David Graeber talked about jobs that he says qualify as employment but are pointless and unnecessary. David Graeber was interviewed by Cory Doctorow. Recorded June 13th, 2018
I was a security guard for a waste management facility in Gardena, CA. My job was to deter the public from climbing a 12' fence with barbed wire, to steal trash.
Garbage men in NY had a strike once and demanded more income, the mayor refused but after 6 days the stink got so bad that he did something. Bankers in Ireland had a strike once for more income and nothing happened, even after 6 months Ireland was still ok. Enough said.
I’m reviewing an employee. Even though my boss never reads my reviews, in my case it isn’t BS and is worthwhile because it increases my APHG score count where I work, and without making the monthly cutoff someone will review me downwards. These things matter to us.
I'm a highly skilled software engineer who is basically a duct-taper and I have personally experienced a lot of this. I've had my boss assign me an insane amount of work just because I'm the only one who does work and then I get made responsible for *all* of the bugs, even when I don't cause them (which is the case for most of them). It's the worst.
We have lost the culture of rewarding and protecting technical people. I tried to sell a piece of technology I had created in Taiwan but the government stopped the company trying to buy it for me and asked the question "cannot a Taiwanese engineer do this? why should we import it?" Today in the west we protect bullshitters such as accountants and lawyers but not our graduate engineers and computer scientists like the Far East Asians do, and who is rising in spite of countries that are so corrupt as those in the Far East they are killing us. While you are writing the software here in the west some manager is getting promoted cause he is in useless meetings being seen by the higher ranks.
Thank you Mr. Graeber! For years I thought "what is wrong with me, why can't I appreciate my job?". David Graeber opened my eyes. His book was a revelation for me.
The Dred God you’re conflating “value” with “suffering/hardship/effort(??)”. Value refers to the quality of the end product (in case of mother: it is a balanced and intelligent human citizen and in your case, it’s whatever ultimate societal impact your job has), not the difficulty/suffering involved in the process of creating the end product.
Enabling a valuable member of society to be productive/happy again is valuable. Not all the time, not all psychologists, but sometimes, therapy sessions do succeed at making you a better colleague/friend/father/mother again. Now suppose the person they've helped is truly essential to society, say a nurse or construction worker, then indirectly the therapist would have been useful. The problem is when the patient/client also has a BS job... Or worse, when the therapist encourages the nurse to switch to a less stressful BS job as a solution to their problems.
David Graeber really underrated bought his book everything is so true I got such a job as well. Laywers of companies, banks, holdings everything's so useless and the employees know it but can't get out. Greetings from germany and excuse my bad english I don't know the most words :)
I used to have a job that was all 5 categories all at once: 1-I was a flunky because I was middle management that made the higher ups feel better about themselves 2-I was a duck taper because I was required to asap fix the ANY problems in my dept. 3-I was a in goon that was lawyer and we needed a lawyer (not really true) but it was impressive to our clients 4-I was a task master because I supervised my dept who made they sure they did all they were supposed to do 5-I was a box ticker but I was an attorney running a dept that by the mere fact it was being run by an attorney said we did important work Wow just wow!
Law and accounting really set the bar for corporate nonsense. Almost all BS processes I’ve seen in corporate seem to be copied from law and accounting firms. Or government …
I am a live-in caregiver for people who are dying. It's the most rewarding work I've ever done in my life. I've always worked in caregiving in some fashion, worked in events planning and charities like big brothers. Work my tits off and don't get paid enough to rent even a shitty apartment. I worked at a big fancy insurance company for 2 years and will never go back to the soul sucking exploitative scam like that ever again. Never trust your insurance company to do s*** for you - they will find every reason they can, not to. Fight hard, keep fighting.
Most BS jobs are created by HR departments looking to justify their existence. HR is one of the biggest BS jobs on the planet. People who can't handle operational departments in a company telling everyone else how to work. I have worked as a manager for 20 years and the thing I hate the most is how HR interferes in actually improving the company efficiency and cause more employee frustration than they help.
I think UBI is pretty important to ease the transition to the next economy... but it's meaningless without radical land-reform. ie: There is no point taxing landlords to give money to tenants just so they pay it back to landlords. We need to eliminate economics of artificial-scarcity completely - as a basic moral and logical principle. As well as giving people breathing-space and de-stressing their lives (with all the knock-on benefits of that to do with violence, addiction, child-care etc)... a UBI it will also serve to ease the transition... so we don't inflict the same poverty on landlords when we take away their rental income, that they inflicted on us... via their rental income.
when organizations facing problems, they tend to create a position/job for monitoring the problems rather than spending resources to tackle the problems.
