
“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary” - bootload
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules
======
qq66
Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see
how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the
article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without
actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively
expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business.
Either way, insurance would be less available than it is today.

And what does a world with less insurance look like? Insurance lets people
trade a small amount of money for protection against a loss of a life-ruining
amount of money. Without health insurance or fire insurance, people have to
save up as much money as they can in the case of a catastrophic accident which
they probably won't have, and possibly declining to spend that money on
important things like higher education, etc. And when people are underinsured,
they're constantly in a state of baseline anxiety, worry about "what ifs."

Is that the world this author wants to live in? One where he's constantly
worrying about what might happen if he gets sick? That's not a world I want.

~~~
_abattoir
When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job
that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit
job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and
agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are
electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.)

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by
an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly
would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out
there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of
their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their
job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with
farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self
driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones.

The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like
doing.

I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday
scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the
discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you
want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.

~~~
spydum
> The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like
> doing.

who decides what jobs people dont like doing? Just because you might not like
being a taxi driver, farmer, actuary, etc, doesnt mean you should demolish the
job with automation -- plenty of people find these jobs provide a fulfilling
workday and are passionate about them. any automation there would deprive them
of doing them as a profession, which is somewhat sad.

ill take it a bit further: how would we feel if tomorrow, we woke up and some
guys from stanford published new research on AI which can automagically
produce working software given a set of requirements -- and they give it away
for free. the role of software development is no longer required, since this
AI can do the job in seconds without bugs (you know, assuming requirements can
be written without bugs!). what then of software developers? our jobs no
longer make economic sense. you'll need to find one of those jobs not solved
by a computer.

~~~
intopieces
Allow me to turn it back on you: what if your sentiment had prevailed at any
time during our current revolution in automation? Say a group of factory
workers protest automation not because it puts them out of a job, but because
they like what they do (a totally unnecessary distinction - part of the reason
I like my job is that it lets me eat and pay bills). Are you sympathetic to
preventing automation then? Or is our current level of automation just right
because it has presented you with the least amount of challenge to your job?

No, we should encourage automation full-tilt. Jobs are lost every day to
automation, and the promise of a world where the workweek is short to
nonexistent is one we should embrace, not reject because some people like
their jobs. If we work hard enough to bring this to fruition, the actuary can
crunch numbers on his own time if he wants -- or is free to explore thousands
of other hobbies.

------
ddeck
The entire asset management industry is a candidate for the bullshit job
title. Within the equity asset class for example, aggregate performance is
worse than passive investments and there is ample evidence that substantially
all managers are unable to actually provide the service they are selling.

As an industry, it effectively taxes savings and distributes those taxes to
the employees within the industry, sometimes as eye watering salaries and
bonuses.

One may argue that the consumer is free to choose not to consume the service,
but the reality is that most countries have mandated retirement savings
mechanisms that efficiently funnel employee pensions and savings into the
industry.

[1]
[http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Picki...](http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/PickingWinners.pdf)

[2]
[http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm](http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm)

~~~
mdda
Wow, I'm surprised to see a comment so critical of Venture Capitalists on HN.
But I guess it's fair: The VC industry as a whole badly underperforms the S&P
index on a risk-adjusted basis. Or aren't those the asset managers you were
talking about?

~~~
ddeck
Well VC is a very small part of the asset management industry and you are
correct that that's not really the area I was referring to.

The bulk of asset management is in listed equities and government/corporate
bonds and this is what I was primarily referring to.

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

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

------
aerocapture
Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are
not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen
received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time
instead of going to jobs we hate?

I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological
progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled
by a very few people. Maybe it's time to redefine what we mean by "work" and
why we do it.

[https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500...](https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500001b)

~~~
sktrdie
Wouldn't a UBI simply be inflationary? That is, rather than making 0 you make
1500 (say). But since everybody is making 1500, then it would be the same as
making 0 again.

So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.

~~~
zo1
At the very least, it skews peoples' motivations for work. I.e. Do nothing and
get 1500, or work as a low-wage say woodcutter/garbage man, and get 1600.
You're effectively doing a shitty 9-5 job so you can get 100 (or whatever $X)
more than the guy next door doing nothing all day.

People say that's liberating and "equality" for all, buy I say it's completely
the opposite and directly unfair to a lot of people.

And now that I re-read your post about it being an inflationary scenario, it
makes more sense. All of a sudden, you have a reduction in individuals willing
to do hard/hateful labor for a small amount more than basic income. This
reduces their supply, and thus the salaries go up. Essentially, it sounds like
it would make 1500 the new 0 as you put it. Not sure where to follow that
train of thought further, though.

Anyone care to continue it from there?

~~~
skybrian
There is some reduction in incentive to work, but the idea is that most people
will still want more money so they'll keep working.

