
Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs - mrfusion
http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/
======
gizmo
Graeber is brilliant and I highly recommend his book: The Utopia of Rules.

Much of what we do falls into the pointless jobs category too. We write
software to help people automate things that don't need to be done in the
first place. Almost every piece of software we write has been written before,
and will be written again tomorrow on a slightly different platform for a
slightly different audience. What percentage of software development is
totally redundant? 90%? More? What percentage of the work we do has "clear,
undeniable social value" as Graeber puts it?

When you take a step back and reflect on what we do day-to-day it seems so
utterly bizarre.

~~~
johnnydoebk
>> What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value"

Can we ever define the "clear, undeniable social value"? Isn't it better to
just let people vote, say, using money like they do now?

~~~
gizmo
Not always, but in many cases we can. If you just let people vote with their
dollars then you end up with a dystopian healthcare system, a 20% child
poverty rate, comically expensive higher education, and so on.

Feeding a hungry child has "clear, undeniable social value". As does
healthcare. Also infrastructure like roads and bridges has undeniable value.
And testing whether drinking water and the food we eat is clean. So many
things have clear value in society, but none of these cases are aligned with
the profit motive, which is what the market uses.

When talking about software the work on the Linux kernel has clear, undeniable
social value. Same for projects like Postgres and other indispensable tools.
And this is mostly the work of volunteers, who during their day job work on
software that does not meet this "clear, undeniable value" benchmark.

~~~
anarazel
> When talking about software the work on the Linux kernel has clear,
> undeniable social value. Same for projects like Postgres and other
> indispensable tools. And this is mostly the work of volunteers, who during
> their day job work on software that does not meet this "clear, undeniable
> value" benchmark.

Note that in several projects, including at least linux and postgres, the
percentage of purely volunteer work is constantly decreasing. See e.g.
[https://lwn.net/Articles/713803/](https://lwn.net/Articles/713803/)

------
padobson
_According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm
is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ.
Still, somehow, it happens._

I think that's, at best, a twisting of any economic theory I've ever read.

As a software engineer, I have a skill that is fairly valuable in today's
economy, and yet I've had a number of clients - mostly startups and small
businesses looking to add automation - where I never added any real economic
value to the organization at all. I'd work with the client, trust their domain
expertise, build a solution to the problem they had, and then watch as no one
ever used it.

And yet, this is an important facet of capitalism - investments that fail. In
the age of globalization and automation, entrepreneurs have an out-sized
advantage over employees. The ones that fail are effectively working "bullshit
jobs", but the ones that succeed grow the economy many times what was lost
from the failures.

That, in effect, is why Keynes's 15-hour work week didn't materialize. The
value of the extra productivity went to the entrepreneurs and their investors,
which in turn tilted the playing field even further toward entrepreneurs and
investors.

The good news: the barriers to entrepreneurship shrink further and further
every cycle of productivity increase. 10 years ago you could start a business
with a laptop and some coding knowledge, and build an app or a website that
could be worth millions. Now, you can start your own television station with a
smart phone and some niche domain knowledge, as YouTube and Patreon are
proving.

As a result, there are going to be more and more people out there working for
inevitable failures, but the winners are going to grow the economy for
everyone.

So, eventually, everyone is going to become an entrepreneur, the singularity
is going to make us irrelevant, or we're going to have to re-think how we
distribute scarce resources.

~~~
dukeluke
The barrier to entry may be lower for some parts of the market, but I don't
know if the barrier to entrepreneurship is lower overall. Growing inequality
and lack of growth potential for the uneducated means only those who have
already made it can afford the startup capital(not just in equipment, but in
time too) needed to get a business going. In fact, the rate of small business
creation has been declining: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/2015/02/12/the-decline-of-american-entrepreneurship-in-five-
charts/?utm_term=.f1bfc28467dc)

~~~
padobson
I've read a lot of the same slowing entrepreneurship statistics. Ben
Casselman[0] over at FiveThirtyEight has written some good pieces about it.

It seems to be directly linked to personal debt. Most individuals are more
risk averse because they have to work to pay off their debts. New college
graduates are a great example: they have huge college loans, so a chunk of the
potential entrepreneurs have to take jobs instead of starting a business.

I'd call that a big negative externality to the accessibility of loans for
higher education. If it was me, I'd rather have a few more blue collar
entrepreneurs and a few less white collar employees who'd rather be running
their own business.

[0][https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/ben-
casselman/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/ben-casselman/)

~~~
bante
"I'd call that a big negative externality to the accessibility of loans for
higher education."