No. There was an old joke whereby there was an Englishman and a Japanese in front of a hungry lion. The Japanese changed his trainers/sneakers and tied his shoe laces and the bemused Englishman laughed and said "don't you know that you cannot outrun a lion" and the Japanese guy answered "all I have to do is run faster than you". If you go to South Korea today you will find all youngsters studying engineering and all lower middle and high school kids going to school at 8 am and coming home at 11 pm!!! Say in South Korea they will continue developing that automation and being more and more productive as engineers.
@@FunticVideo Within the context of your answer, the point is that if people have choice they will always require advice. For example, we will have the choice of becoming trans-human (genetically improved human) or bionic (parts inserted or appendages to help us in any way imagined) or dependent on an advanced independently thinking robot. While we have CHOICE we will need help to chose. The choice also determines new things to be manufactured. Even if robots can do this, the choice must be selected, handled, processed, explained. Also, consider that we are thinking beings who can easily get bored if we do either no work or nothing physical or intellectual. Even if all content or activity is performed by intelligent AI software that is creative, we will be active protagonists in a market of sorts for our instincts and our "monsters of the Id" will need an outlet. Even if a fake market there will exist one, as in an alternative reality set in Medieval Times in a game with real work and adventures and an economy where we can amass wealth or power or be poor die and exit the game. When the definition of AI in the game is "a program with an "if statement"" we will be competing to work out such if statements in the game in a false economy that will appear to us to be very real.
@@FunticVideo My earlier point was that even if Singularity is achieved, there will be enormous challenges to get there. Some people in some countries will attract most of the good STEM jobs while perhaps all people in another country do no interesting jobs. There is also a tension between "big brother" solutions which are easier, e.g., every car knowing the position of another car turning driving into mass transportation, and true A.I., e.g., your car feeling what is the best decision in driving under limited knowledge/information as we do as humans. The brain was evolved in layers and with contradictory overlapping rules. Frank Ramsey once said "human thinking is not mathematical logic because I would rather be inconsistent and right, than consistent and wrong". True A.I. will have to mimic this with overlapping and contradictory fuzzy logic rules or some such device, but also it must be guided as to the tradeoffs which are important to us humans to overcome in the thing under development, for we will be the masters, as our choices will guide this "evolution" of this automation. Also neither ourselves nor machines will know what to evolve towards, what is a problem and why we should solve it. The path of this evolution to something cannot be easily determined if we have no idea what we are missing out on.
the thing that improved my bipolar the most, was to stop being a file clerk at the IRS, and to go on social security. i feel so much better when i am in control of my day, rather than when the time clock is in control.
Almost all problems could be solved by making it financially worthwhile for people to SHARE the jobs we can agree we NEED to have done and work much LESS.....no more working and doing anything FOR money but all doing something useful and sharing the work we need.
He's absolutely right about fees and penalties (21.30) - Finance depts. who set 1st of Month payments regardless of our pay cycles & cash in our accounts. Their systems are designed to introduce failures on our part from which they profit.
Ironically, it's the pointless jobs are usually the ones that pay the most, while real labor pays shit. Americans are against collectivism but in truth they serve the collective, just a very small collectivel known as the 1%.
Finnish UBI was an experiment during 1.1.2017-31.12.2018 were 2000 participants (mainly unemployed) got 560€/month without affecting their other possible income. That 560€ is nowhere near an sufficient amount to live in finland. That will all go to rent alone. If your housing is free or some other way funded then 560€ can support your other living expenses (food, bills etc.)
A post-scarcity anarchist society where work is mostly done by AI & machines sounds really nice about now. We have enough technology to make live free and easy for all, where work is something you choose to do rather than something you're coerced to do by the threat of starvation, homelessness, etc...etc... :)
I’ve always noticed that company started throwing out the people that actually made their company and brought an income. Retail is a sucky area to work in but that’s where the money is made. And those are the first people that always get sliced. Companies are always creating suicide amongst themselves. It’s like they want to be out of business.
Not only is this spot on, i think it's really smart and very powerful. The projection and slanderous lies of the capitalists need to be disproven as unquestioned fact in america, and I think David does this perfectly.
