by swatow on 3/15/15, 1:09 AM with 46 comments
by zby on 3/15/15, 11:38 AM
My conclusion is that it is the complexity. It is that people don't understand why they do something - this makes their work meaningless for them. And accidentally there is a big chance that their job is useless in an objective way - it is just that the people that direct them also don't understand the system fully.
And the complexity grows in many ways. One is that our lives are much more regulated than they used to be - we have more laws about everything. In one way it makes lives more fair - but the complexity from the entangling of different laws grows quickly. Another is that we actually have less cultural regulations. For example - take noise from parties, in the past it was that there were just some dates when everyone was partying - because everyone had the same religion etc.
By they way - in 'User Innovation' there is this notion of 'advanced analog field' https://books.google.pl/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&pg=PA134&lpg=P... - an area where there is a much stronger need for something then anywhere else. It is often that the innovation happens in that 'advanced analog field' and later it is adopted in all other areas. Like abs was invented first for airplane breaks - but later it was adopted by the car industry. I think that maybe we should treat software development as a kind of 'advanced analogue field' for law.
by zhte415 on 3/15/15, 6:28 AM
by jraedisch on 3/15/15, 7:06 AM
by jraedisch on 3/15/15, 7:10 AM
by gaius on 3/15/15, 11:16 AM
Consider the following thought experiment: two workers in skilled jobs, let's say they're dentists. Dentist A works 5 days a week and the occasional weekend, like most people do now. Dentist B figures she can get by working 1 or 2 days a week and spend the rest of her time playing roller hockey and fishing, and on a dentist's pay, she can.
Now fast forward a year, dentist A has done 5x the dentistry of B, has encountered 5x as many tricky situations and dealt with them, has kept her equipment in tip-top shape because it's being used every day, has had the time to bounce ideas off other dentists in the practice and so on. A is just after 1 year, a much more experienced and better dentist than B. So who do you go to, when you need some work done? The one who has devoted her life to dentistry and does it every day, or the one who sort of does it on the side when she can be bothered? Pretty soon B won't have any work at all - even from people who like the idea of working a 2 day week!
So these ideas about falling work weeks are nice in theory, but they don't take into account human nature and how real people think.
by michaelochurch on 3/15/15, 2:34 PM
In the late Gilded Age, the prevailing attitude was that poverty was a sort of bitter "moral medicine" that punished laziness and sin. So no one stepped in. But poverty turned out to be a cancer that spreads until it takes down a whole society. When people are economically disenfranchised and there is no economic reward in helping them, businesses tied to their fortunes also fail. The disease spreads. Rural poverty in 1925 led to corporate and bank failures circa 1928 and a full-blown Great Depression by 1931.
We can look at farm subsidies in 2015 and say that they're unnecessary and antiquated and we're right. (Worse yet, they seem to benefit corporate food producers more than individual farmers or sustainable agricultural practices.) However, the reason why those controls exist is because we learned, very painfully, about what can happen when food prices collapse. That's why those protections exist, even if they're ridiculous (leading to the unhealthy overuse of high-fructose corn syrup, for example) in 2015.
Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia took an altogether different route: fascism, and a communism that was the same thing in left-wing clothing. Rather than face the chaotic economic meltdowns that were occurring in freer countries, they instituted authoritarian societies that managed to distract the populace from economic struggles and class conflict by replacing those with narratives of nationalistic and racial conflict. It was evil, and disgusting, and self-serving on the part of the elite (because it allowed them to rape the country while blaming external agents or disliked ethnic groups) but, at least subjectively, it took the edge off of the Great Depression for the common people. (One could alternatively argue that the starvation and misery were just externalized. The Ukrainian Holodomor was far worse than the North American Great Depression.) In the end, it led to things far worse, as we (quite sadly) know.
What happened to agricultural commodities in the 1920s is happening to almost all human labor in the 2010s. The good news is that we don't seem to be taking quite the same path as in the 1920s: there are more social and economic controls, and the specifically racial or nationalistic impulse of the fascist movement is unlikely to re-emerge in respected institutions. This is a crisis, but it's a different kind. It's more widespread, but less severe (unless we're only in the early stages). We're nowhere near the Great Depression or fascism, and as of 2015, society (at least, in the U.S.) seems to be on the mend. We are better off than we were 10 years ago-- in the nightmare of the peak Bush years of 2001-2006, when fascism really seemed around the corner-- although we haven't made as much ground as we might like.
"Bullshit jobs" exist because people are protecting themselves from creeping de-necessitation. In the fight to stay employable, the more politically savvy are playing games to create the appearance of high output and performance, and the less savvy are often caught up in those games without knowing it. This drives the efficiency of rendered work down-- a sort of organic self-limiting element on increasing efficiency and rapid change-- but makes it almost impossible to tell who can be unemployed harmlessly and who is actually essential. What Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" are the innately political jobs. We don't have many entrepreneurs or programmers anymore, but we have a lot of private sector politicians who call themselves such.
One thing that you see amid destabilization, as well, is the feudal impulse. The European nobles are the descendants of the warlike people who provided protection as the Roman Empire disintegrated in the 3rd-8th centuries. Similarly, people cling to those (either people or institutions) who can provide protection from market chaos. Universities earn $200,000 per head on the promise of a credential that is supposed to insulate a person from here-and-there wage fluctuations (because the liberal arts education makes you generally employable as a leader) even though they haven't really been delivering that protection. The job of corporate management, these days, has more to do with providing protection from vision-less, cost-cutting (read: cost-externalizing) executive assholes than building a team or supporting subordinates' careers. Even in the VC-funded world, we see a frank re-emergence of feudalism, with investors as manorial lords and founders as vassals, and the same mythology around these 25-year-old, white male "entrepreneurs" as existed around 21-year-old white men (i.e. knights) with armor and battle axes, 1000 years ago.
Bullshit jobs exist because staying employed, in complex organizations, often has more to do with extending and enjoying political protection than the work itself. This keeps people on a monthly salary and prevents things from going from "stupid, tedious and annoying" to "I'm completely fucked if I don't find work in 3 months".
I wish I had a solution, and I don't. The sad thing that one learns in studying the 1920s-50s is that humans tend only to cut away the bullshit in a perceived existential crisis, and (this is most important) one that threatens the elite as much as (or more than) the rest. In war, humans can advance and innovate. R&D spending goes up, full employment becomes the norm, and petty differences are put aside. Sadly, though, no one has found anything but violent conflict that has that effect. In peace, the elite (such as our corporate elite) wages a slow-burning and subtle class war to keep itself in place at any cost, and this keeps them comfortable until mounting civil dysfunction (usually in multiple nations at once, allowing violent conflict) reaches a flash point and sets something off that threatens to take down absolutely everyone. And then (and often only then) do the private-sector social climbers go into hibernation and does the demand for real (non-bullshit) work reach a level that can involve everyone.