Bullshit Jobs was bad to the point that I couldn't finish it. Most of the BS jobs he identified served clear purposes, he just wasn't intellectually curious enough to identify those purposes.
One that stood out was his complaining about the scheduling person for the university carpenter. Why couldn't they just hire a second carpenter instead so he could get his bookshelves fixed? Because a scheduling person is almost certainly cheaper than a carpenter, you need someone to schedule the carpenters time, and that person probably was doing a dozen other things in between phone calls.
I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the guy was an idiot.
I've actually been writing something extending Harry Frankfurt's concept of "bullshit", and I saw that it ties in to at least some of what Graeber was after, so I felt myself compelled to read the whole book. But his earlier book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" is one of the few books that I actively started reading, intending to finish, and then actively hated enough that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Both of these books had some actual real interesting speculative ideas in them, but they were packaged with so many swipes at other people for their speculative ideas that they just felt like packages of resentment.
I thought that this paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067) was a useful empirical critique of the Bullshit Jobs idea - what Graeber has really discovered is that Marxian alienation is not just a feature of assembly line blue collar work, but also a feature of white collar work in the modern knowledge economy. They do it in a context that claims to be very sympathetic to him, and probably is too sympathetic to him. But based on how he treated other people who have engaged with his work, I would not be surprised if he attacked these authors too.
I think there are a few real and interesting phenomena he's pointing at - some bosses who feel self-important enough that they are willing to waste some company money on flunkies and toadies; regulatory apparatuses that require companies to hire people for compliance roles that the companies treat as bullshit; the aforementioned white collar alienation. But he's trying to have it both ways when he says that "bullshit jobs" are *actually* useless, while using as his criterion the fact that the person *feels* useless.
Yeah, as both you and Noah said, i felt there was a kernel of truth to his thesis, but his execution was awful, coming across as basically non-funny George Carlin routine, and he didn't really do anything with the interesting parts (though like I said, I could not finish).
I think part of it is that a have what he would probably call a BS job - I'm an insurance coverage attorney. But I can see how what I do helps grease the gears that keep the modern economy running. There are probably some BS jobs out there, but usually if you pan back far enough, you'll find that most jobs serve a meaningful purpose and he had no interest in doing that.
The number of times that he basically said "I know that I'm right because some of my Twitter followers agreed with me about this"...
He's really good at coming up with interesting and provocative thoughts. Really bad at having any interest in checking whether there might be good reason to doubt some of them.
Oh was BS Jobs supposed to be funny? I couldn’t get through more than a couple chapters because it seemed so spiteful and mean. If that was supposed to be snark, I completely missed it.
If anyone has an intuition that bs jobs are a real phenomena but were disappointed in the lack of rigour in Graebers' book, I wrote a review of the book that tries to ground bs jobs in more standard economic concepts, mainly market failures.
My conclusion was that they are a major feature of modern Western economies, and it's not just a case of ordinary Marxist alienation.
Excellent essay, I especially liked your definitions of goons, changers and rickshawers (not a word, but should be). I do take some exception to the whole notion of ductapers being BS though. There are plenty of things that have to be done in stages (building a house, for example) and sometimes a stage that either isn't complete or that will rely on one or more other stages until it's stable will need things like scaffolding or duct tape to hold it together until it emerges as a final finished product. So this is actually a useful job most of the time because it often represents only a stage towards the final product, which could not exist independent of the ductapers. The example I'll give is mudding and taping. When drywall is cut it creates jagged, independent edges. There is no way to produce a smooth finished surface for paint without the intermediate step of mudding and taping (or previously, plastering). Without that you'd have holes in your walls that all sorts pests could enter or dirt would be trapped in. It's an essentially valuable part of the house to have the walls closed up. The only way to achieve this without mudding and taping would be to produce the house whole (either with 3D printing of concrete or factory production and shipping) and drop it into place. But that's a much less efficient system than simply renovating an existing structure (in most cases) because you'd always be bulldozing whatever came before it. If you're building from scratch it would probably be more efficient, but re-use is often the better and cheaper solution. So duct tapers can easily perform some necessary (and not BS) work if you don't want to increase the total amount of work necessary to finish each job.
The bureaucracy and consulting industry involving in the diversity scheme is useless, and in fact harmful. Probably not an example leftists would want to use, but it seems like an obvious one. In fact, all the consultants and NGOs that suck money from the government while doing nothing seem to be a net negative. Obviously, these people are hindering, not helping, California in building trains and removing homeless people from the streets.
I guess, from one point of view, there are really few meaningful jobs, and it also depends on how you define them. Think Covid lockdows and who still had to go to work, like medical personnel, police and infrastructure maintenance workers. But in that sense artists are not essential either to keep the basic infrastructure going. Some work like delivering pizza is clearly not a net negative, but I guess the argument is that you can pick up your pizza or make it yourself. To Noah's point about people getting paid to play Call of Duty, that certainly wouldn't be useful, but it would increase utility in the sense of increasing happiness, so would that work be a good bullshit job?
I never took the David Graeber idea too seriously, but I'm also unconvinced by Noah Smith's argument that there aren't many bullshit jobs because apparently 60% say they are satisfied with their jobs. One problem with Graeber's argument is that in a sense it seems like he was just talking about the emptiness of existence, this has nothing to do with capitalism, and it's not clear that people are going to find meaning outside of work. On the other hand, many people loved working from home, because of the flexibility and the very fact that they had more time to spend with the family, smell the roses, and whatever, which is certainly evidence in favor of giving people more time off work.
"All consultants and NGO's" seems like a very broad brush, also, some bureaucracy is necessary (although I'd agree that it's out of hand at the moment - still, if you need to renew your driver's license then you also need someone at the desk). Also, having worked for NGO's in a past life, I can say that quite a lot of funding is usually private, not government (though some is) and some of that work does things like counter foreign psy-ops in internal affairs or promotes not only goodwill but also other industries in country as well as in the country they're acting in. For instance, when a medical team for Doctors Without Borders goes in to a disaster zone, who do you think supplies the needles and bandages they'll use? Who built the portable MRI? Yep, us. So it's not all waste. Also, helping people out can be good for the soul as well as promoting good links between countries that are other than political. Do you think the guy rescued in a flood or saved from dysentery will forget? I doubt it.
I was talking specifically about consultants and NGOs that are supposed to be doing things that they obviously weren't doing, or that are much more inefficient than the alternatives. I gave the example of infrastructure consultants in California who raise the price of projects immensely, without showing any results, and NGOs who are paid to take care of the homeless problem, but they never do. In the case of the homeless issue, the individuals working for these organizations may be well-meaning, but it's the system that is obviously rubbish. Obviously the issue is solved by housing construction, housing subsidy, and then by having the police arrest people and force them into treatment for the hard cases.
I think we have fairly different opinions about how to solve California's homeless problem, although we do both agree on housing as a start. I lived in Venice Beach for awhile and tried with an initiative to help with that specific issue but I found far more lip service towards it than concrete action. I can't speak to the rest of California but I would expect about the same. Anyway, at the time I was not a consultant, just a chef so I dropped out of even trying. I do think many individuals were well-meaning and I think none of it was very co-ordinated, either between NGO groups or with the city/county/other groups (like police) or that it addressed some of the underlying issues causing it (like California is a relatively warm place to be homeless in all the way to LA is an expensive city to be homeless in, regardless, things like racism and classism can play a part too). It's not all "people need treatment" though IMHO. I think that's more a symptom than root cause. I don't even think "treatment" (either for drugs or for mental health) actually works very well, at least by itself the numbers are rather dismal. Maybe as a part of a larger concerted effort they improve to acceptable levels.
