We need to talk about your TPS reports.
August 10, 2018 11:53 AM Subscribe
"Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference [to society] — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place." Imagining a World With No Bullshit Jobs
He seems to be conflating useless/harmful jobs with tedious work. Healthcare workers' time spent completing records (even if there are problems with the systems, etc) is not in the same bucket as a financial analyst's time doing something bureaucratic-looking with CDOs at an investment bank, apart from it's not recognizable from the outside as something valuable. I realize I'm not engaging with the argument, but that's partly because I'm not really sure what the argument is. Some work is make-work! Some work looks tedious! Some work is tedious but valuable! Some work is tedious, difficult, and on balance harmful! OK, all true, great job.
(It's Friday afternoon, and I'm on vacation in one hour, and I'm crabby. Sorry.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:44 PM on August 10, 2018 [25 favorites]
(It's Friday afternoon, and I'm on vacation in one hour, and I'm crabby. Sorry.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:44 PM on August 10, 2018 [25 favorites]
How dare nurses have to fill out forms - instead of what?
Well, we have a shortage of nurses, for one thing, so people could be getting better care if the care time:patient ratio was better.
posted by AFABulous at 12:51 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
Well, we have a shortage of nurses, for one thing, so people could be getting better care if the care time:patient ratio was better.
Three subcategories accounted for most of nursing practice time: documentation (35.3%; 147.5 minutes) medication administration (17.2%; 72 minutes), and care coordination (20.6%; 86 minutes). Patient care activities accounted for 19.3% (81 minutes) of nursing practice time, and only 7.2% (31 minutes) of nursing practice time was considered to be used for patient assessment and reading of vital signs.(NIH study)
{...}
The documentation process in many hospitals is also rife with inefficiencies. For example, nurses and other care providers often must transfer information between data collection systems, consuming nursing time and contributing to transcription errors. Documentation is often duplicated between departments and disciplines because of the lack of a single patient problem list for all providers. The result is fragmentation of care, duplication of data sets, and the inability to quantify the outcome of the care provided. Evolving regulatory and public policy requirements for documentation (such as “present on admission”) may exacerbate these problems.
posted by AFABulous at 12:51 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
Well, we have a shortage of nurses, for one thing, so people could be getting better care if the care time:patient ratio was better.
That makes intuitive sense but is there any evidence of that? I don't doubt that medical record systems are inefficient but record entry is also important and not intrinsically a waste of time.
posted by atrazine at 1:07 PM on August 10, 2018 [10 favorites]
That makes intuitive sense but is there any evidence of that? I don't doubt that medical record systems are inefficient but record entry is also important and not intrinsically a waste of time.
posted by atrazine at 1:07 PM on August 10, 2018 [10 favorites]
Evolving regulatory and public policy requirements for documentation (such as “present on admission”) may exacerbate these problems.
So you want to add another major category of their time - spent being subject matter experts/consultants on re-writing software packages to fix duplication and poor systems to their already busy schedule? I'm being a bit facetious, but filling out paperwork that other people can follow is one of the primary roles of the job of 'nurse'. It's also a common joke - that hospitals have all those forms - to create extra work for them to do. They also have lower paying roles to handle paperwork - LVNs, Medical Assistants...
If you want them spending more time on 'patient assessment and reading of vital signs', then we can either automate some of that through technology or update their titles to something more like 'doctor'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:09 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
So you want to add another major category of their time - spent being subject matter experts/consultants on re-writing software packages to fix duplication and poor systems to their already busy schedule? I'm being a bit facetious, but filling out paperwork that other people can follow is one of the primary roles of the job of 'nurse'. It's also a common joke - that hospitals have all those forms - to create extra work for them to do. They also have lower paying roles to handle paperwork - LVNs, Medical Assistants...
If you want them spending more time on 'patient assessment and reading of vital signs', then we can either automate some of that through technology or update their titles to something more like 'doctor'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:09 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
He seems to be conflating useless/harmful jobs with tedious work. Healthcare workers' time spent completing records (even if there are problems with the systems, etc) is not in the same bucket as a financial analyst's time doing something bureaucratic-looking with CDOs at an investment bank, apart from it's not recognizable from the outside as something valuable.
Aside from this argument being nul on its face since it quite literally depends on assuming that your readers do in fact recognize value from the outside for the first job and not the second, the second example is seriously biased.
Corporate and investment banking are tools. Like any tool, they can be used for good or evil. Cities are funded using financial instruments. Hospitals. Schools. Local, regional, international governments. People like to cast investment banking as evil on a wide scale, which makes it easy to compare healthcare workers with "a financial analyst at an investment bank" and know in your core that Healthcare Is Good and Investment Bankers Are Evil. Except that, as a human being in capitalist society, you have dealt in financial instruments at some point. You have been involved in investment banking. Heck, even if money weren't a thing, we as human beings invest in assets and (generally, though yeah, with unfortunate exceptions) work to trade those assets equitably.
What about people who work on regulating markets to minimize abuses? Are they evil too since they work at investment banks? Where does the "evil" line get drawn? "People who abuse the tools!" Okay. Then that's no longer specific to a job, that's specific to abusive behavior.
"But it's all rotten!" Welcome to humanity. The line between good and evil is drawn through each of our hearts. Be kind to each other.
posted by fraula at 1:09 PM on August 10, 2018 [21 favorites]
Aside from this argument being nul on its face since it quite literally depends on assuming that your readers do in fact recognize value from the outside for the first job and not the second, the second example is seriously biased.
Corporate and investment banking are tools. Like any tool, they can be used for good or evil. Cities are funded using financial instruments. Hospitals. Schools. Local, regional, international governments. People like to cast investment banking as evil on a wide scale, which makes it easy to compare healthcare workers with "a financial analyst at an investment bank" and know in your core that Healthcare Is Good and Investment Bankers Are Evil. Except that, as a human being in capitalist society, you have dealt in financial instruments at some point. You have been involved in investment banking. Heck, even if money weren't a thing, we as human beings invest in assets and (generally, though yeah, with unfortunate exceptions) work to trade those assets equitably.
What about people who work on regulating markets to minimize abuses? Are they evil too since they work at investment banks? Where does the "evil" line get drawn? "People who abuse the tools!" Okay. Then that's no longer specific to a job, that's specific to abusive behavior.
"But it's all rotten!" Welcome to humanity. The line between good and evil is drawn through each of our hearts. Be kind to each other.
posted by fraula at 1:09 PM on August 10, 2018 [21 favorites]
Seriously? Google nursing shortage, this has been a well known problem for years in the US.
From the article: "Right now nurses in New Zealand are on strike and one of their major issues is exactly that: on the one hand, their real wages have been declining, but on the other, they also find they are spending so much time filling out forms they can’t take care of their patients. It’s over 50 percent for many nurses."
I would assume that nurses know that record entry is important.
posted by AFABulous at 1:10 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
From the article: "Right now nurses in New Zealand are on strike and one of their major issues is exactly that: on the one hand, their real wages have been declining, but on the other, they also find they are spending so much time filling out forms they can’t take care of their patients. It’s over 50 percent for many nurses."
I would assume that nurses know that record entry is important.
posted by AFABulous at 1:10 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
And I'm not picking on the way nurses spend their time any more than judging a guy building a house on how much time he spends hammering and nailing and subtracting time spent looking at plans.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:11 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:11 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
A nursing shortage is also irrelevant, as that has nothing to do with whether or not they consider part of their jobs to be 'bullshit'. We could be fully staffed on nurses or overstaffed, and that wouldn't necessarily change the amount of paperwork they have to fill out.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:13 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:13 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
Right, but given the shortage, if the ones we have now were better able to spend time on patient care, then patients would... get more care. Are you in the US? Our insurance system is an unholy mess and a great deal of that time is spent filling out forms for the benefit of a myriad insurance companies.
posted by AFABulous at 1:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by AFABulous at 1:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
Nurses (and doctors, and patients, and everyone else) at Kaiser Permamente have a pretty efficient system for documentation. Want to know why? Because KP plowed $7,000,000,000+, and a lot of years, into their IT infrastructure.
Almost all the time the answer to “Why isn’t this tedious task automated” is “because having a human do it is much cheaper than building an automated system”.
Heathcare requires a lot of documention, and unless you are willing to do the increably expensive projects that places like Kaiser do, it’s going to cheaper/easier to just have humans manually do it.
posted by sideshow at 1:24 PM on August 10, 2018 [18 favorites]
Almost all the time the answer to “Why isn’t this tedious task automated” is “because having a human do it is much cheaper than building an automated system”.
Heathcare requires a lot of documention, and unless you are willing to do the increably expensive projects that places like Kaiser do, it’s going to cheaper/easier to just have humans manually do it.
posted by sideshow at 1:24 PM on August 10, 2018 [18 favorites]
This would likely mean a world with a lot less activity on MetaFilter, though, no?
posted by ryanshepard at 1:30 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 1:30 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
I wonder if a large portion of the jobs he's labelling as "bullshit" are marketing/sales arms-race jobs? If you have a finite pool of money in an industry you're competing for, and the product is a mature enough technology that everyone's offerings are about the same*, it's the company with the better marketing that wins. So if a company wants to remain competitive, at least some of what they squeeze from the workers has to go to maintaining a lead in convincing people to buy their stuff. So... more and more of people's efforts go to marketing things rather than making them.
I mean, I'm not sure if that contradicts his thesis that a lot of people are involved in making bullshit, but.... maybe it's not a matter of people intentionally hiring flunkies, but a feature of the system itself.
*And depending on how cynical you are, that doesn't need to be all that true - lots of worse products win out of better ones because of marketing.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:55 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
I mean, I'm not sure if that contradicts his thesis that a lot of people are involved in making bullshit, but.... maybe it's not a matter of people intentionally hiring flunkies, but a feature of the system itself.
*And depending on how cynical you are, that doesn't need to be all that true - lots of worse products win out of better ones because of marketing.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:55 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
The only time we're ever going to live in a no-bullshit job world is when a pandemic comes along and wipes out more than half the world's population.
posted by Melismata at 2:07 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by Melismata at 2:07 PM on August 10, 2018 [6 favorites]
And why spend all your time railing on unions and Obama when there is another entire political party cutting away the value of every job, except for CEO?
I think this line of reasoning is kind of bullshit even when applied to direct political criticism, but it's also kind of a weird thing to invoke here because he's not really making an argument against supporting Obama or unions - he's using them to talk about the ideology of work at a bigger scale than that.
Questioning his judgment of which jobs are "bullshit" is probably a more interesting angle.
posted by atoxyl at 2:11 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
I think this line of reasoning is kind of bullshit even when applied to direct political criticism, but it's also kind of a weird thing to invoke here because he's not really making an argument against supporting Obama or unions - he's using them to talk about the ideology of work at a bigger scale than that.
Questioning his judgment of which jobs are "bullshit" is probably a more interesting angle.
posted by atoxyl at 2:11 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
How is he coming to the conclusion that corporate law is a bullshit job, by his definitions? Corporate lawyers provide a service and expertise that corporations need and are willing to pay an exorbitant fee for. Many of them parse difficult issues, negotiate difficult deals, draft complicated contracts without ignoring a single detail, provide nuanced strategy for overcoming litigation threats, help to protect intellectual property, advise on corporate structures and capital, perform due diligence in assessing mergers and licenses, etc. No corporate executive board loves to pay legal fees for this stuff, but they uniformly do rather than trying to handle these matters themselves - if it was just bullshit and corporate lawyers really just twiddle their thumbs all day, then it would be apparent and the entire law firm model would have collapsed long ago.
Now - are corporate lawyers a net good in the world, that's a separate question (the answer is probably no). But we should go one level lower and ask whether corporations are a net good or contributing something necessary for society to function first, and the answer is probably no. Or one level lower still, capitalism - no. As long as corporations exist in a capitalist society based on rule of law, though, corporate lawyers serve an important function for them, for better or worse.
posted by naju at 2:19 PM on August 10, 2018 [5 favorites]
Now - are corporate lawyers a net good in the world, that's a separate question (the answer is probably no). But we should go one level lower and ask whether corporations are a net good or contributing something necessary for society to function first, and the answer is probably no. Or one level lower still, capitalism - no. As long as corporations exist in a capitalist society based on rule of law, though, corporate lawyers serve an important function for them, for better or worse.
posted by naju at 2:19 PM on August 10, 2018 [5 favorites]
he's not really making an argument against supporting Obama or unions
Yes he is. The article wasn't written while Obama was president. It was written sometime around August 7, 2018. If you are making some kind of point that putting everyone on a 4 hour day can only be done during a financial crisis and that unions are the primary factor holding us back from lives of leisure then stop beating around the bush with bullshit analogies and make it directly. Otherwise those two were chosen to make a political point.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:22 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yes he is. The article wasn't written while Obama was president. It was written sometime around August 7, 2018. If you are making some kind of point that putting everyone on a 4 hour day can only be done during a financial crisis and that unions are the primary factor holding us back from lives of leisure then stop beating around the bush with bullshit analogies and make it directly. Otherwise those two were chosen to make a political point.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:22 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
He seems to be conflating useless/harmful jobs with tedious work.
I've always felt that the weakness of Graeber's analysis has been a failure to properly value bureaucracy and classes of people who collectively provide social lubrication. Before we had lawyers, we killed each other in feuds. You can argue that if people were non-violent, honest, and just plain better we wouldn't need lawyers, prison guards, auditors, or all kinds of other roles. But we're not, so here we are.
People love to quote that Ark B bit about sending away the telephone sanitisers, for some reason they don't quote the bit about the phone plague killing everyone afterwards.
Who needs PR people and marketers? Well if they're promoting unnecessary things, no-one, except that also applies to the people making the things being promoted. I'm sure that Graeber would consider the head of brand strategy for McDonalds to have a bullshit job. Why though? If its because we don't need McDonalds then everyone flipping burgers has an equally bullshit job.
posted by atrazine at 2:33 PM on August 10, 2018 [14 favorites]
I've always felt that the weakness of Graeber's analysis has been a failure to properly value bureaucracy and classes of people who collectively provide social lubrication. Before we had lawyers, we killed each other in feuds. You can argue that if people were non-violent, honest, and just plain better we wouldn't need lawyers, prison guards, auditors, or all kinds of other roles. But we're not, so here we are.
People love to quote that Ark B bit about sending away the telephone sanitisers, for some reason they don't quote the bit about the phone plague killing everyone afterwards.
Who needs PR people and marketers? Well if they're promoting unnecessary things, no-one, except that also applies to the people making the things being promoted. I'm sure that Graeber would consider the head of brand strategy for McDonalds to have a bullshit job. Why though? If its because we don't need McDonalds then everyone flipping burgers has an equally bullshit job.
posted by atrazine at 2:33 PM on August 10, 2018 [14 favorites]
In the book, part of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is that the worker has to feel like the job has no meaning. By his definition, corporate lawyers and McDonald’s marketers who feel that their work is meaningful and important do not hold bullshit jobs.
posted by chrchr at 2:45 PM on August 10, 2018
posted by chrchr at 2:45 PM on August 10, 2018
David Graeber is an anarchist organizer and Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was among the early participants in Occupy Wall Street in New York.
