The "Bullshit Jobs" phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1/2 the population digging holes so the other 1/2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.
I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?" is a difficult enough question to answer when you're a philosopher who has studied the problem academically and you're surrounded by other people going about their productive lives and overcoming various challenges in order to survive.
Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.
Instead of telling people to play video games or go kayaking, I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated. These are "jobs" that I would argue robots cannot meaningfully fill, but which society would benefit from a lot more of.
"I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated."
I think a large portion would choose video games over this...
What about "video games with the elderly, video games with children, video games with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated in speedrunning"?
How bout play video games with elderly hospice patients while holding hands with a convicted pedophile who is holding hands with a racist who is holding hands with a child who is playing video games with their other hand all on one big sofa while on a rocketship to the moon. But wait ... that's no moon!
Those who "play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice" will likely have more successful encounters with the opposite sex than those who choose video games.
If they don't want to, that's fine with me. Just offering some options for people (like me) who still want a meaningful way to contribute to society, in a world where robots do most of our current jobs.
Yes, a large portion of the elderly, children, and formerly incarcerated (maybe less the dying in hospice) would choose video games as the shared activity. That’s okay, too.
Maybe they would, and its their own prerogative as to how they wish to spend their time.
For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.
Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.
But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.
It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.
I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.
You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.
The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.
I don't anticipate everyone wanting to do this, and I definitely don't picture anyone wanting to do "work" for 40 hours a week in a world where work is optional. I would think some people will want to do a few hours a week of something in the category I'm describing, and many people will elect other forms of meaning in their life (maybe they love whittling driftwood or golfing or just want to watch AI-generated movies all day. That's fine.) The whole point is we'll have options, so there will be some supply/demand curve for meaningful human interaction that will find equilibrium.
Right, or plant trees, clean up trash from the creeks rivers or oceans, take on foster kids and really invest time in giving them the best start possible, help refugees integrate into society, work on creating a sense of community with your neighbours, fix or repurpose trash to help reduce landfill, prioritise your health, start walking or cycling places rather than driving even if it takes longer (since time is now something you have lots of), create art, basically deal with some of the negative externalities and/or undervalued services that modern capitalism addresses so poorly.. and hopefully in the process create a life that is fulfilling and enjoyable for yourself and others.
My conviction is that there are literally infinite ways to be useful, and always will be, even if the robot overlords work perfectly, which they won't.
My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.
Have a look at the FIRE community and see how difficult it can be to create meaning and a fulfilling life.
Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.
FIRE is a good cautionary example, but I think it makes the point I wanted to get at: people start out as little meaning-making machines. They connect deeply with each other, interact easily, enjoy their lives. Then we ruin that.
The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.
There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.
Haha, yeah, that's not a bad comparison. Adults intoxicated to a helpful degree behave kind of like children before the modern world grinds away their joy.
Not necessarily, but every bullshit job pays the bills and most of them give at least a social context and a form of identification.
Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.
Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".
This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.
(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)
I think you raise a valid point, but it was ever thus. Every time we level up in technology, we essentially give everybody some of the life possibilities - and problems - of aristocrats, 100 years ago.
Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.
Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.
Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.
And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.
We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.
Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.
Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.
And that message is actually pretty recent. Before the 20th century you could just go off into the wilderness, build your own house, catch or grow your own food, and then just do whatever you wanted without ever needing money once all of that was taken care of. The work of survival itself was the mental stimulation, and when that work was over you went in search of other stimulation. Nowadays there's a chain of reliance and ownership where you can't settle without purchasing the land, can't build your own house without purchasing the licensing and permits, can't catch your own food without a license or outside of season (and even then you're limited to a certain amount of catch), and need to buy or invest in things deemed necessary to participate in society like cellphones and bank accounts. You can grow your own garden to feed yourself, provided you own the land, but that's limited by seeds you have to buy and whatever regulations apply where you live. Essentially the only stimulation you get is by the excessive amounts of entertainment we have now, because most modern jobs aren't providing anything.
There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.
In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?"
Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.
That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.
We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.
Even smoking weed and playing video games doesn’t scale. Someone needs to grow the weed and make the video games. Someone has to feed and minimally clothe the weed-smoker. Someone must build and maintain the weed-smoker’s house.
Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.
For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.
And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.
That is not the point. If you can produce 4x as much with 1/4th the labour, then at the very least those labourers can work much much less than they do now. 15 hour work weeks are feasible TODAY, let alone after further labour-saving tech that the future will bring us.
It suggested that locking people in solitary confinement, even in the relative luxury of their own homes, is a torture to be avoided. It had little to do with, for or against, the idea that maybe making up worthless jobs to keep people busy being a good idea.
> there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage
Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.
We tell them to build. There are planet scale transformations underway and we need another incarnation of the WPA to help mitigate the impacts.
For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?
What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.
How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!
Find yourself in nature won't scale, and smoke weed and play videogames is hollow.
I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.
The exception to that is highly social games. I did genuinely feel a sense of accomplishment when me and 4 friends would crush another team in league of legends. Or the old World of Warcraft raids involved coordinating 40 people and felt meaningful to execute.
Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.
Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.
It would be nice to have UBI and be able to take a mid week day off and walk around town. Hell maybe go clean up a local park to get my steps in for the day.
Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.
A truly ridiculous amount of current work could be automated with today's tech and massive capital investment. And by today's tech, I don't even include current advances in ML. Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment. Retail stores, likewise. Self-driving vehicles are trivial when you stick 'em on rails, there's a big chunk of the cargo industry gone. Longshoreman-free ports, all that and more.
Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.
Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.
> Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment.
I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.
I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.
But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.
Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.
If by "we" you mean Washington, DC - I guess I could believe that since it's one of the highest per-capita income cities in the world. But park sweeping robots are nowhere near reality for most cities in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
I'll make a hash of this, sorry... Please amend, correct as needed:
Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.
Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).
Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.
Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.
Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.
Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.
Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.
I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)
It's so sad that Graeber passed.
There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.
The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.
Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf
Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.
Population rate is declining, and in the next couple of decades many first world countries are expected to have a population collapse.
I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.
However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.
Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.
Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.
A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.
Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.
I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.
In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.
But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.
Yeah. Even when I am taking my mandatory time off work, I spend it coding things.
Lots of people project this “you just want to be lazy”, but honestly, that’s not it at all. Hordes of people cannot just sit around and watch tv, as is demonstrated by the wealth of people who retire and then become extremely bored.
Contributing where you want to contribute is a very much different thing than just wanting to be lazy.
>A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.
>Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.
Reminds me of an Onion article that's stuck in my mind: "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive"
It's very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren't about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn't collapse during "shut downs" of certain activities, but we can't get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice. We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID's medical specifics and surrounding culture war.
For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.
> and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.
This will never, ever not be the case. Working age people today don’t even expect social security to exist when they need it. How could you possibly guarantee a UBI to the level you’re asking?
A huge wave of immigration from people fleeing the effects of climate change or meaningfully extending average lifetimes could change the calculation of population "collapse."
==Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking.==
Is this from your personal experience or is there a study that shows this outcome?