That's only one side of it though. The other being the expectations discussed
in the article. You see this quite clearly in housing markets where the price
is dictated by the profile of who's going to live there and when they are
expected to pay off the loan. A house with an expected 100 year loan in a
professional market is of course much more expensive than a 30 year loan in a
worker market. For what could be more or less the exact same thing.

------
qznc
I agree with the authors general point. If you would settle to a 60's life
style, you could probably achieve that by working only 15h per week. However,
there is a big industry which constantly tries to persuade you to improve your
life style. You need a better iPhone/car/home/TV! Very few people manage to
break out of that brainwashing and we do not respect them much. So, is Apple
evil when it tries to persuade you to buy the new iPhone? No, we clearly give
them the right to do that. Our system gives them the right. Our system is
called Capitalism.

Nevertheless, the author uses "evil" persuasion techniques himself. At one
point, he appeals to the "evil elite" meme:

> The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling
> class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time
> on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this
> even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).

Later, he says it was just evolution:

> Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a
> century of trial and error.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Even if you have the right to do something, it can still be evil. Capitalism
has been given plenty of rights that turned out to be evil, slavery is the
simple example.

If the ruling class decides what to try and what is considered an error, both
those statements can still be correct.

~~~
thomasrognon
It's interesting that slavery existed for millennia, and then virtually
disappeared within a century or so of the emergence of capitalism.

~~~
forkLding
I wouldn't say that, slavery is still existent as alternative forms around the
world, not discounting the fact of so-called sweatshop slavery

------
seibelj
There is no such thing as a "bullshit job". If you work in the private sector,
where the primary reason for existing is to make a profit, your job directly
or indirectly contributes to that goal.

If you want to make an impact that is unrelated to making money, volunteer or
join a nonprofit.

~~~
rubber_duck
>If you work in the private sector, where the primary reason for existing is
to make a profit, your job directly or indirectly contributes to that goal

That's assuming people who are responsible for managing your work know what
they are doing. I've seen plenty of net loss jobs, and especially in big
corporations, it's easy for such losses to go undetected for years as long as
the sum is positive.

~~~
notahacker
I'd be the first to say that people make bad economic decisions and companies
are full of bloat, and even layers of management who attempt to demonstrate
how they add value by laying off people more productive than themselves to
achieve short term cost-reductions.

But as a general rule, I think "someone else thinks your job is worth doing to
the extent they're willing to pay you more than you could earn in other jobs
to do it" is a better metric for the usefulness of a job than "do you resent
the fact people would rather pay you for long hours pushing paperwork than for
the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle of being a poet-musician", which is
Graeber's preferred yardstick. (And if he's not spoken to any corporate
lawyers that think what they're doing is very important, he probably hasn't
spoken to enough corporate lawyers. Some successful songsmiths get sick of
touring and consider their more successful songs to be sellout shite too.)

And the idea that jobs which probably don't add value to their business exist
as part of some sinister "ruling class" plot because of the "mortal danger" of
too many people dropping out to become poet musicians, as opposed to because
the less useful employees are good enough at promoting themselves to protect
their salaries from a shareowning class that would happily reap the rewards of
firing them if it understood its business a little better is just silly...

------
unoti
the article references how little money nurses and teachers make. I did a good
amount of medical training, and what you need to do to be an EMT is demanding,
requiring as much or more raw memorization and practice than most things I've
ever done. And yet they make so little. Considering how difficult the training
is, and how EMT's are necessary everywhere, I do not understand how the
economics works out. Why don't they make more money? Clearly the answer is
supply and demand, but it still puzzles me.

There is an oversupply of people willing to bust their asses to learn
difficult things so they can work in the midde of the night to do stressful
things that might scar them emotionally?

