
Why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid - primroot
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/?source=newsletter
======
vikp
Humans value conformity more than we care to admit. There are a couple of
studies in this vein, but one from Baylor shows that people in groups punish
others who are more generous, even when the generosity benefits everyone[1].

The author makes an interesting point about people who dislike their work
begrudging people who do meaningful things (in their judgement). Throughout
our history, we have had an idealized vision of the average American in the
back of our heads -- first it was the farmer, creating food for their family.
Then it became the factory worker, creating cars for the masses -- now it may
be the programmer, making the software that powers our world.

The interesting thread here is creation. We live in a country that idealizes
making things and taking risk/responsibility. Yet society is heavily geared
towards conformity, and work is an extension of that. Even tech startups are
increasingly becoming a systematic, codified industry. Is it no wonder that
there is some resentment of people who are perceived to truly be free to
create?

This is why something like basic income[2] is so interesting. Once we are
freed from having to conform to society in order to meet our basic needs, what
will we be able to do? The cynic would say that people will all collect their
checks and accomplish nothing. The optimist would say that everyone would
start creating new art, music, machines, etc. I think somewhere in between,
but that somewhere in between is still vastly more interesting than what we
have now.

[1]
[http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=st...](http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=131067)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

~~~
anon4
> _There are a couple of studies in this vein_

The largest and most instructive one is, I think, Facebook. And tumblr. To a
lesser extent reddit. For shits and giggles, 4chan and SA.

And if you look at the latter of those, you'll see kids making things by
themselves in large amounts. You could take that as support for basic income -
everybody under 18 pretty much lives on basic income and then some. A lot of
them make really fun things and publish on the internet.

My hunch is that if we do get basic income, it will take one to two
generations before the floodgates really open and our problem will not be
people being too uncreative, but exactly the opposite.

~~~
notahacker
The idea that the cat memes and horrendously inane linkbait headlines that
litter the social internet might be representative of the creativity that
could be unleashed in even greater volume with basic income is the best
argument in favour of "worthless" mid level marketing managers and the forty-
hour workweek I've ever heard.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen dilettantes' blog articles that are more thought
provoking than supposed social science classic writings, but _in general_ the
more user-generated areas of the internet - populated by adults as much as
kids - we'd still mostly waste the free time we got anyway.

(I've been distracted from a bit of volunteering I was going to do in order to
add a comment on a social site that won't be read by anyone after tomorrow,
and probably won't be remembered by many ten minutes after they've finished
reading it. QED, I guess)

~~~
vikp
Your comment is definitely interesting, and I will remember it for more than
10 minutes. But the real question isn't "is what people do in their free time
a good thing?", it is "is what they could do in their free time better for
society than what they are doing at work now?" What are the hidden personal
(not using your time optimally, lower happiness, etc) and societal (more
stress, higher medical bills, etc) costs of people constantly doing things
they hate? Not saying I have an answer, but it would be nice to find out.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
>"is what they could do in their free time better for society than what they
are doing at work now?"

That is a really great question and one that I think gets to the heart of the
problem this article and others like it are demonstrating.

~~~
contingencies
When we do things for the love of them, we tend to excel.

Furthermore, when we are truly passionate we can maintain focus and energy
towards our goals for far longer periods.

------
hvs

      If you think about it in that light, it makes the 
      achievements of the socialist bloc seem pretty 
      impressive: a country like Russia managed to go 
      from a backwater to a major world power with 
      everyone working maybe on average four or five 
      hours a day.
    

That is a _very_ selective reading of history.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The empire-building helped I'd guess. Funny how a Socialist country had to
depend on exploitation to grow. Just like most everybody else.

~~~
wpietri
I'd be interested to see when actual socialists think the Soviet Union stopped
being an effective socialist state and started being more of a totalitarian
kleptocracy with a veneer of socialist rhetoric as justification.

I was an early Agile person, starting with Extreme Programming in 2000. It
blew me away how quickly a revolutionary approach to the work I loved was
turned into a bunch of empty labels and pointless rituals that covered up the
same old power structure but provided the useful appearance of change. [1]
It's definitely made me wonder what early Russian revolutionaries would think
of how the Soviet Union turned out.

[1] [http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-
how...](http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-
in/)

