7 ms·

Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation [pdf]

77 points by huherto 11y ago

endymi0n 11y ago
Why? That's why. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- jdmichal 11y ago
  And yet GDP per person has trended upwards in a pretty global fashion. [0, 1] So either those providing "real" value are so productive that they support all that dead weight and yet still continue to grow, or those "bullshit" jobs are actually providing real value and increases in productivity. [0] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03 http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03 [1] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01 http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01
  - danharaj 11y ago
    GDP measures GDP, not 'real value' or 'productivity'. Also, just because the mean is increasing does not mean the median is, too.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      GDP is a (attempted) measurement of economic value-add. I cannot think of a better definition of productivity in the context of this conversation. The value-add per person has been increasing despite the claimed existence of "bullshit" jobs, with that being roughly defined (by me) as a zero-value-add position. My proposal is simply that if they are zero-value-add, then the value-add demonstrated by the rest of the population must be enough to completely cover those losses and then some. I'll let the audience decide if they consider that viable. Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.
      - danharaj 11y ago
        We'd like GDP to track what we would consider value, but it need not. It's not hard to find people who will complain that some contribution to GDP is unhelpful, detrimental. It wouldn't be hard to find sour words speaking out against financialization, for example. Economic rents in general can contribute to GDP but intuitively are not 'real value' because otherwise we wouldn't call it rent. Governments can create a lot of worthless work that contributes GDP, but unsustainably. It would be debasing to the word 'value' or 'productivity' to ignore that. We'd like at least for 'real value' or 'productivity' as intuitively understood to contribute to GDP. That is, from an increase in value one may infer an increase in GDP (usually). I can accept that. I take issue with an inference in the other direction. If I knew how much 'real value' contributed to GDP and how much was in excess of that contribution, I would be an incredibly accomplished economist.
        jdmichal 11y ago
        I can buy both yours and TeMPOraL's [0] argument, which I think are roughly saying the same thing. Thanks for the well-reasoned response. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Maybe you and GP think about different concepts of "productivity". Economic value-add has only a loose correlation with work benefiting individuals and societies. That's the point of "bullshit jobs" concept - we're inventing occupations that feed on one another, wasting people's time and resources but making the numbers go up. It's like in this story of soldiers who dig up latrines one day, and fill them up on another day. Yes, a lot of people were busy, but in the end, nothing useful got done and lots of man-hours were wasted.
      - crpatino 11y ago
        What about "GDP is detached from the production of hard physical goods and services that satisfy human needs."??? I won't go as far as to claim that Economy is a pseudo science, but like many other disciplines it uses words that are already in use by the general population and redefines them to mean technical concepts. The end result is that economist can make statements that are technically true but that end up conveying a completely different message when listened by a lay person. In this case, when an economist talks about "productivity", it has a very specific concept in mind. One that has more to do with ROI than with the manufacturing of any thing of value at all. Of course, both concepts are not completely detached from each other (it would be useless to grab a concept to mean something random instead), but they are not 100% aligned either, and this results in misunderstanding, if not actual misleading. By example, when some troubled company talks about "increasing employee productivity", naive employees expect some sort of training program to help them be more effective at their jobs. What they get is a pink slip instead; if productivity is ROI, you can lay off half of your people and use the company's momentum to keep turning 80% of the income, so on paper it will look like you are having better ROI (even if the cuts get too deep and are damaging the long term viability of the business).
  - michaelchisari 11y ago
    Certainly you can't believe there's only two possibilities.
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      ... The options presented are either "bullshit" jobs provide value or they don't. So yes, there actually are only two possibilities. Which other ones would you propose to exist?
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        That they add some value, but considerably less than "real" jobs?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        There's a third one, in which I believe - that bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use. A typical example would be political campaigns and/or advertising in highly competitive sectors - all work done there serves only to cancel out the work done by other people, thus creating a negative feedback loop that can consume infinite amount of resources for little marginal gain. Think about how much time, paper, paint and fuel is wasted printing leaflets and billboards and notice that if everyone collectively agreed not to do this, the results would be the same.
        jdmichal 11y ago
        > bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use. Touché. See, this is why we should all unit test with a fuzzer... I suppose I would need to amend it to zero-or-less-value-add. This thought intertwines with the other line of discussion, in that these proposed "negative" items would likely be seen as GDP-positive. After all, someone needs to print all those pamphlets, and that's a value-add over paper and ink. Interesting aside: São Paulo, Brasil has a ban on all outdoor advertising. Of course, that's only a limited subset of possible advertising, but it seems to have gone over well with the general populous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
  - S4M 11y ago
    It could be that the best workers have a crazy productivity that accounts for the major part of the GDP while the rest has a low productivity.
    - hebdo 11y ago
      Especially if you realize how quickly is the public sector growing in many (most) countries. Not to mention centralized efforts, such as QE, which are literally aimed at jobs creation, regardless of their value.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    There is another possibility: per capita GDP is an increasingly unrealistic measure for estimating "real" productivity. None of the three possibilities preclude the others, so there could be combinations. It could be all three.
  - justonepost 11y ago
    GDP is all inflated meaninglessly by central banks. Inflation rates aren't particularly accurate either so you can't count on real GDP as well.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    "The ideal economic or GDP hero is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a 20-car pileup, while munching on fast-take-out-food and chatting on a cell phone. All add to GDP growth. The GDP villain is non-smoking, eats home-cooked wholesome meals and cycles to work." -- Mark Anielski Something to remember when you next start going on about "real value".
- hermanmerman 11y ago
  So bullshit jobs are a tax paid by big corporations? Why are they willing to pay this tax? If most of their workforce is improductive, why not get rid of it altogether? Why do these jobs exist?
  - ch4s3 11y ago
    Because corporations aren't monolithic rational actors, but rather large bureaucratic bodies made of people who operate in a broader social and cultural context.
    - mr_luc 11y ago
      A thousand times this. One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity. And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?" But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways. There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself: "Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?" "Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?" "If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?" It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations). The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation. TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology.
- justonepost 11y ago
  Yes, low interest rates allow for a lot of meaningless labor to be performed .. why not? You can borrow at near 0% to pay for it, so who cares. The fed is pushing interest rates lower and lower to keep people employed - even if it is in purposeless, pointless jobs. When they stop though, we'll see how many of these jobs remain. Zirp did the same thing in Japan, by the way. Japanese hate unemployment and with Zirp they were allowed to keep a lot of people employed that otherwise would be laid off in a normal functioning capitalist society.
- pdeuchler 11y ago
  David Graeber is one of those guys who finds a nugget of truth and surrounds it with mountains of convenient and crowd pleasing BS. Everyone loves to hear that their "real jobs" are being cut while the boss that "does nothing" gets to stay, and nobody wants to be told that the "people who make things" are being rapidly replaced by a single "creative" and machines. Of course, all of this "progress" ends up generating a lot of paperwork so we end up with "pointless" corporate lawyers (who, in the article, had a very interesting life and is probably paid quite handsomely) who bitch about not having a philosophically interesting career as if that's some sort of inalienable right. The true "pointless jobs" are the thought leaders who try to warp political and economic philosophy to their own solipsistic psychological needs by pandering to the baser wants and desires of their audience. Most else is a circumstance of market inefficiencies or people not actually being worth the salary they used to be paid.
Animats 11y ago
The American Economic Association site: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie This site uses cookies to improve performance. If your browser does not accept cookies, you cannot view this site. In black and red lettering on a dark purple background. A summary is available here. It's the usual economist hand-waving.[1] [1] http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/08/since-1986-my-actual-paid-job-as.html http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/08/since-1986-...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
wcummings 11y ago
Interesting read, I love to see contrarian views on automation. I'm really tired of seeing poorly thought out rants from techno-prophets predicting unbounded exponential growth when economic growth is stagnating globally.
- justonepost 11y ago
  Unbounded exponential growth is possible, but we have to redefine the rules of capitalism. For example, rewarding those who actually advance our economies versus those who just play with numbers in stock markets.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - hebdo 11y ago
    Given that any resouce you can think of is bounded, no, it is impossible.
    - netcan 11y ago