Quoted without comment. No wait, I have a comment: What a wanker.
posted by desuetude at 2:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
Quoted without comment. No wait, I have a comment: What a wanker.
posted by desuetude at 2:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [7 favorites]
Yeah, I'm going to pile on here and say that anyone whose go-to example of a bullshit job is "medical professionals have to document stuff" is a fucking idiot. Please do go spend time getting major surgery at a hospital that prides itself it not bothering with all that "bullshit", see how it works out for you.
That's not to say that medical documentation can't be poorly managed and not automated enough; both happen a lot, and a lot of companies [conflict of interest: including the kinds I have worked for for like 14 years] are trying to help fix it. But, the notion that the things being documented are in fact somehow not worth documenting kinda slides past stupid and up to the cliff of socially irresponsible.
posted by tocts at 2:52 PM on August 10, 2018 [13 favorites]
That's not to say that medical documentation can't be poorly managed and not automated enough; both happen a lot, and a lot of companies [conflict of interest: including the kinds I have worked for for like 14 years] are trying to help fix it. But, the notion that the things being documented are in fact somehow not worth documenting kinda slides past stupid and up to the cliff of socially irresponsible.
posted by tocts at 2:52 PM on August 10, 2018 [13 favorites]
(spammers, instagram like farms, telemarketing for scams, people who work out how to circumvent environmental regulations, manufacturing cheap plastic 'decorations')
These jobs are done by foreigners or the underclass, not by the rich westerners who write opinion pieces and go on book tours. Their friends are the ones who went to law school intending to be hard-nosed public defenders helping the downtrodden fight a rigged system, but instead ended up writing special purpose vehicle charters in order to package mortgage debt. Their friends are the ones who went to medical school fantasizing about gallantly driving around in Model T with their doctor's bag making house calls like an old timey country doctor, but instead are complaining about all the time they have to waste entering records into a computer system like some sort of typing pool girl.
They are not associating with bright eastern european programmers who happen to fall in with organized criminals who threaten their families if they don't set up the spam server they want for their penny stock scheme. They are not associating with the legions of marginally-attached workers in India and the Midwest who work at call centers for dubiously legal debt collectors or reverse mortgage pushers. They certainly are not associating with anyone who runs injection molding equipment to make cheap plastic party favors that spend a few weeks on the peg at a dollar store and then forever in a landfill. It's possible they have associates whose real job is to work out how to circumvent environmental regulations, but even they will likely see their work in another light, like looking out for a client's fiduciary interest or even something noble like standing up for the rights of producers in the free enterprise system.
More importantly, the clicks and shares that are the lifeblood of modern public debates like the one around so-called bullshit jobs come from those in the former class. They're the ones with 8 hours to fill, brand new Macbooks on their desk, and precious little to actually do during those hours. They're the ones who pay the bills, by ultimately clicking on the ads and ordering organic yogurt from instacart. Privileged people don't want to learn more about the lives of the less fortunate than they have to in order to sound compassionate at cocktail parties. Really, they want to read about whether or not their law school classmates are making out better than they are. Anything that says "not really, their jobs are as bullshit as yours" is welcome comfort.
posted by LiteOpera at 3:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [25 favorites]
These jobs are done by foreigners or the underclass, not by the rich westerners who write opinion pieces and go on book tours. Their friends are the ones who went to law school intending to be hard-nosed public defenders helping the downtrodden fight a rigged system, but instead ended up writing special purpose vehicle charters in order to package mortgage debt. Their friends are the ones who went to medical school fantasizing about gallantly driving around in Model T with their doctor's bag making house calls like an old timey country doctor, but instead are complaining about all the time they have to waste entering records into a computer system like some sort of typing pool girl.
They are not associating with bright eastern european programmers who happen to fall in with organized criminals who threaten their families if they don't set up the spam server they want for their penny stock scheme. They are not associating with the legions of marginally-attached workers in India and the Midwest who work at call centers for dubiously legal debt collectors or reverse mortgage pushers. They certainly are not associating with anyone who runs injection molding equipment to make cheap plastic party favors that spend a few weeks on the peg at a dollar store and then forever in a landfill. It's possible they have associates whose real job is to work out how to circumvent environmental regulations, but even they will likely see their work in another light, like looking out for a client's fiduciary interest or even something noble like standing up for the rights of producers in the free enterprise system.
More importantly, the clicks and shares that are the lifeblood of modern public debates like the one around so-called bullshit jobs come from those in the former class. They're the ones with 8 hours to fill, brand new Macbooks on their desk, and precious little to actually do during those hours. They're the ones who pay the bills, by ultimately clicking on the ads and ordering organic yogurt from instacart. Privileged people don't want to learn more about the lives of the less fortunate than they have to in order to sound compassionate at cocktail parties. Really, they want to read about whether or not their law school classmates are making out better than they are. Anything that says "not really, their jobs are as bullshit as yours" is welcome comfort.
posted by LiteOpera at 3:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [25 favorites]
highly paid managers, telemarketers, ...
Where does he get the idea that telemarketers are paid well?
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 3:52 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Where does he get the idea that telemarketers are paid well?
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 3:52 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Why not talk about the obvious bad instead of getting sucked into whether or not nursing has too much paperwork or all financial people are evil?
Not only what LiteOpera wrote, but also because the argument quickly becomes circular. Who prevents those who manufacturing cheap plastic 'decorations' for example? Regulations. Which then need someone to verify and track compliance. Which then becomes a bullshit job most of the time. One of the guy's earlier examples was actually an example of this - someone was hired to prevent people from touching artwork on a wall. Few did, so the job was dreadfully boring and seemingly unnecessary. But there is always that miscreant, especially as the stakes get larger. So it's 95% bull, 5% extremely necessary.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:57 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Not only what LiteOpera wrote, but also because the argument quickly becomes circular. Who prevents those who manufacturing cheap plastic 'decorations' for example? Regulations. Which then need someone to verify and track compliance. Which then becomes a bullshit job most of the time. One of the guy's earlier examples was actually an example of this - someone was hired to prevent people from touching artwork on a wall. Few did, so the job was dreadfully boring and seemingly unnecessary. But there is always that miscreant, especially as the stakes get larger. So it's 95% bull, 5% extremely necessary.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:57 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Maybe paperwork is actually useful and the solution to a nursing shortage is to pay nurses better so you can attract more, not look for shortcuts. It’s not like the healthcare industry has a shortage of funds.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [11 favorites]
Maybe paperwork is actually useful and the solution to a nursing shortage is to pay nurses better so you can attract more, not look for shortcuts. It’s not like the healthcare industry has a shortage of funds.
Nursing does pay pretty well around here. But it's a little more complicated. Most of the actual R.N.s I know are paid rather handsomely. They also tend to have more managerial roles, and as a result, do more things such as paperwork, sometimes exclusively, and have some significant responsibilities. In fact, the variety of non-patient-seeing paths for the R.N. might be surprising. There are other levels of nursing that tend to deal directly with patients much more, LPN/LVN, and specialists and technicians of various types such as phlebotomists.
Nurses (and doctors, and patients, and everyone else) at Kaiser Permamente have a pretty efficient system for documentation. Want to know why? Because KP plowed $7,000,000,000+, and a lot of years, into their IT infrastructure.
Almost all the time the answer to “Why isn’t this tedious task automated” is “because having a human do it is much cheaper than building an automated system”.
Heathcare requires a lot of documention, and unless you are willing to do the increably expensive projects that places like Kaiser do, it’s going to cheaper/easier to just have humans manually do it.
I'm a little bit familiar with So CA KP system. You know, saying it's efficient/not efficient is a complicated answer. You'd be hard pressed to say a simple "yes" or "no", at least meaningfully. Medicine, and the industry supporting it, is incredibly complex, moreso all the time. It demands more and more documentation, coordination etc. KP is something of a behemoth, and its in its interests to be comprehensive. This demands a great deal of human capital simply to support the infrastructure. I suppose one could say it's inefficient because so much of this human capital never deals with actual patients at all. However, the big picture argues in favor of such bureaucracy to provide the best care for the greatest amount of people.
And lets not be misled: KP is a huge machine. It's mind boggling, to me, a least. Last I heard, they were even planning to implement what amounts to their own in-house medical school to help standardize the practice of medicine for their own benefit, the efficiency gains. Amazingly complicated endeavor. Their system does demand a great deal of electronic paperwork, even from people pretty high up the deal-with-patient ladder. Your actual KP doctor is probably sick to death of the rigor demanded from their documentation system, and the time it demands from them. You should not be surprised to find your doctor spends more time, sometimes much, much more time, documenting your visit than they actually physically spent with you.
But, yeah, I tend to call bullshit on the idea of bullshit jobs. Plenty of people feel their jobs are pointless. There's usually at least one person who disagrees: the one who provides the paycheck. And sure, there are jobs that *I* think are bullshit. But that's my hangup, not necessarily anyone else's. Going on about bullshit jobs feels like kind of shit stirring for the sake of shit stirring to me.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:23 PM on August 10, 2018 [5 favorites]
Nursing does pay pretty well around here. But it's a little more complicated. Most of the actual R.N.s I know are paid rather handsomely. They also tend to have more managerial roles, and as a result, do more things such as paperwork, sometimes exclusively, and have some significant responsibilities. In fact, the variety of non-patient-seeing paths for the R.N. might be surprising. There are other levels of nursing that tend to deal directly with patients much more, LPN/LVN, and specialists and technicians of various types such as phlebotomists.
Nurses (and doctors, and patients, and everyone else) at Kaiser Permamente have a pretty efficient system for documentation. Want to know why? Because KP plowed $7,000,000,000+, and a lot of years, into their IT infrastructure.
Almost all the time the answer to “Why isn’t this tedious task automated” is “because having a human do it is much cheaper than building an automated system”.
Heathcare requires a lot of documention, and unless you are willing to do the increably expensive projects that places like Kaiser do, it’s going to cheaper/easier to just have humans manually do it.
I'm a little bit familiar with So CA KP system. You know, saying it's efficient/not efficient is a complicated answer. You'd be hard pressed to say a simple "yes" or "no", at least meaningfully. Medicine, and the industry supporting it, is incredibly complex, moreso all the time. It demands more and more documentation, coordination etc. KP is something of a behemoth, and its in its interests to be comprehensive. This demands a great deal of human capital simply to support the infrastructure. I suppose one could say it's inefficient because so much of this human capital never deals with actual patients at all. However, the big picture argues in favor of such bureaucracy to provide the best care for the greatest amount of people.
And lets not be misled: KP is a huge machine. It's mind boggling, to me, a least. Last I heard, they were even planning to implement what amounts to their own in-house medical school to help standardize the practice of medicine for their own benefit, the efficiency gains. Amazingly complicated endeavor. Their system does demand a great deal of electronic paperwork, even from people pretty high up the deal-with-patient ladder. Your actual KP doctor is probably sick to death of the rigor demanded from their documentation system, and the time it demands from them. You should not be surprised to find your doctor spends more time, sometimes much, much more time, documenting your visit than they actually physically spent with you.
But, yeah, I tend to call bullshit on the idea of bullshit jobs. Plenty of people feel their jobs are pointless. There's usually at least one person who disagrees: the one who provides the paycheck. And sure, there are jobs that *I* think are bullshit. But that's my hangup, not necessarily anyone else's. Going on about bullshit jobs feels like kind of shit stirring for the sake of shit stirring to me.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:23 PM on August 10, 2018 [5 favorites]
Thanks for the healthcare insight.
I just got a job in regulatory compliance, which sounds like a total bullshit job, because I am on of those people reviewing reviews of paperwork.
Except people make mistakes all the time, and the reason my job exists is because enough of those mistakes caused enough serious problems that it became necessary to bring in yet more people. Which is where I come in. Paperwork and bureaucracy seems useless until it suddenly isn’t.
If the definition of a bullshit job centers on whether you feel it’s bullshit, I don’t know why Graeber would be making that call on behalf of people like me in contexts he isn’t familiar with. Plenty of people think college professors have bullshit jobs, but that doesn’t make it true.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 5:34 PM on August 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
I just got a job in regulatory compliance, which sounds like a total bullshit job, because I am on of those people reviewing reviews of paperwork.
Except people make mistakes all the time, and the reason my job exists is because enough of those mistakes caused enough serious problems that it became necessary to bring in yet more people. Which is where I come in. Paperwork and bureaucracy seems useless until it suddenly isn’t.
If the definition of a bullshit job centers on whether you feel it’s bullshit, I don’t know why Graeber would be making that call on behalf of people like me in contexts he isn’t familiar with. Plenty of people think college professors have bullshit jobs, but that doesn’t make it true.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 5:34 PM on August 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
I'm sure that Graeber would consider the head of brand strategy for McDonalds to have a bullshit job. Why though? If its because we don't need McDonalds then everyone flipping burgers has an equally bullshit job.
Not necessarily. McDonald's, the brand, is bullshit. Burgers less so. Someone flipping burgers is fundamentally cooking food for people. That is useful. Someone increasing McDonald's market share or brand value or whatever is not.
posted by Dysk at 5:50 PM on August 10, 2018 [11 favorites]
Not necessarily. McDonald's, the brand, is bullshit. Burgers less so. Someone flipping burgers is fundamentally cooking food for people. That is useful. Someone increasing McDonald's market share or brand value or whatever is not.
posted by Dysk at 5:50 PM on August 10, 2018 [11 favorites]
People love to quote that Ark B bit about sending away the telephone sanitisers, for some reason they don't quote the bit about the phone plague killing everyone afterwards.
Graeber quotes both parts of that bit in his book.
posted by servoret at 6:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Graeber quotes both parts of that bit in his book.
posted by servoret at 6:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
I like Graeber and kinda agree, but he's also kinda missing the point: bureaucracy is a thing that just naturally evolves in any large power structure; and it's often obtuse, ineffefficient, and annoying; but you can't just wipe it out and start over again without pure chaos.
posted by ovvl at 6:48 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ovvl at 6:48 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Hell yes you can. See: Anarchists basically every time they have gotten a foot hold, e.g., Rojava, Spain
posted by Space Coyote at 6:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Space Coyote at 6:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Whenever a large group of human beings come together to work on a collective project, private or public sector, a hierarchy evolves. Fat Cats sit at the top and bask in glory; next, ambitious & aggressive upper managers claw their way to the top, and once they achieve that, they prove their worth by being active and doing shit, mostly by causing useless problems which are counter productive. They get away with it because they have the status in the hierarchy. Middle managers exist to try to protect lower managers from that wierd shit that upper managers keep creating from falling down on them. Lower managers just remind workers to do their jobs.
posted by ovvl at 7:26 PM on August 10, 2018
posted by ovvl at 7:26 PM on August 10, 2018
These jobs are done by foreigners or the underclass, not by the rich westerners who write opinion pieces and go on book tours.