There's a far more fundamental drive in humanity than the drive to become wealthy -- it's the drive to mate. Those who are successful and productive have a fundamental advantage in the mating game than those who watch TV all day. That's not going to change whether we use money to keep score or not.
There is nuance. There might be a drive to have sex, but not necessarily reproduce. When women are empowered, have agency, and there is robust access to contraceptives, the total fertility rate declines below replacement rate. High status marketplace participants will be advantaged, but not everyone might value that chase or advantage. Some chase wealth, some status, some power, some happiness.
I remember record usage being reported through streaming services earnings reports and or media. Anecdotally I can confirm that is what many in my circle of friends did.
I remember I was very motivated at the start of lockdowns but 3 months in I had basically resorted to binging video games for the rest of the 7 months.
> So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
With all due respect to mister Fuller, this sounds like bullshit from someone that hasn't worked in manufacturing.
Quality manufacturing processes are hard, and this complexity only increases with the sophistication of what's being produced. Usually, the measurement systems in place are a tradeoff between cost, efficacy, and regulatory requirements - and I guarantee if an inspection can be removed, some engineer is begging to do it.
I think the idea is to use humans and robots to make progress, not be complacent with existing jobs.
There's always more work to be done. There will always be details discovered that are not automated yet. There will always be new topics unexplored that robots have not been built for yet. A general purpose robot is by definition a "jack of all trades" compromise that cannot do what specialized humans do first.
This need for humans to explore is where all the progress and all the money is, and how you fight off both the bullshit jobs and AI taking our jobs.
If such a scenario were recognized, and we end up with something like UBI, how does one 'get ahead?' It seems some people are always wanting and willing to get ahead, either through multiple jobs, long hours, or study. Is that dream now crushed into just do nothing and exist like everyone else? The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.
Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.
> Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.
One technicality that blocks me is something I encountered not that long ago...
How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house's clogged pipe? I had to do that: toilets wouldn't flush anymore, shits floating and all. I didn't know where the pipes were exactly and one them, the last one before the sewers, was clogged. So basically 40 meters of shit blocked inside the pipe, which then started overflowing on the property, for weeks (or months), unnoticed.
The plumber couldn't come immediately (it was a sunday late in the afternoon) but would be there next morning.
So for five hours I dig into human manure to find the damn pipe (which I more or less knew where it was located). It saved the plumber five hours of digging into, literally, shit and piss (saved me five hours of billing and five hours of waiting for things to be fixed too).
In that "without working" society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?
Easy, if you do nothing the market deems productive, be it playing games all day or tutoring poor kids in maths, you only get the UBI which equals ~minimum survivability income.
If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth).
There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.
These are the exact things we should be trying to automate rather than automating away writers, artists, actors etc. Personally I think it all depends on getting a humanoid Boston Dynamics style robot made. Once you've got that done, you hook it up so it can be controlled remotely via VR. Then you get trades people and workers of menial jobs to control these robots and start doing these unpleasant tasks. Once you've done that enough years and collected enough data, then you can build an AI for plumbing, garbage collecting etc. Then you can have robots that can do literally any task, you just have to load the right module into them like Neo in the Matrix.
Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.
Expecting everyone to get a PhD is ridiculous. Even granting people enough time and enough Universities to manage this, there's a limit to half the world's intelligence. Unless you dumb down the meaning of a PhD, this isn't a realistic goal.
A few hundred years ago expecting everyone to be literate was thought ridiculous. Many people today think that everyone learning to code is ridiculous, yet I would wager that in 100 years, people will look back and wonder how people could get by when only 10% of the country were code literate. The standard of education rises continually throughout time. The PhD will become the new normal, just like the Masters degree is increasingly becoming the new normal today.
Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow:
Current completion rates for doctoral program hovers around 56%. And that's with a huge gating process filtering out unqualified candidates. The idea that this will become a norm is just not realistic. A Bachelor's degree is averaging six years now, a Masters another two/three and a PhD ten. Expecting people to spend 18-20 years to achieve a PhD just goes against all trends unless the three degrees become seriously degraded in standards.
> How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house’s clogged pipe?
Same as today, with money.
Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater.
UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs.
> In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working?
Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.
The false assumption here is that people are naturally inclined to do nothing unless given money.
In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money.
Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.
I think the UBI argument is that the cost of those shit-digging jobs will have to significantly rise to the actual price of finding someone willing to do them.
If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr.
If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.
I don't understand, jobs don't become pro bono if there's UBI lol. Salaries still exist. Actually, if anything, they become more valuable.
And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.
That's how robots will take over the world. We know that giving robots intelligence, agency and physical power is a bad idea, but if we don't do that we'll have to dig the shit ourselves.
I think the idea of what it means to "get ahead" would change. For example, with UBI I'd still work part time at a coffeeshop to save up money to turn my long-time hobby into a small business. That's a way to "get ahead" in a way that personally fulfills me. I don't need to become the next 30 under 30, or show up on some list for my success. Just the personal satisfaction of being able to say "I did this, and I'm proud of it. I hope you can enjoy it too".
Of course, those who do want to show up on that 30 under 30 list can make different choices to get ahead in the way they interpret that meaning.
UBI brings more options for people to dedicate to new ideas, new inventions, new ways of thinking. It doesn't restrict the choices of any citizen, it opens up more choices. Getting ahead still exists, and those who want it can go for it, that option wouldn't be taken away from them.
Sure, some people want to get ahead just for the feeling that they're doing better than most people, but a lot of people try to get ahead out of fear of not having enough. In a system where everyone has enough wouldn't that fear be at least greatly diminished?
I think there is a pretty strong case that "having enough" is very much a moving target and now matter how much many people have it's not "enough". I see a lot of evidence that it's impossible to have a system where everyone has enough and I haven't seen a lot of evidence that it is possible to build such a system.
All it does is give everyone access to enough resources for basic survival, not Ferraris, which will still exist and continue to motivate some to be Vikings.
Why does getting ahead have to mean money? In a Star Trek utopia where money is meaningless, everybody can become one of the best in the world in some small niche.
Star Trek utopia always smelled unworkable... It really leaves way too many open questions of how does that economy really work. Most media is about the absolute elite of that society. Or their relatives.
It never truly answered where the non replicable resources come from.
By learning things? By knowing and liking many things? By knowing and liking many people? By being very good at a unique permutation of skills, and using them to improve your life and that of your friends, having great adventures and whatnot?
> The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.
Which would not be a problem, since all other super rich people would be taxed at the same "insane" rate, leaving the "getting ahead" relative to your peers completely untouched -- if that was really the issue, if people really couldn't think of ways to stand out amongst others other than the amount of money they "make" (it's just shifted around after all).
The problem is exploitation I'd say, and even that is not an end in and of itself, it's just a necessary nuisance that is optimized away wherever possible, leaving pure ownership of pure [0] means of production in very, very few hands. The rest gets nothing, and since humans cannot persist on that, cease to exist shortly after.
Compared the trajectory we're on -- the scenario we're in -- the technicalities of how to make the world somewhat human and livable instead of just an insane runaway train seem rather minor to me.