I've contemplated the answer to this question a lot. Here's my answer.
Corporate drones risk emotional scarring too, but at least EMT's get to serve
humanity and save lives. Maybe that's the reason for the high supply of
willing candidates.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Probably a combination of two things. One is that the payer is not
incentivized to value the work of an EMT. People don't really need EMTs that
often, and even when they do, do they directly pay them? I suspect it's a
combination of taxes and insurance funds that go towards paying the EMT, and
hence they're a step removed from the person actually benefiting from them,
which doesn't help the bargaining power of an EMT.

Second is they might not actually be important enough to justify paying them
more. Markets work well when there is lots of supply and lots of demand, but
if that's not true, then it's not easy to figure out where the supply curve
meets the demand curve.

At the end of the day, I would postulate the answer is a combination of the
above two factors, and a well qualified EMT simply isn't that important to
society, and/or people who would make well qualified EMTs are not going to
want to do that type of work at any realistic price point.

I wonder if EMTs in zip codes with wealthier people are better paid and
staffed.

------
thedevil
"The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class
has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their
hands is a mortal danger”

Take, for example, a telemarketer selling junk.

Maybe they took the job because some ruling class wants them to not be
productive and happy with free time, as the article claims.

Or maybe, just maybe, they do the job because they can make money doing it and
someone else can make money employing them to do it.

------
zabuni
Given Graeber's previous work: [http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-
very-last-david-gr...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-
david-graeber-post.html) I'd want numbers to back up his claims. For example,
we could easily say that while the expertise of a corporate lawyer is
artificially limited by law, and maybe not even these days:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/the-
law...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/the-law-school-
scam/375069/) while the musician poet makes songs, which these days have zero
marginal cost to replicate.

When we look at some of the other "bullshit" jobs, we see similar things. Sure
the amount of actuaries is predicted to increase by 14% in the US from 2014 to
2024, but there will still be less than 30k actuaries in the us, with an
increase of upwards of 4k.
[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm)
There are only 250k public relation specialists:
[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/public-
relat...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/public-relations-
specialists.htm) There will be 8k anthropologists by 2024:
[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-
science/ant...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-
science/anthropologists-and-archeologists.htm)

His numbers don't pan out. There aren't that many bullshit jobs.

------
dcdanko
He makes some good points about how certain jobs are more wasteful in a pure
economic sense but he jumps to quickly to denigrating a large swath of modern
jobs.

'It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity
CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal
consultants to similarly vanish'

Best cases: \- Private equity CEOs buy out companies and get rid of the
pointless jobs this article rails against \- Lobbyists help inform politicians
about the impacts of complicated laws \- Actuaries make insurance more
efficient and affordable \- Telemarketers.... yeah.... \- Bailiffs help to
enforce rule of law \- Legal consultants can help companies to be more
efficient

There are huge negatives to all of these jobs but it's not fair simply to
write them off as wasteful and unimportant.

------
stephengillie
Desire is suffering. Advertising induces desire to generate economic activity,
and so could be construed as a form of paid torture.

We're kept on the "hamster wheel" by a carrot, not a stick.

~~~
CuriouslyC
I totally agree with your sentiment, but your method of stating it is a bit
hyperbolic given the fact that the majority of your audience is paid as a
result of revenue generated from advertising.

It is undeniably true that we don't need the overwhelming majority of things
consume be happy. People have found happiness without being rampant consumers
for thousands of years. Unfortunately, advertising has directly influenced
people's ability to find happiness without consumption. The problem is not
everyone can consume everything they believe is required to be happy.
Furthermore, many people give up work/life balance or go into debt-slavery in
order to try and consume their way to happiness. As a result, people who might
otherwise be happy are made unhappy by in significant part by advertising.

Even worse, if you actually do reach your consumption quota, you find it
doesn't make cause lasting happiness. Most people infer that the answer is to
consume more, and they end up killing themselves on the hedonic treadmill.

------
skadamou
>If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the
power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better
job.

I think this is fundamental to capitalism and, at least from a Marxian point
of view, this is what’s so bad for the wage earning person about capitalism.
The owners of “finance capital” (ie the wealthy) will eat into workers’ wages
exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor.

>The standard line today is that he [Keynes] didn’t figure in the massive
increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and
pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.

I think there is a lot more going on here than what Graeber addresses in this
article. IMO, the reason we don’t all work 15 hours per week has a lot more to
do with the nature of competition (both in the labor market and in the economy
at large) and the legal framework around a 40hr work week than it does
“consumerism”. This whole article in general felt like a massive over
simplification of the issue in order to justify Graeber’s lived experience

I’m not an economist and I definitely don’t understand these issues as well as
I wish I did but this is just my two cents. Perhaps Graeber is due more credit
than I gave him.

------
new299
This is basically the substance of the article:

"The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class
has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their
hands is a mortal danger"

But doesn't go really any way to explain how (and who) might be manipulating
people to this end.

------
jrs95
Personally I don't need all night pizza delivery because I'm working too much,
it's because I'll be having fun with friends until 4am and we tend to get
hungry. This article seems to take the position that the worst possible
explanation is the correct one.

