every job, but this justification can be dubious, or can not be worth the cost in human energy or social side effects. Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption. To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe. There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies). More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.
- amelius 12y ago
  Reading your last paragraph, I just wished more people were researching ways to fix this situation, and to come up with new economic models to replace standard capitalism. It would probably be the least bullshit job of all :)
alphydan 12y ago
> 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 Some countries have figured some of that out: Distribute the health and education risk between every citizen (it typically achieves a 50% discount vs. privatly insured countries)[0] [0] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/US_spends_much_more_on_health_than_what_might_be_expected_1_slideshow.jpg http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...
learnstats2 12y ago
> 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. In terms of personal insurance, a world with less insurance looks like a place where people don't suffer just for the small risk of such a loss. Catastrophic events such as fire and health could be dealt with more sympathetically by society rather than being handled by a profit-making industry that only really wants to help people who are rich enough.
- stephenbez 12y ago
  The government has tried that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progra... By charging premiums below market risk valuation, the program has encouraged building in vulnerable areas. This has led to destruction of resources and government transfers to the rich people in a position to own coastal property.
Ilverin 12y ago
Marketing/advertising is a bullshit job 99% of the time (the only time it isn't is when the product you are marketing is not well known and is a better option for some people than a competitor's product).
mousa 12y ago
There are jobs that are legitimately BS and everyone within the industry knows it but works hard at it anyways because it's their job. In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind. A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more. Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money. That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.
collyw 12y ago
You should try Europe. No health insurance, no problem. I think that is the bigger picture that he is getting at. In an "ideal society" these jobs wouldn't need to exist.
- ryanmonroe 12y ago
  I'll admit I'm not familiar with healthcare in Europe, but surely there are people whose job it is to estimate the cost of providing healthcare and estimate the probability of certain health events occurring.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Yes, I am sure there are. Worth noting, my girlfriend is a Neurologist. She and her colleagues say if you have anything serious wrong with you, go to the public healthcare system. You will probably have to wait longer, but you will get the treatment the doctors want you to have. When the same doctors have to deal with private patients (many doctors have both private and public patients here) then its basically a battle with the insurance companies trying to justify why they should pay for the better drugs. So you have doctors time being wasted on bureaucracy and form filling on one side (they would rather be treating patients), an insurance company person wasting time on the other side. Doctors time isn't cheap. I doubt actuaries are either. It seems blatantly obvious to me that the system without that aspect to it is way superior.
- superuser2 12y ago
  Sure you do. Your insurance premiums are your taxes. An actuary had to figure out how much revenue the state healthcare system has to bring in to be stable.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Well unlike insurance premiums, we don't get a choice in paying taxes. And the poor who don't have the money to pay taxes are still covered. So while what you say is true in one respect, its not really the same. And it has been well documented that the American system is very inefficient compared to Europes.
egypturnash 12y ago
I think there is an argument to be made that pretty much the entire health insurance industry is a bullshit industry. It's led to the price of medical care spiralling absurdly high; it spends a lot of the money it siphons out of the process on getting lawmakers to resist removing it from the equation entirely. And when that catastrophic accident or illness comes they will find every excuse they can to avoid paying out.
prograhmma 12y ago
Having worked as an actuary who prices insurance, you are wrong. Most clients already know what they want there prices to be. It is is common to calculate insurance rates based on statistics then hit everything by a constant varying anywhere from .5 to 2 to get the rates to be competitive with the market. It's all about the government mandated signature.

