Someone needs to include a link to:
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Oh, Thank You! I thought I was the only one who thought Gladwell was a lightweight, like ‘News of the Weird’ for mediocre Business majors.
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My grandfather was a career civil servant and rose through the ranks to be the ‘chief statistician’ in the government of the day. After a change of government (the first in about 30 years) the new bosses decided that the top tier of civil servants were probably not sympathetic.
They couldn’t fire him, but the last two years of his career, the highest paying years, were spent going in and sitting at a desk for 44 hours/week with absolutely nothing to do, waiting to max out his pension.
The grand irony is that the new bosses ended up completely screwing things up. The premier went on a tour of the then Soviet Union with a book of stats clutched in his fist, and was profoundly embarrassed when the Soviets took the opportunity to correct him on several key points about his own economy. Following that trip they re-hired my grandfather as a consultant at about triple his former wage to look over the work of the so-called loyalists.
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Indeed. Hence his feeling that the effect isn’t economic. I find that hard to believe though because, well, there’s clearly money involved.
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You’re welcome. Malcolm Gladwell is to sociology what Dan Brown is to history. I’ve never understood why anyone reads him as if he has something profound to say.
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I was thrown out of college, and when I was thrown out of college I got a job on Madison Avenue in New york, a real dyed-in-the-wool advertising agency on Madison Avenue, wanted a man to come in, and they pay him ninetyfive dollars a week, and to sit in their office, and to look jewish. They wanted to prove to the outside world, that they would hire minority groups, y’know. So I was the one they hired, y’know. I was the show jew at the agency. I tried to look jewish desperately, y’know. I used to read my memos from right to left all the time. They fired me finally, 'cause I took off too many jewish holidays.
– Woody Allen - Standup Comic 1964-1968
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These are great jobs for budding writers, if they require you to look busy and if it’s desk work. Even a guard shack job often has long stretches of boredom.
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I got really good at lucid dreaming1) in my days of standing guard. Along with taking a nap while standing up. And recognising sleep depriviation-induced hallucinations for what they are.
1) At the time, I didn’t know it was called that. Sounds far better than “sleeping with your eyes open”.
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These jobs are how I get fired. If you don’t keep me busy with actual work, I will make work for myself. Left alone to my own devices, I turn into ‘Blair’, the Wilford Brimley character from The Thing; when they quarantined him in the tool shed and he built a spaceship out of scrap lumber:
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I think a problem that does not get enough attention is that many of the jobs that are NOT Bullshit, don’t require as much time to do as workers are forced to perform.
for example, I work 40+ hours a week but typically only actually have around 20 hours of work that needs or can get done. There is no practical way to know ahead of time WHEN during that 40+ hours of the week is a moment for which a task is needed. Thus in essence I feel I am paid to be on call for the moments something needs to be done.
I have primarily encountered this more or less at about 75% of all jobs I ever have held, so I would assume its got to be pretty common.
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My dream job!
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This is an area of general interest to me that I often contemplate as I spend my day gathering data for reports and applications that I suspect will misinterpret said data as well as my daily 1.5 hour round-trip commute.
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That leaves a lot of uncited citations
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Sometimes all the hours are at once, and you have to tell everyone “This will take half an hour to do, I’ll have it done in six days.” That’s always fun.
The 2% agriculture is from the BLS. This includes workers producing agricultural products for export. Manufacturing is currently higher than 5%, but China has taken off a lot of the automation pressure. Based on existing trends, 5% is a reasonable estimate for the number of manufacturing jobs we might expect.
- KI’m at the point where I take Graeber and his methodology with a very large grain of salt, but I’m also skeptical of how well we can pull off guaranteed employment. I support UBI over GE, not because of bullshit jobs, but because of all of the work people do for free home-making and child-rearing, caring for their extended families and so-forth. Like, you could maybe employ a bunch of people in a Universal Child Care system, but there’s also a lot of contingency in people’s lives that happens outside work hours, and they’ll still be doing work even outside of the workplace.
Some work is because, “We’ve always done it, and who knows what chaos will ensue if we don’t continue to do it”. This is common in offices, where even once a job is automated, or an outside firm is hired to do something (like payroll) someone in the office continues to do it, essentially duplicating the work of the outside firm.
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