~~~
philwelch
Since Stalin was both an early Russian revolutionary and the nadir of "how the
Soviet Union turned out", it's hard to accept the reading of history that says
the Soviet Union didn't turn out according to plan.

~~~
krfsm
Considering Stalin's swift elimination of all his political rivals, it's
reasonable to assume not everybody shared his political vision.

------
shkkmo
“I want to do something with my life that actually benefits others; but if I
go into a line of work where I care for other people, they pay me so little,
and they put so much in debt, that I can’t even take care of my own family!
This is ridiculous!”

Yet, the big swing in silicon valley is B2B.

The question we should asking ourselves is:

What can we, as software engineers and web developers, do to support our
working class?

We need to reduce their debt, reduce their cost of living, and decrease the
amount of time they waste dealing with the intricacies of living in modern
society. How can we do this?

~~~
rattray
Exactly the question to be asking, in my opinion.

I like what Balgair has to say, to some degree - though voting without
education may backfire, so it's not that simple.

Some off-the-cuff ideas re; debt reduction, in the hope that others find their
flaws & suggest others:

\- Facilitating P2P debt _may_ help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the
"overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this
but can't recall the name.

\- Reduce student debt by making expensive college degrees obsolete. I think
the next step in that (now that we have libraries, wikipedia, coursera,
udacity, etc) may be changing hiring practices: a startup that helps companies
hire based on experience/aptitude rather than falling back to the college
degree heuristic could have a big impact. Relatedly, other startups (or FOSS)
might replace the traditional degree in other ways, like guiding students
through free online tracks or connecting them to advisors, mentors,
internships, peers, and jobs.

\- Change how employers pay employees. Most large employers have cheap debt
and/or lots of cash, while many of their lowest-paid employees have terrible
credit. This means they have to rely on mind-bogglingly expensive services
like Payday loans and credit cards to cover their basic expenses (which don't
come due on payday). A startup that helps employers pay daily instead of
fortnightly, or pay bills directly, or even provide credit directly to their
employees could put a _lot_ of money back in poor pockets.

\- I don't know the other main sources of American debt. Car payments? Large
houses? I just don't know. But a systematic investigation of the sources of
the debt, the costs of servicing it, and the underlying reasons it's required
may be a decent way to scout out some good ideas!

Ultimately, though, much of this comes down to Policy and Culture. Student
debt would evaporate if we just had free education. Cost of Living would
likely plummet if we had terrific public transportation. There may be tax
schemes (land taxes?) that would lower rent/home ownership costs. A culture of
minimalism would likely also reduce cost of living =)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Facilitating P2P debt may help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the
> "overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this
> but can't recall the name.

There are a number. The one I'm most familiar with Prosper.com. (Most of them
technically aren't _really_ P2P debt because the central site is the lender of
record, in order to deal with regulatory compliance, which can be quite
involved when it comes to lending and debt collection, but they approximate
P2P lending.)

------
notahacker
If we're making sweeping generalizations about why "helping others" apparently
pays less well, the most concise and obvious answer is that those who need the
help most (those with debilitating illnesses, the developing world,
bootstrapped startups, the offspring of uncaring parents) have a lot less
access to cash than those that arguably need it least (fund managers, brand
managers, large multinationals, high-net worth individuals). A corollary of
this is the latter groups also tend to be much more forgiving of your cockups
and are certain not to be aggrieved if you get rich helping them.

The irony of Graeber's generalizations is that his job has arguably less
reason to exist than most hospital paper-pushers'. As a result some of his
understanding of the real world seems more theoretical than practical (I mean,
I agree with him in principle about the concept behind many internships being
dubious, but I don't think "for the first few _years_ they won’t even pay you"
actually applies anywhere outside academia.)

