Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video](youtube.com) |
Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video](youtube.com) |
Take "social media coordinator" - we had some young person at our Fortune 500 company have this position, which led to some eye rolls. But is it really "bullshit" if she keeps an exec from posting something embarrassing, which could damage the stock price? I guarantee you that companies have reasonable justifications for every position.
AI is more a tool that allows a productivity boost per employee, like all other automation tools (e.g. SolidWorks almost completely automated mechanical drawings, so drafting is not a thing any more - something I was told in high school, BTW, that would always be in demand...)
You seem to be using the definition: “A job that people think is worthless”.
The actual definition he uses is: “A job where the person doing it thinks it is worthless”.
>Graeber classifies a job as bullshit if society would be no worse off (or even >notice) if such job(s) disappeared, and names five classes of meaningless jobs: >flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
That's how Graeber defines it - but as I said above, every time someone points to a specific job and says "that's bullshit" it usually turns out that there is a reason for it.
Really, it should be "bullshit industries", rather than picking on individuals with jobs. Entire companies are doing harm (e.g. tobacco, soft drinks, most of the social media ecosystem, etc.) If AI starts closing truly harmful industries, then we can declare bullshit jobs are being reduced. I am not hopeful in the short term.
1) BS jobs, in the sense outlined by Graeber (the BS jobs essay guy), proliferated due to easy money/low interest rates
2) money is not so easy anymore
3) AI is taking our jobs
4) BS jobs may actually not be going away, just shifting, e.g. from "culture coordinator" to "AI ethics reviewer"
But the obvious problem is that it's still a societal taboo, so it's not UBI because it's not universal. It's probably lot more efficient to actually openly embrace shorter work hours, so that people can stop pretending and choose to do something more useful.
Also, existence of BS jobs is often driven by high status individuals, so it is comparatively less free than UBI.
This bill proposes that:
https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-32-hour-work-week-how-it-w...
BS jobs are the anti-UBI. With a UBI you get to avoid starvation even if you refuse to take a job which is excessively dangerous or degrading or low-paying, which in turn exerts pressure on those jobs to improve conditions or pay. You get more runway to start a business instead of being forced to work for someone else because you need to make rent today rather than a year from now when your new venture is off the ground. It allows you to be actually productive by your own metrics rather than getting taken advantage of for lack of alternatives.
Whereas BS jobs create the illusion of productivity. You get to avoid starvation by digging holes and filling them back in, but now you're wasting all day doing something useless instead of spending that time starting your business or going to school, so you end up stuck in the BS job forever. Which helps neither society nor you compared to you still getting the money and then letting you choose what to do with your time.
Society demands consumption, which is funded via wages. The higher consumption, the more the economy grows. Ergo, having more people employed with higher wages creates more economic activity, which in turn fuels more growth, which fuels more jobs, etc. While eliminating bullshit jobs sounds great on its own merits, eliminating the wages for said jobs can actually clog the local engine by lowering wages, raising unemployment, slowing hiring, and curtailing growth. If 15% of jobs are “bullshit” to be eliminated, that’s a 15% reduction in SaaS and seat-based revenues, which means those companies providing services have to cut their headcount, which startles others…you get the idea.
I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime) such that more folks have an opportunity to engage in meaningful and valuable labor in exchange for higher wages. Rather than burning out a smaller portion of folks with longer hours, we share the load across multiple folks over a shorter time frame. The extra downtime creates more opportunity for economic activity, which in turn will grow the economy.
This was a good video from Laura Fryer talking about this. She compared how there were barely any “producers” on the Halo game from 25 years ago. And then you look at the recent remake of the same game and there are so many people working in it. Again this remake of the same game from 25 years ago. So much bloat. So many managerial and producer positions? Why? It’s the same game!
Actually it’s not even the same game. It’s less than the same game! The original Halo 1 had single player and multiplayer. The remake only has single player. So you have tons of more managers to do less than the stuff just in some better graphics…
This guy seems to hear "bullshit jobs" and simply think "people who I don't think are useful". Graeber's is a critique of the economic order, this guy seems to be beholden to it.