I think there's a good objection to be made to consultants who are really just there to give a stamp of approval for political reasons. Some play an environmental role though, and that can have real world consequences, like in the case of development in fire or flood prone areas. Often, like in IT, it's just a way for management/politicians/developers to get what they want without consulting staff or other "on the ground". It perpetuates the top-down, non-consultive, simplistic approach we've had in place since Hammurabi. I'd agree we could do a lot to reform that.
California spends an enormous amount of money on NGOs to not resolve the homeless issue. It is a lip service in the sense that nothing actually happens, but it is not a lip service in the sense that resources are not spent on the issue. How things work now is that NGO employees show up, propose treatment for the homeless, they refuse, and that's it. Treatment doesn't work because nobody is forced to do it, and because the streets are open drug markets, if someone goes through treatment, he can easily go back and he is tempted to go back. The solution is to force people off the streets, and force them to go to drug treatment or go to a hospital if that's what they need. Of course, there needs to be ongoing policing of the streets against vagrancy, tent cities and drug use.
This notion that everything is very complicated, and there's the warm weather, and inequality, and I don't know what, is ridiculous. California had the same weather 20 or 40 years ago, but the problem has gotten much worse since then. It got worse in the last ten years. Not every city in the world looks like these cities. Obviously there are ways to get these people off the street, but there is a lack of political will in many American cities. Yes, housing needs to be built, so regulation needs to allow for it, and yes, the government needs to buy or subsidize housing for some people, but also, the government needs to just have zero tolerance for its cities becoming dystopias.
On Biden and Afghanistan: sure, withdraw. But first, put some goddamn effort into resettling all those we promised to “free” if they worked with us. What an utter travesty.
As a successful serial startup founder/CEO less than 15% of the things I did on a daily basis for years was what I wanted to do, why I founded the companies.
85% of it was the things that allowed me to do the other 15%. Some of that 85% was odious.
I loved doing the 15%.
That is the nature of work.
We have lost our touch with the reality of how a career is developed. You start with hard, menial jobs and work you way up.
I worked as a concrete laborer, then a kid who put in the forms, then a concrete pusher, then a finisher, and then I got a chance to run the big machines. I went from making minimum wage to making 4X minimum wage as my skills increased.
I saw an engineer checking the forms and the concrete -- arrived in an air conditioned Suburban, wore khakis and a polo shirt. I wanted to become an engineer. I went to school and studied engineering.
I paid for my education by serving 5 years in the Army.
I did all that stuff for a decade and a half. That is how the American Dream is founded -- hard work.
When you start out, you do the things you really want to do on your own time. Then, if you are really, really, really lucky you get to do them for a living.
Teachers/parents fail kids by letting them think there is a shortcut to the American Dream. You have to work hard and remember nobody ever drowned in their own sweat.
I think people are forgetting that those "menial" jobs actually teach some things too. You learn how to act, how to show up and not be late, maybe the very basic parts of the jobs above first. Only then can you be ready/trusted/capable of handling the larger jobs. Not everything in the menial jobs is a teaching moment, some is just drudgery, but even being able to get through drudgery without complaining (well, not too much) prepares you for the inevitable moments of drudgery later in even the bigger jobs, where you need to finish it before you call it a night.
I would say no job is menial if the worker can find dignity in the tasks they do. In turn, it's up to us who don't have the burden of living under a menial job to treat workers with respect, no matter the position.
The opposite is indignity in work. I remember the social media foofaraw after a Fox News segment of "In Joe Biden's America, stimulus payments are making people lazy and fast-food cashiers are being replaced with iPads." Actual fast-food workers brought the receipts on what it's like to work for terrible pay, random schedules and the indignity of treatment by customers, co-workers and supervisors.
These are jobs where dignity goes to die because a lot of it is beyond the worker's agency. They don't get to choose their customers, who they work with, and who gets to boss them. Yes, that's the way things are but not because for some immutable law of physics or nature the way things must be.
Reading your story, with the excellent little details like the air conditioned Chevy, kinda makes me feel like I didn't have to work all that hard to be successful.
I started out in a min-wage job too, but I definitely did not work hard at it. It didn't seem to me, at all, that there was any prospect of moving up to anything from bagging groceries and rounding up carts.
High school also was not fun and I did not try hard, but it seemed like a better gig than the grocery store.
I don't think every kid going to a hedge fund from Wharton this year has had an experience that is anything like yours.
A lot of people are looking at who works hard, and who gets what, and coming to the opposite conclusion.
Personally, I think your framing is the healthier one.
"Progressives need to realize that racial demographics are not political destiny."
Progressives need to realize that racism (that is, favoring one race over another as a matter of official government policy) is bad, and is opposed by an overwhelming majority of the voting public.
Proof: in California in 2020, the very same electorate that voted for Biden 2-to-1 over Trump also voted AGAINST "affirmative action" (that is, racism) in state contracting and college admissions by a margin of 55% to 45%.
"racism (that is, favoring one race over another as a matter of official government policy) is bad"
I think your definition of "racism" isn't really the way the term is generally used, Mark, although government policy on race *could* be racist (or not). In my experience, "racism" traditionally meant either the belief that different races were of different value, and that members of some races were intrinsically superior/inferior to members of others, or it referred to a closely related idea of various types of prejudice in thought and action against members of a race other than one's own. When "affirmative action" programs were first begun in the 1970s, they were not widely seen as racist because they were viewed not as judgments about the value of different races, but as paths to make up for longstanding inequities that had been caused by blatantly racist (in the ordinary sense) policies and practices. Helpfully assessing to what degree they were justified then, now, and in intervening decades would need to go way beyond a blanket good/bad judgment. (On the other hand, people Left and Right seem happy to distort the word "racism" to fit the argument they want to make, carrying over the negative associations of blatant white supremacism to very different ideas and conduct, so why shouldn't you be able to mold the term to fit your point?)
As for Kendi, whom you link to, his anti-racist amendment proposal is, I think, contemporary "anti-racism" at its worst (which is very bad indeed!). However, if you read his book, "How To Be An Anti-Racist," I think you'll be surprised (as I was) to find a very different approach, one that's insightful and constructive, portraying racism as a dehumanizing form of stereotyping, and treating our habit of seeing individuals through stereotypes as a root problem that can be productively addressed to combat racism in the ordinary sense. Just like affirmative action, I think we don't need to come up with a single judgment on Kendi or progressive anti-racism, as both the woke and anti-woke brigades urge us to.
Unions: guess the patronage must flow or else we’ll choke the economy like the dockworkers. People tell me “unions good and you’d be a serf otherwise”; I say “fuck off, American unions bad, other countries do it better”.
Race: leftists will have to decide if they want to win elections or go back to their 80s losing configuration of blacks (who are slipping away) + neurotic woke whites (who aren’t close to a majority) or dial back on some of their pet victim protection excesses. Already Asians in NY are trending GOP because Dems clearly see us as being patronage fodder for blacks in education.
Asians have been viciously and brutally discriminated against by "progressives" for decades. I was told 30 years ago by a University of California Dean that undergrad Asian enrollment was being ruthlessly suppressed for fear that the white state legislators would cut state funding (which they later did anyway); ironically this Dean was himself Asian! I always expected Asians to figure out what was going on, and to organize and emerge as a political force; maybe it's finally happening.
Asians are mostly violently targeted by right leaning white supremacists. There is not a situation in which they are prevented from attaining higher education. There are affirmative action programs in some colleges that may admit minority classes but ultimately, there are enough colleges to admit anyone that wants to go to one. The Ivys are not the onlys and actually are not ever the best colleges -- they just have brand cachet. If classes in colleges were so competitive that people could not get in, we would not be having college closures, we would be seeing more new colleges open.
Hmm, I have been more worried about anti Asian sentiment forming similar to how certain folks used to hate on Jewish people for being such successful professional people
The Reddit anti work stuff is dumb and overwrought, but there is something to the idea.
I think it relates to Lean/TPS ideas of value-added and non-value added steps in a process. Many steps seem critically important, until you realize the entire process can be simplified 90 percent.