Which is to say they (and the burger flipping) are what Graeber distinguishes as simply "shit jobs." Though to be fair I think Stoneweaver was not referring to the people who operate the injection-molding machinery but rather the people who manage the making of the crap etc.
If you are making some kind of point that putting everyone on a 4 hour day can only be done during a financial crisis and that unions are the primary factor holding us back from lives of leisure then stop beating around the bush with bullshit analogies and make it directly.
He's not, and I don't think he's that unclear about what he means. He is making a point with the choice of examples, but the point is that even the side of the political spectrum that is supposed to believe in improving the lives of working people can't seem to imagine anything more radical to offer than "work for work's sake, but at least you'll be getting paid for something." Which he contrasts explicitly with the success of unions in the past in fighting for less time working.
Ever since the ’60s there has been one strain of radicalism that sees unions as part of the problem for this reason. But I think we need to think about the question in broader terms: how labor unions which once used to campaign for less work, less hours, have essentially come to accept the weird trade off between puritanism and hedonism on which consumer capitalism is based — that work should be “hard” (hence good people are “hard-working people”) and that the aim of work is material prosperity, that we need to suffer to earn our right to consumer toys.
As I said, there's a value judgement inherent to the "bullshit job" concept which I think is inevitably its weak point - because it's sort of one dude's judgment. But it's not exactly a rare opinion on the left that unions in the mid 20th century compromised or were forced to compromise somewhere far short of what they had the potential to achieve.
posted by atoxyl at 7:31 PM on August 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
Which is to say they (and the burger flipping) are what Graeber distinguishes as simply "shit jobs." Though to be fair I think Stoneweaver was not referring to the people who operate the injection-molding machinery but rather the people who manage the making of the crap etc.
If you are making some kind of point that putting everyone on a 4 hour day can only be done during a financial crisis and that unions are the primary factor holding us back from lives of leisure then stop beating around the bush with bullshit analogies and make it directly.
He's not, and I don't think he's that unclear about what he means. He is making a point with the choice of examples, but the point is that even the side of the political spectrum that is supposed to believe in improving the lives of working people can't seem to imagine anything more radical to offer than "work for work's sake, but at least you'll be getting paid for something." Which he contrasts explicitly with the success of unions in the past in fighting for less time working.
Ever since the ’60s there has been one strain of radicalism that sees unions as part of the problem for this reason. But I think we need to think about the question in broader terms: how labor unions which once used to campaign for less work, less hours, have essentially come to accept the weird trade off between puritanism and hedonism on which consumer capitalism is based — that work should be “hard” (hence good people are “hard-working people”) and that the aim of work is material prosperity, that we need to suffer to earn our right to consumer toys.
As I said, there's a value judgement inherent to the "bullshit job" concept which I think is inevitably its weak point - because it's sort of one dude's judgment. But it's not exactly a rare opinion on the left that unions in the mid 20th century compromised or were forced to compromise somewhere far short of what they had the potential to achieve.
posted by atoxyl at 7:31 PM on August 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
Yeah, I would say there is a difference between bullshit jobs and inefficient jobs.
A bullshit task example from real life:
A lab out our company did weekly tests and sent out an e-mail to our researchers. They've been doing it for a decade or so. This bothered me because for at least the last five years our groups automated e-mails that sent out when any test result got uploaded have been pretty reliable, going to the right people at the same time. I'd point this out, they still manually type up e-mails. Earlier this year a new lab director comes in and complains to me how much time his people are spending typing these up and asks what it would take to stop sending the e-mails. I say "You telling them to stop sending the e-mails." They stop. No one complains. Five years of tedious, meaningless manual report writing!
So: bullshit job is one you can literally stop and change nothing else and nothing happens.
Health insurance is not a bullshit job; if you want single payer you aren't saying no one should do the job that insurance companies are doing, you're just saying there's a way more efficient way to accomplish it. I will accept a lobbyist for a health insurance company as a bullshit job.
------
I'll keep rambling on here for just a bit longer: People are pretty good at recognizing inefficient crappy procedures in the workplace and they are everywhere. They are generally not good at understanding how hard it might be to make them more efficient. People who are confident it will be easy to eliminate inefficiencies in some task often go on to create one of the most common bullshit jobs in corporate America: The cross-departmental task force that studies something without ever having a prayer of having the clout, influence, expertise or insight to actually improve anything.
posted by mark k at 7:57 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
A bullshit task example from real life:
A lab out our company did weekly tests and sent out an e-mail to our researchers. They've been doing it for a decade or so. This bothered me because for at least the last five years our groups automated e-mails that sent out when any test result got uploaded have been pretty reliable, going to the right people at the same time. I'd point this out, they still manually type up e-mails. Earlier this year a new lab director comes in and complains to me how much time his people are spending typing these up and asks what it would take to stop sending the e-mails. I say "You telling them to stop sending the e-mails." They stop. No one complains. Five years of tedious, meaningless manual report writing!
So: bullshit job is one you can literally stop and change nothing else and nothing happens.
Health insurance is not a bullshit job; if you want single payer you aren't saying no one should do the job that insurance companies are doing, you're just saying there's a way more efficient way to accomplish it. I will accept a lobbyist for a health insurance company as a bullshit job.
------
I'll keep rambling on here for just a bit longer: People are pretty good at recognizing inefficient crappy procedures in the workplace and they are everywhere. They are generally not good at understanding how hard it might be to make them more efficient. People who are confident it will be easy to eliminate inefficiencies in some task often go on to create one of the most common bullshit jobs in corporate America: The cross-departmental task force that studies something without ever having a prayer of having the clout, influence, expertise or insight to actually improve anything.
posted by mark k at 7:57 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
In the book, part of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is that the worker has to feel like the job has no meaning.
There's a distinction to be made that shapes that haunt the dusk touches on in their experience (people making mistakes) which is "jobs that might not have to exist if other people did their own jobs well/better/perfectly" In a corporate matrix that really is quite a lot of roles and person-hours.
On projects where the client and service providers have a good working relationship, and everyone feels that work is being scoped accurately, compensated fairly, and given adequate time to complete, everyone involved can be pretty heckin' efficient. In the real world, though, I've often been frustrated by time spent having to dissect and analyze others' work to find where they're being sneaky or mistaken. I understand why it's necessary and simultaneously hate that it is.
posted by a halcyon day at 8:01 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
There's a distinction to be made that shapes that haunt the dusk touches on in their experience (people making mistakes) which is "jobs that might not have to exist if other people did their own jobs well/better/perfectly" In a corporate matrix that really is quite a lot of roles and person-hours.
On projects where the client and service providers have a good working relationship, and everyone feels that work is being scoped accurately, compensated fairly, and given adequate time to complete, everyone involved can be pretty heckin' efficient. In the real world, though, I've often been frustrated by time spent having to dissect and analyze others' work to find where they're being sneaky or mistaken. I understand why it's necessary and simultaneously hate that it is.
posted by a halcyon day at 8:01 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
Honestly, I have a bullshit job. I'm an accountant for a firm that manages (literal) rent-seeking capitalists' money. (Our clients made/make their fortunes by buying and renting out commercial real estate). If my job were eliminated, it would be extremely inconvenient for the firm's employees/owner/clients, but that's pretty much the worst of it. And if rent-seeking capitalists didn't need a staff (including me) just to count, distribute, and collect their millions of dollars, then the world would probably be a better place.
It does get to me sometimes. Hopefully I will one day have the opportunity to work in service of something meaningful. I view my current job as a glorified apprenticeship. And the places that can afford to hire apprentices and actually have openings for them are usually not the places busy doing something meaningful and socially valuable, so... Or at least that's what I found to be true when I was looking for work.
Anyway, I agree with the article that work for work's sake is stupid and a drain and at best a misallocation of human effort. But it's profitable for capitalists to have people like me to make sure the tenants pay rent and to charge them penalties and fees and etc etc etc besides, and so therefore to capitalists, these bullshit jobs like mine are worth paying for. In a sense, us "capitalist staff" exist to drum up business and then shake the customers down on behalf of the capitalist, and then we get a little piece of the pie ourselves for our trouble. I see what's in it for the capitalist and I see what's in it for me and there ya go. But I'm not proud of what I do and don't think it's making the world a better place (maybe in fact, my work is overall making it a worse one).
I guess I would even go further than the writer, though, in that I come from working in restaurants for a long time, and that was both a shit job as he defines it, and a bullshit job, too. It also wasn't making the world a better place in any sense. Food is an industry with a smaller profit margin [than commercial real estate] and is more of a commodity industry and so you have to hustle more for your money because what you provide is more transitory and easily substituted. But just the same as in my current job, as a waitress I was there to drum up business and then shake down the customers on the owners' behalf, and at the end of the day, I took home my little piece of that pie.
I don't think there's necessarily some sector of jobs that are categorically not bullshit jobs. Working class or not, feminine-coded or not, social or done while hidden away behind a computer monitor. I mean, there are reasons I prefer my current job to working as a waitress, but not because being a waitress was more socially positive or meaningful.
I wonder really what makes work meaningful or not. I wouldn't say it's all in the eye of the beholder, but then again, maybe all meaning fundamentally is.
posted by rue72 at 8:40 PM on August 10, 2018 [13 favorites]
It does get to me sometimes. Hopefully I will one day have the opportunity to work in service of something meaningful. I view my current job as a glorified apprenticeship. And the places that can afford to hire apprentices and actually have openings for them are usually not the places busy doing something meaningful and socially valuable, so... Or at least that's what I found to be true when I was looking for work.
Anyway, I agree with the article that work for work's sake is stupid and a drain and at best a misallocation of human effort. But it's profitable for capitalists to have people like me to make sure the tenants pay rent and to charge them penalties and fees and etc etc etc besides, and so therefore to capitalists, these bullshit jobs like mine are worth paying for. In a sense, us "capitalist staff" exist to drum up business and then shake the customers down on behalf of the capitalist, and then we get a little piece of the pie ourselves for our trouble. I see what's in it for the capitalist and I see what's in it for me and there ya go. But I'm not proud of what I do and don't think it's making the world a better place (maybe in fact, my work is overall making it a worse one).
I guess I would even go further than the writer, though, in that I come from working in restaurants for a long time, and that was both a shit job as he defines it, and a bullshit job, too. It also wasn't making the world a better place in any sense. Food is an industry with a smaller profit margin [than commercial real estate] and is more of a commodity industry and so you have to hustle more for your money because what you provide is more transitory and easily substituted. But just the same as in my current job, as a waitress I was there to drum up business and then shake down the customers on the owners' behalf, and at the end of the day, I took home my little piece of that pie.
I don't think there's necessarily some sector of jobs that are categorically not bullshit jobs. Working class or not, feminine-coded or not, social or done while hidden away behind a computer monitor. I mean, there are reasons I prefer my current job to working as a waitress, but not because being a waitress was more socially positive or meaningful.
I wonder really what makes work meaningful or not. I wouldn't say it's all in the eye of the beholder, but then again, maybe all meaning fundamentally is.
posted by rue72 at 8:40 PM on August 10, 2018 [13 favorites]
So I'm a family doc-- just finished residency training at $Prestigious_Hospital_System. Please believe me when I tell you that the vast majority of our documentation is clinically irrelevant bullshit that exists either because, as mentioned above, it's cheaper to have MDs and RNs manually transcribe information between systems than to automate the process, or because it is necessary for billing (which would be vastly simplified under a single-payer system). We spend half of our time documenting and less than a third of it with patients. A couple years ago at our cutting-edge hospital I would spend about an hour delivering a baby and roughly 5 hours entering data into and transposing it between four separate medical record systems. We never did the study about errors that resulted from this reliance on manual transcription by sleep-deprived staff.
That the problem of superfluous documentation is deemed too expensive to fix through automation, and moreover that it owes its existence in the first place to our reliance on an incoherent, fractured, inefficient payment system leads the healthcare worker to feel a certain sense of bullshit. Marx would call it alienation-- the estrangement of the healer from their eons-old duty to the patient through a series of forms that have nothing to do with healing. Graeber wrote about the similarity between alienation and bullshit in 2007:
That the problem of superfluous documentation is deemed too expensive to fix through automation, and moreover that it owes its existence in the first place to our reliance on an incoherent, fractured, inefficient payment system leads the healthcare worker to feel a certain sense of bullshit. Marx would call it alienation-- the estrangement of the healer from their eons-old duty to the patient through a series of forms that have nothing to do with healing. Graeber wrote about the similarity between alienation and bullshit in 2007:
Creativity and desire — what we often reduce, in political economy terms, to “production”posted by Richard Saunders at 10:14 PM on August 10, 2018 [13 favorites]
and “consumption” — are essentially vehicles of the imagination. Structures of inequality and
domination, structural violence if you will, tend to skew the imagination. They might create
situations where laborers are relegated to mind-numbing, boring, mechanical jobs and only a
small elite is allowed to indulge in imaginative labor, leading to the feeling, on the part of the
workers, that they are alienated from their own labor, that their very deeds belong to someone
else. It might also create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities or CEOs prance
about oblivious to almost everything around them while their wives, servants, staff, and handlers
spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them in their fantasies. Most
situations of inequality, I suspect, combine elements of both.
The subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures of imagination is what we
are referring to when we talk about “alienation”.
It strikes me that if nothing else, this perspective would help explain the lingering appeal
of theories of alienation in revolutionary circles, even when the academic Left has long since
abandoned them. If one enters an anarchist infoshop, almost anywhere in the world, the French
authors one is likely to encounter will still largely consist of Situationists like Guy Debord and
Raoul Vaneigem, the great theorists of alienation (alongside theorists of the imagination like
Cornelius Castoriadis). For a long time I was genuinely puzzled as to how so many suburban
American teenagers could be entranced, for instance, by Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of
Everyday Life — a book, after all, written in Paris almost forty years ago. In the end I decided it
must be because Vaneigem’s book was, in its own way, the highest theoretical expression of the
feelings of rage, boredom, and revulsion that almost any adolescent at some point feels when
confronted with the middle class existence. The sense of a life broken into fragments, with no
ultimate meaning or integrity; of a cynical market system selling its victims commodities and
spectacles that themselves represent tiny false images of the very sense of totality and pleasure
and community the market has in fact destroyed; the tendency to turn every relation into a
form of exchange, to sacrifice life for “survival”, pleasure for renunciation, creativity for hollow
homogenous units of power or “dead time” — on some level all this clearly still rings true[...]
