Nope. Just going off of what you’re posting. No appetite for a 44 min podcast on this; particularly when “this” (admittedly going off of only what you’ve posted) is an argument that entire sectors of our economy are unnecessary as a result of the equivalent of a mass delusion and that if we only woke up and said "what if . . . " then things would be very different. “What if there were no lobbyists? What if coders didn’t make mistakes?” Etc.
Timex
1769
You also had basically no food, so you likely didn’t have much energy.
Oh, here’s some stuff about that.
So the low number of hours is based on the idea that you had peasants only working basically half of the year. But apparently that’s not true anyway. That’s just the labor that the peasants put in for rent to their lord… it didn’t include the labor they actually had to do for themselves, to, you know, grow food and not die of starvation.
Also it didn’t include any of the labor required to survive as a medieval peasant, like making your own clothes, etc.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
From the original 2013 article.
http://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
I’m completely baffled by what you’re arguing at this point. You’re now asking why the world is so different when we now have much more industrialization globally and less agrarian societies? Are you arguing for going back to some sort of agrarian nirvana?
I admit that it’s possible to live life without next-day delivery of stuff or pizza rolls or whatever else you want to flag as the unnecessary excesses of modern society, but that’s not where we at.
None of that ends up supporting what I said earlier is your apparent hypothesis: that large segments of our jobs are the result of a mass delusion that they are actually necessary.
If you don’t care about keeping up with the Jones and want to work less and earn less, I argue it’s easier to do that today and not starve than it has ever been.
No, I think the piece is arguing that humanity is making work for itself to satisfy the egos of a free people and that many people just push around paper for no good reason.
With automation, I am more productive then my parents or grandparents, yet work the same hours (if not more, they got a paid lunch break) for less pay.
Where is this work going?
If you haven’t ask yourself these questions, person some introspection is in order.
Hell, I do 401(k) administration. It’s made up work that didn’t exist 50 years ago, and I am not entirely sure why it exists today, except to push around paperwork to validate it’s existence.
ShivaX
1773
Yeah, I definitely assumed the “work” was purely hours spent for one’s lord. You’d be working to not die every second you were alive.
Ex-SWoo
1774
Ok - after reading the article I think I get the positioning : He’s attacking this from a communist manifesto-type of POV where if you’re not a direct “producer” of a good then your job is BS.
I mean…sure? It’s so far removed from reality of economics so not sure how relevant it is except for philosophical conversation
Your parents and grandparents (assuming you’re talking about Americans) where part of an incredibly small elite group, when looking at the world as a whole. Today, many more folks are living more than just hand-to-mouth, on a global level per capita, than ever before. We also have more uber-billionaires than ever before, too, which is the focus of this topic. Pros and cons to the whole thing.
Nesrie
1776
Heh.
Please Lord help us make sure no one sends us back to the hell that was the agriculture society of peasants. That is a kind of paradise I will certainly do without.
It’s probably a mistake to assume Graeber is stupid and doesn’t have an argument worth considering. Just sayin’.
One can very reasonably argue that we should have better nationalized pensions and such, but here in the states, we go more for private retirement. If, despite being in the sector, you don’t see value in not having our elderly be destitute in retirement, I don’t know what to tell you.
In the past and in countries that don’t have strong nationalized retirement, you either relied on/burdened your kids or you just died. I guess those are still options if your useless job and industry disappeared?
I am not seeing the pros here.
I see more people employed, doing more with less, and yet the majority of jobs created have been adminstrative. And they make up a bigger sector of the employed people.
That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Why is larger percentage of people being employed in administration? I can understand a set amount being employed that way, but why is it growing? Why does my job exist? What changed in the world that made it necessary?
In past, there were pensions, but they didn’t require the staff and specialist knowledge I had.
And 401(k) has nothing to do with retirement. I mean, I know what it says on the box, but all we do is tax deferred savings. That’s all of it. Our whole industry is based around saving corporations (and people) taxes.
There’s a pretty strong argument that the 401k system was basically a con, designed to 1) free businesses of pension obligations and 2) funnel worker’s savings to financial institutions to generate fees and 3) incapable of delivering actual meaningful pensions. So maybe not the best place to start to debunk the idea of bullshit jobs.
Yeah, it pretty much is. Nothing I do has anything to do with the elderly.
In fact, as soon as you are 70.5, we start forcing you take money out (if you aren’t working).
The whole industry is just about saving taxes.
Which you have to pay when you take it out.
That’s weird to hear from someone in the industry. The whole tax deferred nature of it has been clearly shown to promote savings that folks otherwise wouldn’t make. I don’t see how you don’t see it is part of our retirement funding structure.
Sure, in finding retirement, but 90% of my job is calculating what business can put into profit sharing, of which, 90% goes to the owners, because you only have to give rank and file participants about 1% of salary for every 3% of salary you give to the owners, (and even then, the rank and file can be capped at 5%, while not capping the owners). So, you can give 250 dollar to an employee that makes 25,000, and and 8250 to the owner that makes over 275,000, and the business can take off their taxes.
It’s just a tax free give away to business owners and the wealth.
Even more so when you look at median 401k savings balances.
Fine, than your particular job could be viewed more as being on the finance side for the businesses. That’s making dollars for them, which they see as more than worth the cost of your pay. That doesn’t mean your job is reflective of the impact of the 401(K) industry, as a whole.
Look, it seems like you hate your job (and maybe are also dissatisfied with your economic life in general?). None of that supports your argument that large segments of our economy are parts of a mass delusion or some sort of nefarious scheme to oppress the masses.
Yeah, there are some suggested changes in Congress, but mostly it won’t pass, because people are making money.
And, as long as the IRS underfunded, our industry is pretty safe from playing with loopholes we can find.
Nesrie
1787
It’s all fine and dandy to assume everyone should logically max out their 401(k) or at least save 20% of their after tax income until retirement
Where did they get the idea individuals are saving 20%? I mean yeah he says that seldom happens but where is the number 20% even coming from?