As long as competition for money exists, competition for social status will exist. Graeber, as an anthropologist, knows that human beings are very status oriented, and in large "free" societies, status competition is inevitable to some degree. (Small societies, under 200, are the norm for most of human history and in such small societies there were mechanisms for controlling social inequality. For example, in hunter-gatherer societies, when one distinguishes oneself among the others by showing extra ability, extra social status does not automatically accrue to that person, often to the contrary, to keep that person from feeling special or showing off, the others would ridicule him or her. We still have some of this instinct and customs in the West but not as much perhaps as we should. In Europe, for example, they tend to view billionaires or very ostentatious wealth as suspect or even abhorrent, where we, in the US, are more impressed. But we are also more envious than they, which is probably why Scandinavian countries score higher on happiness index than we do.) I think moving to a BGI will be a very big deal. It won't simply mean keeping our current economic structure that just happens to have a BGI, I think it will mean re-evaluating our entire economic and social structure, especially our metaphysics connected to social status. But it will be easier to do with a system less focused on human value determined by a wealth metric as opposed to a metric more centered on happiness and social contribution. And yes, there will still be competition because, as I said, human beings are a very conscientious about social status, but if the paradigm or structure is not understood as zero sum, then the competition need be less rooted in envy (or a least socially toxic envy).
A job is not necessarily defined as the amount of activities accomplished with a time window that others see as beneficial to society. A job is simply a commitment to be available to at sometime and somewhere for the purpose of doing something regardless of how it’s importance is seen by others. The amount and important of the activities accomplished within a time window from the perspective of society is something society itself will never have consensus over. The fact that the worker is detained somewhere for sometime and not free to live his life the way she or he likes is a deprivation that requires compensation. Sure, as a society, we may revisit our jobs and collectively design a system that strikes out certain jobs from the market and reduce the waste in time and energy, but until we do that collectively, it is unfair to assign the blame to individuals who are trying to survive and preserve their dignity in doing something for living without being looked down upon by society. It would be only wonderful to optimize not only our jobs for maximum efficiency and productivity, but that goes well for everything else in life such as dealing with food waste, frivolous education, bureaucratic expensive healthcare, personal time and financial management and so on.
This show's that humans like to be of value, which feeling is created when their doing something worthwhile, they feel self worth. Just making money for someone doesn't make us feel valuable to humanity.
Sometimes it's much better to do nothing as it's less harmful to people and society. If we have to pay some people not to do something that might be more useful. As an example pay criminals not to get involved in crime. the problem is that law abiding citizens would moan about that the most. Funnily enough the politicians wouldn't give a crap. It would make their lives even easier.
The economy worked well with only 50% of the population in the workforce only 1-2 generations ago. the other of the couple was taking care of the home and the offspring. Today, the cost of living in the western economies became completely out of whack with the salaries on offer. Here in London, the graduate salaries have not increased since 2001 in nominal terms (sic!), and in the same time the cost of housing increased 3 times, not to mention the energy bills. We should get back to those days, instead of this crazy universal basic income, which does not make any sense given the acute shortage of housing and other necessities.
there comes a point with productivity increases and automation where full employment just isn't very important for maintaining growth. In failing to acknowledge that and still making employment basically mandatory for anyone who didn't win the birth lottery, we've created an entire class of useless people with massive amounts of political power both in governments and in management of companies, who will use that power to maintain the situation that allows them to exist.
The problem isn't just one of bullshit jobs, but also of bullshit information, I would like to see the development of an evidence based society, we live in Plato's cave.
Problem with a career is that one starts out being a worker .. and ends up being a Task master ... its just how the system works .. meaning that if one is any good at their job, they will eventually rise to the rank of a "Bull shit" job
Inflation is really the result of scarcity, not just demand. This economy is already so automated, you could damn near *double* demand and still not produce scarcity in most product categories. Perhaps spot shortages here and there, but there are already so many substitutions available I can't really ever see any significant inflation in our foreseeable future. Quite frankly, it's *de*flation that concerns me, wherein every value-added occupation becomes less and less valuable over time. There are less jobs that represent real, substantial "value" (in a capitalist sense) to the overall economy every single year - a trend that will continue until the entire economy eats itself.
@@latifoljic - It *should* tell you that nobody's got any disposable income to invest. Which means the price gouging we're seeing is just corps taking advantage of supply chain issues and not a result of normal currency inflation. Their P/L statements also bolster that argument.
The examples in the book are mostly private market ones though. There's a story of one guy who worked for a contractor who worked for a contractor who worked for another contractor of the German military, but the book mostly shows private companies are just as bad.
Fuck me!! Working from home on a Sunday with director pocking me to finish some useless tracker for a needy client, and when i provided the beautiful looking KPI’s that took me days and a chunk of my weekend it got descoped to not look us bad. Working+wasting my time. And to add insult to injury pay grade is in discrepancy with a factor of 10. I should bring in molotov tomorrow to work and start second Marx revolution.