------
fecklessyouth
The Enlightenment produced a society which identified pleasure as its most
fundamental social value. As Locke says, individuals are hardwired to pursue
pleasure. And as Smith says, capitalism is the economic system best able to
produce the most total pleasure. Thus, if you can produce lots of pleasure for
people, if you are useful, if you can make money appear out of the stock
market, you are rewarded. The jobs most rewarded by society are those that are
most pleasurable to others, like CEOs who can turn profits for board members.
The group who's pleasure is the deciding pleasure is the dominant social
group, who has the most of whatever currency matters to society. (Status,
property, now cash)

Whether someone is virtuous, or caring, or helps others, is irrelevant in
ascertaining their value, and thus how they should be paid. A teacher might
produce pleasure in a student, but that student is in no capacity to makes its
pleasure the deciding one. The moral good of a job is, at best, a footnote,
and only valuable insofar as far as the dominant groups are pleased by them.
The market doesn't care about your moral good.

The mistake of writers like this one is supposing that such a system can be
fixed within the confines of modern capitalism. It cannot. People will conduct
their campaigns, and go on strike, and create new movements, and perhaps pay
teachers more out of social duty and pity, but they will ultimately butt heads
with the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. If this writer is serious,
the solution is not to turn to mere Marxist-inspired theories of labor, but to
Aristotle and Aquinas.

For what Aristotle, Aquinas, and essentially the entire stock of pre-modern
philosophy, approached differently was the question of, "what should our
fundamental social value be?" Their answer was not, "pleasure." For Aristotle,
it was the good produced by a life trained in socially-imparted virtues--which
ultimately allowed one to contemplate the divine. For Aquinas, it was more
explicitly religious: loving God, which entailed doing and believing all the
things He wants us to do. And as was the case with the Enlightenment, the
cultures that both these thinkers embodied were constructed around such
answers, from the top down. In either system, the moral worth of work is not
irrelevant, it's the only thing relevant (with differences in how moral is
defined).

In-depth rebuttals should be directed to Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish
philosopher whose book "Whose Justice, Which Rationality," I just paraphrased
in part. (But seriously...)

~~~
jmcmichael
The interviewee, Davide Graeber, is considered to be one of the leading
figures of the Occupy movement so probably does not believe that a solution to
this problem lies with the confines of modern capitalism. He identifies
himself as an anarchist.

There's more detail on his political/economic views in his book, 'Debt: The
First 5000 Years':

[http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt](http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt)

~~~
fecklessyouth
Thanks. My point is, activists like Graeber are bound by philosophical systems
they don't recognize, which have been in place for hundreds of years and which
form the foundation of our entire modes of thought. He may dislike modern
capitalism, but he probably accepts the core tenets of modernism which allow
it, like the assumption that the good of man is to be achieved by man pursuing
whatever his interests happen to be. He might be radical, but I'm guessing
he's not a radical as to reject Hume. (the source for the aforementioned
tenet).

~~~
jmcmichael
Graeber probably spends more time analyzing the effects of various
philosophical/political/economic systems on individual and social behavior
than most people. I'm not familiar enough with the totality of his work to
directly address what he does and does not accept about modernism, but from
reading 'Debt', he rejects many of the core tenet of modern economics.

Another of his books is titled, 'Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value:
The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. Its summary on Amazon begins: "This
innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political,
and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of
anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a
way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at
the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism."

So I rather doubt from the title and the summary that we'd discover that he
blithely accepts the core tenets of modernism. It appears to me that he
probably would reject quite a bit of the core tenets of modernism and those
that he accepts he probably does so understanding their roots and
implications. Again, I can't be sure b/c I haven't read it but the guy assumes
an outsider, iconoclastic stance in almost everything I _have_ read.

------
ehmish
I found quite interesting his point regarding the redirecting of funding away
from automation innovations and towards military and advertising innovations.
It resonated with a blog post I read recently[0]

[0][http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-
fle...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-
blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/)

------
outside1234
This is because the more your job can only affect the live of one person, the
less leverage you have. (1 unit of work effort = 1 unit of work output)

This is why we are so highly paid. We can put in 1 unit of work and enable
checkout for all of Amazon, for instance.

Also: 1) supply and demand and 2) rewarding jobs pay less than shitty ones
(all of finance in my opinion)