~~~
badosu
One could argue that the reason why you're having fun at night is because you
can't have fun in the middle of the day due to work.

------
golergka
It's funny how the author attributes this to 'capitalism', where as the worst
offender I've ever seen was Soviet Union. In the turmoil that followed the
liberation of Russia in the 90s, many and many people lost their jobs - but
mostly these were exactly the bullshit jobs that author talked about, while
new jobs being created by the capitalist system were driven by direct demand
from the society.

It never ceases to amaze me, how american leftists continue to ignore the
soviet legacy as a learning opportunity.

~~~
thatcat
In a capitalist society in which most markets are monopolized and industry
regulatory agencies are captured there exist similar conditions to soviet
union inefficiency as the author mentions - even if you call it capitalism;
which differs significantly from the initial freedom of markets that
capitalism creates as seen in 90s Russia.

~~~
golergka
> in which most markets are monopolized

Interesting. What society would that be?

~~~
thatcat
US - where most jobs outside tech are either pointless or heavily regulated.
My mistake, oligopolized was the intended meaning there.

------
curiousgal
\- In order to live, one needs money

\- In order to obtain money, one needs to work (except for the lucky too few)

Thus work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of
creating bullshit jobs if needs be. You can't remove jobs if it so directly
means no more revenue for those people unless you introduce something like
basic income.

~~~
6d6b73
Money is just a way to exchange time and resources between people. Money is
not needed to live.

~~~
valvar
But it is. You need those resources and a way to predictably obtain them. The
system of currency is the only known way to achieve this, especially in our
modern society. Previously, it may have been possible for a large number of
individuals to live an agricultural lifestyle where they produced almost all
of the resources they required. That would be impossible today, unless the
world population (fractal distribution generally applies to smaller
geographical divisions) were reduced to less than 1% of its current size. The
other downsides of such a scenario are also easy to imagine, I am sure.

------
bcg1
Sorry, but this article is kind of full of assumptions and it has more
storytelling than facts. Multiple times author says "I have no objective
measure but one time I met a guy..."

Perhaps the worst assumption is that we have a capitalist economy/society and
thus its ills can safely be attributed to capitalism. In America at least, we
have a mixed economy in which the state is deeply influential in most
industries through regulation and/or outright participation. Additionally, all
income can potentially be taxed and interest rates and money supply are
controlled by a quasi-governmental corporation (and since barter is rare,
money is in general half of every transaction).

I would suggest that it is possible that many (or a majority?) of the
"pointless" jobs exist because the income tax (if people aren't working, they
aren't being taxed) and because of government laws and regulations (more laws
and regs = more pointless paper pushing = more people being taxed). My theory
has as much logical support as the author provides at least.

Also might want to look up the term "contrafreeloading"

~~~
padobson
You nailed it.

Look at the jobs he cites as meaningless: _It’s not entirely clear how
humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers,
actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish._

Bailiffs, lobbyists and legal consultants are directly tied to state actions.
Private equity CEOs and actuaries directly benefit from a century of monetary
policy that slants the playing field toward finance. 5/7ths of the examples he
came up with rely on state intervention for their existence, and yet he blames
capitalism.

Even his musician/corporate lawyer friend owes his own employment to the vast
swaths of corporate laws and regulations that exist.