      Bounded theoretically, yes. But the boundary can be so far away that it doesn't matter. Take energy. Oil & coal are certainly bounded, either by available deposits to mine or the environmental effects of burning them. But energy can come from solar, wind, nuclear and other sources. It's possible that 200 years from now, we'll have hit a wall on energy, but it's also possible that we'll have increased our energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Other than that, I think it's hard to think of economic growth for periods longer than a few generations. When economists say that a dollar in 2015 is worth $X in 1066 and we are Y% richer, that's a very leaky metaphor. It's basically saying that a sheep or a loaf of bread cost x in 1066 and people made z every day and if we take our daily salary and divide it by loaves of bread and sheep then we don't really have to consider that we buy ipods and toothpaste and they bought slaves and mutton. It's just nonsensical to try and represent it quantitatively. So economic growth in the long term is hard to think about in numbers. Say a vaccine for cancer, alzheimer's & diabetes was invented tomorrow. You would be willing to pay money for that and glad of the opportunity. That's economic growth. The researchers uses lithium in their laptops and fossil fuel to keep the lights on, but still I don't think natural resources will bound this kind of thing.
skadamat 11y ago
Really good in depth dive into the problem, love it
Animats 11y ago
Many "bullshit jobs" in finance exist only because of legal quirks, and could be eliminated by minor regulatory changes. Finance has about 5% of US jobs. Manufacturing has 7%. We need to get finance down and manufacturing up. It would be straightforward to downsize the insurance industry. Insurance is complicated because insurance companies want it complicated so they don't have to compete on price. Much to the annoyance of the insurance industry, Medicare supplement policies are limited to 10 standard options, A through N. (There used to be more). So comparing companies means looking at a table of prices vs standard forms. If that was extended to other types of policies, the insurance industry's marketing operations would be much smaller. Finance could be downsized by imposing a Tobin tax on financial transactions. One takes effect on January 1, 2016 in the European Union. It's 0.1% on most transactions, and 0.01% on derivatives transactions. That's enough to kill the high frequency trading industry and downsize derivatives trading by 90%, based on Sweden's experience. The excess labor can be reassigned to more productive jobs in the lower levels.
- justonepost 11y ago
  A lot of "bullshit" jobs also exist because of low interest rates. As unemployment due to automation increases, the central banks lower interest rates (lower rates are used to increase employment). So when all this free money floats around it allows companies to invent jobs that really don't need to exist. As soon as rates are allowed to increase, as has happened a couple times over the last 15 years, unemployment will sky rocket harsh and we will see the results of automation. For now, however, the tide is in and the naked are hidden.
  - justonepost 11y ago
    Check this out: Watch what happens whenever they try to raise interest rates: https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/April-2013/Low-Interest-Rates-Have-Yet-To-Spur-Job-Growth https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/A...
  - tmrgn 11y ago
    Shouldn't we rather expect a lot of "bullshit investment" and automation first in a situation of "free money"?
netcan 11y ago
Automation and labour is a question we have a history of being repetitively wrong about. So, its worth treading lightly. First of all, we use the word “automation” which already implies replicating people. We could just as easily use “tools.” There is a lot of grey area between automation and tools and economically the two are fungible anyway. If we think of new tools being invented, we think of people’s productive capacities being enhanced rather than replaced. Is a combine harvester a tool or automation? “There is no fundamental economic law that guarantees every adult will be able to earn a living solely on the basis of sound mind and good character.” I think this is a good thing to be pondering. Our modern economy, our political philosophies and I think most of our ideas of how society works kind of assume that every adult with decent character is be able to earn a living. This is why living wage debates get people so fired up. The rug gets pulled out from under all our political ideas if this doesn’t hold more or less true. Overall, I think this paper goes down the right track. Historically, demand for stuff has been remarkably elastic. We can consume a lot of stuff. Automation is essentially tools for producing more. We have good historical examples of the workforce becoming more sophisticated to take advantage of these tools and continue being useful. I do think it could be dangerous relying on the historical analogy, because as the quote above suggests the is no rule in economics that makes this necessary. I do see a couple of avenues to worry about. (1) One is the vaguely Marxist one: labour & capital. Automation is capital. It accumulates in ways that concentrate wealth. If the 99% thing we are seeing now is indicative of a long term trend dictated by technological progress… Marxist conflict dynamics may well play out in some way. Growing wealth gaps create social-political instability that’s hard to avoid. (2) The pace of change. Technological progression’s effect on everyday life is moving very fast. The digital divide thing is real, way more than it was ten years ago. I recently spoke to a woman (about 40) who has never really had a computer that couldn’t get up to speed in hospitality work because she couldn’t leaner the software and its quirks fast enough. Workforce skills keeping up with technological progress is part of the process. But historically, this has been something schools could lead because the pace of change was generational. These days the rate of change is revolutionizing occupations much quicker. That could leave a lot of people behind. I think demand elasticity will hold We can keep consuming more. I think the problem is in the workforce’s ability to keep up. There are plenty of potential jobs today, if the skills were available. I think if we got a 100% increase in the number of skilled programmers of the caliber that Google and FB are fighting over, the economy would absorb them pretty easily. Same for a lot of professions. The problem is that the skill sets required keep getting more sophisticated. That means inflexible labour markets.

