Bullshit Jobs

KosherBosher · 2023-02-09T12:47:49+00:00

What overall percentage of bullshit or useless jobs do you think exist in the job market? For example, if we removed half of all jobs today, what sort of soc...

mechap

Strangely enough, Economies around the world are, increasingly, becoming vast engines for producing nonsense. In the same way as the fact that so many people feel unhappy being paid to do anything defies our current assumptions about human nature, the fact that so many people are being paid to do nothing in the first place defies all our assumptions about how market economies are supposed to work.
Part of the reason no one has noticed this phenomenon until recently is that people simply refused to believe that capitalism could produce such results, even if that meant considering their own experiences or those of their friends and family as somehow anomalous. All conversations on changes in the structure of employment have to begin with an acknowledgement that the overall global trend, especially in rich countries, has been for a steady decline in farming and manufacturing, and a steady increase in something called "services"

The idea of a service economy in general is the real issue here. When a country's economy is characterized as being dominated by the services sector, one gets the impression that its citizens primarily support themselves by serving each other iced lattes.

BronzeAge

mechap

The reducing of contemporary economies as 'vast engines' for the production of nonsense is something I'm increasing agreeing with. Why am I not as happy as I could be? Why aren't us all? Back in the day, which I mean very much so, one could see the impact on their community. Likewise, one was not as likely to be swallowed by the pit of existential crisis that is so crowded today. There was ease in doing what your father and grandfather did, and knowing that you would. A farmer. A miner. Who doesn't doubt that they've made the right choices in relation to work in modernity?

The problem of choice.

Kaper

Oh to be one of those office women who's job is to send one or two emails today and take a phone call then take home 70k a year.

Pedestrian

as that crazy dude in 12 monkeys said humans are no longer productive so its natural for bullshit jobs to be prevalent what i dont like about the idea of bullshit jobs is assumption that there non bullshit jobs out there somewhere. nope.

I speak for the cubes

Not to glorify and romanticize yesterday's horrible jobs but honestly moving from a thinky smartypants desk job to a workshop job has been a great decision.
Now I do something I quite like in some conditions that aren't the best and I have to deal with a shitty boss ; instead of doing something that was growing very uninteresting and unfullfilling in some conditions that weren't the best while also dealing with a shitty boss.
It was easier before to deal with your job being dull and abstract when it meant you could at least climb up the social or income ladder much faster than a trade worker would in the past. Now though, the "everyone must graduate everyone must go to college everyone must climb up the middle class ladder or our consumption based economy will implode" phenomenon has overcrowded the job market and the answer is corporate and managerial bloat. And with so much competition that you'll also be stuck with low pay, low status, lots of hours and few prospects for most of your carreer while unlike a craftsman or tradie, the quality of your work doesn't help you much, it doesn't build you a reputation and won't really help you advance. So you get a dull job with none of the former rewards... With job turnaround, you don't even get the safety that was the appeal of office jobs.
At least when you physically get some stuff done, you find some joy in knowing that even if you didn't outdo yourself, even if you kinda phoned it in, the roofing job or the weld you've finished should last a good dozen years, or that even if your heart wasn't in it well you still got an entire wagon worth of people to where they needed to be.

Johnny

userlame Civilization seems fundamentally exploitative. After all, it is an incredible amount of work to maintain what are essentially non-automatic processes.

I doubt that automation will ever pan out, because the machines in question are complex systems that did not derive from evolution. So they're not at all reliable, and require constant fixing. This is what happened with transfer machines back in the 20th Century: they were machines designed to move parts from one process to the next, and it never went anywhere because they were always breaking.

I feel like they will always overwork us. They'll demand as much as they're allowed to get away with without people throwing a fit.

The problem with socialism is that if it is unable to reorganize the means of production to achieve communism, then it will eventually break down. Because fundamentally it is based in a communal, not a civilized mode of organization -- so it causes a lot of chaos.

Left-leaning capitalist governments tend to eventually abandon their policies, and pursue austerity.

It seems there's small-scale tribal communalism, and capitalism as our options. And capitalism has to be maintained by the state, otherwise it devolves into a traditional economy (which might actually be a good thing).

sanner

I'm not sure i understand what a "bullshit job" is. Are jobs which only produce cultural goods "bullshit"? Are bullshit jobs just deskilled labour?