~~~
jameshart
The guy who repairs the rail tracks that get thousands of commuters to their
office every day should have a ton of leverage then, right?

~~~
ctdonath
Actually, the guy who can ensure those rail tracks get repaired _does_ have a
ton of leverage, and reaps the reward.

It's not just the guy who pulls out a broken rail and nails a new one in
place. Finding someone to do that isn't hard or expensive. It's the guy who
_knows_ who will do that for a competitive price in a timely (urgent) manner,
can ensure such guys are available to thousands of miles of track, has enough
replacement track on hand & well-situated, owns (or can rent) equipment to
move such long heavy rails to where needed fast, has personnel handling all
the QA & regulatory burdens to ensure those rails won't likely fail soon after
installation, etc etc etc; few people are willing & capable of pulling all
that off. Rail replacement also includes paying some to do "BS jobs" which
those with the money & responsibility know are needed, even if seem largely
pointless or distasteful to most casual observers. And yes there's some abuse
buried in all that; human nature is far from perfect.

I didn't fully appreciate how some earn their keep until I joined a startup.
Organizing productivity demands talent and risk, without which (and
obtained/retained by salary) very little resembling corporate productivity
would happen. Yes, swinging a hammer is valuable; knowing who should swing it,
where, when, and to what purpose - moreso.

~~~
mercer
What I find fascinating is that I feel a strong desire to respond to your
statement, write out a long comment (which I've done and posted earlier on in
this thread) explaining how I disagree, only to realize that it's really hard
to get anywhere when our disagreement is so fundamental and complex.

I stopped to think where we disagree fundamentally, and I think it boils down
to this:

Our technological, social, and economic developments, I believe, have led to
crazy increases in wealth and comfort, and I suppose happiness too, at least
in the West, but arguably even globally. I think we more or less agree on
that.

I think we are also in agreement in many ways we're better off than we have
been in the past.

We are somewhat less in agreement over the cause of this, and I suppose that
could be a worthwhile conversation. I'm inclined to believe capitalism played
some role in this, but that, from a 'social evolutionary' perspective, it's
become, or turning into a malignant growth. I'd say technological developments
play a much bigger role, and perhaps capitalism was just a mechanism that
'worked' to enable this. But I'm by no means certain of that, and it seems to
me that there's no way to get anywhere on this subject other than sustained
conversation where we move down to our most basic 'axioms' step by step.

Where I am more certain, and where I suspect we agree _least_ , is whether the
status quo is 'good enough' and by extension worth defending or 'fighting'.

I think it's not worth defending too much, primarily because I strongly
believe that should be no reason whatsoever for us to be working as much and
as hard as we do now. The 'general' increase in wealth and comfort pales in
comparison to what would be possible if we had a fairer system in place, and I
believe it is absolutely worth the effort to take a shot at creating such a
fairer system. I think we've learned at least something from the past, and
that we won't attempt to just implement a full totalitarian redistribution
scheme.

And even if there's a significant risk of our efforts turning into another
'failed utopia', merely the rising social instability and the (I'd say) well-
proven disastrous ecological developments are reason enough for me to take
that risk rather than making some small incremental changes to our current
system.

However, that would be outside of the confines of the discussion in this
thread, and that's quite frustrating.

I guess what I'm saying is that without considering these more fundamental
disagreements, our collective discussions in this thread are bound to
frustrate and not really significantly 'shape' or change our views.

That said, I enjoy reading your views and I mostly just felt like writing
this; it's not something 'aimed' at you in particular!

------
sk8ingdom
Although the trend of more work today than ever is obviously troubling, as an
engineer, I can't help but think that the reason we don't yet have what the
past promised because "the robots" really are not that great yet--we do, after
all, need an entire staff of people to design, test, build, and monitor them.

In addition, for every problem that we solve--global distribution,
connectivity, transportation--we create even more. All of these "solutions"
require additional infrastructure, research and development, and ultimately,
breed entirely new disciplines and fields of study--i.e. STAFF. Additional
flexibility breeds complexity.

100 years ago, I probably wouldn't have ventured very far from where I was
born. Food would be grown locally. I wouldn't have internet, etc. Today I have
MUCH more flexibility, but that comes at the price of complexity. I tend to
believe the SUV / iPhone argument but think they're pretty terrible examples.
All things equal, I could likely maintain the same level of technology and
lifestyle as someone 100 years ago on about half my income. It's simply, not
our culture, which is in large part driven by consumerism. Even if I WANTED
to, most companies wouldn't allow it.