[0] As in, basically no workers, no more than you can personally oversee or even be yourself. I know that will never be "fully achieved" but I think that's splitting hairs. It's the trend, we keep accelerating and making previously thought impossible tools of dystopia real, who cares if there will ever be just one dude in a toga living forever commanding a blob of energy that can do and create anything, except make him sane.
Whenever I consider the UBI and "bullshit jobs" arguments, I end up thinking about jobs that we might need but don't inherently create economic value. In a society where we reward jobs that "create value" and have everyone else on UBI, who manages the country, who fights the wars, who modernizes the military? Perhaps these roles are also relics of the past which should fade away. Is being a lawyer a job that creates value or one that exists solely due to the necessities of a flawed system?
As tech enthusiasts, we often envision a Star Trek future where all value originates from science and technology, and everyone else has to justify their existence. To some extent, I understand this view, but it will never fully materialize.
Any practical system will be shaped by its current participants: politicians, governments, etc. So, by definition, "bullshit jobs" will be recognized as respectable in any system designed by humanity. In fact, they will be enshrined as the elite class, and then the entire utopia morphs into a mirror of our existing society. Those at the top remain entrenched indefinitely, while those at the bottom are viewed as providing no value—except now, this perception might be closer to the truth.
It takes a huge amount of actual human effort to do all the most important jobs in society: grow food, transport food, make clothing, transport it, build housing, repair housing, build things for growing food and transporting clothing, healthcare, building hospitals... we are not remotely close to replacing the need for vast amounts of human labor for our most basic needs. We have huge trade shortages. We have bridges collapsing. Fuller's assertions are total fucking nonsense, only someone extremely insulated from the real world could believe what you just quoted.
The number of bullshit jobs is always small; first level managers manage a team of people. You have mid level managers managing several managers, etc, but the frontline workers always vastly outnumber management, even in bloated organizations.
And yeah, people should justify their existence by contributing to society. Dismissing that idea off-hand is absurd.
Why is your response to "everyone should contribute to society" basically an accusation?
Obviously I mean everyone who is capable of doing so. Those who are capable but unwilling? I wish them luck, but they are owed nothing by the rest of us.
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest
This comment misses the alternative - continue working and produce even more. No, not more production for things like cars or other consumer items - more production to pay for things like social benefits, better healthcare, etc.
> we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population.
People will point out that the solution would be the opposite: a decreasing population.
But that is not cost-free and basically is swapping a set of problems for another set of problems. Even then "swapping" is a promise at-best. We could end with two sets of problems instead of one.
The thing is, if you have growing productivity but a stagnant population, either everyone works less hours or some people work and others don't work at all. So economists say we should grow the economy so everyone has enough busy work. Whether that growth is actually necessary or not doesn't matter.
Frankly there is no surer sign that the opponents of "the system" are running out of material than this god-awful "bullshit jobs" argument. We are not going to restructure our economy and raise other people's taxes to spare anyone the first-world problem of having a lame job.
If you don’t maintain your own means of making a living then your mode of living will end up owning you. This seems to happen every single time. I don’t think there’s ever been a single person who is a permanent dependent that didn’t ultimately end up as a subject or slave to the provider.
Everyone will be athlete, entertainers, artists, caregivers, blue-collars while robots are not very high-dexterity, doctors and nurse, scientists, deep space explorers... And what not.
The end of white-collars.
>more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.
Yes, and then firms like OpenAI come in and automate those BS jobs, and take away all the societal upside of their existence. OpenAI will thrive, at first, by undoing the intricate scaffolding of lies that buttresses BS jobs. The country will either embrace socialism at that point, or perhaps there will be a Butlerian (buttressarian?) jihad of some kind in foolish attempt to put two genies back in the bottle.
And who knows what will work to keep us alive and relatively thriving in the future? It seems clear to me that belief in a fantasy panopticon, if not taken to an extreme, was a useful part of society. It is strictly better than a real panopticon or no panopticon - and who could have guessed that from first principles? Perhaps it really is better to have BS jobs than overt socialism. Maybe people really do feel better believing their work makes a difference rather than just existing and knowing they do nothing. Idealists want to believe that people will thrive with the truth, but I think that's demonstrably false.
The thing about BS jobs is you could eliminate the position entirely and nothing would happen. The point of the BS job is to be filled with bodies so there is no reason to automate it.
The problem we have is that the people who still have to work in order to keep the robots on etc won't want to pay for the scum people to have 15 children
Food and bars is one sector I could honestly see to be run as hobbies. Maybe bad customers would be shown door or the opening times would be erratic, but there is plenty of people who could run one as part of self-fulfilment. This scaling to feeding everyone everyday might be harder.
Well, automation optimized away most need for physical work. Information technology and economies of scale optimized away a lot of thinking. So, the only driving factor behind many jobs is now the power dynamics.
Power is when you can tell another person to change and they are forced to do as you tell them. So, the more power-driven your corporate ladder becomes, the more useless jobs it creates. The whole purpose of those jobs is to please the boss and contribute to their feeling of power. The actual economic output of the job can be zero, or negative, as long as is produces "power output" to the next level of management.
Normally, when companies are forced to compete against each other, playing the power ladder too much makes you uncompetitive, so you are forced to bring merit back on the table. Except, the zero interest rates of the whole decade and the uncontrolled mergers have mostly destroyed this. So yeah, unemployment is low now, but every job sucks and people are miserable.
Automation helps, but there are plenty of jobs requiring physical labor. They’re often low paid from a worker’s perspective and very pricey from a retail customer’s perspective. Consider child care. Often this isn’t about middlemen taking profits, but rather because the work doesn’t scale and people expect pay similar to industries that do scale.
Office work often is in industries that scale very well and they can afford to be less efficient.
Amazing how many people who are smart enough to engineer software fail to comprehend that these things are necessary for success. If you are starting a company or currently running a company, the adage of "if they build it they will come" is not true, and your finances will not miraculously manage themselves and once you reach a headcount of anything outside founders and a few direct reporting employees you will have to find some one to spend at least a portion of their bandwidth preparing/planning work and focusing peoples time and energy.
Obviously there are "bullshit" jobs, as people love to reference, in massive company's with thousands of employees and a billion dollars in assets - but... ok? Of course massive bureaucracies contain some level of redundancy and cruft but, even still a lot of that is actually by design from a planning perspective.
The best Engineers tend to be those who have humility to recognize that we are working as a team across all functions, but I've seen people with this lack of humility across all roles (Finance, Sales, Mgmt, etc) in my experience. HN just tends to attract a certain type of smooth brain.
Funny to post an anti-marketing rant with a link to youtube, a site full of marketing. Here's an invidious link instead: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
The mere existence of marketing and sales is a really good example of why unregulated capitalism (heck, even heavily regulated capitalism) doesn't perform well or do the things we would want an economic value system to do. Maximizing profits by selling useless products to people who don't need them isn't progress, but under capitalism it's oh so smart to do in the short term.
I love that we worry about AI maximizing the wrong objective function and killing us all, when our own economic system is already doing that for us and has been for over a century.