Work that mostly involves coordinating, scheduling, communicating to non-customers, expediting, managing queues, completing forms, meeting compliance - it’s all non-value added in the end.
Would your customer pay you just to have a meeting where you talk about filling their order, or do they just want their order filled?
I have not read that book. The way I think of BS jobs is that of what jobs actually contribute to a direct economy-- what jobs actually do things vs those that don't. We have a shortage of people who want to provide direct impact to creating the physical and technological infrastructure for not only survival but thriving communities not filled with blight.
That means tradesmen (construction trades like roofing, electrical, bricklaying, concrete work) agricultural (planting and harvesting food), communication (building cell towers, satellites, maintaining the wired systems, the security to prevent interruption by foreign enemies), transportation (railway, engineers, air traffic controllers, people to work on and maintain airplanes, car manufacturing-- affordable personal transportation, electrical charging stations, oil drilling and refining etc.) and housing (new builds for needed shelter, providing lower income housing or just reasonable sized homes and other types of shelter like boarding houses, hostels for singles, the kinds of places we need vs. what may sell to provide the greatest profit), people to develop and actually build these structures, landscaping, providing the roads/infrastructure and of course, Healthcare-- actual hands on caregivers and those that support them (ancillary such as phlebotomists, lab techs, clinical testing techs, therapists, transporters-both in and intra facility), also pharmaceutical manufacturing and preparing, and of course the clinical practitioners/providers; we have a huge shortage of specialists down to homecare aides-- this sector is so stretched beyond capacity. -- all the jobs that people have to show up for and actually physically do. (Like we need people to collect and remove garbage, to work in the resource recovery plants, to maintain the water treatment plants or we will all end up poisoning our environment and ourselves.
These are the jobs and functions that are going wanting and are needed -- we are not suffering from a shortage of social media stars/marketers, cashiers, office support and WFH accounting, law, medical billing, human resources, data, and gaming software programming engineers. There are many jobs that just don't provide environmental comfort but they need to be done in order to keep the nation running, people sheltered, fed and the lights on.
I guess I also forgot to add law enforcement/military/investigative to police people very tempted to defraud (steal) and exploit systems for their benefit (this includes drug dealers from the Sacklers, corporate thieves like HCA, Individual and company tax cheats as well as the inner city slum lords, gangbangers and drug dealers, and of course arms smugglers, domestic terrorists and gun toting vigilantes.
I feel like “bullshit job” concept is fake but points to something real. The real issue might be that some people like a boss breathing down their neck when they work. The aggressive boss helps them stay on task, be their best self and feel purposeful. In other words, they find getting the work done more enjoyable and purposeful when someone is like “growl, i need this now or we’ll die.” It’s easier to find purpose when someone (an authority you accept and respect) is providing you with that purpose. Self-generated purpose, to some, feels fake or just meh.
But, like also, people can’t admit to themselves that they’re just not that self-motivated, not very agentic. After all, everyone is always talking about how great go-getters are with their self-motivation. You can’t roll up to an interview and be like, actually, I need a good smack every now and then to do my best work. So, if you can’t admit a lack of self-motivation, the next best thing is to say, my job sucks my soul out because it’s pointless, purposeless and “bullshit.”
People don’t like to talk about this, but there’s something exciting and fun and very much alive about a boss screaming in your face. Now, screamers are considered unprofessional, mean or whatever. And, on the other side of the screamer-phillic screamer-phobic spectrum, some people develop a nervous breakdown when screamed at.
Of course, employers understandably prefer people that they don’t have to yell at to get going, even setting aside legal or reputation risk If every employee needed at personal browbeaten, that would cost a lot.
Anyway, “bullshit jobs” is a zombie concept because it’s getting at a real issue. I think the issue is louder now because of increasingly feminized or walking-on-ice work norms, which flow from civil rights and employment mandates. Possibly, women managers are also on average less charismatic and have more trouble pulling off the socially/ psychologically authentic authoritarian yet charismatic boss. Maybe also men (and women) find themselves in lines of work that they are usually not suited to and would have been previously discouraged from, stuff like scheduling, liasing, coordinating. So instead of quitting, they try to make it work. And the poor person-job fit sucks.
I would add that some industries really do have bad institutional incentives, and some companies have a sclerotic corporate culture. And, when you’re in one of these situations, the sensation of purposelessness can be a lot for some people. But I don’t think these other issues are systemic.
While I admit that I’m not very self-motivated and I usually do better when there’s someone applying pressure (though I do best in the few occasions when I find internal motivation), having a boss actually screaming at me doesn’t help. In fact, it just causes me to turtle up and make mistakes.
My husband has been working at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant -- he is not employed by them, but employed through his union by an electrical contractor to upgrade, maintain and equip power to new clean rooms/labs. Security there is remarkable, heavier than one would find at a nuclear plant and requiring more people. Also it is top heavy in project managers, safety managers, safety inspectors etc. etc. He and one other guy often work with 4 people actively watching them, writing stuff on clipboards and honestly, those 4 people have absolutely no idea what the hell the electricians are doing. There are others that routinely tour the worksites (often inappropriately dressed) and make fickle demands they move this or that or require them to leave a work area. Since he started, the company has been purchased by a Korean company. Little by little the clipboard people and the self important assholes are disappearing.
It's well established people tend to be most productive when allowed to determine how to complete their work without someone breathing down their neck.
I like your suggestion on Twitter that the US begin forming coalitions with other democracies from the second and third worlds - like India, Indonesia, Nigeria etc... as a counterpoint to useless groupings like BRICS.
I think the I in Brics is India. Although you can join more than one group, I suppose. There are also 3 definite democracies in there, and whatever Russia is.
Yes, but the US is not a member. BRICS is bullshit anyway - the grouping makes zero sense. But a group of democracies from all economic levels around the world would. And at this point South Africa is a deeply flawed, only partly democratic country anyway.
But looking at this broadly, reason may be - because anyone can join BRICS. There are no by-laws, no secretariat, no charter, no accession requirements, no chairperson/ED or anything else. Unlike OECD or NATO, which require a whole series of requirements to gain accession status and then eventually, membership, BRICS literally asks for nothing. And it also does nothing either. There are no preferred entry requirements for BRICS citizens, no reduced tariff scheme etc... it's an amorphous grouping of states with nothing in common other than being on the outs with the civilized world.
Agree that BRICS will not be a worthy alternative to the established world order. None are really industrialized outside of China. Most are agrarian and have not much else to offer to trade. Crafting and nurturing an industrial policy is probably what they desire.
Well, the problem of South Africa is that few people vote in the opposition parties, but I think very few people put in doubt the freedom and fairness of South African elections
The problem is that the ANC, originally a liberation movement, decided to become a political party and like every African liberation movement before it including those in Guinea, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique and more, it descended into kleptocracy. The ANC also uses ever lever of state it controls, which is all of them, to ensure its continual reelection through patronage and outright corruption. Did you know there was an outbreak of cholera in Joburg recently because of the ANC's mishandling of the city's water treatment facilities? South Africa is a flawed democracy and becoming more so every year.
I think we did youth a big disservice by not having them do truly bullshit jobs when young. Youth labor participation has fallen for decades and many youth now never work (especially the kinds of youth who cry because they have be an intern and work).
The best thing my parents ever did was make work doing manual labor in concrete foundations and my son has thanked me for making him work at McDonald’s and while in college. If you never had a real brutal soul crushing job while having to go to school I guess working on a laptop must seem awful. If you comparrison is hauling multiple 4x8 sheets of plywood up a terraced hill starting at 5 in the morning to avoid as much of the brutal heat as possible working in the laptop is much nicer.
That said, I’m in NY state right now and there are a bunch of refugees seeking asylum who would happily haul that plywood. Wish we could keep them and send the crybabies to Central America for a few years. When they comeback I bet those soul crushing jobs will look a lot better.