His wacky intellectualism is one of my favorites. His scruffy appearance reflects his particular ethnographic focus, making it easier for listeners to comprehend what he's saying, even if it's nonsense. Studying and profiting from them is the ultimate B.S. employment, correct? Capitalism? David, you are an inspiration. You've come up with one of the most ridiculous academic gigs of our time. There's something quite ingenious in what he's doing, but as of yet, it's diffuclt to put my finger on it. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy him. May he rest in peace.
he's doing intellectual work for the working class, which is something your not supposed to do in academia, aside from telling the worker's that they need to work harder/faster/smarter and be happy doing it. also, i love that he is his normal appearance even at a formal place, because it show's his priorities are around the work he does, rather than how people perceive his status. that's seen as a negative in our status obsessed capitalist world, but to me, if i can't see grease on a mechanics overall's, that's a bad mechanic.
I'd disagree here - there are plenty of low-level clerical and service industry jobs that are more or less just placeholders for automation. I currently work as a cashier at a dollar store and I can tell you right now that my job is completely unnecessary and only exists so long as the corporate overlords decide it's more profitable to pay me slave wages than to replace me with a machine that they have to pay somebody to maintain. It can't so simply be broken down to "BS job petite bourgeoisie" vs "real job workers" in post-industrial societies.
56:13 enact direct democracy and pay everybody for political participation. pay people to learn, to be healthy, to raise their families, or, i dunno, maybe rebuilding america. 🤔
I feel bad that in the Q&A they guy that asked about cripto currencies didnt get a response, might not be their area but felt like they made fun of him...
Also, whats the deal with the 'person who identifies as female' shit? Is that like a joke? i dont get it :/ Other than that David kincking ass as usual, looking forward to his next work it sounds really interesting
Both these men could live in an Indian village for 6 months ... well David Graeber's dead and he was great! at explaining why the future is cancelled (without ever referring to Mark Fisher)
Disappointing to see the Leigh Phillips shout out - never thought I’d hear praise of a “socialist” who believes and advocates for infinite economic growth. If it sounds absurd, it’s because it is. The Lord looking like a peasant line is particularly insightful, though if you read through Austerity Ecology (which, do yourself a favor and please don’t) it comes off as the ramblings of a cheugy millennial upset at shifting cultural expression and capitalist talking points rebranded as “eco-modernism”. Bleghhh
Doctorow's mockery of MMT belies his ignorance of it despite pretending he's actually been & read it and understood it. I was disappointed to hear Graeber rattle off the Zimbabwe example whilst skirting around the inflationary aspects of UBI, which is what the woman at the back addressed. The idea that the opposite to bullshit jobs is a goodly portion of the workforce doing 'nothing' (or rather 'fulfilling' themselves in art whilst the postman still walks around in the rain delivering your letters & packages) is far-fetched. In a state of infrastructure decline, which has been at the mercy of shrunken public spending for 45 years, the creaton of useful jobs has never been more necessary. The revaluation of such jobs is also necessary. It is how our societies furnish us with the actual things we need. A society doing this is the opposite of mindlessley pouring money into corrupt corporations. UBI has a role, but it is not a way to furnish a society with things like national healthcare or safe drinking water; those are large-scale public spending tasks.
These guys take an interesting idea (UBI) and make it sound like some kind of bad hippie trip. 1. Most importantly: the kind of utopian global automation they are talking about is dangerous, regardless of UBI. Their position is disingenuous. Current solutions for automation do not just "eliminate drudgery". They often give someone centralized control over what used to be a job done by many independent people. If you have free money, but someone else controls a fully automated factory that produces *all the goods*, your money won't matter much. They don't address this issue in any way, except going "LULZ, capitalism sucks". 2. Eliminating bullshit jobs is probably a sensible endeavor, but it *does not* guarantee all those people will magically find meaningful occupation. 3. Misimplemented UBI could be a complete disaster for a complex, developed economy. This stuff needs to be tried in carefully controller experiments. 4. FYI, in Soviet Union, long lines and paperwork weren't the real issues, they were just manifestations of actual problems: severe deficits and corruption.
The next step in awareness is understanding Money Itself (oh the sacrilege!) is obsolete and no longer necessary. People will still work, innovate, produce and create, but the incentives will be different, rather than "must make money to live" as the now-assumed only incentive. Maybe not in our lifetime, but it is inevitable. The problems inherent in currencies (who creates them, who facilitates them, how they are manipulated, etc.) are too numerous and too destructive to be ignored much longer.
I take from this, the author thinks our real "Human Nature" will produce the perfect Soviet model economy.If this is so, it is because the educated intellectual class has created it's own Soviet Model Economy, as this is their own nature! This is not the experience for a small business person, or any one living in the 70% world of work and jobs. Used as a justification for destroying this 70% is outrageous!