"Maximizing profits by selling useless products to people who don't need them isn't progress"
And who are you (or anyone else) to decide the utility some thing has for someone else? I say this as a guy that only buys a new phone every 10 years, usually because, after swapping 2 or three batteries and learning how to use a soldering iron along the way, I finally dropped it and broke it beyond repair.
Capitalism is the most amazing "invention" the human race ever achieved. The masses of ignorant fools that spend on things they "don't really need" are what creates the jobs maaaany other people around the world REALLY NEED to sustain theirs and their families lives.
Being born and raised, and still residing, on a 3rd world country it amazes me to no end seeing the childish ignorance the average HN commenter have about how the world works. Being that the average HN commenter is an IT worker from the american coastal regions, it seems understandable that he is going to believe a world can exist, in this thermodinamically bound universe of ours, where resources can be magically given to anyone, regardless of their merits in working towards generating a part of it.
There ain't no free lunches, just as there ain't no free robot technicians to fix them after they invitably broke apart. Even in 1000 years, after maybe humanity could have achieved a level of technological advance where it "could exist", how in the hell would the darwinistic forces of competition, to gather more resources to impress a potential mate, end the necessity to work? It's so silly to see people that reap the benefits of the free market and the hard work of millions of people trying to make their life better every day literally discussing UBI and nonsense like that.
Somehow you've convinced yourself that the widespread exploitation of economically inferior nations by the first world is actually beneficial to those nations which is wild to me. I would argue that the massive amount of human capital dedicated to creating useless trinkets and baubles for first world consumers would be better served improving the countries in which they live. A worker in an impoverished country toiling away to manufacture fast fashion or e-waste that will ultimately only serve to fill a landfill is understandably only doing what they must to survive, but don't pretend that that somehow makes it beneficial for themselves or the planet as a whole.
> It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless.
It's important to remember that asking people about stuff like this—the pointlessness of their job, their perception of safety, how happy they are—is problematic because in the end it just comes down to how they choose to define the meaning of a concept to themselves, how they are feeling on a particular day, how the question is asked, and so many other factors. Ask the same person again under different circumstances, or present the question differently, and you may very well get a different response. I don't take studies like this with a grain of salt, I assume they are packed in salt, like barrels of cod on a transatlantic sailing voyage in the 18th century.
It's not just the methodology that's silly, this whole line of "research" is silly and the press release is misrepresenting the paper's results. It's perhaps a useful jumping off point for people to complain about their own jobs but as a work of scholarship it has negative value. The author claims he wasn't funded by anyone, and hopefully that's true but it sounds unlikely given that the university is apparently happy to advertise it for him.
Although their announcement states that "employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society" this is highly deceptive. If we look at Figure 1 on page 12 ("percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation") then we see that the winner is Transportation and Material Moving. Second top category: Production Occupations.
Well it sure doesn't get more useless than those jobs! Who needs people who make things or move stuff around?
Management actually does much better than Computer/Mathematical and Food Preparation/Service. Business and Financial apparently has the same number of socially useless jobs as Installation/Maintenance/Repair. That result directly contradicts his primary claim, so he just ignores it and announces what he wanted to be true instead.
Right at the bottom with the second lowest percentage of useless jobs is, of course, social science.
This sort of scientific fraud is unfortunately way too common in academic research. In some fields you can't assume the abstract or press release matches what the data says. This specific paper also reinforces the narrative that academia has a high tolerance for Marxists. It cites Marx and then discusses several other sociology papers that are built directly on Marxist theory (p7)! It's not often you see a citation from 1844 in something claiming to be modern science. The premise of the paper is also pure Marxism - words like price, wage, salary and market don't appear at all, and it takes as axiomatic that there's no objective way to judge how useful a job is.
In 1987 I visited Soviet Estonia. Seeking gifts to take back to the USA, I bought a bunch of bottle openers. They were simple and robust. Stamped metal. And (get this) with the price stamped right in the metal.
See the benefits ? No arbitrage/speculation: the price is fixed, and dirt cheap. No marketing costs: that right there is going to bring down the price. No R&D bureau to finance: it's a piece of cheap stamped metal. No pilferage: who in their right mind is going to risk their job stealing cheap stamped metal bottle openers ?
Translate this kind of product idea to an OECD economy. The existence of a cheap stamped metal bottle opener does not preclude the existence of fancy bottle openers, just as the existence of cheap mass-produced coffee mugs does not preclude the existence of hand-thrown hand-painted cat-themed ceramic coffee mugs. But "universal goods" (let's call them that) are made & distributed basically at cost.
Similarly, how about machines that dispense nutritious biscuits for free, if you insert your ID ? Nobody says they have to taste good, but they'd keep ya going. Maybe like in Repo Man: he opens the fridge and takes out a can labeled FOOD.
> And (get this) with the price stamped right in the metal. See the benefits ? No arbitrage/speculation: the price is fixed, and dirt cheap.
i've spent many minutes arguing with NYC bodega owners about how "99 Cent" Arizona cans only cost 99 cents (I was even willing to pay an entire dollar for it!)
at the end of the day, us humans are the optimization engines behind "the economy", whichever economy is the style of the time
I agree though, and I do love the minimal stylings of some store-brand Foods
> i've spent many minutes arguing with NYC bodega owners about how "99 Cent" Arizona cans only cost 99 cents (I was even willing to pay an entire dollar for it!)
People waste so much time the argument over which is better capitalism or communism when they fail to appreciate that both systems are technically failures because they both have not lead to a scenario where the cost of ensuring that the base physiological needs of every member of society has dropped to a point where it's just a given that every member of society will have access to three meals a day and a secure and warm shelter.
We throw away double digit percentages of our food every year and there are laws that ban people from feeding the homeless. It's fucking sickening.
> both systems [capitalism and communism] are technically failures because they both have not lead to a scenario where the cost of ensuring that the base physiological needs of every member of society has dropped to a point where it's just a given that every member of society will have access to three meals a day and a secure and warm shelter.
What? That's a very weird take.
Firstly, your goal might be way too high. Even in theory, a system can be optimal without being good enough. If there isn't a way to produce enough food (for example) no matter what, then a system that produces the maximum amount of food that is possible wouldn't be a failure in my eyes.
Secondly, this makes an implicit comparison between the two systems and finds them both similarly wanting. But capitalism almost completely solves the problem of "three meals a day and warm shelter", whereas communism famously doesn't solve it at all. Under capitalism, a tiny minority of people starved. Under communism, millions starved. It's not even close.
And while yes, the fact that we throw away so much food is terrible, but it's definitely better than not having enough, and that happens because of capitalism, for the most part.
Most people do not have a birds eye view that lets them see all the problem spaces and all the solutions. Marketing is increasing the likelihood you are aware there is a solution out there, and sales is the part where you become convinced the solution offered is the right one.
If you are in the lucky position where your company's solution is considered the standard and is widely known, marketing becomes all about maintaining that perception.
> Most people do not have a birds eye view that lets them see all the problem spaces and all the solutions. Marketing is increasing the likelihood you are aware there is a solution out there, and sales is the part where you become convinced the solution offered is the right one.
Coca-Cola spends ~4 billion dollars a year on marketing. Pepsi spends ~3 billion. Soda makes you fat and unhealthy. This is not solving any problem, only causing them.