I highly doubt that most of them can be automated away. It's dramatically easier to automate email jobs than it is to automate most real world tasks that people find unpleasant (e.g. cleaning, basic repairs). I wouldn't be surprised if people are still working as janitors when we first have AGI.
There is something to be said for work-hardening. If you cannot survive and perform under pressure, the value you bring to specific jobs is low. The world is a hard place. We cannot automate our military which is why we currently have a shortage of enlisted because there is a limited supply of people of enlistment age who are physically fit, possesses a work ethic and self discipline to manage discomfort, can manage anxiety, and have practice with delayed gratification and social/emotional intelligence. I think they are going to have to extend the basic training in the near future instead of compressing it. Not all jobs can be done by remotely controlled drones.
Great analysis on the BS jobs meme and China. On both topics, your information rings true.
I once very snakily,and perhaps rudely, suggested that you stick to economics and not venture into foreign policy. I apologize for any past snakiness/rudeness.
That said, I will disagree with you on Biden's FP. it's way too early to declare that our policies vis a vis either Russia or China are successful.
We have no exit plan for the war in Ukraine, and although the blame for the invasion lies 100% with Putin, we failed to try diplomacy to avoid the war. And hastened war with the ill-conceived Charter: Agreement dated 11/9/22, link below.
As for China, it remains to be seen whether our aggressive economic policies induce China to, for lack of a better phrase, "pull a Putin."
Finally, in terms of Afghanistan, i think it was an ill-conceived, poorly designed departure that set back America's reputation. To paraphrase a line from Macbeth: "Nothing in this war became us less like the leaving it."
Yes, Zelensky's prewar platform was diplomacy, but he never really pushed for it when he got in because the right wing militias threatened a second Maidan if he tried. And everyone in the West now admits that there never was an honest intention to implement the Minsk agreements, which contrary to your lies never involved territorial concessions in the Donbass. The end goal of Minsk was the reunification of the Donbass to Ukraine which also gave them additional autonomy. So everything you said was either wildly misleading or an outright lie.
" leftists, who once venerated work, pivoting their ideology to being against nearly all forms of it."
Perhaps ironically, the "bulshit jobs" thing is in large way a subproduct of the leftist veneration of work - if we follow the traditional neoclassical view of work (a thing with a negative utility that we do to receive in exchange things with positive utility), all jobs are supposed to be boring, and that is all.
It is when you adopt the point that work should be our realization as humans that, confronted with the reality that some jobs are boring, you will have the tentation of argue that those jobs are useless and only exist because an inefficient organization of society.
That Afghanistan take is right directionally and equal parts ignorant and morally abhorrent the more I think about. Of course, Asia is the priority and our focus needs to be there. Afghanistan was a humiliation because the US effectively surrendered the country back to the Taliban, abandoning any allies in the country to a grim fate, when it did not have to be that way. Worse, it is entirely Biden’s fault, trying to time the ending to September 11. This put pressure on an untested, unprepared government (another humiliation for as much as we spent in blood and treasure), when the Taliban never would have invaded if they had to campaign in the winter. If the purpose was solely to kill Al Qaeda, we could have achieved that with cruise missiles. The point was to prevent them from coming back, and that’s still TBD. AQ as a nation-state has lots of enemies, but AQ as a terrorist organization would likely still be useful to the same sponsors for the same reasons.
Afghanistan might have met the same fate regardless, but at least a few months of stability, with more time for allies to leave peacefully, would have been preferable to the swift, chaotic collapse. It will remain a huge stain on Biden’s reputation and character, though his administration’s savvy in Ukraine and Chinese containment dramatically outweighs it in impact.
> But Milei’s proposal is not a good one; a country needs a central bank, as a lender of last resort, to manage the money supply, and so on. It just needs a central bank that’s more responsible than Argentina’s. Argentina, perhaps more than any other country in the world, is a country with great potential that’s been held back by bad macroeconomic management, with hyperinflation and sovereign default making regular appearances. (This is probably why so many great macroeconomists come from Argentina — they want to help their country, but no one listens to them.)
Add a Latin American (and former economist) I have paid close attention to the question of dollarization. If handled well, an independent currency will help cushion the economy from external shocks. But in Ecuador by the year 2000, any significant purchase by consumers was transacted in dollars, so at that time Ecuador exhibited the downsides of both floating currency(pricing instantly) and dollarization(slow growth).
Regarding polling showing shift in Black and Hispanic vote to GOP, I think your bigger point is a good one. Shift is at least on a small level likely real and it’s probably a good thing long term if the two parties are less racially polarized.
But I’d really caution against extrapolating 2024 outcomes from polls this far out. For one, you’ll notice that “undecided” is a significant portion of the respondents. You more than most people would know that direction of inflation and whether or not we continue to have a “soft landing” will go a long way in determining which direction these supposed “undecideds” go.*
Last note that’s not really something you touched on but worth highlighting especially my Clinton example; absolutely ignore pundits bigging up challenges to the incumbents and “News analysis” that consists of someone on background saying “ppl are expressing doubts incumbent should run again”. This is as much about the slow news season that’s the summer as anything and also why Mark Helprin was always the most useless pundit in America even before he was outed as being kind of garbage as a person (he was the king of this kind of useless insider stuff).
* strong suspicion that a decent amount of those undecideds are more “can’t we have someone who’s not a geriatric running” but will likely still vote Biden. The true mystery to me are what I suspect are GOP “never Trump” vote. If I’m not mistaken they were key to 2020 and 2022 and if I had to guess will be key in 2024.
Some people seen to have a very romanticised view of working in the arts - I'd love to be an author, but getting the ideas from my head to the page is actually really hard even when I'm doing it for fun. Trying to make a living through art (writing, performing) is famously difficult and stressful, just in a different way to an office job. Maybe that's just the need to appeal to the market under capitalism, although it's not like feudalism and communism didn't place their own constraints on artistic expression. Even in some imagined post-scarcity utopia, there's always going to be competition for attention - if I got paid to just do whatever I wanted, I'd definitely try writing but I'd stop caring if nobody was reading it.
So true. Arts work is still work, and no one really prepares you for the boredom and the precarity from trying to make a living from your art.
Science fiction author John Scalzi writes about many things: liberal politics, the science fiction genre itself, life in rural Ohio, his family, but he routinely will share insights on what it's like to be a successful author. He doesn't romanticize it; he writes about the tedium about the writing process itself, the back-and-forth with his editors, and even how traveling for book signings is also drudgery. His blog is whatever.scalzi.com , and is worth reading even if you disagree with his politics.
Bullshit Jobs was bad to the point that I couldn't finish it. Most of the BS jobs he identified served clear purposes, he just wasn't intellectually curious enough to identify those purposes.
One that stood out was his complaining about the scheduling person for the university carpenter. Why couldn't they just hire a second carpenter instead so he could get his bookshelves fixed? Because a scheduling person is almost certainly cheaper than a carpenter, you need someone to schedule the carpenters time, and that person probably was doing a dozen other things in between phone calls.
I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the guy was an idiot.
I've actually been writing something extending Harry Frankfurt's concept of "bullshit", and I saw that it ties in to at least some of what Graeber was after, so I felt myself compelled to read the whole book. But his earlier book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" is one of the few books that I actively started reading, intending to finish, and then actively hated enough that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Both of these books had some actual real interesting speculative ideas in them, but they were packaged with so many swipes at other people for their speculative ideas that they just felt like packages of resentment.
I thought that this paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067) was a useful empirical critique of the Bullshit Jobs idea - what Graeber has really discovered is that Marxian alienation is not just a feature of assembly line blue collar work, but also a feature of white collar work in the modern knowledge economy. They do it in a context that claims to be very sympathetic to him, and probably is too sympathetic to him. But based on how he treated other people who have engaged with his work, I would not be surprised if he attacked these authors too.