The main difference between the Situationists and their most avid current readers is that the millenarian
element has almost completely fallen away. No one thinks the skies are about to open any time
soon. There is a consolation though: that as a result, as close as one can come to experiencing
genuine revolutionary freedom, one can begin to experience it immediately. Consider the following
statement from the Crimethinc collective, probably the most inspiring young anarchist
propagandists operating in the Situationist tradition today:
“We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up to you to create these situations Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere — and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not.”
What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the defiant insistence on acting
as if one is already free? The obvious question is how it can contribute to an overall strategy,
one that should lead to a cumulative movement towards a world without states and capitalism.
Here, no one is completely sure. Most assume the process could only be one of endless improvisation.
Insurrectionary moments there will certainly be. Likely as not, quite a few of them. But they
will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifaceted revolutionary process
whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be fully anticipated.
In retrospect, what seems strikingly naïve is the old assumption that a single uprising or successful
civil war could, as it were, neutralize the entire apparatus of structural violence, at least
within a particular national territory: that within that territory, right-wing realities could be
simply swept away, to leave the field open for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity.
But if so, the truly puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that
appeared to be exactly what was happening. It seems to me that if we are to have any chance of
grasping the new, emerging conception of revolution, we need to begin by thinking again about
the quality of these insurrectionary moments.
- Graeber, Revolution in Reverse, 2007
A huge part of bureaucracy is keeping the functional aspect of a system going while a separate group of individuals examines the process of improving the system, and then executing that improvement.
And maybe some of that seems like bullshit from casual observation, but we can’t really, like, shut entire hospital chains down, or retail chains, or government departments, or shipping facilities, for the 6-24 months it would take to do a complete overhaul from scratch. Duplication of effort murders efficiency but it is, in many cases, necessary, because the alternative is to shut down completely.
My job may or may not be bullshit; it encompasses both UX (actual role) and business strategy (soft skills/tertiary role). In one sense it’s bullshit because my job is to facilitate the sale of things people don’t necessarily need, but on the other hand, people may well argue about the improvement these products bring to their quality of life. And the job has taught me a lot about how to problem-solve issues on a very large scale, which I find both personally fulfilling and applicable in a lot of different scenarios.
Data governance is one thing I find very interesting for some reason. The principle is to maintain a centralized data store for all the data you use across the enterprise. If you collect customer information (which you almost certainly do if you sell things), then good data governance dictates that you use the same format for first name, last name, address, etc. everywhere in the company that uses that data. You don’t have Accounting organizing customer info by Lastname Firstname Mrs. while Services organizes customer info with Mrs. Firstname Lastname. Repeat for every kind of data your company collects. Now, if you haven’t been doing this kind of thing since you launched, and you decide to centralize your data governance, then a governance committee has to first decide what all the standardized forms will be, and then someone (or a lot of someones) actually has to go through all your data and standardize it, line by line.
Someone might consider that a bullshit job. Data entry, making sure a company’s customer info is all standardized to say Lastname, Firstname Mrs. instead of some other format. Probably tedious as hell and probably not going to save the world, but good data governance prevents duplication, fraud, error, and enables a company to analyze their own data more easily, reacting more quickly to supply and demand. You know how you go to Target and the thing you used to buy all the time hasn’t been on the damn shelf for 5 consecutive visits? You know what causes that? Error. Bad data. Systems that don’t play well together because of non-standardized info.
And of course you can’t cure it just by shutting down and building a fresh new system and flipping the switch when it’s ready. Or by doubling your staff and using half to build a fresh new system while the other half runs the current system. And although you CAN launch your new site and tell people, “Hey, we have a new system now! So your old account got nuked. Make a new one,” it really makes a lot of people unhappy.
But people who aren’t in that business don’t know all that and probably don’t care. All they know is that they went to Target for a whatsit and Target is STILL out. And then maybe they go home and write an article about how corporate keyboard jobs are bullshit, because they don’t know that for a product to be produced in China and wind up on a Target shelf in Poughkeepsie involves about 10,000 people and a hell of a lot of process.
But that’s another thing I find interesting about my job. It is very true that the things we sell are not necessities by any means. Nobody would starve or die if they couldn’t buy an Apple Watch or a pair of Bluetooth headphones. But by the same token, the speed and means by which the adoption and standardization of technology progresses through this country is through retail. It doesn’t necessarily matter if a company arbitrarily decides to get rid of headphone jacks or to come out with their own proprietary format. What matters is if enough people buy it. Sony’s been playing format wars since the Betamax and only once has their proprietary format become the industry standard (Blu-ray). But the reason we see technology advance and become more affordable over time is because of the way it’s marketed, and the way it is marketed is extremely dependent on customer data. Again, seems like a bullshit job, but if you’ve ever joked, “Can someone hurry up and invent this thing so I can give them my money?” that is literally what they’re trying to do.
So sure, a person can kind of reduce every job down to its lowest common denominator and call it bullshit. I could just as easily say that my job is to create images of electronics and paste copy into templates, but that’s just a process, that isn’t what I do. And last time I checked, the populace at large has not said, “You know what? This e-commerce thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I guess I’ll ditch my internet connection and go back to only shopping at the local mall,” so it’s probably reasonably safe for the foreseeable future. But it still tackles a very interesting problem, which is how to deliver a million things to a million people in the shortest possible time, without losing any or giving them to the wrong customer. Spoiler alert, it takes 10,000 people who each do what looks like a bullshit job (or a shit job, depending on where you are in the chain). But without it, Target has empty shelves. Maybe it’s something that isn’t a critical need, like the new release of Deadpool 2, or maybe it’s baby formula and Plan B. Maybe it’s Walgreens and you’re refilling your prescription by text message.
tl;dr: any job can seem like bullshit, but I think the author needs to have a way better sense of context before they assign the bullshit label to a given job. This is not the same as finding your job personally fulfilling, since one person’s fulfillment is another person’s mind-numbing tedium. I know plenty of people who would be bored silly by my job even though I don’t feel that way, and I can think of other jobs that would bore me silly. But a boring job is not necessarily a superfluous job, not by a long shot.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:27 PM on August 10, 2018 [4 favorites]
And maybe some of that seems like bullshit from casual observation, but we can’t really, like, shut entire hospital chains down, or retail chains, or government departments, or shipping facilities, for the 6-24 months it would take to do a complete overhaul from scratch. Duplication of effort murders efficiency but it is, in many cases, necessary, because the alternative is to shut down completely.
My job may or may not be bullshit; it encompasses both UX (actual role) and business strategy (soft skills/tertiary role). In one sense it’s bullshit because my job is to facilitate the sale of things people don’t necessarily need, but on the other hand, people may well argue about the improvement these products bring to their quality of life. And the job has taught me a lot about how to problem-solve issues on a very large scale, which I find both personally fulfilling and applicable in a lot of different scenarios.
Data governance is one thing I find very interesting for some reason. The principle is to maintain a centralized data store for all the data you use across the enterprise. If you collect customer information (which you almost certainly do if you sell things), then good data governance dictates that you use the same format for first name, last name, address, etc. everywhere in the company that uses that data. You don’t have Accounting organizing customer info by Lastname Firstname Mrs. while Services organizes customer info with Mrs. Firstname Lastname. Repeat for every kind of data your company collects. Now, if you haven’t been doing this kind of thing since you launched, and you decide to centralize your data governance, then a governance committee has to first decide what all the standardized forms will be, and then someone (or a lot of someones) actually has to go through all your data and standardize it, line by line.
Someone might consider that a bullshit job. Data entry, making sure a company’s customer info is all standardized to say Lastname, Firstname Mrs. instead of some other format. Probably tedious as hell and probably not going to save the world, but good data governance prevents duplication, fraud, error, and enables a company to analyze their own data more easily, reacting more quickly to supply and demand. You know how you go to Target and the thing you used to buy all the time hasn’t been on the damn shelf for 5 consecutive visits? You know what causes that? Error. Bad data. Systems that don’t play well together because of non-standardized info.
And of course you can’t cure it just by shutting down and building a fresh new system and flipping the switch when it’s ready. Or by doubling your staff and using half to build a fresh new system while the other half runs the current system. And although you CAN launch your new site and tell people, “Hey, we have a new system now! So your old account got nuked. Make a new one,” it really makes a lot of people unhappy.
But people who aren’t in that business don’t know all that and probably don’t care. All they know is that they went to Target for a whatsit and Target is STILL out. And then maybe they go home and write an article about how corporate keyboard jobs are bullshit, because they don’t know that for a product to be produced in China and wind up on a Target shelf in Poughkeepsie involves about 10,000 people and a hell of a lot of process.
But that’s another thing I find interesting about my job. It is very true that the things we sell are not necessities by any means. Nobody would starve or die if they couldn’t buy an Apple Watch or a pair of Bluetooth headphones. But by the same token, the speed and means by which the adoption and standardization of technology progresses through this country is through retail. It doesn’t necessarily matter if a company arbitrarily decides to get rid of headphone jacks or to come out with their own proprietary format. What matters is if enough people buy it. Sony’s been playing format wars since the Betamax and only once has their proprietary format become the industry standard (Blu-ray). But the reason we see technology advance and become more affordable over time is because of the way it’s marketed, and the way it is marketed is extremely dependent on customer data. Again, seems like a bullshit job, but if you’ve ever joked, “Can someone hurry up and invent this thing so I can give them my money?” that is literally what they’re trying to do.
So sure, a person can kind of reduce every job down to its lowest common denominator and call it bullshit. I could just as easily say that my job is to create images of electronics and paste copy into templates, but that’s just a process, that isn’t what I do. And last time I checked, the populace at large has not said, “You know what? This e-commerce thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I guess I’ll ditch my internet connection and go back to only shopping at the local mall,” so it’s probably reasonably safe for the foreseeable future. But it still tackles a very interesting problem, which is how to deliver a million things to a million people in the shortest possible time, without losing any or giving them to the wrong customer. Spoiler alert, it takes 10,000 people who each do what looks like a bullshit job (or a shit job, depending on where you are in the chain). But without it, Target has empty shelves. Maybe it’s something that isn’t a critical need, like the new release of Deadpool 2, or maybe it’s baby formula and Plan B. Maybe it’s Walgreens and you’re refilling your prescription by text message.
tl;dr: any job can seem like bullshit, but I think the author needs to have a way better sense of context before they assign the bullshit label to a given job. This is not the same as finding your job personally fulfilling, since one person’s fulfillment is another person’s mind-numbing tedium. I know plenty of people who would be bored silly by my job even though I don’t feel that way, and I can think of other jobs that would bore me silly. But a boring job is not necessarily a superfluous job, not by a long shot.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:27 PM on August 10, 2018 [4 favorites]
so his main point is that a big part of the economy feels like make-work because the companies providing those jobs are monopolistic, rent-seeking entities that arent even trying to be efficient because they dont have to be. fair enough! buuut.. as others in this thread have mentioned, the words "republican" and "trump" appear zero times in the article while the insufficient zeal and complacency of unions and obama is center stage. this is some alternate reality shit and makes an otherwise reasonable argument sound like bad faith.
posted by wibari at 11:18 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by wibari at 11:18 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
See, I feel like we need the critique of how capitalism values people, but it gets muddied in the framing around bullshit jobs. Instead of uniting us in an awareness of how we sell our labor, we end up discussing what is and isn’t bullshit, and what kind of bureaucracy is valuable and what isn’t. I feel like I have to justify my own job, when I’d rather just talk about how to make our working days and lives better. Labor unions fought for shorter working days because people deserved shorter working days, not because some tasks were less valuable than others.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:18 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:18 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Health insurance is not a bullshit job; if you want single payer you aren't saying no one should do the job that insurance companies are doing, you're just saying there's a way more efficient way to accomplish it.
Eh, kinda. I guess I if you go to single payer but keep all private providers, you need a lot of the existing infrastructure to deal with claims and what have you. If you have a fully public system, though, you can legit all but eliminate that entire layer of bureaucracy.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be arguing that jobs aren't bullshit because they're necessary or useful in the existing context. Which okay, sure, but that's thinking way smaller than Graeber.
posted by Dysk at 12:10 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
Eh, kinda. I guess I if you go to single payer but keep all private providers, you need a lot of the existing infrastructure to deal with claims and what have you. If you have a fully public system, though, you can legit all but eliminate that entire layer of bureaucracy.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be arguing that jobs aren't bullshit because they're necessary or useful in the existing context. Which okay, sure, but that's thinking way smaller than Graeber.
posted by Dysk at 12:10 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
Their friends are the ones who went to law school intending to be hard-nosed public defenders helping the downtrodden fight a rigged system, but instead ended up writing special purpose vehicle charters in order to package mortgage debt.
One of the reasons we have so much depressing writing about how boring it is to be a BigLaw lawyer is because a lot of clever people went to law school after the literature and history degrees without really being suited to that kind of work temperamentally. I know quite a few Magic Circle lawyer types and most of them actually do find their jobs fulfilling. They tend to not do a lot writing about how awful it is to be a lawyer.
posted by atrazine at 1:46 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
One of the reasons we have so much depressing writing about how boring it is to be a BigLaw lawyer is because a lot of clever people went to law school after the literature and history degrees without really being suited to that kind of work temperamentally. I know quite a few Magic Circle lawyer types and most of them actually do find their jobs fulfilling. They tend to not do a lot writing about how awful it is to be a lawyer.
posted by atrazine at 1:46 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yes, I agree with Graeber!
Which is why we should get started right away and form the Department of Getting Rid of Bullshit Jobs, which of course will need an army of inspectors and researchers to study every job in the United States. As part of the study all current and former employees in all businesses with over two employees will be required to fill out this 15 page survey which will be sent out semi-annually, unless you've changed jobs in the last year. If you've changed jobs in the last year, we have a special form designed specifically address your former position...
posted by FJT at 1:51 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Which is why we should get started right away and form the Department of Getting Rid of Bullshit Jobs, which of course will need an army of inspectors and researchers to study every job in the United States. As part of the study all current and former employees in all businesses with over two employees will be required to fill out this 15 page survey which will be sent out semi-annually, unless you've changed jobs in the last year. If you've changed jobs in the last year, we have a special form designed specifically address your former position...
posted by FJT at 1:51 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
This went in a much different direction than I imagined when I envision "getting rid of bullshit jobs."
So much of our society is driven by the bullshit need for pursuing money, and then more money, and then more money on top of that. I had imagined "bullshit" jobs were those servicing useless consumption - tanning salons, direct mail and email marketing, wedding consultants, interior decorating, pumpkin spice everything, 40 flavors of Doritos...
This has been tickling the back of my brain for years, bullshit jobs coupled with the idea of a universal income, but I have a hard time articulating it. There's so. much. crap that we do that's just in blind pursuit of a buck that is utterly useless. What if... we just didn't?