The real question we should be asking ourselves, is do we need the iPhone /
SUVs, etc. And if not, why are we working so hard for them?

The film Happiness [1] also explores the work / leisure balance in depth.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_(1998_film)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_\(1998_film\))

~~~
don2
"do we need the iPhone / SUVs, etc. And if not, why are we working so hard for
them?"

As a personal anecdote, I don't need those things. I don't need a car, I don't
need a smartphone, I don't need a TV, I don't need more than a few clothes, I
don't need furniture other than a bed, I don't need to eat out or eat
expensive food/drinks, if I wasn't working I wouldn't even need a computer and
internet. I'm quite happy without most of those things. I make an engineer's
salary and save almost all of it, so that one year out of college (cheap
education, no loans) I now have savings that could easily last me 5 years in
the bay area at my current lifestyle (counting housing/food/healthcare) or
significantly longer in a cheaper area. (Though I'm not quitting yet, I still
enjoy my job and maybe there's the beginnings of golden handcuffs there.)

Unfortunately for my case, I expect it will be hard to raise a family on this
below-standard-expenditure lifestyle, although that is something I think I
want to do. For one thing, I can't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on
board with living without all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a
woman exists, but I wouldn't know where to look.

And even though I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work
on my own (zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's
disapproval of this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if
it was hard to get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money
like everyone else?

~~~
contingencies
Compelled to respond as after the big risk of leaving the west at 17 or so, it
all worked out well for me. I've dipped back in to western 9-5 for two years
out of the last 14, to great success (one employer, rose from entry-level to
hiring/managing teams and relationships, international travel, more money,
relocation, and finally a payout when the company was acquired) but it's just
not for me right now ... and no longer required.

 _I can 't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on board with living without
all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a woman exists, but I
wouldn't know where to look._

Clearly, outside America.

 _I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work on my own
(zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's disapproval of
this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if it was hard to
get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money like everyone
else?_

The answer to this is definitely _No, you won 't regret it_. As long as you
can carry yourself in the workplace, you are likely to return with skills,
motivation and experience far outweighing that which your peers in industry
were able to gather in the equivalent period. After years running my own
startup in mainland China, I found my workplace competition in London to be
frankly underwhelming... to put it bluntly, I was learning things full time
during those years and they were filling in time for a salary with
bureaucratic and temporal challenges to overcome. Even if you can't envisage a
return with such confidence, you're smart and will be fine. Fear not.

------
contingencies
What strikes me is that this article seems to conclude with a focus on
changing society's perception of work as a means to changing its nature ( _I
think we need to start by redefining labor itself, maybe, start with classic
“women’s work,” nurturing children, looking after things, as the paradigm for
labor itself and then it will be much harder to be confused about what’s
really valuable and what isn’t. As I say, we’re already seeing the first
stirrings of this sort of thing. It’s both a political and a moral
transformation and think it’s the only way we can overcome the system that
puts so many of us in bullshit jobs._ ) whereas _Debt: The First 5000 Years_
focuses, to my mind, essentially on proving the heterogeneity of value and
value-exchange systems (ie. psycho-social and concrete economies) in past and
present human societies that deviate significantly from our present-era global
neocolonial capitalist system.

I wonder if this represents a change in Graeber's own mindset, or is merely
representative of the interviewer.

PS. I've had emails with Graeber and he's every bit as personable and
intelligent in private communications as in his conventional written output.

------
sz4kerto
"At the same time, these companies are willing to shell out huge amounts of
money to paper-pushers coming up with strategic vision statements who they
know perfectly well are doing absolutely nothing."