Also you're assuming people have the right incentives today. Is working two
minimum wage jobs to make ends meet really what you want people to do?

This is really about changing the relative negotiating power between employers
and employees. Having some fallback income makes it easier to take time off to
go to school, start a business, or find a better job. Also it goes right back
into the economy as revenue for some business, so it's hard to see how it can
be bad for business.

------
BinaryIdiot
I can't say I'm surprised and I much agree with this. I've held many positions
in both the private and public sector. While the public sector was always
inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before
starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs
without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well.

It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that
people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many
times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking
days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which
typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was
> significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you
> could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector
> is pretty bad in many places as well.

I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was
a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various
government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector
providers at open tender for the business of those various government
departments.

Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused
and b) not required to turn a profit.

That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were
significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider.
So the focus on quality was high.

It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was
the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his
political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from
interference from other mandarins within the ministry.

He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the
midst of public sector "meh".

Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently
inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently
large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private.
In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are
typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a
large strata of middle managers)

~~~
justincormack
Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the
government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets").
He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office
originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made
by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later.

There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets
things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done
while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of
"accumulates profits by screwing _everyone_ except senior management and
perhaps the stockholders."

It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very
inefficient in the first sense.

In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large
players, it's pretty much the default.

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

Sounds about right actually...

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

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

~~~
zobzu
I'd go as far to say that this isnt only a problem in governmental
institutions but also in many private companies.

Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need
money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as
many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction.

So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long
(which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that
matters".

Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.

------
phesse14
David Graeber pointed out on his article "The answer clearly isn’t economic:
it’s moral and political"

I don't agree. The answer is strictly economic. There are bullshit jobs just
because people want to amass fortunes. The problem is not to have a guy
working as a "legal consultant" or as a "ska drummer" but to have thousands of
them doing the same thing. There's a point when a 101 legal consultant adds no
value, but the job still exits. Why? because companies in that industry need
to grow and to do so they expand beyond the target to whom they add value.
This is it, they expand where the service is not actually needed.

So services/products expanded to targets to whom they add no value is when
bullshit jobs are created, and the reason behind this is just to make more
money instead of solving problems to the world.

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

~~~
np422
I live in Sweden and right now we are automating the service industry as well.

You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a
machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout.

Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of
the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service
automation can receive unemployment benefits.

I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.

~~~
ptaipale
However, the good part with buying train tickets from a machine is that the
machine always knows your local language (in this case, Swedish, and English,
and possibly a variety of other languages). This is not necessarily true with
low-paid service workers. I'm pretty happy to buy my Arlanda Express tickets
from a machine. You'd never have enough service booths if they had to have
people in them.

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

------
zby
The real problem here is complexity - people don't understand what is the goal
of what they do, and often there really is no goal because their bosses do not
understand the system too.

Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity
with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?

~~~
mtbcoder
That would presume we are all collectively interested in reducing complexity
and work. Too often these complexities exist to benefit a small minority at
the expense of the majority. For example:
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-
mill...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to-
lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/)

~~~
zby
Agreed - this will not be that easy to fix, but still if we want to fix it
than we need to think about reducing the complexity.

I have also a very tentative idea that this might actually lead for more
democratic organizations - because removing the inefficiencies that come from
the complexity will bring a lot of advantage for the companies that would do
it - and this will require more creative thinking and good will from everyone
in the organization. This is just like science would not thrive in a too
autocratic institution - so the universities had a lot more internal democracy
than for example production companies. And today production companies will
have the same need for creativity and good will as the universities had in the
past.

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

------
bernardlunn
A more humorous/playful take on bullshit jobs

[http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-
thei...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-their-jobs/)

------
throwawayaway
The supporting material mentioned in the article make for exceptional reading:

[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-
are-...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming)

[http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...](http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf)

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

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

It's basically what Salesforce does.

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

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

------
fsloth
The way I understand it is this (sorry,a bit long winded):

The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all
value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has
historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing _materially_
better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with
these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a
good reason.

Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most
adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of
food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to
provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs.

One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in
industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual
_position_ is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of
the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work
responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more
important, _measure_. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important
since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling.

The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance,
conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest
ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work
directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason
this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are
extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and
saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting.

Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st
century.

I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment
and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want
only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment
from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this
does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is
dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to
achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are
agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's
about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book
approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-
scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states.

Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire
"commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance
tactic".

I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product
of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.

~~~
kremlin
In my current employment, the environment provided me doesn't exactly feed
commitment, but it at least marginally allows for it. We are soon moving
office and the new environment is definitely one of those "the best you can
hope for its compliance" type environments. But I have a hard time trying to
tell my boss that without incriminating myself.

------
glaucoma
70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work

[http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-
workpla...](http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-
workplace.aspx?utm_source=WWWV7HP&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles)