How much could we improve the environment if people didn't have to drive to bullshit jobs just to make a buck, or to jobs that support bullshit jobs? What if we just focused on a system that worked for everybody? Maybe that'd mean we wouldn't have an Apple Computer that has a market cap of $1 trillion and a cash pile of $250 billion - and we wouldn't have slim easily breakable expensive smartphones, but we might produce a slightly uglier smartphone everybody could have, with replaceable batteries and components, and home computers that run open source OSes that benefit everybody?
Instead of hundreds of models of cars, we might have a handful and they would be designed to be energy efficient, safe, and maintainable for decades. No new models every year, produce the same model (modulo safety/efficiency improvements) for years.
For that matter, instead of propping up the auto industry to sell more and more cars every year - put resources into public transport and making cities walkable/bike-able instead.
Instead of bullshit fashion that changes every damn year, and clothes that are designed to be obsolete, what if we just produced comfortable clothing designed to last and not be a status signifier? You want something different? OK, learn to make it.
Imagine a world where both parents don't have to work full time, so we don't need so damn many daycares and other childcare services just to park kids while their parents are trying to earn a buck to keep ... paying daycare.
The telemarketers who, after you sign up for Internet service with a cable company, then proceed to call you on the regular to try to upsell you. And all the people above them who plot out the campaigns to try to upsell people who just wanted a damn dumb pipe between their home and the Metafilter server and cat pictures.
All the people at Coke and Pepsi who craft endless awareness campaigns for soft drinks that even uncontacted tribes in the Amazon have probably heard of at least once.
I work for a large enterprise software company. Some of the work we do is absolutely a benefit, IMO. But an awful lot of enterprise software development is in support of "do this faster to make more money. Know your customers a little better than your competitors to sell more shit that they don't really need. Above all costs, grow. Every year. Grow. More. More. More."
In the category of not just bullshit but actively harmful to society you have all of the lobbyists who campaign to weaken regulations, undermine unions and labor laws, everybody who has participated in trying to convince the public that climate change doesn't exist, tobacco isn't harmful, etc.
We could, if we wanted to, have a society where everyone has adequate health care, housing, food, education, and even entertainment and enrichment. But apparently we want a society where we have Jeff Bezos and homeless people, 40 flavors of Oreos but people who go hungry, for-profit healthcare and people dying of cancer because they don't have enough donations in their GoFundMe campaign. That is a society rife with bullshit jobs.
posted by jzb at 5:26 AM on August 11, 2018 [14 favorites]
So much of our society is driven by the bullshit need for pursuing money, and then more money, and then more money on top of that. I had imagined "bullshit" jobs were those servicing useless consumption - tanning salons, direct mail and email marketing, wedding consultants, interior decorating, pumpkin spice everything, 40 flavors of Doritos...
This has been tickling the back of my brain for years, bullshit jobs coupled with the idea of a universal income, but I have a hard time articulating it. There's so. much. crap that we do that's just in blind pursuit of a buck that is utterly useless. What if... we just didn't?
How much could we improve the environment if people didn't have to drive to bullshit jobs just to make a buck, or to jobs that support bullshit jobs? What if we just focused on a system that worked for everybody? Maybe that'd mean we wouldn't have an Apple Computer that has a market cap of $1 trillion and a cash pile of $250 billion - and we wouldn't have slim easily breakable expensive smartphones, but we might produce a slightly uglier smartphone everybody could have, with replaceable batteries and components, and home computers that run open source OSes that benefit everybody?
Instead of hundreds of models of cars, we might have a handful and they would be designed to be energy efficient, safe, and maintainable for decades. No new models every year, produce the same model (modulo safety/efficiency improvements) for years.
For that matter, instead of propping up the auto industry to sell more and more cars every year - put resources into public transport and making cities walkable/bike-able instead.
Instead of bullshit fashion that changes every damn year, and clothes that are designed to be obsolete, what if we just produced comfortable clothing designed to last and not be a status signifier? You want something different? OK, learn to make it.
Imagine a world where both parents don't have to work full time, so we don't need so damn many daycares and other childcare services just to park kids while their parents are trying to earn a buck to keep ... paying daycare.
The telemarketers who, after you sign up for Internet service with a cable company, then proceed to call you on the regular to try to upsell you. And all the people above them who plot out the campaigns to try to upsell people who just wanted a damn dumb pipe between their home and the Metafilter server and cat pictures.
All the people at Coke and Pepsi who craft endless awareness campaigns for soft drinks that even uncontacted tribes in the Amazon have probably heard of at least once.
I work for a large enterprise software company. Some of the work we do is absolutely a benefit, IMO. But an awful lot of enterprise software development is in support of "do this faster to make more money. Know your customers a little better than your competitors to sell more shit that they don't really need. Above all costs, grow. Every year. Grow. More. More. More."
In the category of not just bullshit but actively harmful to society you have all of the lobbyists who campaign to weaken regulations, undermine unions and labor laws, everybody who has participated in trying to convince the public that climate change doesn't exist, tobacco isn't harmful, etc.
We could, if we wanted to, have a society where everyone has adequate health care, housing, food, education, and even entertainment and enrichment. But apparently we want a society where we have Jeff Bezos and homeless people, 40 flavors of Oreos but people who go hungry, for-profit healthcare and people dying of cancer because they don't have enough donations in their GoFundMe campaign. That is a society rife with bullshit jobs.
posted by jzb at 5:26 AM on August 11, 2018 [14 favorites]
Fantastic comment jzb.
R.e. The article, I’m generally in agreement with the basic idea but as much as Obama could be a disappointing centrist at times, that health care quote is misunderstood. When he said that he was saying it’s not feasible to just tear down the current system overnight without considering the social impact of the sudden disappearance of a whole industry , so we need to consider how to ease into a better system. A claims processor may have a bullshit job but they deserve to be able to feed their kids tomorrow.
posted by freecellwizard at 5:57 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
R.e. The article, I’m generally in agreement with the basic idea but as much as Obama could be a disappointing centrist at times, that health care quote is misunderstood. When he said that he was saying it’s not feasible to just tear down the current system overnight without considering the social impact of the sudden disappearance of a whole industry , so we need to consider how to ease into a better system. A claims processor may have a bullshit job but they deserve to be able to feed their kids tomorrow.
posted by freecellwizard at 5:57 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don’t think it’s a fantastic comment, I think it’s extraordinarily ignorant of the scope of how people consume things. For one thing, okay, let’s say you don’t work your bullshit job anymore, but you want to redecorate your house and get a PSL from Starbucks. Let’s say you need groceries. Like literally, how do you actually get goods and services from XYZ to your hot little hands? Just wait for somebody to feel like doing it, or are you gonna go grab your .22 and go out and shoot a deer and clean it yourself? Grow your own vegetables? Sew your own clothes? Install your own water heater?
Even if you slow the replacement cycle, you still have a continuous need for replacements and repairs, because things wear out or break and they don’t do it on a neat schedule. And part of the reason we have capitalism in the first place is because we have specialization. Yes, we certainly don’t need an Amazon in the sense that it grinds through employees with bullshit stack ranking and impossible quotas. But people will still live their lives, presumably, and go places and eat food and live in houses and wear clothing. If you ever want to travel, you’ll need someone who makes planes, and an FAA. For everything that you consume, everything, either YOU have to make it or someone else does. And if you want those things to be produced with safety and efficiency in mind, then someone else has to make the rules and a third someone has to make sure they’re followed.
This goes right back to what I said in my previous post, which is that people don’t understand that when they go to a store and see a thing on a shelf, they don’t grok that it took about 10,000 people to make that happen. Unless you plan to use your newfound leisure time to go learn carpentry and plumbing, then someone, an awful lot of someones, will have to do a job that may be perceived as bullshit.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:50 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Even if you slow the replacement cycle, you still have a continuous need for replacements and repairs, because things wear out or break and they don’t do it on a neat schedule. And part of the reason we have capitalism in the first place is because we have specialization. Yes, we certainly don’t need an Amazon in the sense that it grinds through employees with bullshit stack ranking and impossible quotas. But people will still live their lives, presumably, and go places and eat food and live in houses and wear clothing. If you ever want to travel, you’ll need someone who makes planes, and an FAA. For everything that you consume, everything, either YOU have to make it or someone else does. And if you want those things to be produced with safety and efficiency in mind, then someone else has to make the rules and a third someone has to make sure they’re followed.
This goes right back to what I said in my previous post, which is that people don’t understand that when they go to a store and see a thing on a shelf, they don’t grok that it took about 10,000 people to make that happen. Unless you plan to use your newfound leisure time to go learn carpentry and plumbing, then someone, an awful lot of someones, will have to do a job that may be perceived as bullshit.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:50 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Never mind the requirements involved in, say, maintaining the infrastructure of a city. The phrase, “It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” exists for a reason.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:52 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Autumnheart at 6:52 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think the article could have been more clear about the difference between “tedious seeming job in the service of something socially useful “ and the same job in the service of something not useful. Bookkeeping for a local shoe store or community organization is not bullshit, but bookkeeping for a payday lender is probably bullshit.
As far as the consumption bit, ymmv but as a fairly well off knowledge worker with a family there’s no way I can reasonably argue that my consumption is totally about necessary replacement. The flow of goods into and out of my life is probably like 5x what it needs to be and I say that as someone who recycles and wears a total of 2 different pairs of jeans to work. The capitalist structure we have encourages and rewards waste. Endless growth helps fund my 401k but it’s also eating the planet. I don’t know the solution.
posted by freecellwizard at 7:28 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
As far as the consumption bit, ymmv but as a fairly well off knowledge worker with a family there’s no way I can reasonably argue that my consumption is totally about necessary replacement. The flow of goods into and out of my life is probably like 5x what it needs to be and I say that as someone who recycles and wears a total of 2 different pairs of jeans to work. The capitalist structure we have encourages and rewards waste. Endless growth helps fund my 401k but it’s also eating the planet. I don’t know the solution.
posted by freecellwizard at 7:28 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
I completely agree that getting rid of jobs that exist for the purpose of exploitation (payday lenders, timeshare telemarketers, etc.) would be a benefit. It doesn’t mean that there will no longer be a job of sitting on the phone calling people about their aluminum siding, but eliminating exploitation wherever possible would be a net gain (and open up a lot of positions at the CFPB).
But we’re never going to get rid of bureaucracy, because that’s the lifeblood of a modern society, capitalist or otherwise. The problem of getting stuff to people will always exist. And you also have to consider the need for contingency production. The problem with saying, “Let’s slow down the production cycle and not consume as much” is that it doesn’t account for events of mass destruction. There’s a reason Walmart is always the first one on the scene with their semis full of bottled water, it’s because they have really great logistics. And when the will to perform bureaucratic functions isn’t there, you wind up with a situation like Puerto Rico.
An individual can certainly modify his consumption habits to minimize single-use products and maximize their product lifecycle. That is actually quite effective. But I think it bears recognizing that capitalism is not driving consumption. Capitalism is only one means of serving consumption. And even if a society dialed things way back to only produce necessities, they take a huge hit in their ability to adapt and innovate and progress. Do we need developers only building luxury housing that only a tiny portion of the population can afford, while the rest struggle to find affordable housing? No. Do we need housing developers? Yes.
So the question of how we evolve from a profit-driven society that stratifies people into “rich people who deserve to enjoy the best of everything” and “poor people who are born to be exploited”, into one that flattens the hierarchy, is...tough. You have to control the people who exploit, regardless of whatever social system you’re using. But that’s a much different question from “how much bureaucracy is needed in order to advance as a society” and I think the author VASTLY underestimates that. Good bureaucracy is invisible, after all, and it is a common flaw in human thinking to believe that a system that is running smoothly must have unnecessary parts in it. Everyone, from the author of the article to every initiative to make an organization “lean”, makes that mistake.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:02 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
But we’re never going to get rid of bureaucracy, because that’s the lifeblood of a modern society, capitalist or otherwise. The problem of getting stuff to people will always exist. And you also have to consider the need for contingency production. The problem with saying, “Let’s slow down the production cycle and not consume as much” is that it doesn’t account for events of mass destruction. There’s a reason Walmart is always the first one on the scene with their semis full of bottled water, it’s because they have really great logistics. And when the will to perform bureaucratic functions isn’t there, you wind up with a situation like Puerto Rico.
An individual can certainly modify his consumption habits to minimize single-use products and maximize their product lifecycle. That is actually quite effective. But I think it bears recognizing that capitalism is not driving consumption. Capitalism is only one means of serving consumption. And even if a society dialed things way back to only produce necessities, they take a huge hit in their ability to adapt and innovate and progress. Do we need developers only building luxury housing that only a tiny portion of the population can afford, while the rest struggle to find affordable housing? No. Do we need housing developers? Yes.
So the question of how we evolve from a profit-driven society that stratifies people into “rich people who deserve to enjoy the best of everything” and “poor people who are born to be exploited”, into one that flattens the hierarchy, is...tough. You have to control the people who exploit, regardless of whatever social system you’re using. But that’s a much different question from “how much bureaucracy is needed in order to advance as a society” and I think the author VASTLY underestimates that. Good bureaucracy is invisible, after all, and it is a common flaw in human thinking to believe that a system that is running smoothly must have unnecessary parts in it. Everyone, from the author of the article to every initiative to make an organization “lean”, makes that mistake.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:02 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think it’s extraordinarily ignorant of the scope of how people consume things.
I understand very well how people consume things, thanks. My point is that people consume a lot of things that are utterly unnecessary, and we could do with consuming less, consuming more standardized things, and stop focusing on sustaining capitalism and focus on sustaining people. I'm not arguing that we stop having a system that distributes food, but maybe we don't really need a system that churns out a new flavor of everything on a quarterly or annual basis to prop up sales.
If your job is sitting around dreaming up yet another flavor of latte so Starbucks can keep growing - congrats, your job is bullshit. If your job is sitting around dreaming up ads to convince people they need Tabasco flavored lattes, your job is bullshit.
Note I didn't say anything about getting rid of distribution systems or even bureaucracy. As long as we've got organized systems to serve populations in the millions, we're going to have some form of bureaucracy.
posted by jzb at 8:13 AM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
I understand very well how people consume things, thanks. My point is that people consume a lot of things that are utterly unnecessary, and we could do with consuming less, consuming more standardized things, and stop focusing on sustaining capitalism and focus on sustaining people. I'm not arguing that we stop having a system that distributes food, but maybe we don't really need a system that churns out a new flavor of everything on a quarterly or annual basis to prop up sales.
If your job is sitting around dreaming up yet another flavor of latte so Starbucks can keep growing - congrats, your job is bullshit. If your job is sitting around dreaming up ads to convince people they need Tabasco flavored lattes, your job is bullshit.
Note I didn't say anything about getting rid of distribution systems or even bureaucracy. As long as we've got organized systems to serve populations in the millions, we're going to have some form of bureaucracy.
posted by jzb at 8:13 AM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
So you think you can just tell people not to want a new flavor in their latte for the good of society? Yeah, that worked out great for the Soviet Union.