Ahh. So for some reason, private companies (or shareholders, if you like) are
willing to give their money to people who they know are doing absolutely
nothing. Well, I simply don't believe that.

~~~
sheepmullet
Shareholders have a lot less influence over the running of a medium-large
company than you would think.

In a 1000+ employee profitable company do you really think the shareholders
will revolt because senior management has a few dozen worthless positions that
help consolidate their power?

------
thucydides
The main reason is because human desires are inexhaustible. As our society
gets wealthier, more people will be hired to perform tasks that make people's
lives easier, though those tasks are ancillary to an organization's main
mission. For example, the university's main mission is to educate students,
but more and more administrators and staff will be hired to turn the
university into a luxury resort to satisfy students' desires (big gym, mental
health services, remedial education, sports, expensive food, transportation
systems). And the university will also use more of its wealth to satisfy its
employees' desires and problems (by hiring human resources officers and
lawyers and hedge fund managers). That happens to every organization as it
grows wealthier, I suspect. And those jobs, being ancillary, being divorced
from directly helping people, are miserable. So, paradoxically, inexhaustible
human desire for what is "better" and easier ends up creating jobs that, while
comfortable, feel wretched and meaningless.

You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food,
clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are
never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but
much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction
we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade
quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even
the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily
lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current
airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or
whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest
societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from
Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating
jobs.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need
because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.

Likewise there are only so many hours in the day, and days in your life. There
is a hard (large) limit to what you can do in a lifetime. We may be increasing
what we desire as resources become cheaper, but it is increasing
asymptotically to 'what a person can consume/experience in the hours they
have'.

~~~
waps
> There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need
> because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.

I'm sure someone will see value in a gold retina display. And if we get that
done, I'm sure we'll start selling retina displays that have been baptised on
pluto by the pope himself.

There is no limit.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Most of us are not in a position to demand Plutonian displays. In an efficient
market we'll take a functional one made in Korea. So in our market which is
pretty efficient, there's a calculable reasonable bound to consumption.

------
moron4hire
Simple: the more your job is about helping others, the less it's about helping
yourself.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
helping other is also an intrinsic reward which lowers the amount of money you
need in order to be willing to do the job

~~~
moron4hire
No, no it isn't. That's just a bullshit excuse managers and government bureaus
use to justify not paying people a living wage.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
maybe not for you, but for me it is

------
fred_durst
Why have so many people been convinced that money is anything more than an
arbitrary system at this point? It is bizarre to me how many smart people keep
believing that it isn't. The reason something generates money from something
else is simply because it does. There is nothing good, bad or otherwise about
it.

------
mahyarm
The caring classes he talks about being underpaid are probably underpaid
because they tend to help the poorest who do not have much money, the amount
of people with their skill set is high and their professions do not scale in
the amount of people they help.

------
AndrewKemendo
I think this idea of the bullshit jobs, and the implicit removal of them, has
corollaries with what was posted here recently: "How to get business ideas -
remove steps" [1]

The trouble is, as was pointed out in the article, is that removing steps
means removing a person from their source of income and in a lot of cases also
their identity and social network. So how do you remove bullshit jobs without
causing a massive collective existential threat?

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826338)

~~~
wpietri
It's definitely an interesting topic. One of the reasons Toyota had a deep
tradition of avoiding layoffs was so that people would feel safer helping
remove waste from the system.

One way to look at it: idle people with decaying skills and self esteem are
just another kind of waste. So if your first step is to eliminate some
particular sort of bullshit work, the second step could be to find some non-
bullshit way to employ the people who no longer are doing anything.

Thinking broadly, that shouldn't be hard. After all, we could afford to pay
people to do bullshit, so we'll be even better off if we pay those people to
do something productive. But the current way we account for things often makes
it tricky in specific cases.

------
im3w1l
This fact can be derived from very simple assumptions. Let's assume people
value pay, and let's assume they value helping others. Different people value
pay more/less.

People will then choose jobs on the "efficient frontier". Which point on the
frontier depends on how much you value pay.

Now it follows from the efficient frontier that if job A is both better paid
and helps other people more than job B, then no one will do job B. So for all
pairs of jobs (A,B) that people do, one will be better paid and the other help
others more.

------
mikeash
What nonsense! Certainly there will be outliers, but _in general_ people get
paid more because they help others more. Your pay comes from other people
giving it to you willingly. They wouldn't give it to you unless you were
helping them somehow.

I think the confusion is that, as you get paid more, you tend to help people
less directly. A minimum-wage fast-food worker is obviously helping people.
That's what he does. He probably says the literal words, "May I help you?" a
hundred times a day. But he's not helping very _many_ people and he's not
helping them very _much_ , and that's why the job doesn't pay so well.