The incentives for marketing and sales also aren't really aligned with what is actually best for the consumer. If you wanted them to be aligned with what the consumer wanted, then you as the consumer would be the one paying the marketing company, and they would compete to be the best at finding you solutions to your problems.
This is kind of what Google Search did before they really monetized their search. You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems. Now companies pay them to be brought to your attention, which is why Google Search sucks now.
These dollars are apparently well spent: You are aware these drinks exist and you consider them to be the market leader in these types of drinks.
> Aligned with what is actually best for the consumer
This is a classic straw man.
Who said it needs to be? They are simply educating you on the existence of their product. But marketing doesn't remove your agency to decide if you want to drink them or not, or whether that product is good for you. There are products that I am aware of due to marketing that serve no purpose to me, but I am not helplessly buying them anyways. I agree that in some scenarios (like we saw with cigarettes) this can go awry, and maybe advertising should be restricted for certain types of food. But in general, most products are not like this.
> You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems.
If Google didn't solve a problem for you, you would likely stop using it. You wouldn't continue to use Google simply to see their ads. Their advertisers would disappear if you weren't there, so first and foremost they must deliver a good product to you.
And without Sales and Marketing, your physician wouldn't know about the new treatment for the disease that's killing you. Different sides of the same coin!
After working at a considerable number of companies it's clear that most software work is to a large degree just replicating things that have been done other places, and not like solving the same complicated interesting problems, but figuring out how to do their own local variation of plumbing various things together. Many businesses also only have a competitive advantage because of some set of hidden knowledge. And not "we spent a lot of work inventing this new thing" but "we have contacts and knowledge of this poorly documented messy system and we only exist because of it's continued state of brokenness".
The real threat of AI/ML/LLMs are that they're going to get smart enough to do all of this stupid incredibly repetitive work and then there's not going to be much left to do. We might actually reach a post scarcity economy and the transition will be _interesting_.
You do need to know. That discovery likely happened without you being aware of it.
At some point you may need to buy a new washing machine. If you knew nothing about washing machines, you might have no information to work from.
However, maybe you saw an LG commercial at some point. So now when you walk into the store and see an LG washing machine, that recognition leads you to consider it. Maybe because of that commercial, you saw a feature. Now when you look at the Samsung washing machine and it doesn't have that feature, you consider that model to be lacking over the LG machine.
A personal anecdote here: Amazon now has so many different brands and sellers with product lines I've never heard of before. Their ratings have long since lost meaning. I often find it very difficult to decide on even simple purchases because I don't have enough information to know what is good.
Great example. The best way for most people to buy a washing machine is to read the Consumer Reports article on washing machine and then comparison shop.
This is the best way, at least in part, because Consumer Reports does not accept advertising or sponsorships.
And you don't find out about Consumer Reports through advertising, either, it's through word of mouth like this post.
In my headspace, Sales & Marketing are grouped together. I realize they are distinct functions, but still they feel thematically in the same area. Perhaps the author is in a similar headspace.
The question is whether the garbage that gets visibility thanks to marketing is more or less vital and useful than the stuff we would lose if marketing was not a thing.
I think it is fair to argue that word of mouth, good prices and quality rpoducts would thrive more often without marketing, compared to brightly coloured, cheaply made, nonsense that is easy to sell
It's absolutely true. I'm in the technological side of finance. I create a lot of cool systems. I absolutely hate what they are applied to, but it's satisfying to use technologies and design complex systems.
But in the end it is utterly pointless. However so is so much other crap in the world.. and if I'm not doing this someone else will. Thus I try to take solace in just the work I do, not necessary what it's applied to.
I'll go against 99% of the commenters here and say that the jobs are not pointless at all. It's just that people doing the job don't have the bird's eye view (or experience) to understand their usefulness.
Here's a simple example: for the entire 19th century (the 1800's), the British empire was at least 20 years ahead of anyone else. Part of this was due to their formidable Royal Navy. But most of this was due to their financial system. All European governments, princes, aristocrats, people with money, kept their cash parked in British banks. Why? They trusted the British banks more than the banks in their own countries. As a consequence, British businessmen had better access to credit, scratch that, infinitely better access to credit, than their continental counterparts. Which meant that more enterprise was happening in Britain, and so, by some form of law of large numbers, more innovation, hence technological advantage, hence higher GDP, and more tax money to fund expensive cutting edge ships for the Navy, and round and round in virtuous cycles.
Finance is fairly unintuitive, and it's easy to perceive it as a waste of people's time and talent. But it's finance and the rule of law (and the Royal Navy) that made a tiny island nation lend its name to the phrase "Pax Britannica", a period of stability and prosperity that humanity had not seen since the Pax Romana, almost two millennia prior.
If you work in finance, don't sell yourself cheap. Your work is meaningful.
The day-to-day job on an individual scale can definitely be pointless. In aggregate though, the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes. That's it!
No one will like that explanation without a perspective change, and for good reason. I'd wager most people do try to put some effort into having skills and holding down a job. It obviously sucks for that effort to go to waste.
This study is, perhaps, a sign that we should view these jobs as a form of basic income in disguise. No one's going to like that ruse because it means your skills are being wasted, sure, but the alternative is ripping the band-aid off (and it's a big one) by eliminating those jobs and moving those people to socially useful ones. This action would cause chaos, which is likely why nothing has eliminated the bullshit jobs yet.
The problem is, there likely isn't enough socially useful jobs as well paying as these pointless jobs. Even if there were, you'd need training infrastructure to transition people to new jobs.
So why then should people change their perspectives? Well, the fault of having a pointless job is not really on the person, but the economy, which has grown very quickly and added jobs without regard to how socially useful they are on a long timeline. Nothing really keeps this job growth in check except market forces, which may not be rational.
If you can mentally deal with the fact that your skills are going to waste and not being used for something socially important, and frankly stop caring as much at your job, you can use the time on the pointless job for more fulfilling things.
I promise you I can name 100s of FANG upper managers whose day-to-day is pointless or a net negative. If not net negative to the company then certainly net negative to society.
You aggregate those together, you just get a bigger net negative. That's how addition works. The collective net-negativity of hundreds of net negative upper managers doesn't magically trickle down into a net positive when viewed in aggregate.
Also, if we're being fair, "pointless" is still net negative in the amount of the person's salary, at minimum, unless we're talking about unpaid volunteers.
They are net positive by not starting a competing startup, and slowly rotting away into obsolescence in a snake pit. Have you noticed that an increasing share of innovation now comes from Asia, while U.S. startups are increasingly about grift or skirting regulation?
Money is crystallized time. If a startup frees up your time, it's like giving you money. If the startup is subsidized by the government (or gullible VCs), it doesn't even need to take any of your actual money.
So what can the government do that will give us all more free time ? Maybe quit encouraging a dinosaur-ridden 20th-century economy ? Time to shelve those buggy whips.
Name the last time a profitable startup product genuinely saved you time when you subtract out the time-value of what you also paid, the hassle of setting it up, the email drip campaigns that waste micro-moments of your day...