I agree that jobs whose express purpose is to spur consumption for the sake of itself don’t really fit the bill of “necessary”, but you are never, ever going to make people stop dreaming of new and different things. That’s like the driving force behind our entire species. If you stifle innovation, you stifle advancement. And maybe you, personally, don’t think that a given item qualifies as a necessity based on your personal experiences and the resources that you personally have available to you, but who are you to decide that for anyone else? We’ve been trotting out that argument since the Industrial Revolution, acting like people who have refrigerators and cell phones are living unnecessarily luxurious lives, even though refrigeration and portable communication literally keep people alive and able to participate in society. Does EVERYONE need four televisions in their house, probably not. But the actual, practical execution of limiting the amount of “stuff” people are allowed to have is extremely tricky and ripe for abuse. We already have massive inequality in our current system based on exactly the principle that “people don’t need stuff because I say so”.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:39 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
I agree that jobs whose express purpose is to spur consumption for the sake of itself don’t really fit the bill of “necessary”, but you are never, ever going to make people stop dreaming of new and different things. That’s like the driving force behind our entire species. If you stifle innovation, you stifle advancement. And maybe you, personally, don’t think that a given item qualifies as a necessity based on your personal experiences and the resources that you personally have available to you, but who are you to decide that for anyone else? We’ve been trotting out that argument since the Industrial Revolution, acting like people who have refrigerators and cell phones are living unnecessarily luxurious lives, even though refrigeration and portable communication literally keep people alive and able to participate in society. Does EVERYONE need four televisions in their house, probably not. But the actual, practical execution of limiting the amount of “stuff” people are allowed to have is extremely tricky and ripe for abuse. We already have massive inequality in our current system based on exactly the principle that “people don’t need stuff because I say so”.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:39 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think it also bears mentioning that part of the benefit of the speed of innovation within a society is that those learnings can be distributed. This enables emerging economies to skip the step of, to use an example, burning coal and installing copper cables and going directly to fiber and solar and cellular. Of course the question there is, how do we convince organizations to share their innovations without exploiting people, either the innovators or the emerging societies? And how do we maintain the flexible zone between “everyone has enough” and “polluting the planet with things we don’t need” when people’s needs vary so greatly based on their own access to resources?
Of course if we could think of that answer, we’d win the Nobel prize and be hailed as heroes who saved the world from itself, but that’s really what it comes down to.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:55 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Of course if we could think of that answer, we’d win the Nobel prize and be hailed as heroes who saved the world from itself, but that’s really what it comes down to.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:55 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
"So you think you can just tell people not to want a new flavor in their latte for the good of society? Yeah, that worked out great for the Soviet Union."
This is such an incredible bad faith, strawman misrepresentation of my comment I don't even know where to begin. But it's a perfect example of how we got here and why bullshit jobs exist, and why we'll probably just end up with an uninhabitable planet (for humans, at least) and nobody will need to worry about what flavor latte they're going to get.
If we, as a species, want to survive we need to learn to consume less. We also have an increasingly shocking disparity between a small group of people who have far more wealth than they could ever possibly need and the people who actually do the (often bullshit) work to line the wealthy's pockets even more. And that's really only considering countries like the U.S., it doesn't take into account the billions of people without even the possibility of adequate health care, clean water, etc.
We’ve been trotting out that argument since the Industrial Revolution, acting like people who have refrigerators and cell phones are living unnecessarily luxurious lives, even though refrigeration and portable communication literally keep people alive and able to participate in society.
If you read my comment, I literally included cell phones as something we should produce - but maybe, just maybe we could stop supporting a system where we focus on producing what are essentially disposable phones that cannot have batteries replaced or components swapped out.
posted by jzb at 8:59 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
This is such an incredible bad faith, strawman misrepresentation of my comment I don't even know where to begin. But it's a perfect example of how we got here and why bullshit jobs exist, and why we'll probably just end up with an uninhabitable planet (for humans, at least) and nobody will need to worry about what flavor latte they're going to get.
If we, as a species, want to survive we need to learn to consume less. We also have an increasingly shocking disparity between a small group of people who have far more wealth than they could ever possibly need and the people who actually do the (often bullshit) work to line the wealthy's pockets even more. And that's really only considering countries like the U.S., it doesn't take into account the billions of people without even the possibility of adequate health care, clean water, etc.
We’ve been trotting out that argument since the Industrial Revolution, acting like people who have refrigerators and cell phones are living unnecessarily luxurious lives, even though refrigeration and portable communication literally keep people alive and able to participate in society.
If you read my comment, I literally included cell phones as something we should produce - but maybe, just maybe we could stop supporting a system where we focus on producing what are essentially disposable phones that cannot have batteries replaced or components swapped out.
posted by jzb at 8:59 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
My point is that people consume a lot of things that are utterly unnecessary
But everyone has different ideas about what is "unnecessary". As the highly gendered examples of "tanning salons...wedding consultants, interior decorating, pumpkin spice everything" illustrate.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 9:14 AM on August 11, 2018 [7 favorites]
But everyone has different ideas about what is "unnecessary". As the highly gendered examples of "tanning salons...wedding consultants, interior decorating, pumpkin spice everything" illustrate.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 9:14 AM on August 11, 2018 [7 favorites]
Does EVERYONE need four televisions in their house, probably not.
But does working hard to convince everyone that they do need four televisions in their house make you evil...?
quite possibly.
posted by some loser at 9:15 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
But does working hard to convince everyone that they do need four televisions in their house make you evil...?
quite possibly.
posted by some loser at 9:15 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
It’s not a bad faith misrepresentation of your comment, it is simply a demonstration of how your comment works out in real life, or at least historically has done so. It’s not just about “consuming less”, it’s about the reality of deciding where the line is between “enough” and “less”. It’s about the actual logistics of getting people to participate in the bureaucracy of maintaining and advancing a society, of rewarding them sufficiently, of encouraging their ability to continue to innovate, while equitably distributing the results of all that progress. Your comments do nothing to address any of that, which is entirely reasonable because it’s not like we’re going to solve the world’s problems and come up with a whole new social system in this thread. If capitalism and communism couldn’t figure it out, it’s not likely that you and I are going to.
Nonetheless, it continues to not be enough to just say “we have too much and should use less and give more to other people” because at some point you literally have to make those definitions and come up with a process. That’s why I say that it’s a naive thing to say. People don’t even agree on what “enough” is within the same city or state, much less the country, much less the world. A lot of the things we consider humanity-level entitlements, people don’t want. A lot of the things they consider dire necessities, we don’t want. Do you want to live in a theocratic society where you’re told whether or not you may legally drive or go out with your face showing? I don’t. I don’t want those people deciding what’s enough for me. I doubt they want us deciding that for them (in fact I’d say that the last few wars we’ve fought have provided conclusive proof that they’re not into it).
Part of the paradox of living in an egalitarian society is in accommodating opposing ideologies.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:19 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Nonetheless, it continues to not be enough to just say “we have too much and should use less and give more to other people” because at some point you literally have to make those definitions and come up with a process. That’s why I say that it’s a naive thing to say. People don’t even agree on what “enough” is within the same city or state, much less the country, much less the world. A lot of the things we consider humanity-level entitlements, people don’t want. A lot of the things they consider dire necessities, we don’t want. Do you want to live in a theocratic society where you’re told whether or not you may legally drive or go out with your face showing? I don’t. I don’t want those people deciding what’s enough for me. I doubt they want us deciding that for them (in fact I’d say that the last few wars we’ve fought have provided conclusive proof that they’re not into it).
Part of the paradox of living in an egalitarian society is in accommodating opposing ideologies.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:19 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
We can moralize all we want about how somebody has to do these jobs if modern society is to function, but ultimately the market for such labor is a market one. If we increase the price that employers have to pay for it, it will be mechanized to the extent possible. Soul-crushingly meaningless jobs should pay more than the equivalent work in a socially-valuable context, if we really mean it when we say it is repugnant to us. To a large extent this is probably already true: well-trained lawyers at non-profits or government agencies make less than the ones that scheme ways to offload the externalities of derivatives to other actors by subtly changing contract language. If that difference in price represents a "morality premium", then we as workers (and as citizens through public policy) can in theory increase that premium to the point where no-one is employed in the shitty versions of the job, and everyone can work for cool non-profits instead of uncool for-profits. The same could be said for other categories of work that the workers feel are socially undesirable and hence morally taxing.
What I've described is of course a fantasy world, where labor solidarity is already a useful force, the labor market works exactly as it does in economics textbooks, public policy isn't largely a product of K-street, and labor markets aren't global. Even in this fantasy world, such action through willful labor organizing and public policy would reduce the "efficiency" in some sense of the economy, since this would be a sizable distortion of the labor market from the point of view of capital.
That said, I would argue that, with the amount of capital stock on the planet today, any sane system should not optimize labor for the sake of the best utilization of that capital, but instead optimize the capital for the sake of the best utilization by labor. In other words, rather than having the jobs that make best use of our stuff and institutions, we should reshape our stuff and institutions to give us the jobs we most want to do. It made sense to do things the first way when capital was still a very scarce thing, but it simply isn't anymore.
posted by LiteOpera at 9:22 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
What I've described is of course a fantasy world, where labor solidarity is already a useful force, the labor market works exactly as it does in economics textbooks, public policy isn't largely a product of K-street, and labor markets aren't global. Even in this fantasy world, such action through willful labor organizing and public policy would reduce the "efficiency" in some sense of the economy, since this would be a sizable distortion of the labor market from the point of view of capital.
That said, I would argue that, with the amount of capital stock on the planet today, any sane system should not optimize labor for the sake of the best utilization of that capital, but instead optimize the capital for the sake of the best utilization by labor. In other words, rather than having the jobs that make best use of our stuff and institutions, we should reshape our stuff and institutions to give us the jobs we most want to do. It made sense to do things the first way when capital was still a very scarce thing, but it simply isn't anymore.
posted by LiteOpera at 9:22 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
Let’s explore a practical example. Sweden has such an effective recycling program that they are actually short on things to recycle. What kind of system is that, and what would be the best way of implementing it in the US?
1. Get the current administration out of office so that we have an EPA that isn’t run by someone who actively wants to pollute.
2. Figure out all the plants that produce the things we want to recycle, and all the recycling plants, and what they would need in order to make this system a reality.
3. Pass whatever federal and state laws would be required to enforce this new system.
4. Give all these plants sufficient time and/or money to overhaul their facilities to meet these new standards.
5. Train a workforce to run the plants.
6. Create more laws and incentives to convince the populace at large to recycle.
That in itself is a project of a generation. Worthwhile as hell because we produce the most trash of anyone, and it would certainly be to the entire world’s benefit if we could reduce our trash production so much, not to mention that we wouldn’t necessarily have to sacrifice our ability to innovate because we’d be re-using materials.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:30 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
1. Get the current administration out of office so that we have an EPA that isn’t run by someone who actively wants to pollute.
2. Figure out all the plants that produce the things we want to recycle, and all the recycling plants, and what they would need in order to make this system a reality.
3. Pass whatever federal and state laws would be required to enforce this new system.
4. Give all these plants sufficient time and/or money to overhaul their facilities to meet these new standards.
5. Train a workforce to run the plants.
6. Create more laws and incentives to convince the populace at large to recycle.
That in itself is a project of a generation. Worthwhile as hell because we produce the most trash of anyone, and it would certainly be to the entire world’s benefit if we could reduce our trash production so much, not to mention that we wouldn’t necessarily have to sacrifice our ability to innovate because we’d be re-using materials.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:30 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
And you know, maybe we have to conclude that we can’t effectively implement major enhancements like that in a democratic republic that is as large and subdivided as ours, and which believes strongly in the ideology of “You shouldn’t have to do something if you don’t want to”. China can do it because they have a communist society that tells its people, “We’re doing it this way and tough shit if you don’t like it,” not that their pollution and human rights record are anything to envy. A theocratic society like Saudi Arabia can’t do it because their extremely stringent limitations on acceptable behavior stifles innovation, even though they have plenty of wealth. An emerging economy may have the will to do it, and be in a good position socially to adopt a cutting-edge standard, but may not have the wealth needed to implement it.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:40 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 9:40 AM on August 11, 2018
But I think it bears recognizing that capitalism is not driving consumption.
Of course it is - if people didn't consume more and more, the economy would grind to a standstill. It's the entire job of companies to convince you to buy more stuff, especially high-profit margin stuff you don't need, so they can please their shareholders. Capitalism has to create desire for more to justify its existence.
posted by AFABulous at 9:45 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Of course it is - if people didn't consume more and more, the economy would grind to a standstill. It's the entire job of companies to convince you to buy more stuff, especially high-profit margin stuff you don't need, so they can please their shareholders. Capitalism has to create desire for more to justify its existence.
posted by AFABulous at 9:45 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
It would be the project of a generation because if you want to scale a system, you have to study the existing one first, so that’s a good few years right there. Because laws and regulations, and the education level of the workforce, varies so widely between states, you aren’t doing this once in one state, you’re doing it a dozen times in a dozen states. As I said earlier, duplication of effort murders efficiency, but since we allow states to vary their own regulations, then you have to understand how to get from point A to point Z in each of those systems, and then to bring point Z to a federalized standard in order to scale further.
Of course it is - if people didn't consume more and more, the economy would grind to a standstill. It's the entire job of companies to convince you to buy more stuff, especially high-profit margin stuff you don't need, so they can please their shareholders. Capitalism has to create desire for more to justify its existence.
Of course it isn’t, because non-capitalist societies still manufacture and consume stuff. Capitalism is the system of privately owned production, as opposed to state-owned. It is not the principle of “wanting more stuff”.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:49 AM on August 11, 2018
Of course it is - if people didn't consume more and more, the economy would grind to a standstill. It's the entire job of companies to convince you to buy more stuff, especially high-profit margin stuff you don't need, so they can please their shareholders. Capitalism has to create desire for more to justify its existence.
Of course it isn’t, because non-capitalist societies still manufacture and consume stuff. Capitalism is the system of privately owned production, as opposed to state-owned. It is not the principle of “wanting more stuff”.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:49 AM on August 11, 2018
For a piece about imagining a theoretical world without bullshit jobs, the thread is getting awful bogged down in discussions about the immediate practicalities of achieving implementation in the US.
posted by Dysk at 9:52 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Dysk at 9:52 AM on August 11, 2018
That’s a good point. But as others have pointed out, we do use the lion’s share of the world’s resources while encouraging a system of growing (and already significant) income inequality. So figuring our shit out would have a major impact on the rest of the global economy.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:58 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 9:58 AM on August 11, 2018
I would say instead that consumerism is a global phenomenon. Capitalism is just a means of facilitating it.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:07 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 10:07 AM on August 11, 2018
(Let me note the irony of my engaging in this discussion as I go around the house putting away things I bought from Costco, dismantling packaging, and putting my old phone in my pile of “electronics to be recycled” because I got a new phone.)
posted by Autumnheart at 10:09 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 10:09 AM on August 11, 2018
They're both global phenomena. Regardless, the derail on implementation in the current climate rather is beside the point of a piece attempting to define an endpoint, an ideal, and not a plan of action.
