My experience: Got an award as “most productive state employee.”
Some Web project thing, saved my state (and yours) millions per year. Whatever.
Anyway, got laid off a few months later for no particular reason.
Here’s the tricky part: Can you see the connection?
From the article: [emphasis mine]
It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
Remember everyone…
Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same… exactly the same…
It’s worth throwing a vote away (along with long-term, critical thinking) to usher in more Republicans with a little protest vote for a candidate that has no chance in hell in winning (or by not voting at all). It’s worked out fantastic so far, huh?
Or maybe it’s time to vote in lesser evil consistently for a couple of decades to lessen the damage that’s been done already?
Still wonder how Democrats became Republicans? Look in the mirror. 
When the American public is inconsistent and votes in Republicans (either directly or indirectly), many Democratic politicians surmise they need to shift increasingly to the right in order to win seats. By not supporting lesser evil Democrats, we send a message loud and clear to others that they need to shift to the right in order to make a greater impact (to win or stay in office at all).
If we would have consistently voted in lesser evil Democrats all these years, even the Republican party would have shifted more the left by now. Instead, here we are with an infestation of DINOs and Blue Dog Democrats as the barely lesser evil and a Republican party that’s so far to the right, that they’re dangerously unhinged.
We’ve allowed greater evil to become entrenched in our government by our own inconsistency. And, because of this egregious mistake it’s now going to take (literally) decades of consistently voting in lesser evil before there’s even a small hope of a feasible third party candidate that has a chance in hell of winning.
The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. Stop using false equivalency when judging between parties and candidates. They LOVE it when you do that.
Yep: “pointless” is subjective. I know plenty of people who would call science fiction authors pointless and without tangible benefit, and I’m not driving trollies for flames.
Having said that, I worked at a large publishing company where they kept cutting production positions to save money…then replaced them with middle management positions to “streamline” the operation. They were awfully top-heavy when I got laid off and I’m sure they’ll all get comfy severance packages when the inevitable door closing comes in the near future.
I think nearly free and endless supplies of anything people want would be incredibly disruptive at a societal level.
I nearly had a panic attack once after buying a ticket to a $350 million dollar lottery. I started thinking about my day to day life and realized that almost all of my needs relate to making enough money to support my family. (home, job, etc) My frivolous wants (toys, computers, TVs, cars, etc) at the scale I am used to working with would be completely swamped with that level of money.
I could get that video card I wanted… Or just buy a better computer…
I could fix that … Or have someone else fix it… Or just get a new car…
I could quit my job… What would I do with my time???
I could… Or… I could… Or… (rinse and repeat)
I’m just not sure we could do that. Here’s an example. Farming. Most of the food we consume is the result of industrial-scale farming that relies on heavy machinery, cheap migrant labor and chemicals created in plants that employ low-skilled workers. In order to enjoy the same standard of living, we would have to somehow re-create that entire behemoth. I’m not sure it’s possible, because of scale. The beast is so big, and over-produces so much that it has to export to realize that economy of scale. So to say, “lets go back to back yard gardens to feed ourselves: you grow the peppers; I’ll grow the corn.” It can’t happen. We cannot create the same economy. We cannot outdo what has been done without making some adjustment. If that adjustment is instead of $1.50 per pound bell peppers we now must accept that bell peppers are $3 a pound, and all the other foods literally double in price, because we could only achieve a 50% simulacrum of the current food production machine… then WHERE DOES THAT MONEY COME FROM? It clearly could not come from working less. It could come from greatly increasing our wages, but then where does THAT money come from? And in turn, if the laborers in the back yards are getting “paid” more to produce more expensive food, where does THAT money come from?
See what I’m saying? There is no free lunch. Either we accept that life is hard work, or we don’t and have less. We cannot have a system indistinguishably similar to the current system without having some way to pay for the changes we make.
I don’t like the current system. But I do not see how we could cut out all the “nonessential” work, when, in some form, all of that activity has been earmarked to pay for each next step in the chain. The only way to strike up a fundamental shift would be to take personal responsibility for the production of stuff we each want to consume. And that, I can guarantee, would cost us a lot more than 40 hours a week to build and maintain those personal systems: papermaking, clothes, food, clean water, fuel, etc.
I’ve always described this as “Those of us who actually do things” vs “Those who talk about other people doing things”
Obviously this is an enormous over-simplification but if you are a Do-er then the Talkers seem like an overly large group of people yammering on about things they don’t understand. Plus there seem to be many more asshats who are talkers.
Unless you are a talker then I’m sure your perspective is exactly the same… just reversed.
A plague of newborn daughters! play the don don DOOOO music.
What a great article. Just before reading this great article I found that my time sheet passes through 3 peoples hands before my boss gets a hold of it, and then he sends it off to HR!
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what
does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely
limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite
demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: 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.)
What about the people who work “meaningless” jobs to fund the things they actually think matters ie writing SF, or oil painting, or snow boarding…
I might go round befouling phones to bring on the Apocalypse.
Anyone remember Groenings’ ‘9 Types of Bosses’? I’ve worked for each of those, and the penultimate one I had, the Perfect Boss, ruined me for work forever, especially as he was replaced by a boss that managed to combine characteristics of all the other eight, and seemed to think that the company only existed so that she could buy a big house and pad her pension.
Some were bad bosses because they were useless, and some because they only worked effectively for their own benefit. The one good one got kicked out because he didn’t watch his back.
I’ve forgotten my point now, but I think it had something to do with the uselessness of modern management. I wonder if they would work better if they weren’t so direly over-valued?
I don’t think we have to recreate all of these systems. They’re already there, and they can be adapted. There would be huge changes necessary to do this right, but I don’t think recreating existing systems would be significant challenges.