by qq66 12y ago

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.
- fsloth 12y ago
  The dynamics of the financial incentives involved are a bit different with goverment provided health care and private clinics funded through medical insurance. Private clinics which are the main receivers of insurance money are often owned by the doctors. Thus, they have an incentive to over-charge, over diagnose and run expensive labs whenever they can. I'm not saying it happens, just that the incentive is there. Government provided healthcare offers no financial incentives for practicioners to over-diagnose - on the contrary this system then incentivizes to be as prudish as possible with the public resources. I'm not saying one or the other is better or worse, just that they are not equal in every way.
fsloth 12y ago
Weeel now. As an example Finland - while there is a fairly functional state paid health service, most affluent people take the health insurance anyway and go to private clinics for day-to-day needs to avoid the public queues. Most eployees have a compulsory medical coverage by the employers, which is a bought service from the private clinics. Thus the medical scene is a bit more complex than "state pays it all". It can require quite a bit of effort to get proper medical attention in the public side unless one is ill in a critical, easy-to-diagnose form. Best places in the world to have a cancer or such though, since the state pays most of the treatment (thus Breaking Bad creates quite strong cultural dissonance initially).
- ptaipale 12y ago
  In Finland, there's not really a compulsory medical coverage by employers. The only compulsory part is planning and processes to prevent work-related health hazards and harms, and to protect and advance workplace safety, ability to work and health. (See law 2001/1383) So, some paperwork is mandatory, no actual health care. The reason many employers voluntarily provide an actual health insurance (or simply reimburse private-sector medical costs directly) is that it is one of the few tax-free benefits that employers can give to people, so it works efficiently as an additional compensation. And of course, because employee absences are costly, it makes good sense to try to keep them in good health. The public sector health care does practically nothing in terms of preventive health care for people between 25-65 and in employment (except for maternity-related things). This is left to employers.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - fsloth 12y ago
    "So, some paperwork is mandatory, no actual health care." The way the law is brought to action is that the private clinics have specific service tiers which they offer to employers, of which even the basic one covers consultation by a general practitioner. The easiest way for employers to fulfill the letter of the law is to buy the service. Which means that working adults seldom tend to the public services unless they are really ill, which means more business for the private clinics and increases the appeal of a health insurance (it's easier). This is getting really obscure for this forum, but as a reference: The specific law is https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2001/20011383 https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2001/20011383 Which in google translate is https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.finlex.fi%2Ffi%2Flaki%2Fajantasa%2F2001%2F20011383&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev...
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Clearly the state budget planners have no need to compute the expected future health care expenses of the state.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
Much of Europe has mandatory public health insurance if you work. It also has voluntary private health insurance. What you probably are referring to is that USA has not private health insurance at all. In the US only your employer could give you insurance, so it is not personal and private, but collective, if you try to do on your own it is prohibitively expensive.

sjtrny 12y ago

I think actuary is a poor example. Graeber himself would might correct himself if he was reminded of what he just said. It's probably a waste of time to hone in on that particular off the cuff statement. There are still plenty of jobs which are bullshit though. For example my girlfriend is an auditor. Most of her job would disappear if the infrastructure existed to have her clients financial records completely digitised. A program could then analyse the data (which is mostly done at the moment with a bunch of spreadsheets right now) and with higher audit coverage (they can only check/test a fraction of records and transactions). Her workload could go from 5-6 days a week to 2.

justincormack 12y ago
The list was a list of jobs that people self declared as useless, not which Graeber decided were useless.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  Are you sure? In the article it looks like it's a direct quote from Graeber.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Yes, if you read the original bullshit jobs article it is clearer.

crdoconnor 12y ago

>Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these? * Private equity CEOs * Lobbyists * PR researchers * Telemarketers * Bailiffs Tell us how the world would be worse off without them. You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.

WalterBright 12y ago
Let's take Private Equity CEOs. The bottom line of what they do is try to reallocate capital away from less productive investments and towards more productive investments.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  Which is why we have off-shoring, and stagnant or dropping real income for that segment of the population that still has a job. Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?
  - darawk 12y ago
    a) Off-shoring is a consequence of poorly thought out and even more poorly enforced tax-laws, not private equity firms. b) If you have a private equity investor stomping around your startup, it's because you solicited their investment. If you didn't want it, don't take the money. Simple.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      a) Private equity has always pushed for off-shoring and for a favourable tax culture. This is only a government failure to the extent that government hasn't resisted lobbying efforts from the PEs. b) So you're saying founders have a choice between accepting bullying or being starved of funding? Perhaps that's not the positive argument for PE it might appear to be. The reality is that PE culture vampirises and kills real businesses and real affluence. It's only investment in the most toxic and predatory sense.

danparsonson 12y ago

I expect he wants the world to change more fundamentally than that - per your example, if you have a good state-provided health service then the health insurance question is simply no longer an issue. There are of course countries that do this already. I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance premiums), would risk-taking increase to the point where the cost to the state became untenable? Then again if we lived in a futuristic society looked after by self-maintaining solar-powered robots then any service would essentially be free so maybe it wouldn't matter.

blfr 12y ago
Single payer still acts as an insurer and needs actuaries (even if they're not called that) to figure out which procedures make sense with their limited resources.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Not really. There is no need to price the cost of insuring a 30 year old white male living in Croydon. If he is ill, he gets treatment. If he is not ill, he doesn't. The only thing close to actuarial science that the NHS actually needs is QALYS calculations. This is only really used for calculating how worthwhile very expensive treatments that target the very old or very disabled. The number of people needed to do that is very small, compared to the number needed to calculate prices in a non-single payer context.
  - jaytagdamian 12y ago
    All you need to know is that you 'maydie' if you go to Croydon's hospitals ;)
  - blfr 12y ago
    Then they need to estimate how many procedures of each kind to contract, or how large facilities to maintain, in Croydon. Which in part depends on the number of 30 year old white males living there. If they get it wrong, he doesn't magically get treatment anyway. He either has to wait, or travel elsewhere (and someone still has to figure out where and when). Otherwise, they waste money on unused capacity.