Capitalism is the underlying issue, because it is what leads us both to see the coupling of work and income as necessary, and it creates the inefficiencies of competition. Not just in redundancy and work duplication (though also that) but in that structure necessitating things like marketing (which I see as firmly falling into the "bullshit jobs" category) which contribute nothing to society as a whole, but serve to redistribute consumption toward an individual employer. Beneficial for your company? Yes. Beneficial for society? No. Could the few useful fringe benefits of marketing (awareness of new innovations, for example) be useful in a different context? Yes. But the fundamentally antagonistic setting inherent to marketing (buy our stuff, not our competitors') is not it. Maybe something more akin to consumer advice, a basically co-operative, rather than competitive setting.
But yes, fundamentally all of this requires us to dismantle the current capitalist market system, and decouple employment and income as part of that project.
posted by Dysk at 10:16 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Capitalism is the underlying issue, because it is what leads us both to see the coupling of work and income as necessary, and it creates the inefficiencies of competition. Not just in redundancy and work duplication (though also that) but in that structure necessitating things like marketing (which I see as firmly falling into the "bullshit jobs" category) which contribute nothing to society as a whole, but serve to redistribute consumption toward an individual employer. Beneficial for your company? Yes. Beneficial for society? No. Could the few useful fringe benefits of marketing (awareness of new innovations, for example) be useful in a different context? Yes. But the fundamentally antagonistic setting inherent to marketing (buy our stuff, not our competitors') is not it. Maybe something more akin to consumer advice, a basically co-operative, rather than competitive setting.
But yes, fundamentally all of this requires us to dismantle the current capitalist market system, and decouple employment and income as part of that project.
posted by Dysk at 10:16 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
What’s the point of defining an endpoint without considering the implications of implementing it in the current climate?
posted by Autumnheart at 10:18 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 10:18 AM on August 11, 2018
We don't all have the current political climate of the US, for one thing. Defining a goal is also a pretty necessary first step prior to planning or considering any kind of implementation, if what you're aiming at is a radical reconfiguration of context and expectations, rather than ending up working - and thinking - entirely within the constraints of current expectations, needs, desires, etc, etc. It's a big project. It is not the work of one generation.
And like - Graeber is an academic. This isn't an action plan, and isn't meant to be one.
posted by Dysk at 10:21 AM on August 11, 2018
And like - Graeber is an academic. This isn't an action plan, and isn't meant to be one.
posted by Dysk at 10:21 AM on August 11, 2018
Douglas Adams proposed a solution to this dilemma.
posted by Brachinus at 10:37 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Brachinus at 10:37 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
No, but the US does exist as an entity and presumably has a need to consider these issues. And you’re always going to have a “current climate” of whatever system in which you begin implementation. One could just as easily ask the question of, “How does one achieve this end in the context of Brexit?”
If Graebel is an academic and his article isn’t meant to have any practical application, then why did he write it? Just to complain about paper pushers? That just circles back to how people don’t know what’s involved in delivering a result, and therefore think that a system that works must have unnecessary actors. It’s been repeated in this thread about all the supposedly unnecessary fields—marketing, bridal consultants, tanning, basically all the shit where someone thinks, “I don’t think it’s useful, therefore it isn’t, therefore you should do without it and/or not perform that job” without considering the implications or even that some people might LIKE to be a bridal consultant.
If there’s one thing I definitely don’t want in a future society, it’s to be in one driven by people who don’t have imagination and who want to live a strictly functional existence. It’s one thing to want to make sure all of humanity’s basic needs are met and where all of our basic quality of life is as excellent a one as we can contrive. It’s entirely reasonable to say that we should strive to minimize our impact on our planetary resources so that we can continue to survive and thrive as a global ecosystem. It is ridiculous, though, to claim that people shouldn’t CONSUME, by some arbitrary definition of frivolous consumption. Consumption is part of the creative process, you stifle one and you stifle the other. I don’t want to live in a world where people stop creating because now there is shame attached to the idea of consuming. I don’t want to live in a world where people act like your vocation is “evil” because it inspires people to want more than what they currently have. That has never turned out well and is an idea straight out of George Orwell. No thanks.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:39 AM on August 11, 2018
If Graebel is an academic and his article isn’t meant to have any practical application, then why did he write it? Just to complain about paper pushers? That just circles back to how people don’t know what’s involved in delivering a result, and therefore think that a system that works must have unnecessary actors. It’s been repeated in this thread about all the supposedly unnecessary fields—marketing, bridal consultants, tanning, basically all the shit where someone thinks, “I don’t think it’s useful, therefore it isn’t, therefore you should do without it and/or not perform that job” without considering the implications or even that some people might LIKE to be a bridal consultant.
If there’s one thing I definitely don’t want in a future society, it’s to be in one driven by people who don’t have imagination and who want to live a strictly functional existence. It’s one thing to want to make sure all of humanity’s basic needs are met and where all of our basic quality of life is as excellent a one as we can contrive. It’s entirely reasonable to say that we should strive to minimize our impact on our planetary resources so that we can continue to survive and thrive as a global ecosystem. It is ridiculous, though, to claim that people shouldn’t CONSUME, by some arbitrary definition of frivolous consumption. Consumption is part of the creative process, you stifle one and you stifle the other. I don’t want to live in a world where people stop creating because now there is shame attached to the idea of consuming. I don’t want to live in a world where people act like your vocation is “evil” because it inspires people to want more than what they currently have. That has never turned out well and is an idea straight out of George Orwell. No thanks.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:39 AM on August 11, 2018
It would certainly bear thinking about what “real life” would actually look like, if the ideal is to consume less and get rid of bullshit jobs (assuming for the sake of argument that those have been eliminated). What is a person actually doing with their time on a day-to-day basis?
posted by Autumnheart at 10:47 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 10:47 AM on August 11, 2018
One could just as easily ask the question of, “How does one achieve this end in the context of Brexit?”
Indeed, and it would be just as irrelevant to the idea of imagining a better world or way of organising or doing things.
It is ridiculous, though, to claim that people shouldn’t CONSUME, by some arbitrary definition of frivolous consumption.
Indeed, and it is not something Graeber suggests.
I don’t want to live in a world where people act like your vocation is “evil” because it inspires people to want more than what they currently have.
Evil has been invoked in the thread an order of magnitude more often in defense against imagined arguments to that effect than they've actually been raised (literally one person). A job being bullshit doesn't make it evil, and it certainly doesn't make the person doing it evil. It just makes it not a meaningful contribution to society.
posted by Dysk at 10:48 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Indeed, and it would be just as irrelevant to the idea of imagining a better world or way of organising or doing things.
It is ridiculous, though, to claim that people shouldn’t CONSUME, by some arbitrary definition of frivolous consumption.
Indeed, and it is not something Graeber suggests.
I don’t want to live in a world where people act like your vocation is “evil” because it inspires people to want more than what they currently have.
Evil has been invoked in the thread an order of magnitude more often in defense against imagined arguments to that effect than they've actually been raised (literally one person). A job being bullshit doesn't make it evil, and it certainly doesn't make the person doing it evil. It just makes it not a meaningful contribution to society.
posted by Dysk at 10:48 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Why does a job have to have a meaningful contribution to society? It shouldn’t be a detriment to society, but it certainly shouldn’t have to be a “meaningful contribution”. There are plenty of jobs that exist simply because they facilitate our enjoyment.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:53 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Autumnheart at 10:53 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Why does a job have to have a meaningful contribution to society?
Because if it isn't useful, it shouldn't be a requirement of anyone. Nobody should be coerced, or have their livelihood or quality of life contingent on carrying them out. It isn't that nobody should do those things under any circumstances. It's that they shouldn't be jobs.
There are plenty of jobs that exist simply because they facilitate our enjoyment.
That is a meaningful contribution...
posted by Dysk at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Because if it isn't useful, it shouldn't be a requirement of anyone. Nobody should be coerced, or have their livelihood or quality of life contingent on carrying them out. It isn't that nobody should do those things under any circumstances. It's that they shouldn't be jobs.
There are plenty of jobs that exist simply because they facilitate our enjoyment.
That is a meaningful contribution...
posted by Dysk at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Again, framing this around bullshit jobs that aren’t meaningful to society makes it a moral argument. Most people are just trying to get by, and instead of being united, some people are told they contribute nothing to society. Graeber’s message should be empowering to everyone, even the people who make flavors for Starbucks, because we’re all in a capitalist system that compels us to use our time in service of other people. Instead, the discussion seems to be more “whose job is a bullshit job” without much commentary beyond why they’re bullshit. You can’t blame people for getting defensive.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:14 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:14 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
What I’m getting at is that ultimately most of the things we do in enjoyment are basically bullshit, and result in bullshit jobs.
If we were to eliminate the need for every individual to be entirely economically self-funding (through UBI or some other mechanism), so that instead people could choose their vocation to a certain extent, we would still wind up with a marketplace. You would still want to disseminate the products and ideas within the marketplace. You’d still have coffee shop baristas because people like coffee, including making it and being a connoisseur of it. You’d still have green yoga pants because people like yoga and the color green. And you’d still have marketers, because people would want to know where they could get some green yoga pants.
If the goal is to flatten inequality and share the marketplace as widely as possible (without trashing the planet) then yeah, that’d be an incredible benefit. But if the goal is to quash the marketplace, that would not be a benefit. I would say that the goal should not be to quash the marketplace, but instead to quash exploitation of it.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:19 AM on August 11, 2018
If we were to eliminate the need for every individual to be entirely economically self-funding (through UBI or some other mechanism), so that instead people could choose their vocation to a certain extent, we would still wind up with a marketplace. You would still want to disseminate the products and ideas within the marketplace. You’d still have coffee shop baristas because people like coffee, including making it and being a connoisseur of it. You’d still have green yoga pants because people like yoga and the color green. And you’d still have marketers, because people would want to know where they could get some green yoga pants.
If the goal is to flatten inequality and share the marketplace as widely as possible (without trashing the planet) then yeah, that’d be an incredible benefit. But if the goal is to quash the marketplace, that would not be a benefit. I would say that the goal should not be to quash the marketplace, but instead to quash exploitation of it.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:19 AM on August 11, 2018
In other words, you shouldn’t have to be a Starbucks barista in order to put a roof over your head, but you certainly should be allowed to be, insofar as the coffee industry can be managed in respect to fair trade and sustainable production.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:21 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 11:21 AM on August 11, 2018
Mod note: Heya, Autumnheart, you are commenting enough that you're basically dominating the thread this morning; at this point please chalk it up as position sufficiently expressed and let the room breathe a bit. Those of y'all wrapped up in that dynamic go ahead and likewise disengage.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:23 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:23 AM on August 11, 2018
No worries. I will take this opportunity to recycle my cardboard!
posted by Autumnheart at 11:24 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 11:24 AM on August 11, 2018
I fear that nothing's ever going to change for the better until we remove the concept of "busy work" from grade school education. We learn at a very early age that much of what teacher (and eventually boss) orders us to do is ultimately pointless ... beyond denying us that time to do some other thing that we might actually find meaningful, even if it's just playing, because what are children doing when they're playing? They're learning.
posted by philip-random at 11:44 AM on August 11, 2018
posted by philip-random at 11:44 AM on August 11, 2018
If we were to eliminate the need for every individual to be entirely economically self-funding (through UBI or some other mechanism), so that instead people could choose their vocation to a certain extent, we would still wind up with a marketplace. You would still want to disseminate the products and ideas within the marketplace. You’d still have coffee shop baristas because people like coffee, including making it and being a connoisseur of it. You’d still have green yoga pants because people like yoga and the color green. And you’d still have marketers, because people would want to know where they could get some green yoga pants.
Sure. And that's not a problem if they are no longer jobs but instead hobbies or pastimes. Things that aren't linked to your income. It's still work, but it's not about eliminating bullshit work. It's bullshit jobs.
posted by Dysk at 12:10 PM on August 11, 2018
Sure. And that's not a problem if they are no longer jobs but instead hobbies or pastimes. Things that aren't linked to your income. It's still work, but it's not about eliminating bullshit work. It's bullshit jobs.
posted by Dysk at 12:10 PM on August 11, 2018
some people are told they contribute nothing to society.
The first paragraph of the article, emphasis mine.
The first paragraph of the article, emphasis mine.
Is your job pointless? Do you feel that your position could be eliminated and everything would continue on just fine? Maybe, you think, society would even be a little better off if your job never existed?Slightly further down, emphasis mine:
Bullshit jobs are most often paid quite well, involve nice benefit packages, you’re treated like you’re important and actually are doing something that needs to be done — but in fact, you know you’re not.posted by AFABulous at 3:51 PM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place.
Right, except the way we talk about it keeps circling back to what we think of as bullshit jobs. Working at McDonald’s isn’t bullshit (because it provides people with food), but doing McDonald’s brand marketing is. Working at a Starbucks isn’t bullshit, but designing coffee flavors for them is. I like Graeber in general, but I feel like this sets it up so that we’re talking about jobs we think are bullshit, instead of what the workers themselves feel. Even Graeber seems to do it when he talks about corporate lawyers as if it’s a given that they provide no real value. This is why I think the framing is problematic, not because of how he presents it, but because of how it encourages us to think of other people’s jobs as without value to society. I’m not talking about how Graeber himself defines it, but how we all run with it.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:13 PM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:13 PM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
And again, I’m not saying this isn’t a bad thing to talk about, just that we’ve spent a lot of time hashing out which jobs are bullshit and which aren’t, which seems to make this conversation more divisive than it could have been.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:19 PM on August 11, 2018
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:19 PM on August 11, 2018
Burn Down All The Forests ... etc
After landing on prehistoric Earth, Ford meets the Golgafrinchams and discovers much to his chagrin, the secrets of human evolution - Management Consultants, Hairdressers and Phone Booth Hygienists.
posted by philip-random at 11:59 PM on August 11, 2018
After landing on prehistoric Earth, Ford meets the Golgafrinchams and discovers much to his chagrin, the secrets of human evolution - Management Consultants, Hairdressers and Phone Booth Hygienists.
posted by philip-random at 11:59 PM on August 11, 2018
We don't tend to accept that kind of defensiveness as valid or useful when it's the rich or employers or rent-seekers objecting to more common leftist analysis, so I'm not sure why it should be more useful or valid here? We don't sagely talk about how the the reactionary tendencies of the very rich is just their defensiveness in the face of positions arguing that extreme wealth is immoral.