I think there are a few real and interesting phenomena he's pointing at - some bosses who feel self-important enough that they are willing to waste some company money on flunkies and toadies; regulatory apparatuses that require companies to hire people for compliance roles that the companies treat as bullshit; the aforementioned white collar alienation. But he's trying to have it both ways when he says that "bullshit jobs" are *actually* useless, while using as his criterion the fact that the person *feels* useless.
Yeah, as both you and Noah said, i felt there was a kernel of truth to his thesis, but his execution was awful, coming across as basically non-funny George Carlin routine, and he didn't really do anything with the interesting parts (though like I said, I could not finish).
I think part of it is that a have what he would probably call a BS job - I'm an insurance coverage attorney. But I can see how what I do helps grease the gears that keep the modern economy running. There are probably some BS jobs out there, but usually if you pan back far enough, you'll find that most jobs serve a meaningful purpose and he had no interest in doing that.
The number of times that he basically said "I know that I'm right because some of my Twitter followers agreed with me about this"...
He's really good at coming up with interesting and provocative thoughts. Really bad at having any interest in checking whether there might be good reason to doubt some of them.
Oh was BS Jobs supposed to be funny? I couldn’t get through more than a couple chapters because it seemed so spiteful and mean. If that was supposed to be snark, I completely missed it.
I agree about bullshit jobs, but still you should check out the final book he wrote, the Dawn of Everything. It's really good, I highly recommend it.
If anyone has an intuition that bs jobs are a real phenomena but were disappointed in the lack of rigour in Graebers' book, I wrote a review of the book that tries to ground bs jobs in more standard economic concepts, mainly market failures.
My conclusion was that they are a major feature of modern Western economies, and it's not just a case of ordinary Marxist alienation.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review
Excellent essay, I especially liked your definitions of goons, changers and rickshawers (not a word, but should be). I do take some exception to the whole notion of ductapers being BS though. There are plenty of things that have to be done in stages (building a house, for example) and sometimes a stage that either isn't complete or that will rely on one or more other stages until it's stable will need things like scaffolding or duct tape to hold it together until it emerges as a final finished product. So this is actually a useful job most of the time because it often represents only a stage towards the final product, which could not exist independent of the ductapers. The example I'll give is mudding and taping. When drywall is cut it creates jagged, independent edges. There is no way to produce a smooth finished surface for paint without the intermediate step of mudding and taping (or previously, plastering). Without that you'd have holes in your walls that all sorts pests could enter or dirt would be trapped in. It's an essentially valuable part of the house to have the walls closed up. The only way to achieve this without mudding and taping would be to produce the house whole (either with 3D printing of concrete or factory production and shipping) and drop it into place. But that's a much less efficient system than simply renovating an existing structure (in most cases) because you'd always be bulldozing whatever came before it. If you're building from scratch it would probably be more efficient, but re-use is often the better and cheaper solution. So duct tapers can easily perform some necessary (and not BS) work if you don't want to increase the total amount of work necessary to finish each job.
The bureaucracy and consulting industry involving in the diversity scheme is useless, and in fact harmful. Probably not an example leftists would want to use, but it seems like an obvious one. In fact, all the consultants and NGOs that suck money from the government while doing nothing seem to be a net negative. Obviously, these people are hindering, not helping, California in building trains and removing homeless people from the streets.
I guess, from one point of view, there are really few meaningful jobs, and it also depends on how you define them. Think Covid lockdows and who still had to go to work, like medical personnel, police and infrastructure maintenance workers. But in that sense artists are not essential either to keep the basic infrastructure going. Some work like delivering pizza is clearly not a net negative, but I guess the argument is that you can pick up your pizza or make it yourself. To Noah's point about people getting paid to play Call of Duty, that certainly wouldn't be useful, but it would increase utility in the sense of increasing happiness, so would that work be a good bullshit job?
I never took the David Graeber idea too seriously, but I'm also unconvinced by Noah Smith's argument that there aren't many bullshit jobs because apparently 60% say they are satisfied with their jobs. One problem with Graeber's argument is that in a sense it seems like he was just talking about the emptiness of existence, this has nothing to do with capitalism, and it's not clear that people are going to find meaning outside of work. On the other hand, many people loved working from home, because of the flexibility and the very fact that they had more time to spend with the family, smell the roses, and whatever, which is certainly evidence in favor of giving people more time off work.
"All consultants and NGO's" seems like a very broad brush, also, some bureaucracy is necessary (although I'd agree that it's out of hand at the moment - still, if you need to renew your driver's license then you also need someone at the desk). Also, having worked for NGO's in a past life, I can say that quite a lot of funding is usually private, not government (though some is) and some of that work does things like counter foreign psy-ops in internal affairs or promotes not only goodwill but also other industries in country as well as in the country they're acting in. For instance, when a medical team for Doctors Without Borders goes in to a disaster zone, who do you think supplies the needles and bandages they'll use? Who built the portable MRI? Yep, us. So it's not all waste. Also, helping people out can be good for the soul as well as promoting good links between countries that are other than political. Do you think the guy rescued in a flood or saved from dysentery will forget? I doubt it.
I was talking specifically about consultants and NGOs that are supposed to be doing things that they obviously weren't doing, or that are much more inefficient than the alternatives. I gave the example of infrastructure consultants in California who raise the price of projects immensely, without showing any results, and NGOs who are paid to take care of the homeless problem, but they never do. In the case of the homeless issue, the individuals working for these organizations may be well-meaning, but it's the system that is obviously rubbish. Obviously the issue is solved by housing construction, housing subsidy, and then by having the police arrest people and force them into treatment for the hard cases.
I think we have fairly different opinions about how to solve California's homeless problem, although we do both agree on housing as a start. I lived in Venice Beach for awhile and tried with an initiative to help with that specific issue but I found far more lip service towards it than concrete action. I can't speak to the rest of California but I would expect about the same. Anyway, at the time I was not a consultant, just a chef so I dropped out of even trying. I do think many individuals were well-meaning and I think none of it was very co-ordinated, either between NGO groups or with the city/county/other groups (like police) or that it addressed some of the underlying issues causing it (like California is a relatively warm place to be homeless in all the way to LA is an expensive city to be homeless in, regardless, things like racism and classism can play a part too). It's not all "people need treatment" though IMHO. I think that's more a symptom than root cause. I don't even think "treatment" (either for drugs or for mental health) actually works very well, at least by itself the numbers are rather dismal. Maybe as a part of a larger concerted effort they improve to acceptable levels.
I think there's a good objection to be made to consultants who are really just there to give a stamp of approval for political reasons. Some play an environmental role though, and that can have real world consequences, like in the case of development in fire or flood prone areas. Often, like in IT, it's just a way for management/politicians/developers to get what they want without consulting staff or other "on the ground". It perpetuates the top-down, non-consultive, simplistic approach we've had in place since Hammurabi. I'd agree we could do a lot to reform that.
California spends an enormous amount of money on NGOs to not resolve the homeless issue. It is a lip service in the sense that nothing actually happens, but it is not a lip service in the sense that resources are not spent on the issue. How things work now is that NGO employees show up, propose treatment for the homeless, they refuse, and that's it. Treatment doesn't work because nobody is forced to do it, and because the streets are open drug markets, if someone goes through treatment, he can easily go back and he is tempted to go back. The solution is to force people off the streets, and force them to go to drug treatment or go to a hospital if that's what they need. Of course, there needs to be ongoing policing of the streets against vagrancy, tent cities and drug use.
This notion that everything is very complicated, and there's the warm weather, and inequality, and I don't know what, is ridiculous. California had the same weather 20 or 40 years ago, but the problem has gotten much worse since then. It got worse in the last ten years. Not every city in the world looks like these cities. Obviously there are ways to get these people off the street, but there is a lack of political will in many American cities. Yes, housing needs to be built, so regulation needs to allow for it, and yes, the government needs to buy or subsidize housing for some people, but also, the government needs to just have zero tolerance for its cities becoming dystopias.