I don't think there has ever been one in the consumer market, ever, that is actually a net positive. Across the board they take more than they give. And for any example, I could posit that an open source solution (whether it exists or not) would be a better product and more of a net positive.
B2B sure, there are plenty of examples, but that's just capitalists making capitalism tools for other capitalists. These aren't tools that benefit society so it's a poor example.
We use these products because we have no other choice, not because they are optimal for our situation. Even our need for them is often carefully and artificially crafted by corporations, whose ultimate goal is for us to have no choice but to give them money. They would prefer we derive little to no value from their products, because if they can force us to pay anyway, that is much cheaper to manage.
"Competition" and "Innovation" rarely benefit consumers. You can't solve capitalism being shitty with more capitalism.
Many startups are great (for consumers) during their bootstrap phase. Once they become large the enshitification process begins as we maximize our shitty profit-seeking objective function.
> the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes
I don’t think this thesis holds any water. Companies don’t care about keeping people employed and paying taxes on such a micro scale that they’re willing to bite the bullet and hire people because they know it’s for some greater good of societal stability.
They do keep people employed in useless jobs though. Sometimes hiring shuts down, sometimes they do purges of useless jobs, but it's the larger population that shows the trend.
I think the notion that these jobs are useless is wrong. Most of the categories in bullshit jobs are just straight up not bullshit. Most jobs are useful.
Things like lawyers, secretaries, corporate compliance officers generally provide value.
Things like middle management are more dubious, but I think they generally do provide value.
This is going to be unpopular on HN but lots of software jobs are also pointless. So much effort gets put into automating things like finance or improving advertising. These things don't really add a lot of value to society but instead extract value from it. I know I'm hypocritical because I myself work in one of these areas but lately the lack of purpose has been hitting me hard.
Absolutely, while I'm sure there are people who find joy in solving hard problems related to fields like ad-tech, it's not a particularly useful job. Finance as well, there are tons of jobs that involve creating these huge convoluted systems which only exist because rules and regulation are pretty much incomprehensible.
For my self, working on stuff like e-commerce sites or deployment automation can be a bit pointless. Many of those jobs only existed because a particular client felt special and wanted something that was a better "fit" for their particular situation... Most of it is non-sense. Fortunately I've also be lucky enough to work on products that truly makes society better, strangely enough those jobs pay way less.
When all you have done is make daily meetings to justify your job so that your boss doesn't up and fire you: yes, you have a very pointless job.
I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling. Talk to an engineer, they'll tell you a paperclip holds paper. Talk to sales, you'll be on the line for an hour while he explains the majesty of the holy invention of paperclips, and why Paperclip Co.'s are the best. People who need paperclips will just buy them, bypassing the time sink.
Tell me you’ve never been part of an RFP process without telling me you’ve never been part of an RFP process.
Sure, in some cases what you say is true, when you have an undifferentiated product in perfect competition with other products where potential customers have perfect information, a smoother spokesperson can make the difference.
But in complex sales, the sales staff’s job is to understand the client’s needs and opportunities well enough, then coordinate experts on their team to present promising solutions. A sales person who is a value add is going out and finding people with problems that can be solved with the company’s product, thus pulling a customer into increased productivity.
The role does not need to be a waste, even though many are wasteful.
Companies tend to really overestimate how differentiated their product is. Often these "value add" features are half baked or so situational that they can't be relied upon. I take them with a grain of salt and still frequently I'm disappointed.
There is a good reason companies generally don't want engineers dealing with customers until a project is underway at least. And even then they will always try to limit and control meeting time.
Go to 1800 and a person that needs to get somewhere may have told you they needed a faster horse. The idea that fast personal mechanical transport would exist and would be widely available was still an idea to be sold. Even moreso, that you may not even have to 'go', the idea you could pick up a wire and communicate nearly instantly was still near magic.
> I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling.
This is true to the same degree that "engineering are there to take something that works and reinvent it in a shitty flavour-of-the-month framework that guarantees them extra work by breaking every day"
Sure, some of them make their entire living from doing that, some of them aren't above doing that when it'll work for them, but most of them do other things.
Also companies employ salespeople because (i) not everybody in the world knows every product they could ever want to buy exists and (ii) most people outside HN don't assume that nobody could ever answer their "does the product do this" questions (never mind make a useful suggestion of something they hadn't considered) or want to figure it out from first principles by reading the tech specs.
When I'm working on large purchases-- complex software systems usually-- I often have questions. Engineers want to do engineer-ish things, they usually don't want to talk to people who have questions like this.
The article mentions but doesn't link to Graeber's book on Bullshit Jobs. I've heard it referenced enough times now to put it on my to-read list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Its a very good book... Wikipedia says this – which should make some of the people here become either more self aware or
critical of the book:
"The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
[...]
*duct tapers*, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, *e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code*, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;"
It's hard to get rid of bullshit jobs without changing humanity. One of the biggest jobs of what's considered bullshit is dealing with the quirks of people.
I'll be the divergent voice here and say that I read it because I often heard it referenced here and it was one of the worst books I've ever read.
Part of what makes it so terrible is that Bullshit Jobs is an interesting premise. The fact that some percentage of people think that their jobs don't need to exist is an interesting observation that merits deeper study. If anyone ever does that study and writes a book about it I would love to read it but Graeber's book is not that.
Rather his book discusses the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs and then diverges into an incoherent political rant.
I saw Sam Harris on the Lex Friedman podcast talking about debating 9/11 conspiracy theorists he said:
> I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play Whac-A-Mole sufficiently well, so as to convince anyone of anything...
> ...it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to because they don't connect in a coherent way...
> ...I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled for that day...
> ...how long would it take to track that down, right? Did it happen, was it supposed to run that day, was there a completely mundane reason it would happen? And unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed ... He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird?
That's what reading this book is like.
There is no central thesis just a list of incoherent complaints.
In his other works he proposes a Universal Basic Income, and some have read his book as an argument for that. But not only does he not directly argue for it in the book, even if he did his writings much like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are not set up in a way that could even lead to a logical point because they're just disjoint misrepresentations he deliberately misinterprets to make them seem like they don't make sense.
I've posted here before that I was top 0.3% nationwide in car sales, selling about 34 semi luxury cars a month average.
I never felt my job was pointless. I felt the opposite. If I didn't answer my phone, a total idiot was going to answer it. If I didn't get to the customer, someone was going to lie to them or omit useful info and they'd get screwed a bit. Someone would frustrate them so much they'd buy something they don't even want just to avoid that dealership.
So I felt a mission to get to as many people as I could.
If you're good at your job, and have some integrity, it's easy to value your job even if it's sales.
There is an overwhelming level of nihilism in society. It's even more apparent since most have decided to use their occupation to define their purpose in life.
I don't see how we can continue down this path and see positive results.
If you're a nihilist and you feel like your job is pointless then you wouldn't care, right? You'd just keep rolling that rock up the hill. People feeling like their job is pointless and being bothered by the pointlessness doesn't seem like nihilism.
My view is that nihilistic tendencies create the feeling of pointlessness in occupation.
A job is a means to an end.