77 points by huherto 11y ago

endymi0n 11y ago

Why? That's why. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

jdmichal 11y ago
And yet GDP per person has trended upwards in a pretty global fashion. [0, 1] So either those providing "real" value are so productive that they support all that dead weight and yet still continue to grow, or those "bullshit" jobs are actually providing real value and increases in productivity. [0] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03 http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03 [1] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01 http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01
- danharaj 11y ago
  GDP measures GDP, not 'real value' or 'productivity'. Also, just because the mean is increasing does not mean the median is, too.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    GDP is a (attempted) measurement of economic value-add. I cannot think of a better definition of productivity in the context of this conversation. The value-add per person has been increasing despite the claimed existence of "bullshit" jobs, with that being roughly defined (by me) as a zero-value-add position. My proposal is simply that if they are zero-value-add, then the value-add demonstrated by the rest of the population must be enough to completely cover those losses and then some. I'll let the audience decide if they consider that viable. Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      We'd like GDP to track what we would consider value, but it need not. It's not hard to find people who will complain that some contribution to GDP is unhelpful, detrimental. It wouldn't be hard to find sour words speaking out against financialization, for example. Economic rents in general can contribute to GDP but intuitively are not 'real value' because otherwise we wouldn't call it rent. Governments can create a lot of worthless work that contributes GDP, but unsustainably. It would be debasing to the word 'value' or 'productivity' to ignore that. We'd like at least for 'real value' or 'productivity' as intuitively understood to contribute to GDP. That is, from an increase in value one may infer an increase in GDP (usually). I can accept that. I take issue with an inference in the other direction. If I knew how much 'real value' contributed to GDP and how much was in excess of that contribution, I would be an incredibly accomplished economist.
      - jdmichal 11y ago
        I can buy both yours and TeMPOraL's [0] argument, which I think are roughly saying the same thing. Thanks for the well-reasoned response. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Maybe you and GP think about different concepts of "productivity". Economic value-add has only a loose correlation with work benefiting individuals and societies. That's the point of "bullshit jobs" concept - we're inventing occupations that feed on one another, wasting people's time and resources but making the numbers go up. It's like in this story of soldiers who dig up latrines one day, and fill them up on another day. Yes, a lot of people were busy, but in the end, nothing useful got done and lots of man-hours were wasted.
    - crpatino 11y ago
      What about "GDP is detached from the production of hard physical goods and services that satisfy human needs."??? I won't go as far as to claim that Economy is a pseudo science, but like many other disciplines it uses words that are already in use by the general population and redefines them to mean technical concepts. The end result is that economist can make statements that are technically true but that end up conveying a completely different message when listened by a lay person. In this case, when an economist talks about "productivity", it has a very specific concept in mind. One that has more to do with ROI than with the manufacturing of any thing of value at all. Of course, both concepts are not completely detached from each other (it would be useless to grab a concept to mean something random instead), but they are not 100% aligned either, and this results in misunderstanding, if not actual misleading. By example, when some troubled company talks about "increasing employee productivity", naive employees expect some sort of training program to help them be more effective at their jobs. What they get is a pink slip instead; if productivity is ROI, you can lay off half of your people and use the company's momentum to keep turning 80% of the income, so on paper it will look like you are having better ROI (even if the cuts get too deep and are damaging the long term viability of the business).
- michaelchisari 11y ago
  Certainly you can't believe there's only two possibilities.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    ... The options presented are either "bullshit" jobs provide value or they don't. So yes, there actually are only two possibilities. Which other ones would you propose to exist?
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      That they add some value, but considerably less than "real" jobs?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      There's a third one, in which I believe - that bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use. A typical example would be political campaigns and/or advertising in highly competitive sectors - all work done there serves only to cancel out the work done by other people, thus creating a negative feedback loop that can consume infinite amount of resources for little marginal gain. Think about how much time, paper, paint and fuel is wasted printing leaflets and billboards and notice that if everyone collectively agreed not to do this, the results would be the same.
      - jdmichal 11y ago
        > bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use. Touché. See, this is why we should all unit test with a fuzzer... I suppose I would need to amend it to zero-or-less-value-add. This thought intertwines with the other line of discussion, in that these proposed "negative" items would likely be seen as GDP-positive. After all, someone needs to print all those pamphlets, and that's a value-add over paper and ink. Interesting aside: São Paulo, Brasil has a ban on all outdoor advertising. Of course, that's only a limited subset of possible advertising, but it seems to have gone over well with the general populous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
- S4M 11y ago
  It could be that the best workers have a crazy productivity that accounts for the major part of the GDP while the rest has a low productivity.
  - hebdo 11y ago
    Especially if you realize how quickly is the public sector growing in many (most) countries. Not to mention centralized efforts, such as QE, which are literally aimed at jobs creation, regardless of their value.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  There is another possibility: per capita GDP is an increasingly unrealistic measure for estimating "real" productivity. None of the three possibilities preclude the others, so there could be combinations. It could be all three.
- justonepost 11y ago
  GDP is all inflated meaninglessly by central banks. Inflation rates aren't particularly accurate either so you can't count on real GDP as well.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  "The ideal economic or GDP hero is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a 20-car pileup, while munching on fast-take-out-food and chatting on a cell phone. All add to GDP growth. The GDP villain is non-smoking, eats home-cooked wholesome meals and cycles to work." -- Mark Anielski Something to remember when you next start going on about "real value".
hermanmerman 11y ago
So bullshit jobs are a tax paid by big corporations? Why are they willing to pay this tax? If most of their workforce is improductive, why not get rid of it altogether? Why do these jobs exist?
- ch4s3 11y ago
  Because corporations aren't monolithic rational actors, but rather large bureaucratic bodies made of people who operate in a broader social and cultural context.
  - mr_luc 11y ago
    A thousand times this. One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity. And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?" But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways. There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself: "Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?" "Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?" "If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?" It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations). The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation. TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology.
justonepost 11y ago
Yes, low interest rates allow for a lot of meaningless labor to be performed .. why not? You can borrow at near 0% to pay for it, so who cares. The fed is pushing interest rates lower and lower to keep people employed - even if it is in purposeless, pointless jobs. When they stop though, we'll see how many of these jobs remain. Zirp did the same thing in Japan, by the way. Japanese hate unemployment and with Zirp they were allowed to keep a lot of people employed that otherwise would be laid off in a normal functioning capitalist society.
pdeuchler 11y ago
David Graeber is one of those guys who finds a nugget of truth and surrounds it with mountains of convenient and crowd pleasing BS. Everyone loves to hear that their "real jobs" are being cut while the boss that "does nothing" gets to stay, and nobody wants to be told that the "people who make things" are being rapidly replaced by a single "creative" and machines. Of course, all of this "progress" ends up generating a lot of paperwork so we end up with "pointless" corporate lawyers (who, in the article, had a very interesting life and is probably paid quite handsomely) who bitch about not having a philosophically interesting career as if that's some sort of inalienable right. The true "pointless jobs" are the thought leaders who try to warp political and economic philosophy to their own solipsistic psychological needs by pandering to the baser wants and desires of their audience. Most else is a circumstance of market inefficiencies or people not actually being worth the salary they used to be paid.

