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Comment by beaconstudios

4 years ago

So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it?

If so, welcome aboard.

23 comments

beaconstudios

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smugglerFlynn  4 years ago

Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.

You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.

In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.

Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.

  • dragonwriter  4 years ago

    > Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.

    > You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.

    You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly enforced (corporate) law.

    I mention this because...well, you might want to read more of Graeber’s work (or even just more of Bullshit Jobs) to understand why.

  • beaconstudios  4 years ago

    David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.

    There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.

    • stale2002  4 years ago

      > is a consequence of the airline industry

      So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to track down those bags.

      3 replies →

    • smugglerFlynn  4 years ago

      Noise insulation in the airplane exists because it tries to shield passengers from the aircraft noise, which is a consequence of modern airplane design. Following the same logic, shall we call it bullshit insulation?

      This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:

         1. that existing model is bad
   2. that alternative model for airline (or any other industry) exists
   3. that alternative model won’t suffer from similar issues

      I will now quote Graeber to see what kind of arguments he uses to support these three ideas in his original infamous essay[1].

      Re. 1

         — author uses anecdotal evidence from friends who consider their jobs ‘pointless’: (talking about a friend) “*Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.*”
   - author extrapolates this anecdote to other fields and people: “*it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit*”
   - after establishing negative nature of these jobs on this purely anecdotal basis, author then proceeds to blame capitalism for creating them: “*<…> making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen*”
   — he concludes that “*the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.*”

      Re. 2 and 3:

         - author provides a hypothesis for the root cause of the issue: “*if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else*“

      Unfortunately, no solution is discussed at all. Neither there is a validation for this hypothesis to be found anywhere.

      I’m sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted. Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at very broad and abstract problem (“ruling class”), with no solution provided by author. Anarchism is assumed to be a solution, but I hope at this point it should be obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we could also use a magic wand.

      1 - https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

      5 replies →

MattGaiser  4 years ago

My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing the person.

For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it was under development.

No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.

But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax after all expenses were considered.

  • beaconstudios  4 years ago

    Yeah that's bullshit though - it's a warped incentive caused by social systems. In a healthy social system, these incentives to make money doing pointless bullshit should be minimised. David Graeber is an anarchist, and the whole bullshit jobs concept is a criticism of capitalism.