These discussions regarding which jobs are pointless vs meaningful don't do anything to address that people lacking purpose are more likely to call their job pointless.
Is it only a means to an end? You're implying the only use of a job is to collect money in order to pay for food and housing and maybe use extra money to engage in hobbies.
But, assuming you're not in an alienating job, working together on a problem connects you to other people, which gives you friends (or at least some mild human connection/interaction), and it might even leave you with a sense of fulfillment. The work itself can make you happy.
> My view is that nihilistic tendencies create the feeling of pointlessness in occupation.
I think it's the opposite: a pointless job creates a sense of nihilism. If the thing you're forced to do every day to survive seems pointless and meaningless, it drives you to think that life itself is just pointless and meaningless, and the job leaves you with nothing but a sense of emptiness.
If you feel like you're helping people in your community and doing something meaningful and indispensable, it can easily become your identity.
This chart is always useful.[1] It shows what people in the US are actually doing. Making stuff, total, is under 14% of the workforce. That's agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. 14%. The federal government is tiny, 1.4%. State and local governments are larger, and that's mostly teachers and cops.
Many pointless jobs could be ended by taxing zero-sum activity. That includes most advertising and about half of finance. Finance in the US has doubled in size since the 1960s. Despite this, managed funds, as a class, under perform index funds.
So, yes, there are a lot of pointless jobs. Where does that leave us?
To offer a counter narrative to the all-too-commonly offered BS-Jobs-theory which almost always is used in discussions that shall end with „see, thats why we need UBI, eh?“ (as is the old automation-will-take-our-jobs chestnut):
Lots of the pointlessness stems from the many hours spent by white collar workers making up for other peoples laziness/uninformedness/stressedness, basically bridging the knowledge gap.
So instead of feasting in the idea that whole segments of society should succumb to government allowances (effectively ending social mobility) we might show more virtousness toward human progress by focusing on not wasting other peoples time.
Feelings are important for individuals and that can have an impact en mass.
But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money.
This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers: everyone pays lip service to the urgent need to care for the sick, educate kids etc. But when it comes time to spend money or cast votes what they actually want are cheap credit and cheap goods and services.
This is the problem with all sorts of commentary like this. It relies on people's own internalized hypocrisy. And that's both very strong and very misleading.
> This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers
I think it has more to do with the proximity to money. A banker is close to lots of money moving around, and in a position to craft some scheme to extract parts of it. This basically applies to all of finance. The closer you are, the more opportunities to extract large amounts. A nurse is far removed from the flow of money.
I think it certainly helps. But if that were the only factor, nurses would earn the same as doctors as they're side by side all day. And the guy making coffee in the financial district would get a fantastic bonus. :)
Not just finance. If you want to be wealthy get as close to large sums of money as possible. That's why people move to big cities and go to top schools. They are proxies to being near large sums of money.
It's also much harder to make money by creating value (i.e. nursing a sick person back to health) vs stealing value at scale (i.e. charging $25 overdraft fees to poor people's bank accounts.)
> Most people would rather pay a $25 overdraft fee, than not go overdrawn and keep the $25. That's what the fees popularity tells us.
That is not the case. In the US, only 41% of the people who went overdrawn did so willingly. About 20% knew they were low on funds and expected their deposit to clear first, and for the remainder, the overdraft was a surprise.[1]
The popularity of fees indicates that those who charge them want to keep charging them; it does not indicate that those who pay the fees are in favour of going overdrawn and paying fees.
My interpretation of the evidence is that 41% happily admit it. And another 50 plus pretend they don't. A few are unlucky as you say.
If this were not the case, those 50ish percent would stop doing it. The fact they keep paying these fees tells us one of 2 things is true: EITHER they are honestly not capable of managing a current account OR they (like the 41%) choosing not to but are conditioned not to admit it.
Personally I find the second option much more likely.
The same is true in a lot of other pieces of evidence: people routinely vote against their own interests for instance. And they knowingly eat food that's bad for them despite being offered alternatives.
This is a fundamental part of human nature no one wants to address: people are not logical, dispassionate, long term thinking, selfless, analytical, strategic entities. They do dumb shit that is bad for them. And then they lie about it.
"Lie" might not be the right word, people will claim passionately they want X then do Not X without a moments hesitation.
> The fact they keep paying these fees tells us one of 2 things is true: EITHER they are honestly not capable of managing a current account OR they (like the 41%) choosing not to but are conditioned not to admit it.
The fact that people keep getting robbed at gunpoint tells us one of two things is true: EITHER the victims are honestly not capable of living in a crime-infested world, OR they choose to get robbed but are conditioned to not admit it.
See the issue with your logic? There's a third option: there is a large power imbalance (like people designing exploitative bank account UXs/people in shady corner with guns) and that is being exploited against the wishes of the people who are victimized by them.
I mean, if you keep getting robbed by the same guy, in the same alley, and you could easily avoid that alley, but you don't and you know you will get robbed when you go down there, then yes. Sooner or later you're not actually being robbed. You're giving the guy money presumably because you like the service he offers?
I am all for clearer labeling etc. The few who legitimately don't want to go overdrawn should be offered all the assistance possible.
I just think we need to acknowledge that 40% admit they choose this and another 40% choose it but won't admit it...
> if you keep getting robbed by the same guy, in the same alley, and you could easily avoid that alley, but you don't and you know you will get robbed when you go down there, then yes.
Or rather, there is a robber at every alley, because there is no law that prevents robbing, and no enforcement of the laws that exist. In that society, if you have a gun but aren't robbing people, you're giving up money. What are people without guns gotta do?
I think it is always about the efficiency. Both nursing and teaching is low efficiency jobs. With teaching the customers or users are poor be it students or pupils. Just take a number of students in class. And multiply that by amount of money you are ready to pay for teaching each month. Now add everything else, it just doesn't scale.
Same goes for nursing, a single nurse can only nurse so many people in single month. And it only gets worse if you want 24/7 coverage. At least with teaching you could do 6 hours teaching + 2 hours other work during weekdays.
Money, as you're defining it, is a good example of Goodhart's law: when a metric becomes a target, that metric becomes useless.
Money, initially, may have been a good metric to judge which role is contributing more to society. But soon, a parasite class emerges whose goal is to maximize "money" itself regardless of what value they are providing to society. Just like any other metric, the concept of money as a yardstick of "good for all of us" has failed a long time ago because of that.
I don't think that's 100% true. But I also don't think it's 100% false.
I think it's a problem people pursue money they don't actually intend to spend. But I also think people buying the "wrong" things (chocolate instead of vegetables, bank bailouts instead of universal healthcare) is a weird mix of feature and flaw. Or at least it is just a reflection of human beings own flaws.
> But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money.
Prices in an efficient market (which the labor market is not, but that's another discussion entirely) are determined by marginal cost and marginal utility, not value. The value I get out of having as much water as I do is enormous, but I'm basically indifferent as to whether I get even more water than that, and so water is cheap.
The upper limit of the price is the value you derive. The upper limit of a bankers wage is very high. The upper limit for a teacher less so. Hence price is not value as you correctly say. But it does tell you something about value. At least the free market sense of value.
