(NB, if you want to look for the books or lectures, he does spell BS out in full, but I'm not gonna try my luck with annoying the mods.)
As a quick introduction, David Graeber is a professor of anthropology, so he proceeds to do what anthropology does: try to figure out how a culture works. In his case, western culture, rather than going and annoying some tribe somewhere.
In his case, this started with an article about how some jobs are just useless time-filling pretending to work, and it snowballed until polling companies started doing anonymous polls. Where about 40% of the respondents conceded that either their job contributes nothing to society, or even in some cases that society as a whole would actually be better off if the job were to disappear entirely. That doesn't include those who were unsure if their job actually contributes anything, which were a significant chunk too. Less than half actually gave a definite yes to the question of whether their job contributes anything.
Graeber then proceeds to classify these jobs, based on people's testimonies, into 5 categories:
1. Flunkies: These are people who are there just to make someone else feel good about themselves. Like, say, a secretary who only gets a phone call a day. This can however include any other employees that are there just to inflate the number of people that someone manages, since in most corporations your status and salary as a manager are directly determined by that.
2. Goons: These are the people you only need because the opponents have some of their own. Similar in concept to armies: if nobody had one, you wouldn't need one. In the corporate world that can include stuff like telemarketers.
3. Duct-tapers: People who are there to apply some fix or cover-up to a problem which shouldn't have existed in the first place. His standard example is that when his university needed a carpenter to fix something, for weeks they got to talk on the phone to someone whose job was to apologize that the carpenter can't come today. So, Graeber asks himself, wouldn't have been easier to hire a second carpenter instead of that guy?
4. Box-tickers: People who are there just so it appears that the organization does something that it doesn't actually do.
5. Taskmasters: extra layers of management that aren't actually needed, so in the best case they don't actually do anything, and in the worst case they actually make up BS for other people to do, so they can feel like they did something. E.g., administrators who are supposed to free your time of admin tasks so you can concentrate on the more useful stuff, but in practice make you fill extra forms and attend extra meetings and otherwise actually make you LESS productive.
The last one ties into what he calls the BS-ization of jobs which aren't BS per se. But you get to devote less time on doing the job itself, and more and more on pointless meetings and forms. These are not included in those 40% btw, so this is an additional waste of society's resources on top of that.
Graeber also notes that these have been the jobs that have actually proliferated in the last century straight. The supposed service economy didn't actually create more service jobs that actually do anything for anyone. Those have apparently remained flat at around 20%. They can serve more people nowadays, but that's basically it. Instead what has exploded is the domain of what he calls BS jobs.
One of his example comes from his domain, namely the academia, where apparently teaching jobs have increased by about 40%, but administrative ones have increased by 240%. In case anyone wondered why universities cost more these days.
He also notes that these people don't seem particularly happy about their job. At least theoretically they are getting a good wage for minimal effort, so return on investment, so to speak, is sky high. They should be happy, right? Turns out that most people aren't actually happy about being useless, or worse yet, making up BS work to slow others down too.
Graeber's main solution seems to be the universal basic income. Among other things on the basis that, sure, its opponents say that then people wouldn't go to work if they have some assured income, but then if 40% already contribute nothing or even a negative amount, how much worse can it be?
I'll leave my impressions for another message, since this is already a wall of text.
As a quick introduction, David Graeber is a professor of anthropology, so he proceeds to do what anthropology does: try to figure out how a culture works. In his case, western culture, rather than going and annoying some tribe somewhere.
In his case, this started with an article about how some jobs are just useless time-filling pretending to work, and it snowballed until polling companies started doing anonymous polls. Where about 40% of the respondents conceded that either their job contributes nothing to society, or even in some cases that society as a whole would actually be better off if the job were to disappear entirely. That doesn't include those who were unsure if their job actually contributes anything, which were a significant chunk too. Less than half actually gave a definite yes to the question of whether their job contributes anything.
Graeber then proceeds to classify these jobs, based on people's testimonies, into 5 categories:
1. Flunkies: These are people who are there just to make someone else feel good about themselves. Like, say, a secretary who only gets a phone call a day. This can however include any other employees that are there just to inflate the number of people that someone manages, since in most corporations your status and salary as a manager are directly determined by that.
2. Goons: These are the people you only need because the opponents have some of their own. Similar in concept to armies: if nobody had one, you wouldn't need one. In the corporate world that can include stuff like telemarketers.
3. Duct-tapers: People who are there to apply some fix or cover-up to a problem which shouldn't have existed in the first place. His standard example is that when his university needed a carpenter to fix something, for weeks they got to talk on the phone to someone whose job was to apologize that the carpenter can't come today. So, Graeber asks himself, wouldn't have been easier to hire a second carpenter instead of that guy?
4. Box-tickers: People who are there just so it appears that the organization does something that it doesn't actually do.
5. Taskmasters: extra layers of management that aren't actually needed, so in the best case they don't actually do anything, and in the worst case they actually make up BS for other people to do, so they can feel like they did something. E.g., administrators who are supposed to free your time of admin tasks so you can concentrate on the more useful stuff, but in practice make you fill extra forms and attend extra meetings and otherwise actually make you LESS productive.
The last one ties into what he calls the BS-ization of jobs which aren't BS per se. But you get to devote less time on doing the job itself, and more and more on pointless meetings and forms. These are not included in those 40% btw, so this is an additional waste of society's resources on top of that.
Graeber also notes that these have been the jobs that have actually proliferated in the last century straight. The supposed service economy didn't actually create more service jobs that actually do anything for anyone. Those have apparently remained flat at around 20%. They can serve more people nowadays, but that's basically it. Instead what has exploded is the domain of what he calls BS jobs.
One of his example comes from his domain, namely the academia, where apparently teaching jobs have increased by about 40%, but administrative ones have increased by 240%. In case anyone wondered why universities cost more these days.
He also notes that these people don't seem particularly happy about their job. At least theoretically they are getting a good wage for minimal effort, so return on investment, so to speak, is sky high. They should be happy, right? Turns out that most people aren't actually happy about being useless, or worse yet, making up BS work to slow others down too.
Graeber's main solution seems to be the universal basic income. Among other things on the basis that, sure, its opponents say that then people wouldn't go to work if they have some assured income, but then if 40% already contribute nothing or even a negative amount, how much worse can it be?
I'll leave my impressions for another message, since this is already a wall of text.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2ThGi59
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