Huh? Government is the definition of BS job. We accuse each other while they continue to get paid from us.
Disappointing.
I mean, I obviously know the answers why we don’t (shareholder value, power dynamics, desiring the humiliation of others), but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
If you get rid of BS jobs then you're not paying people to do them. Someone then gets the money you're not paying them, e.g. the company can now charge lower prices to customers who then have more money to spend. They then want to buy something else with the money and the people who need jobs then get jobs doing that.
In most cases this will actually increase consumption, because people buy more when things cost less and therefore provide more value for money. If the cost of a year of college goes down by $10,000 by eliminating some bloated administrative bureaucracy then more people can afford it, positions that couldn't previously find qualified applicants get filled and unemployment goes down, those positions pay better and people have more money to spend, etc.
> I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime)
Isn't this the exact same thing only distributing the hours differently?
You could be proposing one of two things. One is to have everyone work fewer hours doing the same thing they do now, but that one obviously doesn't work. Jobs like carpenter or trauma surgeon aren't BS jobs and if people spent fewer hours doing them then we'd have fewer of those things done, which would be bad.
The other is that instead of getting rid of BS jobs, we get rid of BS work. So we have fewer middle managers and have the people who used to do that instead do something productive, allowing the people currently doing the productive thing to work fewer hours.
The result of that would then be that everyone works fewer hours. But then they would have less money to spend. If you work for 32 hours instead of 40 at the same hourly rate then you take home less money. Getting rid of 20% of hours rather than 20% of employees would reduce total income by the same amount.
If the same thing happens and the company e.g. uses the money saved to lower prices then it's a similar scenario to getting rid of the jobs, except that now instead of production/consumption increasing because we got rid of inefficiency, people work fewer hours to get the same stuff because now they get paid for fewer hours but things also cost less. But that tends to be trouble because the prices change non-uniformly, e.g. the cost of financial services comes down because you eliminate some useless bureaucracy but you haven't done zoning reform so housing is still expensive. When jobs still pay the same amount that's fine, because a bunch of small businesses pay lower costs for payment processing or employee health insurance, lower prices by that much and then have to hire the people who lost their jobs to produce the extra stuff people buy with the surplus money. But if jobs suddenly pay 20% less, your mortgage payment hasn't changed.
Whereas if you take the original premise that people making less money would reduce consumption, e.g. that the savings would go into Evil Corp's money bin and never be spent, then you're in even more trouble in your case. Because you're deterring people from going back to the original number of hours in order to be able to afford the original level of consumption.
"Bullshit jobs are jobs which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist. That’s the bullshit element."[1]
He talks about it a lot and the book is 368 pages. Of course you will get some variations on the general theme with some embellishments to get it to hit home. But the key aspect, which he mentions repeatedly, is the part about "even the person doing it thinks it is worthless".
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...
"A lot of bullshit jobs are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.
And that’s how you know a job is bullshit: If we suddenly eliminated teachers or garbage collectors or construction workers or law enforcement or whatever, it would really matter. We’d notice the absence. But if bullshit jobs go away, we’re no worse off."
Yes, he claims that also many people know that their job is "bullshit", but clearly that is not a necessary and sufficient condition. Believing your job is bullshit might be a necessary piece of his definition of a bullshit job, but that makes my objection to his definition even stronger.
My problem is, he is focusing on the individual job - not the industries. Graeber seemed to think there are some vast class of jobs that can disappear in any given company, e.g. in middle management, but it is simply not the case that companies are that overstaffed. Even if the person believes their job is "bullshit", it doesn't mean that it isn't bringing value. Trust me, if you really could cut 50% of all middle manager positions and the company would still go along fine, it would happen.
However, in too many cases they involve middle management in the process of identifying where those cuts should happen and well, even when those same middle managers know they are the ones most suited to go, the permanent human ability to be self serving, self delusional, and dishonest really does stack up against much of those 'bullshit' jobs being removed from the balance sheet.