Nurses and teachers are both bad examples, because both professions willingly get underpaid because they care about who they are helping. In both cases they aren't paid by their customers, and also don't strike often for that same reason.
Respectfully, the person paying you is your customer by definition. That's sort of my point: the people paying teachers do not want to buy teaching because they don't actually care about the next generation. At best they want babysitting. The same people DEMAND ez credit and cheap plastic shit in Walmart. So they pay the bankers who are key to producing those things handsomely.
The person paying is the customer. The person receiving the service is a "cost centre" in basically all underpaid, "socially useful" roles.
I love that we worry about AI maximizing the wrong objective function and killing us all as a result, when our own economic system has been doing that for centuries by maximizing profit over human life
Earth to University of Zurich - none of the managers I ever worked for felt their work is pointless. On the contrary - they felt their work is so necessary that they were working very hard to expand their charter / mission / statement of purpose / committee / whatever....
This definitely hit home. I work for a bank and my position is helping connect the bank's clients to startups. If I was working for one of the corporate client's as part of their CVC or innovation investment scouting team, that would be different but just brokering the introduction kind of rings shallow.
The only purpose I see to my position is when a startup is talking to a corporate but not necessarily to the key person to get the discussion moving. Corporates are generally capable of reaching out to startups on their own and the startups are usually eager to talk with them.
Despite all that, I find it surprising that some of the corporates are unaware of some of the main players (at least from my perspective) in their target sectors.
I am still waiting for the "AI revolution" to take over these "pointless" jobs and for Universal Basic Income (UBI) to become necessary. With the current state of AI, I feel accounting and most of the finance sector can be largely automated. 2-3 work days can become the norm where humans double check the work output from AI and sign off for correctness. The rest of the week can be used for personal time/investing in other areas/family time.
Feels like we have never achieved that. Even some companies are reverting back to pre-pandemic and going back to 5 day work weeks and returning back to the office for no good reason other than "CuLtUrE"
I like how everyone here likes to sh*t on sales and marketing.
Especially when so many people here have tried to create something tech based that solves a problem, but their endeavor fails because...they don't know how to sell it.
> Of course, this definition raises the question of how one is to decide whether a job makes a positive, a negative, or no contribution to society at all. To make such a decision, one clearly needs a theory of social value.
> Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off.
"Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 ; Impact_investing, Strategic_alignment, #GlobalGoals (UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals) ;
> You can make an impact by solving important local and global problems by investing your time, career, and savings; by listing and comparing solutions.
There are 17 Global Goals. GRI Sustainability Reports are aligned with the Global Goals. Helping keep the information for the [GRI] Sustainability Report ready all year may afford additional opportunities to find meaning and impact.
I am unsure if the headline portrays the content correctly. The content is whether people "their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society”.
There might be people who feel their jobs do not have social impact but important nonetheless on a personal level. In that case, they don't exactly feel their jobs are pointless.
And jobs like the ones in finance have been specifically targeted for adding nothing to society. Or sales being scummy. So, people might feel the overall impact of such labeling and feel that they have net zero impact on society.
I think the problem is the social environment on the job and the general disillusionment of being an adult.
Cheating on the math test while in high school was as pointless (sooner or later the chickens come home to roost) but it felt amazing in the moment because you were doing it with your buddies and against the “enemy” (teacher, school etc.)
Adults all of a sudden feel the need to be important so they suffer in that same scenario
For whom? For those of us who became STEM majors, absolutely. Math and its tests only got more advanced after I got into college. But for humanities majors who's requirements only required a single math class, if that, to graduate never had "the chickens come home to roost". At most they bribed or cheated their way though that one college level math class.
Ok maybe but in this case the enjoyment was also short lived. One instance of cheating
Also I was talking about high school where you have a set of mates to violate rules with as opposed to college where you kinda rotate people based on circumstance and location.
Also you seem really triggered and stressed out, maybe the humanities people weren't wrong picking their path after all /s
Is there a way that my point, that cheating on a math test actually doesn't end up hurting people that it turns out actually didn't need that math, could come across as not bitter to you?
I'm really not bitter about it. I'm quite happy with my math minor.
It's relevant in that if they cheated/bribed, and didn't learn that modicum of math, to your earlier point, that the chickens don't come home to roost.
> > Is there a way that my point, that cheating on a math test actually doesn't end up hurting people that it turns out actually didn't need that math, could come across as not bitter to you?
This is not a humanities forum, they are not here to debate, so why mention them at all?
I work IT at a market maker/prop firm. 110% bullshit job but it’s low stress, pays well, great benefits, they feed me, pay for my gym, and give me plenty of vacation and unlimited sick time. On top of this I’m very good friends with my coworker so I’m basically getting paid to work with my bud. I don’t need my job to have meaning.
I'm not having any of this. So what if other people think it's bullshit. As long as YOU don't think it's bullshit, that's all that matters and everyone can go...People will wish they have bullshit jobs when they are gone and can't provide for themselves/families.
I wonder sometimes how many jobs period feel useful. I think feeling useful might be very different than being useful. We spent most of our evolutionary history in small tribes with personal relationships to the people our work helped. Capitalism has let that all become much more abstract so finding a connection between what we do and it’s impact on others is much more tenuous.
I think there's also been a distinct focus on specialization at a level never before seen.
When the economic unit is the household, as it was in basically all pre-industrial periods, basic upkeep means that you have to complete a relatively wide variety of tasks. Farming, cooking, cleaning, home construction and repair, furniture production, clothing production, tool production, animal husbandry, tending/nursing, child care, etc...
Even divided on traditional gender roles - there was a lot of diversity in available work. Tasks changed by season and need.
Modern society rewards you for specializing - do one thing forever, better than others. But people are hardwired for exploring and learning. We can get bored, tired, apathetic and disillusioned if we follow a monotonous routine at work. Even if that routine is genuinely beneficial to society at large.
I worked a year for a bank and will never do it again. It was very hard to get anything done as a tech person and outsider because every system required new permissions that were usually only granted after a long period of waiting and interference by management. Hardly anything was expected of me beyond showing up in the morning. I also realized that many of the old-timers did not do much at all.
Banks are seen as the epitome of capitalism but they have just as much in common with Soviet organizations as with market institutions at this point. They are in effect junior partners of the government. The weight of the regulations keep outsiders out and shield them from competition. All they have to do is keep the politicians happy and rake in the dough.
This says more about working for a company with a pointless mission.
It may be that engineering / production jobs are more likely at companies with clearly useful missions.
Sales & marketing get a bad rap, but if we want to move into the future, someone has to convince people to do so.
The problem is more that there are a lot of shitty/exploitative products that shouldn't exist and S&M folks are asked to sell shitty futures, and that feels bad unless you're a sociopath... which explains why Wall St / consulting are still so attractive to a certain set.
I have an answer: regulate those unchecked money machines they serve (aka skim some money off the top), and spread the excess wealth among the rest of the citizens. Then those workers will be fulfilled by ensuring the public’s wellbeing, not just feeding corporate behemoths.
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1/2 the population digging holes so the other 1/2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.