Compare to, say, a chemist (as in chemistry, not the British term for a
pharmacist). He's not directly helping people. In his day to day work, he
doesn't interact with the customers. But he's helping to create new products
and maintain existing products that people want, in a fashion that can be
ludicrously indirect but is still ultimately extremely helpful.

Or look at senior management. We like to deride them, but _most_ managers in
_most_ companies are useful. They don't help the customers directly, but they
help their employees help people, and that can translate into a _lot_ of help
in a big company.

Yeah, there are people who get paid a lot to basically shaft other people, but
they're not the common case.

~~~
shanghaiseo
In this sense, I'm guessing he's pointing that those who help with more
immediate, physically-demonstrated (helping) results are getting paid less.
Coming back around, like you said, I agree that jobs (such as chemists) do
"help." In fact, he's helping the helper. Yes, as you mentioned too, even
though there might be no "consumer good" produced, senior managers can be
described to help indirectly, although the clients may not see their actions
on the front end. It's a weird combo of perspective and purpose to grasp. Most
jobs are 'helping,' whether it is for something or someone; its not a one-to-
one process, but often a chain of events that can change order. "The more your
job helps others, the less you get paid" is pretty shallow.

~~~
mikeash
Thinking about it more, there's a fundamental limit to how many people you can
help directly in a day. There are only so many hours in a day.

If you want to break that barrier, you _have_ to provide your help indirectly
in some manner, whether it's shaping an organization for people to work
within, or building tools that help them do their jobs, or what have you.

------
gertef
Title is junk, article is overwritten, some claims are wholly unsuported by
evidence, but there are some uncommonly heard ideas that make it worth a skim
toward the bottom.

~~~
mercer
I find this article the least interesting one I've read so far, so if you find
the ideas interesting, be sure to check out some of his other writing.

------
philosophus
So doctors get paid less than, say, used car salesmen, pawn brokers, payday
lenders, etc?

------
ctdonath
A telling & loaded question: _Are people working so many hours because we’ve
just somehow independently conceived this desire for lattes and Panini and
dog-walkers and the like, or is it that people are grabbing food and coffee on
the go and hiring people to walk their dogs because they’re all working so
much?_

Making panini or coffee - _good_ ones - takes effort, time, and resources to a
degree few are willing to engage on their own. I've a dozen coffee makers,
acquired in the quest to learn how to brew a perfect cup, and still drop $1.75
at Starbucks because a swipe of a card and a few minutes of scheduled skilled
labor are often preferable to finding decent beans, grinding them, heating
water, buying & fitting a filter, pouring, timing, cleaning and stowing what's
needed; ditto lunch and dog-walking. Sure, we could all make fancy lunches and
fine coffees and walk the dogs, and enjoy doing so at select times, but most
people are unable and unwilling to at that level day-in-and-day-out when
slinging dirt, paper, or bits can acquire such lifestyle.

As for the "BS jobs": in between the productive (slinging dirt, or deciding
who should sling which dirt where) are "glue jobs" and "filler jobs", not
notable of themselves but required to cover & hold together aspects of
productivity, without which cumulatively expensive problems would arise.

That opportunities in any job may be abused for personal gain, or trail off to
nothing useful, is simply a reality of human nature and imperfect systems.

The question, foundational to much of the biased rambling in the rest of the
interview, is either naive or disingenuous. We _have_ independently conceived
of odd luxuries, and made them profitable for someone to do despite being
arguably wasteful, or that they are in fact our chosen outlet for the long-
predicted "life of leisure". Like "living on the Moon", the remote notion is
romanticized, but when given the option to ... most people are disinterested
in eeking out survival on a giant atmosphere-free dead rock, or idly reading
or playing games whilst subsisting on mundane food & accommodations; rather,
they'd instead choose a routine of imposed obligations, coupled with swipe-a-
card easy access to higher luxuries of relatively fine foods and fancier
surroundings.

I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society
should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it
happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on
the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be
living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of
idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity
(and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods &
services with the swipe of a card. Force redistribution to impose the social
structure & values the interviewee wants, and methinks most of us would rebel
at the results; we're _not_ living that way for a reason.