On Biden and Afghanistan: sure, withdraw. But first, put some goddamn effort into resettling all those we promised to “free” if they worked with us. What an utter travesty.
True.
As a successful serial startup founder/CEO less than 15% of the things I did on a daily basis for years was what I wanted to do, why I founded the companies.
85% of it was the things that allowed me to do the other 15%. Some of that 85% was odious.
I loved doing the 15%.
That is the nature of work.
We have lost our touch with the reality of how a career is developed. You start with hard, menial jobs and work you way up.
I worked as a concrete laborer, then a kid who put in the forms, then a concrete pusher, then a finisher, and then I got a chance to run the big machines. I went from making minimum wage to making 4X minimum wage as my skills increased.
I saw an engineer checking the forms and the concrete -- arrived in an air conditioned Suburban, wore khakis and a polo shirt. I wanted to become an engineer. I went to school and studied engineering.
I paid for my education by serving 5 years in the Army.
I did all that stuff for a decade and a half. That is how the American Dream is founded -- hard work.
When you start out, you do the things you really want to do on your own time. Then, if you are really, really, really lucky you get to do them for a living.
Teachers/parents fail kids by letting them think there is a shortcut to the American Dream. You have to work hard and remember nobody ever drowned in their own sweat.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
I think people are forgetting that those "menial" jobs actually teach some things too. You learn how to act, how to show up and not be late, maybe the very basic parts of the jobs above first. Only then can you be ready/trusted/capable of handling the larger jobs. Not everything in the menial jobs is a teaching moment, some is just drudgery, but even being able to get through drudgery without complaining (well, not too much) prepares you for the inevitable moments of drudgery later in even the bigger jobs, where you need to finish it before you call it a night.
Congrats btw
I would say no job is menial if the worker can find dignity in the tasks they do. In turn, it's up to us who don't have the burden of living under a menial job to treat workers with respect, no matter the position.
The opposite is indignity in work. I remember the social media foofaraw after a Fox News segment of "In Joe Biden's America, stimulus payments are making people lazy and fast-food cashiers are being replaced with iPads." Actual fast-food workers brought the receipts on what it's like to work for terrible pay, random schedules and the indignity of treatment by customers, co-workers and supervisors.
These are jobs where dignity goes to die because a lot of it is beyond the worker's agency. They don't get to choose their customers, who they work with, and who gets to boss them. Yes, that's the way things are but not because for some immutable law of physics or nature the way things must be.
Reading your story, with the excellent little details like the air conditioned Chevy, kinda makes me feel like I didn't have to work all that hard to be successful.
I started out in a min-wage job too, but I definitely did not work hard at it. It didn't seem to me, at all, that there was any prospect of moving up to anything from bagging groceries and rounding up carts.
High school also was not fun and I did not try hard, but it seemed like a better gig than the grocery store.
I don't think every kid going to a hedge fund from Wharton this year has had an experience that is anything like yours.
A lot of people are looking at who works hard, and who gets what, and coming to the opposite conclusion.
Personally, I think your framing is the healthier one.
"Progressives need to realize that racial demographics are not political destiny."
Progressives need to realize that racism (that is, favoring one race over another as a matter of official government policy) is bad, and is opposed by an overwhelming majority of the voting public.
Proof: in California in 2020, the very same electorate that voted for Biden 2-to-1 over Trump also voted AGAINST "affirmative action" (that is, racism) in state contracting and college admissions by a margin of 55% to 45%.
With racism (unironically though falsely called "anti-racism") now being crammed down our throats at work, with full-on totalitarianism as the openly declared endpoint (https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/), some of us lifelong Democrat voters have finally had enough.
"racism (that is, favoring one race over another as a matter of official government policy) is bad"
I think your definition of "racism" isn't really the way the term is generally used, Mark, although government policy on race *could* be racist (or not). In my experience, "racism" traditionally meant either the belief that different races were of different value, and that members of some races were intrinsically superior/inferior to members of others, or it referred to a closely related idea of various types of prejudice in thought and action against members of a race other than one's own. When "affirmative action" programs were first begun in the 1970s, they were not widely seen as racist because they were viewed not as judgments about the value of different races, but as paths to make up for longstanding inequities that had been caused by blatantly racist (in the ordinary sense) policies and practices. Helpfully assessing to what degree they were justified then, now, and in intervening decades would need to go way beyond a blanket good/bad judgment. (On the other hand, people Left and Right seem happy to distort the word "racism" to fit the argument they want to make, carrying over the negative associations of blatant white supremacism to very different ideas and conduct, so why shouldn't you be able to mold the term to fit your point?)
As for Kendi, whom you link to, his anti-racist amendment proposal is, I think, contemporary "anti-racism" at its worst (which is very bad indeed!). However, if you read his book, "How To Be An Anti-Racist," I think you'll be surprised (as I was) to find a very different approach, one that's insightful and constructive, portraying racism as a dehumanizing form of stereotyping, and treating our habit of seeing individuals through stereotypes as a root problem that can be productively addressed to combat racism in the ordinary sense. Just like affirmative action, I think we don't need to come up with a single judgment on Kendi or progressive anti-racism, as both the woke and anti-woke brigades urge us to.
Call it whatever you like, I am no longer voting for politicians who support it (which currently includes all Democrats holding federal office).
Unions: guess the patronage must flow or else we’ll choke the economy like the dockworkers. People tell me “unions good and you’d be a serf otherwise”; I say “fuck off, American unions bad, other countries do it better”.
Race: leftists will have to decide if they want to win elections or go back to their 80s losing configuration of blacks (who are slipping away) + neurotic woke whites (who aren’t close to a majority) or dial back on some of their pet victim protection excesses. Already Asians in NY are trending GOP because Dems clearly see us as being patronage fodder for blacks in education.
Asians have been viciously and brutally discriminated against by "progressives" for decades. I was told 30 years ago by a University of California Dean that undergrad Asian enrollment was being ruthlessly suppressed for fear that the white state legislators would cut state funding (which they later did anyway); ironically this Dean was himself Asian! I always expected Asians to figure out what was going on, and to organize and emerge as a political force; maybe it's finally happening.
Asians are mostly violently targeted by right leaning white supremacists. There is not a situation in which they are prevented from attaining higher education. There are affirmative action programs in some colleges that may admit minority classes but ultimately, there are enough colleges to admit anyone that wants to go to one. The Ivys are not the onlys and actually are not ever the best colleges -- they just have brand cachet. If classes in colleges were so competitive that people could not get in, we would not be having college closures, we would be seeing more new colleges open.
Hmm, I have been more worried about anti Asian sentiment forming similar to how certain folks used to hate on Jewish people for being such successful professional people
I am not "worried" about Asians organizing politically, I think it's a good thing and long overdue.
The Reddit anti work stuff is dumb and overwrought, but there is something to the idea.
I think it relates to Lean/TPS ideas of value-added and non-value added steps in a process. Many steps seem critically important, until you realize the entire process can be simplified 90 percent.
Work that mostly involves coordinating, scheduling, communicating to non-customers, expediting, managing queues, completing forms, meeting compliance - it’s all non-value added in the end.
Would your customer pay you just to have a meeting where you talk about filling their order, or do they just want their order filled?
I have not read that book. The way I think of BS jobs is that of what jobs actually contribute to a direct economy-- what jobs actually do things vs those that don't. We have a shortage of people who want to provide direct impact to creating the physical and technological infrastructure for not only survival but thriving communities not filled with blight.