Besides, people aren't being told they contribute nothing to society - they're being told their jobs don't. They probably still pay taxes, buy things, talk to people, have families, etc, etc. Your job is not your entire existence, contribution, or identity (and I think there is an extent to which viewing your job as your identity is much more common in the US than in many other places).
posted by Dysk at 12:12 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Besides, people aren't being told they contribute nothing to society - they're being told their jobs don't. They probably still pay taxes, buy things, talk to people, have families, etc, etc. Your job is not your entire existence, contribution, or identity (and I think there is an extent to which viewing your job as your identity is much more common in the US than in many other places).
posted by Dysk at 12:12 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Sure, but that undermines the notion that this is something you figure out for yourself. I thought the idea was that we consider what our labor is in service of? We’re not necessarily talking about the rich or the rent-seeking when we talk about bullshit jobs. At least, not unless we just want to draw that line along class boundaries, in which case I’m not sure what this adds. So Graeber says a bullshit job is one you feel has no value, except we all see these cases where we say we can make that determination from the outside. It has nothing to do with whether your career defines you, but there’s a moral component to being told, rather than deciding for yourself, that what you spend the bulk of your time doing contributes nothing to society. What’s the point of talking about bullshit jobs in the first place, if not to consider what we devote our time to? If people have made a determination that what they’re doing is meaningful, why write that off and compare it to the rich getting defensive about being rich? These aren’t necessarily bullshit jobs according to Graeber’s definition, but they keep being identified as such anyway.
My whole issue is that we imagine the people we’re attacking are worthwhile targets, without considering whether they actually are. Graeber offers a way for all workers to think about our jobs and our time by asking us to think about what we’re working in service of. It seems like it is just a divisive thing in practice, because it’s really easy to point at certain jobs and be like “well, that’s clearly bullshit.” I mean, is the point that some jobs are dumb, or that we shouldn’t feel compelled to devote our time to causes we don’t care about in order to justify our existence? It seems like there’s a distinction, and it seems like a lot of people want to keep circling back to which jobs are worthless.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:53 AM on August 12, 2018
My whole issue is that we imagine the people we’re attacking are worthwhile targets, without considering whether they actually are. Graeber offers a way for all workers to think about our jobs and our time by asking us to think about what we’re working in service of. It seems like it is just a divisive thing in practice, because it’s really easy to point at certain jobs and be like “well, that’s clearly bullshit.” I mean, is the point that some jobs are dumb, or that we shouldn’t feel compelled to devote our time to causes we don’t care about in order to justify our existence? It seems like there’s a distinction, and it seems like a lot of people want to keep circling back to which jobs are worthless.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:53 AM on August 12, 2018
but there’s a moral component to being told, rather than deciding for yourself, that what you spend the bulk of your time doing contributes nothing to society
Only if you think of your job as part of your identity. Otherwise it's just "yup it's bullshit" or "whatever" combined with "I do the thing to get a paycheck so I can eat". We're not attacking the people doing these jobs - we're attacking the employers they are in service of, and the system that allocates resources to enable it.
posted by Dysk at 2:35 AM on August 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
Only if you think of your job as part of your identity. Otherwise it's just "yup it's bullshit" or "whatever" combined with "I do the thing to get a paycheck so I can eat". We're not attacking the people doing these jobs - we're attacking the employers they are in service of, and the system that allocates resources to enable it.
posted by Dysk at 2:35 AM on August 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
If you read my comment, I literally included cell phones as something we should produce - but maybe, just maybe we could stop supporting a system where we focus on producing what are essentially disposable phones that cannot have batteries replaced or components swapped out.
The problem is how did we get to the point where we all accept that smart phones are valuable? We believe that now because we've gone through a few generations of wasteful short-lived phones. Before the first smartphone came out, you could just as easily have made that argument about the phones we hade then.
I continue to feel that Graeber's argument has something of the medieval moralist about it. It looks like on some emotional level he thinks that all jobs which are not directly producing (farmers and artisans) are fundamentally deceitful. He's like a 12th century monk looking down his nose at merchants because he doesn't understand what they actually add to society.
His argument isn't about specific goods and services being bullshit, it's about specific kinds of job being bullshit.
posted by atrazine at 5:13 AM on August 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
The problem is how did we get to the point where we all accept that smart phones are valuable? We believe that now because we've gone through a few generations of wasteful short-lived phones. Before the first smartphone came out, you could just as easily have made that argument about the phones we hade then.
I continue to feel that Graeber's argument has something of the medieval moralist about it. It looks like on some emotional level he thinks that all jobs which are not directly producing (farmers and artisans) are fundamentally deceitful. He's like a 12th century monk looking down his nose at merchants because he doesn't understand what they actually add to society.
His argument isn't about specific goods and services being bullshit, it's about specific kinds of job being bullshit.
posted by atrazine at 5:13 AM on August 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
This is thought provoking.
I keep thinking about one of the jobs my dad did - he spent nearly a decade working on the technical, tedious intricacies of various software systems that feed a sports entertainment company's products. It wasn't lifesaving work, and everyone there knew that, but the end result made a lot of people happy (and made its own little contribution to the larger tech industry) so I know they didn't consider it bullshit. I know other folks would see it as meaningless froth and yet the market clearly demonstrates that folks want/enjoy/value stuff like Fantasy Football and I fail to see the harm with that. It has value.
My current job isn't bullshit at all - the outcome if we're successful is a pretty textbook example of Important Work - but the number of hours I spend on political BS feel pretty bullshit nonetheless. Still, I recognize that the time I spend having circular arguments and debate in buzzwords is a crucial part of getting from Point A to Point B. A lot of those circular argument happen because we do things without neat-and-tidy answers, and all of the arguments have important points. It's frustrating and feels wasteful in the moment but when I step back I don't think it's really all so wasteful after all.
I know I struggle with consumerism and messages about things that will make me happy (that ultimately do no such thing) but I consider the appropriate solution to that to be some level of introspection/community engagement/self-directed work, not regulating all consumerism out of existence (and certainly not determining what constitutes value to other folks).
posted by mosst at 7:40 AM on August 13, 2018
I keep thinking about one of the jobs my dad did - he spent nearly a decade working on the technical, tedious intricacies of various software systems that feed a sports entertainment company's products. It wasn't lifesaving work, and everyone there knew that, but the end result made a lot of people happy (and made its own little contribution to the larger tech industry) so I know they didn't consider it bullshit. I know other folks would see it as meaningless froth and yet the market clearly demonstrates that folks want/enjoy/value stuff like Fantasy Football and I fail to see the harm with that. It has value.
My current job isn't bullshit at all - the outcome if we're successful is a pretty textbook example of Important Work - but the number of hours I spend on political BS feel pretty bullshit nonetheless. Still, I recognize that the time I spend having circular arguments and debate in buzzwords is a crucial part of getting from Point A to Point B. A lot of those circular argument happen because we do things without neat-and-tidy answers, and all of the arguments have important points. It's frustrating and feels wasteful in the moment but when I step back I don't think it's really all so wasteful after all.
I know I struggle with consumerism and messages about things that will make me happy (that ultimately do no such thing) but I consider the appropriate solution to that to be some level of introspection/community engagement/self-directed work, not regulating all consumerism out of existence (and certainly not determining what constitutes value to other folks).
posted by mosst at 7:40 AM on August 13, 2018
Maybe this would be easier to grok if we separated bullshit work from bullshit jobs, which some people are taking to mean that the employee is somehow lesser.
Bullshit work is work that is not necessary to produce the final product or service. Remember that government employee in Spain who collected a check for 5 years despite never showing up? His work was bullshit because it didn't impact the service his department was providing. (He went to jail, IIRC, but that's a different issue.)
I was laid off last year. The company is still in business, likely producing the same amount of widgets (or more). I believe my job made their processes and my team more efficient, and I collected data/produced reports that helped them make decisions, but ultimately it was not deemed necessary work. The company's end product is unequivocally important to society. But there were and are many employees that are not essential to completing that mission.
We can endlessly quibble over whether (e.g.) sports entertainment is necessary to society, but I think the real question is whether (e.g.) ESPN would still exist in its current functional form if certain work was eliminated. If so, that's bullshit work. Society would be better served if those people were doing non-bullshit work. Maybe that's making ESPN even better at what it does, or expanding its mission to cover competitive gardening and extreme knitting.
posted by AFABulous at 11:44 AM on August 13, 2018
Bullshit work is work that is not necessary to produce the final product or service. Remember that government employee in Spain who collected a check for 5 years despite never showing up? His work was bullshit because it didn't impact the service his department was providing. (He went to jail, IIRC, but that's a different issue.)
I was laid off last year. The company is still in business, likely producing the same amount of widgets (or more). I believe my job made their processes and my team more efficient, and I collected data/produced reports that helped them make decisions, but ultimately it was not deemed necessary work. The company's end product is unequivocally important to society. But there were and are many employees that are not essential to completing that mission.
We can endlessly quibble over whether (e.g.) sports entertainment is necessary to society, but I think the real question is whether (e.g.) ESPN would still exist in its current functional form if certain work was eliminated. If so, that's bullshit work. Society would be better served if those people were doing non-bullshit work. Maybe that's making ESPN even better at what it does, or expanding its mission to cover competitive gardening and extreme knitting.
posted by AFABulous at 11:44 AM on August 13, 2018
> Seriously? Google nursing shortage, this has been a well known problem for years in the US.
Honestly curious as to whether we have a natural shortage of nurses, or whether we just don't pay them enough, triggering a shortage.
posted by talldean at 12:31 PM on August 14, 2018 [1 favorite]
Honestly curious as to whether we have a natural shortage of nurses, or whether we just don't pay them enough, triggering a shortage.
posted by talldean at 12:31 PM on August 14, 2018 [1 favorite]
Nurses can get paid quite handsomely, but I think most people don’t know this. Also, bodies are gross and lots of people don’t want to deal with that.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:57 PM on August 14, 2018
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:57 PM on August 14, 2018
I had a friend who in her '30s started a second career as a nurse. The nursing shortage was in the news a lot at the time. My observation was that a part of the shortage might be the training. The public institutions' programs were all waitlisted, she ended up paying for private and then got a really impressive but intense education for, as LizBoBiz points out, the privilege of doing gross stuff.
posted by mark k at 6:28 PM on August 14, 2018
posted by mark k at 6:28 PM on August 14, 2018
Just because your boss or the market thinks your job is valuable doesn't mean it isn't bullshit. Your boss and/or the market don't get to declare whether something is valuable in a "this is genuinely of value" sense, they can just determine how much money they'd be willing to spend on it (aka, how much their liable to make from it). And money doesn't equal value. Love is valuable and yet nobody's boss and no market is going to pay you a premium to fall in love, because as valuable as love is, it isn't profitable. And capitalism isn't about value, it's about profit. Like I said earlier, it is financially profitable (from my employer's perspective) for me to work my job, but that doesn't make it valuable, that doesn't mean it's not bullshit.
I don't know why people are getting defensive about how bullshitty or not their individual jobs are. If you're working a bullshit job, it's sad because it means that the structure of our society is making you waste your labor and your very life when you could be doing something better or at least more fun with that time. The point is the opportunity cost. The TPS report might represent some marginal value to at least one other person, I guess, but at what cost was it created? What human potential will never come to fruition because that TPS had to get filed just so? That's why shorter work hours and mandated time off are not just quality of life or even human rights issues, they're important for society as a whole. People who aren't chained to their desks doing bullshit are going to be healthier and happier and *more productive* in their lives as a whole. They're going to have time to raise their kids or help their community or exercise or write the Great American Novel or invent a perpetual motion machine or whatever, because they aren't wasting their time stressing over yet more meaningless reports. They'll be spending their time based on what's most valuable, not what's most profitable (for their boss).
My job has been worth it for me personally, because it has been a huge learning experience and I got the chance to gain some skills that I genuinely care about and will be able to put into use. It's also been great for my life to have the structure of the job, and the paychecks haven't been too bad, either. I'm not saying I'm too good for my job in any sense. But if the world were a better place, structured so that people weren't forced to waste their lives on trivial bullshit in order to survive, then my job probably wouldn't exist, because my employer probably wouldn't exist, because the industry of taking care of money for people that have so much of it that they aren't willing or capable of taking care of it themselves probably wouldn't exist. I don't hate my job but I do wish the world were that better place. Not that I know what I'd be doing there, though! Hard to imagine a world with no bullshit jobs!
I guess it comes back to that old saw, "if nobody had to work, who would clean up the garbage?" I always thought that in that case, we'd all just have to pitch in and take turns cleaning up the garbage. So I guess what I'm saying is that maybe there will never be no meaningless, waste-of-potential jobs, since even if the bullshit were cut there would still be the drudgery to deal with, but we could all share the bull/shit instead of burdening just some people and overwhelming their lives with that burden.
posted by rue72 at 8:54 PM on August 14, 2018
I don't know why people are getting defensive about how bullshitty or not their individual jobs are. If you're working a bullshit job, it's sad because it means that the structure of our society is making you waste your labor and your very life when you could be doing something better or at least more fun with that time. The point is the opportunity cost. The TPS report might represent some marginal value to at least one other person, I guess, but at what cost was it created? What human potential will never come to fruition because that TPS had to get filed just so? That's why shorter work hours and mandated time off are not just quality of life or even human rights issues, they're important for society as a whole. People who aren't chained to their desks doing bullshit are going to be healthier and happier and *more productive* in their lives as a whole. They're going to have time to raise their kids or help their community or exercise or write the Great American Novel or invent a perpetual motion machine or whatever, because they aren't wasting their time stressing over yet more meaningless reports. They'll be spending their time based on what's most valuable, not what's most profitable (for their boss).
My job has been worth it for me personally, because it has been a huge learning experience and I got the chance to gain some skills that I genuinely care about and will be able to put into use. It's also been great for my life to have the structure of the job, and the paychecks haven't been too bad, either. I'm not saying I'm too good for my job in any sense. But if the world were a better place, structured so that people weren't forced to waste their lives on trivial bullshit in order to survive, then my job probably wouldn't exist, because my employer probably wouldn't exist, because the industry of taking care of money for people that have so much of it that they aren't willing or capable of taking care of it themselves probably wouldn't exist. I don't hate my job but I do wish the world were that better place. Not that I know what I'd be doing there, though! Hard to imagine a world with no bullshit jobs!
I guess it comes back to that old saw, "if nobody had to work, who would clean up the garbage?" I always thought that in that case, we'd all just have to pitch in and take turns cleaning up the garbage. So I guess what I'm saying is that maybe there will never be no meaningless, waste-of-potential jobs, since even if the bullshit were cut there would still be the drudgery to deal with, but we could all share the bull/shit instead of burdening just some people and overwhelming their lives with that burden.
posted by rue72 at 8:54 PM on August 14, 2018
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And why spend all your time railing on unions and Obama when there is another entire political party cutting away the value of every job, except for CEO?
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:10 PM on August 10, 2018 [46 favorites]