~~~
FireBeyond
Okay, here’s one for you…

You can work as an EMT, in the back of an ambulance, running 15+ calls in a 24
hour shift (which is basically back to back with a few minutes break between
calls), dealing with anything from sick old people to immediate life threats.

And you’ll get paid approximately $9/hour for doing so.

~~~
civilian
I didn't believe you so I checked for myself.
[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/emt-salary-
SRCH_KO0,3.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/emt-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm)
Seattle probably has higher pay than usual so.... your statement is close
enough.

Wow. I really thought working as an EMT paid better.

------
cnorgate
Just because certain people can't describe or understand the value of a given
task or job, doesn't mean it has no value. Clearly if person A pays person B
to perform a task, then person B must be creating at least as much value as
they're being paid. Who are you or I to judge that value? We're neither
receiving the value nor paying for it. If person A is consistently paying more
than $2 for $1 of value, then they'll soon be out of money, and the system
will unceremoniously remove person A from decision making authority.

While it's nice to suggest that Wall St. doesn't create any value for people,
~20% of our GDP would suggest otherwise. The truth is that Wall St. acts much
like Adam Smith's invisible hand. For our system to work, capital must be
allocated to optimal uses. Command economies do a poor job of this, except in
war time. Wall St. helps us reallocate capital to the most productive
endeavors. That sounds pretty valuable to me. Even if the folks on Wall St.
don't build your car, they did pool the capital necessary to finance the
construction of the manufacturing facility. Can't have one without the other.

As a final point, if the 'caring class' isn't compensated enough, perhaps it's
because there is an oversupply of 'caring folks'. Or perhaps they're not
really creating any value for others? Perhaps some of the 'caring class'
should get creative and find other ways to be caring, or perhaps they should
find ways to provide more 'care' with their time so they can command a higher
share of the value they create?

------
noname123
Visible help, yes. But as a programmer, I help to write HTML/CSS and rails and
js code that makes a friendlier and more engaging UI that makes every user's
shopping experience that much more pleasant; also unlike conventional
charities that offer sometimes intangible emotional support, I can quantify
"the net happiness add" by Google Analytics, the higher the conversion rate
means, higher the user's "engagement" and contribution to my company and
shareholder value.

I'm also contribute back to the tech community by sharing my code that I
experiment on my own during hackathons and weekends on Github. Unlike other
professions where things are not as transparent, I love that our field is
always on the cutting edge, experimenting with the latest frameworks and
technology and sharing the results (be as it may that sometimes it's not as
well-documented but I make up for it by writing an enthusiastic blog post
about it).

------
kennethcwilbur
Honest question: Is the headline linkbait? I read the entire interview but I
didn't see where he really explained why the more your job helps others, the
less you get paid.

------
orasis
"... ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in
itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people."

------
lightblade
Not true, Bill Gates put a computer on every table and made billions of
dollars while at it.

~~~
jokoon
well bill gates is one of the few guys who managed to properly get something
in return, at least he understood there's no such thing as one way altruism.
You have to insert yourself in a business model to make things happen.

of course if we had thousands of bill gates, I guess it would be better don't
you think?

------
simula67
TL;DR

If your job helps others, you may _want_ to do it [1] for reasons other than
money and therefore get paid less.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs)

------
craigyk
a good piece. one that I suspect resonates with more people than care to
admit.

------
coherentpony
Assuming no corruption, politicians have jobs that help everybody. They are
paid incredibly well.

~~~
otikik
Assuming no illness, doctors help no one.

~~~
sp332
If there's no illness, the doctors must be really good! :)

------
michaelochurch
Most of work, especially the corporate work that pays well _reliably_ , isn't
improving the world or helping people. It's helping individuals _within
companies_ in their campaigns for more money and more status. It's helping one
middle manager become a director, or one executive beat out another one. The
problem is that (a) 90% of corporate executives are completely worthless,
overpaid deadweight, and (b) people have no choice where they land (under
closed allocation) and have no say which boss (i.e. private-sector politician)
to throw their muscle behind.

It really is amazing how much of the work done by the highest-paid people is
completely unnecessary, if not counterproductive.