That means tradesmen (construction trades like roofing, electrical, bricklaying, concrete work) agricultural (planting and harvesting food), communication (building cell towers, satellites, maintaining the wired systems, the security to prevent interruption by foreign enemies), transportation (railway, engineers, air traffic controllers, people to work on and maintain airplanes, car manufacturing-- affordable personal transportation, electrical charging stations, oil drilling and refining etc.) and housing (new builds for needed shelter, providing lower income housing or just reasonable sized homes and other types of shelter like boarding houses, hostels for singles, the kinds of places we need vs. what may sell to provide the greatest profit), people to develop and actually build these structures, landscaping, providing the roads/infrastructure and of course, Healthcare-- actual hands on caregivers and those that support them (ancillary such as phlebotomists, lab techs, clinical testing techs, therapists, transporters-both in and intra facility), also pharmaceutical manufacturing and preparing, and of course the clinical practitioners/providers; we have a huge shortage of specialists down to homecare aides-- this sector is so stretched beyond capacity. -- all the jobs that people have to show up for and actually physically do. (Like we need people to collect and remove garbage, to work in the resource recovery plants, to maintain the water treatment plants or we will all end up poisoning our environment and ourselves.
These are the jobs and functions that are going wanting and are needed -- we are not suffering from a shortage of social media stars/marketers, cashiers, office support and WFH accounting, law, medical billing, human resources, data, and gaming software programming engineers. There are many jobs that just don't provide environmental comfort but they need to be done in order to keep the nation running, people sheltered, fed and the lights on.
I guess I also forgot to add law enforcement/military/investigative to police people very tempted to defraud (steal) and exploit systems for their benefit (this includes drug dealers from the Sacklers, corporate thieves like HCA, Individual and company tax cheats as well as the inner city slum lords, gangbangers and drug dealers, and of course arms smugglers, domestic terrorists and gun toting vigilantes.
I feel like “bullshit job” concept is fake but points to something real. The real issue might be that some people like a boss breathing down their neck when they work. The aggressive boss helps them stay on task, be their best self and feel purposeful. In other words, they find getting the work done more enjoyable and purposeful when someone is like “growl, i need this now or we’ll die.” It’s easier to find purpose when someone (an authority you accept and respect) is providing you with that purpose. Self-generated purpose, to some, feels fake or just meh.
But, like also, people can’t admit to themselves that they’re just not that self-motivated, not very agentic. After all, everyone is always talking about how great go-getters are with their self-motivation. You can’t roll up to an interview and be like, actually, I need a good smack every now and then to do my best work. So, if you can’t admit a lack of self-motivation, the next best thing is to say, my job sucks my soul out because it’s pointless, purposeless and “bullshit.”
People don’t like to talk about this, but there’s something exciting and fun and very much alive about a boss screaming in your face. Now, screamers are considered unprofessional, mean or whatever. And, on the other side of the screamer-phillic screamer-phobic spectrum, some people develop a nervous breakdown when screamed at.
Of course, employers understandably prefer people that they don’t have to yell at to get going, even setting aside legal or reputation risk If every employee needed at personal browbeaten, that would cost a lot.
Anyway, “bullshit jobs” is a zombie concept because it’s getting at a real issue. I think the issue is louder now because of increasingly feminized or walking-on-ice work norms, which flow from civil rights and employment mandates. Possibly, women managers are also on average less charismatic and have more trouble pulling off the socially/ psychologically authentic authoritarian yet charismatic boss. Maybe also men (and women) find themselves in lines of work that they are usually not suited to and would have been previously discouraged from, stuff like scheduling, liasing, coordinating. So instead of quitting, they try to make it work. And the poor person-job fit sucks.
I would add that some industries really do have bad institutional incentives, and some companies have a sclerotic corporate culture. And, when you’re in one of these situations, the sensation of purposelessness can be a lot for some people. But I don’t think these other issues are systemic.
While I admit that I’m not very self-motivated and I usually do better when there’s someone applying pressure (though I do best in the few occasions when I find internal motivation), having a boss actually screaming at me doesn’t help. In fact, it just causes me to turtle up and make mistakes.
My husband has been working at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant -- he is not employed by them, but employed through his union by an electrical contractor to upgrade, maintain and equip power to new clean rooms/labs. Security there is remarkable, heavier than one would find at a nuclear plant and requiring more people. Also it is top heavy in project managers, safety managers, safety inspectors etc. etc. He and one other guy often work with 4 people actively watching them, writing stuff on clipboards and honestly, those 4 people have absolutely no idea what the hell the electricians are doing. There are others that routinely tour the worksites (often inappropriately dressed) and make fickle demands they move this or that or require them to leave a work area. Since he started, the company has been purchased by a Korean company. Little by little the clipboard people and the self important assholes are disappearing.
It's well established people tend to be most productive when allowed to determine how to complete their work without someone breathing down their neck.
https://youtu.be/ZFWC4SiZBao?si=lgDiO4ioCqm6ipn4
I think I see what you are referring to, some people prefer a boss like John Wayne who shouts orders at apparently brainless followers!
I like your suggestion on Twitter that the US begin forming coalitions with other democracies from the second and third worlds - like India, Indonesia, Nigeria etc... as a counterpoint to useless groupings like BRICS.
"Second World" meant Communism.
I think the I in Brics is India. Although you can join more than one group, I suppose. There are also 3 definite democracies in there, and whatever Russia is.
Yes, but the US is not a member. BRICS is bullshit anyway - the grouping makes zero sense. But a group of democracies from all economic levels around the world would. And at this point South Africa is a deeply flawed, only partly democratic country anyway.
it was literally just a thing a Goldman analyst made up for a report!
https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/2001-brics.html
In 2001, yes. Later on organisation was founded.
"the grouping makes zero sense"
Why are so many countries looking to join?
One thing has zero influence over the other.
But looking at this broadly, reason may be - because anyone can join BRICS. There are no by-laws, no secretariat, no charter, no accession requirements, no chairperson/ED or anything else. Unlike OECD or NATO, which require a whole series of requirements to gain accession status and then eventually, membership, BRICS literally asks for nothing. And it also does nothing either. There are no preferred entry requirements for BRICS citizens, no reduced tariff scheme etc... it's an amorphous grouping of states with nothing in common other than being on the outs with the civilized world.
Agree that BRICS will not be a worthy alternative to the established world order. None are really industrialized outside of China. Most are agrarian and have not much else to offer to trade. Crafting and nurturing an industrial policy is probably what they desire.
Well, the problem of South Africa is that few people vote in the opposition parties, but I think very few people put in doubt the freedom and fairness of South African elections
The problem is that the ANC, originally a liberation movement, decided to become a political party and like every African liberation movement before it including those in Guinea, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique and more, it descended into kleptocracy. The ANC also uses ever lever of state it controls, which is all of them, to ensure its continual reelection through patronage and outright corruption. Did you know there was an outbreak of cholera in Joburg recently because of the ANC's mishandling of the city's water treatment facilities? South Africa is a flawed democracy and becoming more so every year.
I think we did youth a big disservice by not having them do truly bullshit jobs when young. Youth labor participation has fallen for decades and many youth now never work (especially the kinds of youth who cry because they have be an intern and work).
The best thing my parents ever did was make work doing manual labor in concrete foundations and my son has thanked me for making him work at McDonald’s and while in college. If you never had a real brutal soul crushing job while having to go to school I guess working on a laptop must seem awful. If you comparrison is hauling multiple 4x8 sheets of plywood up a terraced hill starting at 5 in the morning to avoid as much of the brutal heat as possible working in the laptop is much nicer.
That said, I’m in NY state right now and there are a bunch of refugees seeking asylum who would happily haul that plywood. Wish we could keep them and send the crybabies to Central America for a few years. When they comeback I bet those soul crushing jobs will look a lot better.
I highly doubt that most of them can be automated away. It's dramatically easier to automate email jobs than it is to automate most real world tasks that people find unpleasant (e.g. cleaning, basic repairs). I wouldn't be surprised if people are still working as janitors when we first have AGI.