Animats 11y ago

The American Economic Association site: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie This site uses cookies to improve performance. If your browser does not accept cookies, you cannot view this site. In black and red lettering on a dark purple background. A summary is available here. It's the usual economist hand-waving.[1] [1] http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/08/since-1986-my-actual-paid-job-as.html http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/08/since-1986-...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

wcummings 11y ago

Interesting read, I love to see contrarian views on automation. I'm really tired of seeing poorly thought out rants from techno-prophets predicting unbounded exponential growth when economic growth is stagnating globally.

justonepost 11y ago
Unbounded exponential growth is possible, but we have to redefine the rules of capitalism. For example, rewarding those who actually advance our economies versus those who just play with numbers in stock markets.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- hebdo 11y ago
  Given that any resouce you can think of is bounded, no, it is impossible.
  - netcan 11y ago
    Bounded theoretically, yes. But the boundary can be so far away that it doesn't matter. Take energy. Oil & coal are certainly bounded, either by available deposits to mine or the environmental effects of burning them. But energy can come from solar, wind, nuclear and other sources. It's possible that 200 years from now, we'll have hit a wall on energy, but it's also possible that we'll have increased our energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Other than that, I think it's hard to think of economic growth for periods longer than a few generations. When economists say that a dollar in 2015 is worth $X in 1066 and we are Y% richer, that's a very leaky metaphor. It's basically saying that a sheep or a loaf of bread cost x in 1066 and people made z every day and if we take our daily salary and divide it by loaves of bread and sheep then we don't really have to consider that we buy ipods and toothpaste and they bought slaves and mutton. It's just nonsensical to try and represent it quantitatively. So economic growth in the long term is hard to think about in numbers. Say a vaccine for cancer, alzheimer's & diabetes was invented tomorrow. You would be willing to pay money for that and glad of the opportunity. That's economic growth. The researchers uses lithium in their laptops and fossil fuel to keep the lights on, but still I don't think natural resources will bound this kind of thing.