So here’s one idea, let me know what you think: No more wages. You’re now paid in housing, food, services and stuff. In exchange for this, you work ten hours a week as an epidemiologist. You have a job now that we all decided was important, so you’ll keep doing it. You can work more if you really want to, but you won’t be given more.
Farming is sort of seasonal, so a bunch of other people will work a few straight weeks each year at 30 hours a week to plant and harvest. They like that because they get the rest of the year off. Who? Well, some of them are former health insurance middle managers. We don’t need health insurance any more, because health care is now provided by the same system. It’s part of your pay. So all of those folks, who had non-essential jobs are free to work on essential jobs, reducing the amount of work time for others in those fields. Some of them were advertising managers, some worked at fast food restaurants, some were telemarketers.
Some of those new farmers came from the auto manufacturing industry, which is largely robot driven. Automobiles are now produced to last for a long time rather than to go out of fashion in four years. Because we’d all rather be doing something else with our time than paying for new cars that break. Our cars are now more reliable and last longer and take less time to build.
Every time someone figures out how to do the essential things more easily or quickly or reliably, no one loses a job and has to find new busy work. Instead, we all save a little work time. We all share that productivity increase.
That’s my little utopian fantasy. There are a lot of challenges - agreeing on what’s considered “necessary” being chief among them. I think we both agree that farming would be important.
You say “The only way to strike up a fundamental shift would be to take personal responsibility for the production of stuff we each want to consume.” But I think the other way: The only way to strike up a fundamental shift would be to SHARE responsibility for the production of stuff we ALL want to consume.
Of course it would be completely disruptive if you released them on the world all at once, and extremely dangerous. But in reality we’d have years or even decades of a development process when we knew they were coming, and were getting cheaper until more of use could use them etc. Even if they start out really pricey, eventually someone civic-minded will get there hands on them and end the rent-seeking forever.
What a replicator really means is that anything you can design or obtain a design for, you can have for free in as much abundance as you choose. The work of engineering, and possibly of obtaining raw materials, swtill exists. Science still exists. Art of all forms. Relationships. Law and crime will exist (even property crime, though less of it, and most likely violent crime m eventually be prosecuted more like property crime is today if people have frequent reliable backups. Medical research is still needed. We still need to invent space travel.
And even if someday we can discover the true laws of reality and find we can do absolutely anything we want, we still get to enjoy going out and actually doing it.
Yeah, a few of us have been fighting for an end-around, with some limited success (because everybody’s too busy looking at the bad things that are being done with corporations to realize that one can be exploited from the inside to let us take our entire lives back!
I think I have figured out what bugged me about the assertion in the original article - it’s that it is so blanket. It’s not the actual jobs or occupations that are useless. It’s that the people are used in unproductive or outright counterproductive ways.
Lawyers engage in zero-sum battles over rent seeking instead of preventing conflicts through well-structured contracts and negotiations, middle managers send each other piles of reports instead of hands-on coordinating the operation, clerks figure out ways to deny people their health insurance instead of diligently keeping records…
So it’s in fact rather about bullshit positions than bullshit jobs.
It would be safe to say that a huge number of administrative tasks in our current society either provide no real value or else are simply propping up another part of an already inefficient system.
The reality is that capitalism itself requires a sort of manufactured scarcity, and wouldn’t function well without it, nor would it function well with very low unemployment.
You can even go as far as McDonalds. What value is there in flipping burgers? Why not have burger-making robots and have the only HUMANS who make them be the ones who love them and make the most amazing artistic burgers ever? Sure, one could say ‘automating all those things would create chaos’ and I’d argue ‘we HAVE chaos’. One could say ‘these jobs teach valuable skills’ and I’d respond with ‘not in a useful way’.
Then when you get to the vast majority of administrative tasks (NOT ALL! just most) you end up realizing that they only have value in this very specific context, as part of a complicated interconnected system that’s kind of an unguided evolutionary mess.
If we had more nurses, doctors, providers, producers, and just made sure to keep up a nice stockpile of nonperishables and places for people to be then sure, we couldn’t justify paying them as much as we do in our economic system, but we also would have plenty of food and health care and people with places to live. It’s so broken there’s no way to fix it incrementally without breaking it, but that doesn’t mean we should give it excuses.
Shorter version of article: If you actually do anything with reading or writing for a living that isn’t 100% creative, your job is bullshit!
Snarky, anti-intellectual piece of crap article, sorry.
I’ve done work as part of a legal staff, and in grant administration, and believe me, the jobs were not “zero value bullshit.”
Another note: Those who bitch the loudest about how much they hate lawyers are the ones who cry the loudest when they actually need one.
You are asking the question wrong, you should ask it like this: “What is better for our community, well paid people with stable jobs and good benefits or EVERYDAY LOW PRICES!!!”
I’m not working a 4-hour day partly because I’m working on a project too large to tackle alone. That requires time spend in communications.
I’m also not working a 4-hour day because that’s absolutely the wrong direction. What I should be working is much longer creative blocks, and then taking corresponding time off. Significantly more efficient when working on complex systems where half the work is keeping all the context loaded in wetware. (Unfortunately, even though I’m on flextime, some of the systems I need become unavailable for service during some of my more productive hours. And on this project, I can’t argue that disrupting my efforts is really worse than disrupting someone else’s in another 8-hour shift. Grumph.)
Well, with this and Taibbi’s piece making reference to “degrees in bullshit,” at least kids nowadays can get a job in what they majored in.
Yeah, I like this.
I’m a big fan not of ‘4 hour days’ but ‘80 hour months’.
And let’s be fair, even that’s kind of a trick. If we have useful work to do, with people we love working with, then it’s not really work anymore. And a few intrinsically motivated people can blow a huge number of people being motivated in other ways out of the water, there’s just no competition. 