There is something to be said for work-hardening. If you cannot survive and perform under pressure, the value you bring to specific jobs is low. The world is a hard place. We cannot automate our military which is why we currently have a shortage of enlisted because there is a limited supply of people of enlistment age who are physically fit, possesses a work ethic and self discipline to manage discomfort, can manage anxiety, and have practice with delayed gratification and social/emotional intelligence. I think they are going to have to extend the basic training in the near future instead of compressing it. Not all jobs can be done by remotely controlled drones.
Great analysis on the BS jobs meme and China. On both topics, your information rings true.
I once very snakily,and perhaps rudely, suggested that you stick to economics and not venture into foreign policy. I apologize for any past snakiness/rudeness.
That said, I will disagree with you on Biden's FP. it's way too early to declare that our policies vis a vis either Russia or China are successful.
We have no exit plan for the war in Ukraine, and although the blame for the invasion lies 100% with Putin, we failed to try diplomacy to avoid the war. And hastened war with the ill-conceived Charter: Agreement dated 11/9/22, link below.
https://ua.usembassy.gov/our-relationship/u-s-ukraine-charter-strategic-partnership/#:~:text=This%20Charter%20is%20based%20on,foundation%20of%20our%20bilateral%20relations.
As for China, it remains to be seen whether our aggressive economic policies induce China to, for lack of a better phrase, "pull a Putin."
Finally, in terms of Afghanistan, i think it was an ill-conceived, poorly designed departure that set back America's reputation. To paraphrase a line from Macbeth: "Nothing in this war became us less like the leaving it."
Lol we didn’t try diplomacy before the invasion?
Not only did we try, but Zelensky’s prewar platform was to negotiate with Putin and make territorial concessions in the Donbass.
Yes, Zelensky's prewar platform was diplomacy, but he never really pushed for it when he got in because the right wing militias threatened a second Maidan if he tried. And everyone in the West now admits that there never was an honest intention to implement the Minsk agreements, which contrary to your lies never involved territorial concessions in the Donbass. The end goal of Minsk was the reunification of the Donbass to Ukraine which also gave them additional autonomy. So everything you said was either wildly misleading or an outright lie.
" leftists, who once venerated work, pivoting their ideology to being against nearly all forms of it."
Perhaps ironically, the "bulshit jobs" thing is in large way a subproduct of the leftist veneration of work - if we follow the traditional neoclassical view of work (a thing with a negative utility that we do to receive in exchange things with positive utility), all jobs are supposed to be boring, and that is all.
It is when you adopt the point that work should be our realization as humans that, confronted with the reality that some jobs are boring, you will have the tentation of argue that those jobs are useless and only exist because an inefficient organization of society.
That Afghanistan take is right directionally and equal parts ignorant and morally abhorrent the more I think about. Of course, Asia is the priority and our focus needs to be there. Afghanistan was a humiliation because the US effectively surrendered the country back to the Taliban, abandoning any allies in the country to a grim fate, when it did not have to be that way. Worse, it is entirely Biden’s fault, trying to time the ending to September 11. This put pressure on an untested, unprepared government (another humiliation for as much as we spent in blood and treasure), when the Taliban never would have invaded if they had to campaign in the winter. If the purpose was solely to kill Al Qaeda, we could have achieved that with cruise missiles. The point was to prevent them from coming back, and that’s still TBD. AQ as a nation-state has lots of enemies, but AQ as a terrorist organization would likely still be useful to the same sponsors for the same reasons.
Afghanistan might have met the same fate regardless, but at least a few months of stability, with more time for allies to leave peacefully, would have been preferable to the swift, chaotic collapse. It will remain a huge stain on Biden’s reputation and character, though his administration’s savvy in Ukraine and Chinese containment dramatically outweighs it in impact.
Really enjoying the Econ 102 podcast. It’s a perfect companion to the substack.
Plenty of Hot Takes in that podcast! Makes for a fun listen.
> But Milei’s proposal is not a good one; a country needs a central bank, as a lender of last resort, to manage the money supply, and so on. It just needs a central bank that’s more responsible than Argentina’s. Argentina, perhaps more than any other country in the world, is a country with great potential that’s been held back by bad macroeconomic management, with hyperinflation and sovereign default making regular appearances. (This is probably why so many great macroeconomists come from Argentina — they want to help their country, but no one listens to them.)
What explains the success of Ecuador, Panama and El Salvador? I think I'd also like a full post on this (which sounds like it'll be a refutation of Cowen's Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-08-18/argentina-s-future-is-promising-with-the-dollar).
Add a Latin American (and former economist) I have paid close attention to the question of dollarization. If handled well, an independent currency will help cushion the economy from external shocks. But in Ecuador by the year 2000, any significant purchase by consumers was transacted in dollars, so at that time Ecuador exhibited the downsides of both floating currency(pricing instantly) and dollarization(slow growth).
Regarding polling showing shift in Black and Hispanic vote to GOP, I think your bigger point is a good one. Shift is at least on a small level likely real and it’s probably a good thing long term if the two parties are less racially polarized.
But I’d really caution against extrapolating 2024 outcomes from polls this far out. For one, you’ll notice that “undecided” is a significant portion of the respondents. You more than most people would know that direction of inflation and whether or not we continue to have a “soft landing” will go a long way in determining which direction these supposed “undecideds” go.*
But just looking at history, you’ll see how much polling and pundit analysis this far out is a bit of a mug’s game. To start with most relevant example; Reagan in 83 (relevant both due to similar age profile and similar worries about inflation). https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/09/17/reagan-should-not-seek-second-term-majority-believes/4ccc2a56-1693-469d-af51-1368fd0fc649/
More recent examples regarding our last two Democratic presidents. For Clinton. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/21/us/political-memo-clinton-s-grip-on-96-ticket-isn-t-so-sure.html For Obama. https://news.gallup.com/poll/149114/obama-close-race-against-romney-perry-bachmann-paul.aspx (most relevant comparison here? See Obama’s approval rating in 2011).
Last note that’s not really something you touched on but worth highlighting especially my Clinton example; absolutely ignore pundits bigging up challenges to the incumbents and “News analysis” that consists of someone on background saying “ppl are expressing doubts incumbent should run again”. This is as much about the slow news season that’s the summer as anything and also why Mark Helprin was always the most useless pundit in America even before he was outed as being kind of garbage as a person (he was the king of this kind of useless insider stuff).
* strong suspicion that a decent amount of those undecideds are more “can’t we have someone who’s not a geriatric running” but will likely still vote Biden. The true mystery to me are what I suspect are GOP “never Trump” vote. If I’m not mistaken they were key to 2020 and 2022 and if I had to guess will be key in 2024.
Some people seen to have a very romanticised view of working in the arts - I'd love to be an author, but getting the ideas from my head to the page is actually really hard even when I'm doing it for fun. Trying to make a living through art (writing, performing) is famously difficult and stressful, just in a different way to an office job. Maybe that's just the need to appeal to the market under capitalism, although it's not like feudalism and communism didn't place their own constraints on artistic expression. Even in some imagined post-scarcity utopia, there's always going to be competition for attention - if I got paid to just do whatever I wanted, I'd definitely try writing but I'd stop caring if nobody was reading it.
So true. Arts work is still work, and no one really prepares you for the boredom and the precarity from trying to make a living from your art.
Science fiction author John Scalzi writes about many things: liberal politics, the science fiction genre itself, life in rural Ohio, his family, but he routinely will share insights on what it's like to be a successful author. He doesn't romanticize it; he writes about the tedium about the writing process itself, the back-and-forth with his editors, and even how traveling for book signings is also drudgery. His blog is whatever.scalzi.com , and is worth reading even if you disagree with his politics.
Most working artists have a day job and are practical and disciplined about it.