skadamat 11y ago

Really good in depth dive into the problem, love it

Animats 11y ago

Many "bullshit jobs" in finance exist only because of legal quirks, and could be eliminated by minor regulatory changes. Finance has about 5% of US jobs. Manufacturing has 7%. We need to get finance down and manufacturing up. It would be straightforward to downsize the insurance industry. Insurance is complicated because insurance companies want it complicated so they don't have to compete on price. Much to the annoyance of the insurance industry, Medicare supplement policies are limited to 10 standard options, A through N. (There used to be more). So comparing companies means looking at a table of prices vs standard forms. If that was extended to other types of policies, the insurance industry's marketing operations would be much smaller. Finance could be downsized by imposing a Tobin tax on financial transactions. One takes effect on January 1, 2016 in the European Union. It's 0.1% on most transactions, and 0.01% on derivatives transactions. That's enough to kill the high frequency trading industry and downsize derivatives trading by 90%, based on Sweden's experience. The excess labor can be reassigned to more productive jobs in the lower levels.

justonepost 11y ago
A lot of "bullshit" jobs also exist because of low interest rates. As unemployment due to automation increases, the central banks lower interest rates (lower rates are used to increase employment). So when all this free money floats around it allows companies to invent jobs that really don't need to exist. As soon as rates are allowed to increase, as has happened a couple times over the last 15 years, unemployment will sky rocket harsh and we will see the results of automation. For now, however, the tide is in and the naked are hidden.
- justonepost 11y ago
  Check this out: Watch what happens whenever they try to raise interest rates: https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/April-2013/Low-Interest-Rates-Have-Yet-To-Spur-Job-Growth https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/A...
- tmrgn 11y ago
  Shouldn't we rather expect a lot of "bullshit investment" and automation first in a situation of "free money"?

netcan 11y ago

Automation and labour is a question we have a history of being repetitively wrong about. So, its worth treading lightly. First of all, we use the word “automation” which already implies replicating people. We could just as easily use “tools.” There is a lot of grey area between automation and tools and economically the two are fungible anyway. If we think of new tools being invented, we think of people’s productive capacities being enhanced rather than replaced. Is a combine harvester a tool or automation? “There is no fundamental economic law that guarantees every adult will be able to earn a living solely on the basis of sound mind and good character.” I think this is a good thing to be pondering. Our modern economy, our political philosophies and I think most of our ideas of how society works kind of assume that every adult with decent character is be able to earn a living. This is why living wage debates get people so fired up. The rug gets pulled out from under all our political ideas if this doesn’t hold more or less true. Overall, I think this paper goes down the right track. Historically, demand for stuff has been remarkably elastic. We can consume a lot of stuff. Automation is essentially tools for producing more. We have good historical examples of the workforce becoming more sophisticated to take advantage of these tools and continue being useful. I do think it could be dangerous relying on the historical analogy, because as the quote above suggests the is no rule in economics that makes this necessary. I do see a couple of avenues to worry about. (1) One is the vaguely Marxist one: labour & capital. Automation is capital. It accumulates in ways that concentrate wealth. If the 99% thing we are seeing now is indicative of a long term trend dictated by technological progress… Marxist conflict dynamics may well play out in some way. Growing wealth gaps create social-political instability that’s hard to avoid. (2) The pace of change. Technological progression’s effect on everyday life is moving very fast. The digital divide thing is real, way more than it was ten years ago. I recently spoke to a woman (about 40) who has never really had a computer that couldn’t get up to speed in hospitality work because she couldn’t leaner the software and its quirks fast enough. Workforce skills keeping up with technological progress is part of the process. But historically, this has been something schools could lead because the pace of change was generational. These days the rate of change is revolutionizing occupations much quicker. That could leave a lot of people behind. I think demand elasticity will hold We can keep consuming more. I think the problem is in the workforce’s ability to keep up. There are plenty of potential jobs today, if the skills were available. I think if we got a 100% increase in the number of skilled programmers of the caliber that Google and FB are fighting over, the economy would absorb them pretty easily. Same for a lot of professions. The problem is that the skill sets required keep getting more sophisticated. That means inflexible labour markets.