_abattoir 12y ago

When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry? This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones. The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing. I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program...If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job... What, exactly, do you think actuaries do during their 9-5? Do you think they manually compute actuarial tables with a TI-89?
- reitanqild 12y ago
  I personally see a lot of potential for automation, -just tonight I was out working for a non-profit that saves a lot of hassle because I learned them a few Excel tricks back in 2012. Another place I was paid for less than 20 hours and it shaved two hours of preparations for the run of a machine, meaning they could keep it for several years more.

calibraxis 12y ago

The current HN title: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.” It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.

fab13n 12y ago

Bullshitness is not an all-or-nothing quality for jobs, that's part of why they're so hard to get rid of. You can find some justification to every job, but this justification can be dubious, or can not be worth the cost in human energy or social side effects. Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption. To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe. There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies). More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.

amelius 12y ago
Reading your last paragraph, I just wished more people were researching ways to fix this situation, and to come up with new economic models to replace standard capitalism. It would probably be the least bullshit job of all :)

alphydan 12y ago

> 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 Some countries have figured some of that out: Distribute the health and education risk between every citizen (it typically achieves a 50% discount vs. privatly insured countries)[0] [0] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/US_spends_much_more_on_health_than_what_might_be_expected_1_slideshow.jpg http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...

learnstats2 12y ago

> 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. In terms of personal insurance, a world with less insurance looks like a place where people don't suffer just for the small risk of such a loss. Catastrophic events such as fire and health could be dealt with more sympathetically by society rather than being handled by a profit-making industry that only really wants to help people who are rich enough.

stephenbez 12y ago
The government has tried that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progra... By charging premiums below market risk valuation, the program has encouraged building in vulnerable areas. This has led to destruction of resources and government transfers to the rich people in a position to own coastal property.

Ilverin 12y ago

Marketing/advertising is a bullshit job 99% of the time (the only time it isn't is when the product you are marketing is not well known and is a better option for some people than a competitor's product).

mousa 12y ago

There are jobs that are legitimately BS and everyone within the industry knows it but works hard at it anyways because it's their job. In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind. A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more. Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money. That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.

collyw 12y ago

You should try Europe. No health insurance, no problem. I think that is the bigger picture that he is getting at. In an "ideal society" these jobs wouldn't need to exist.

ryanmonroe 12y ago
I'll admit I'm not familiar with healthcare in Europe, but surely there are people whose job it is to estimate the cost of providing healthcare and estimate the probability of certain health events occurring.
- collyw 12y ago
  Yes, I am sure there are. Worth noting, my girlfriend is a Neurologist. She and her colleagues say if you have anything serious wrong with you, go to the public healthcare system. You will probably have to wait longer, but you will get the treatment the doctors want you to have. When the same doctors have to deal with private patients (many doctors have both private and public patients here) then its basically a battle with the insurance companies trying to justify why they should pay for the better drugs. So you have doctors time being wasted on bureaucracy and form filling on one side (they would rather be treating patients), an insurance company person wasting time on the other side. Doctors time isn't cheap. I doubt actuaries are either. It seems blatantly obvious to me that the system without that aspect to it is way superior.
superuser2 12y ago
Sure you do. Your insurance premiums are your taxes. An actuary had to figure out how much revenue the state healthcare system has to bring in to be stable.
- collyw 12y ago
  Well unlike insurance premiums, we don't get a choice in paying taxes. And the poor who don't have the money to pay taxes are still covered. So while what you say is true in one respect, its not really the same. And it has been well documented that the American system is very inefficient compared to Europes.

egypturnash 12y ago

I think there is an argument to be made that pretty much the entire health insurance industry is a bullshit industry. It's led to the price of medical care spiralling absurdly high; it spends a lot of the money it siphons out of the process on getting lawmakers to resist removing it from the equation entirely. And when that catastrophic accident or illness comes they will find every excuse they can to avoid paying out.

prograhmma 12y ago

Having worked as an actuary who prices insurance, you are wrong. Most clients already know what they want there prices to be. It is is common to calculate insurance rates based on statistics then hit everything by a constant varying anywhere from .5 to 2 to get the rates to be competitive with the market. It's all about the government mandated signature.