Johnny I doubt that automation will ever pan out, because the machines in question are complex systems that did not derive from evolution. So they're not at all reliable, and require constant fixing.

Incorrect. Automation is not unpopular because machines aren't "evolutionally derived". Automation is unpopular because skilled labourers and industrial machinery is expensive, whereas slavery and unskilled labourers are cheap. This is why we see large amounts of automation in DTM 4-5 countries but not DTM 2-3 countries.

Johnny Left-leaning capitalist governments tend to eventually abandon their policies, and pursue austerity. [...] It seems there's small-scale tribal communalism, and capitalism as our options.

No, that is the state of some democracies (like the UK), not a general trend we can use to disprove other economic models. Even examining the UK, welfare and non-market resource allocation has not been a strictly left or right position since the 1940s. What you're discussing is the relatively recent effect of Neo-Liberalism on political cleavages, not the longterm possibility of Socialism.

Johnny he problem with socialism is that if it is unable to reorganize the means of production to achieve communism, then it will eventually break down.

Societally owned means of production is the point of socialism so, yes, that goes without saying. That is not a flaw of socialism, reorganizing the means of production is just what all economic models must achieve.

Basile and whether we like it or not, companies are the best way we found to produce technological advances.

I'm assuming by companies, you mean market based advancement through corporate entities. Market based advancement is highly unsustainable. Relying on capitalist modes to produce new technology has corroded our society and environment exponentially over the last 150 years. Non Market advancements in technology have also been extremely successful (government funding of research, NGO/CSOs, charitable donations), but Neo-Liberalism has profoundly hindered their distribution. We dont lack "better ways", these "better ways" have been siezed from us to maintain our reliance on markets.

Doc

I don’t believe that fifty percent of jobs are bullshit. I think overall it would be lower, say thirty percent, but they are over represented in certain careers.
What I consider a bullshit job are those where you find a solution to a problem you made up. This would be something like Sweet Baby Inc, where they told companies how to “fix” their games and then asked to be paid. The other type of bullshit job is manager positions. They are important, but they have become so sought after and wanted that there are too many of them now. I’ve known people that have managers that stay in meetings all day to seem like they are working.
I’ll go against the grain and not consider jobs that don’t do much work bullshit by default, such as an earlier example of doing turn signals for trains. I think they can be super useful, because you are getting paid on the off chance that something happens. Another thing that needs to be realized is most people aren’t getting paid for their work. They are being paid for their time. I do see a huge rise in bullshit jobs, and I think most people know they are not doing anything productive. Still, jobs need to be filled and until we have companies cut back on these jobs and go a more traditional trade route they will remain at high volume.

Fantasy

Doc
I have many siblings.
One of them is a professional Bull rider(yes this is a real job). Another takes books and papers and presses them against a scanner and sorts them into folders, this could be automated. Another is an insurance salesman who sells a product everyone is legally required to have to drive.
It goes on and on. Even my job is replaceable though I am in college to fix this (going into computer science I'm lying to myself)

There are so many bullshit jobs and the pool of them is only increasing. The amount of jobs that actually do anything and those that require humans shrinks daily.

Doc

Fantasy The amount of jobs that actually do anything and those that require humans shrinks daily.

This is one of the biggest causes of bullshit jobs. Technology is making us so efficient that entire sectors have been lost.
The other is expecting everyone to work. Being a stay at home mom/dad should be respected by the larger population. If you have kids, you shouldn't be expected to raise them and work at the same time, or even worse, not raise them just so you can both work.

Ross_R

Doc
Amen.
Shame humanity won't ever build The City Of The Sun in my lifetime.

Fantasy

Doc
Stay at home is becoming more and more viable. My sister had her first child a few years back and was able to become mostly an at home mom because her take home pay was just slightly above what it costs to do daycare. It was a very easy choice to not work and just stay home with the kid. The kid does go to day care still but only once or twice a week and it's more for social gain than a requirement. My sister fills those days with a part time job.

Ross_R

sanner I'm not sure i understand what a "bullshit job" is. Are jobs which only produce cultural goods "bullshit"? Are bullshit jobs just deskilled labour?

I'm pretty sure we are all going by the term outlined in 2013 by David Graeber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
In two words, "bullshit job" is a job that is pointless or meaningless, and "Graeber classifies a job as bullshit if society would be no worse off (or even notice) if such job(s) disappeared".

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