Then he finishes with this: _If someone had designed a work regime perfectly
suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they
could have done a better job._

Again, how can you not point to government monetary policy and say this is
_exactly_ what's happened?

~~~
gus_massa
My favorite is "all-night pizza deliverymen". It's not pointless. They have
this work because someone buy pizza at odd times.

If someday in the future drone delivery is allowed, and it's cheaper to use
drones than humans, then they will get unemployed an no one in the evil elite
will drop a tear.

[It's more complicated, because the delivery guy sometimes help with the other
activities in the pizza shop while not driving, like cleaning or moving the
sacks of flour. So the dismissal will not be immediate.]

~~~
jbmorgado
That's the exact point of the all article that you seem to miss: just because
there is a market for it, it doesn't meen there is an actual need for it.

Hence the motto of the article: capitalism creates unnecessary jobs.

~~~
EpicEng
Define 'unnecessary'. If I run a pizza shop and there is sufficient demand to
justify late night deliveries, then that position is absolutely necessary as
I'm trying to maximize profits.

~~~
heynowletsgo
That's not his point. He's saying people buy pizza at night because they are
unnecessarily working at night. Selling pizza at night shouldn't be necessary
because its an artificially created market.

~~~
SnowingXIV
It's not artificial. I want pizza at night so I need someone to bring me pizza
at night.

~~~
heynowletsgo
It is if the market wouldn't exist without people being forced to work at
night. The difference seems to be very hard to understand.

~~~
EpicEng
I guess you've never been to a bar. People working late are not the only
consumers of pizza...

~~~
heynowletsgo
You misunderstand the point.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

------
unoti
Summary: pointless jobs exist because people are willing to PAY MONEY for
them, says a professional anthropologist with only a slight hint of irony,
while he muses about why people might not enjoy talking to him at dinner
parties.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky dismissals here.

------
merpnderp
"Clear undeniable social value" being the metric for what work gets done is
why Venezuela with the largest known oil reserves has massive fuel shortages.

Markets over technocrats.

~~~
dang
Please don't post ideological sound bites to HN. They sound like they're
saying something but actually are unsubstantive, and don't connect into a
conversation in a meaningful way.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955445)
and marked it off-topic.

------
gigatexal
So if I read the article well the gist is: instead of choosing leisure people
chose to consume more and thus work more to afford more. And this then creates
the need for administrative workers or as the article put it "paper-pushers"
who are redundant and "pointless". It lists telemarketers as one example. I
wonder if the author consulted people working as telemarketers in developing
countries (not those involved in scams) if their jobs were pointless? Now I'm
not the only one to gripe at the inefficiencies of mature businesses where
management is often slow to act and mired in procedure but there is work to
make things more efficient and perhaps the author could invest more time in
thinking about that. Lastly, rational profit-seeking entrepreneurs will create
positions for jobs like telemarketers where it makes sense. If there was not a
supply of profit-seeking consumption-maximizing people there'd not be
telemarketers for example. I'd rather work my 40 to 50 hours a week and set
money aside and provide for my family than work 15 hours a week and have a
tougher time. Also I like nice things. So...

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
Did you read the whole article? The author is decrying a society where people
are forced to work 50 hot weeks so they remain docile(he claims this is in
contrast to the 60s where people started to get free time and used it to
protest).

Remember, according to Keynes we should we working 15 hour weeks by now(and if
that's sustainable people would be paid a reasonable wage for a 15 hour week).

He then provides an example of a rock musician who was providing a measurable
benefit to people's wellbeing, but is now working as a corporate lawyer(and
aparrently generating nothing of value). The author's central question is
basically asking why we live in a society where there's a finite number of
artists, but an infinite number of lawyers(all kept busy for 50hrs/wk and paid
well).

~~~
gigatexal
I did read it and quoted parts from it. Also Keynes is given undue acclaim in
economics. People would do well to study more Hayek.

~~~
notthemessiah
Why do you think Keynes is well-respected? Have you read "A General Theory"?

~~~
gigatexal
Studying Keynes was required for me to graduate with my degree in Econ,
though, I find the Hayek-ian school fits better with theory that can also be
shown experimentally.

~~~
notthemessiah
Experimentally? What economic experiments validate Austrian theory?

~~~
gigatexal
Look at any firm or individual

