There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the employee "do."

I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe more. What are they doing in there? They sell ads, manage ad accounts, moderation, data protection audits... stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too.

Either way, that building is full of "marketing and social media" graduates doing stuff that doesn't need to be done for twitter to be twitter. Twitter was twitter before they had all those people.

You could call what twitter does creative work. That resonates with me. They invented a communication method with all sorts of cultural impact and value. That's creative. But, extending that to the median employee... I think we might divert here.

I think you have your finger on an interesting point, even if I don't know how to articulate it. A generation ago, a lot of the ecoomy could be measured in stuff with value that one could reason about. Cars, tothbrushes, haircuts, podiatrists.... You can count and weigh and value that stuff. Media was always more abscure. The tv viewer mightn't be the customer. The purpose of a paper might be do get a classifieds insert into your hands.

Once you throw in social/user-generate services make the picture more messy. Once you go to Google/FB territory, it's all very obscure. Half of what they do doesn't have any direct economic benefit to them, it's more a way of keeping them in a massively powerful position.

I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...

The economic machine used to fulfill our basic needs, to keep us varm and fed. Now, that problem is solved, we have infinite sugar and cheap synthetic clothes. So it's on to massaging our psychological needs. And the market forces who gave us cheap soda gives us the same "solution" in FB, Twitter and friends.

A giant perverted maslov hierarchy for our society if you will.

  Twitter was twitter before they had all those people.

Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?

scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same product with a much smaller team, at one point.

Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.

.. because they believe that they'll get more money from the efforts of these people than they cost? If they can sell ads that people wouldn't buy without a person on the other side, they can be worth the cost.

Twitter has people to sell adds to companies that use people to decide to buy ads. If automation makes it easier to use fewer people to buy ads, then twitter and other ad companies would likely sell ads with fewer people in the mix.

As an aside it's odd to think of twitter and google etc as a kind of modern successor to the MadMen ad house. I guess if you were being pedantic, they're more like the modern version of what the network TV commercial industry was in the 60's.

Selling advertising online could be automated for the most part, unless Twitter really does offer personalised offering to ads buyers—which I'm not sure is the case.

At a certain spend level, advertisers want to have a single human that they can call when they need something/something goes wrong ("a single throat to strangle").

Providing this dedicated connection is also an opportunity to upsell them on more ad products.

I did this work at Google for a couple years at the start of my career. They are an exceptionally analytics driven company, and would not employ these kinds of people if there wasn't good ROI

> stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. (...) I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...

What I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions is Jevon's Paradox[0], which can be summarised as:

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

Or more cynically: when increased efficiency creates greater demand than that increase in efficiency. I probably don't need to convince anyone here that this happens in real life all the time - we're all familiar with Wirth's Law[1], right?

So I think the same applies to automation and work. If anyone hasn't seen "Paperwork Explosion" by Jim Henson (you know, the guy who made The Muppets and the original voice of Kermit, and Ernie), this is a really good time to do so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

Look at what IBM promised: freedom from administrative woes! We can go back to do real productive work! Essentially exactly what we're hearing now. Now compare it to what actually happened. At the last two universities I've worked I have seen a lot of “the administration department is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding administration department” in action. At the expense of the quality of education and science, I might add.

Buurtzorg Nederland[2] got a lot of attention in recent years for breaking that trend with its simple approach to letting nurses self-organise as independent, self-managing teams (so what Agile tried to be I suppose, except for nurses). What is often overlooked is that this is basically just going back to the model that the Netherlands had up until the 1980s, but a bit enhanced with modern information/communication technology. Jos de Blok, who founded Buurtzorg, briefly that in this short TED talk[3], but my parents were both general practitioners until they retired a few years ago confirmed that this happened all throughout healthcare.

With programming, we know that complexity is something that must be actively fought or it sneaks in. We even have tons of special descriptions for how that happens: spaghetti code, big ball of mud, etc. So ask yourself: why would it be different in any other human-created system?

For me, this is part of the explanation for all the obscurity we see everywhere (that, and a vested interest of a number of parties in keeping things obfuscated). And my prediction is that the natural tendency of automation is to backfire, unless we actively fight this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

How long before we get to a situation where this is a realistic proposition for many people? Most people on HN live in a comfortable bubble. The reality right now is that the vast majority of jobs are not creative, fun, or satisfying for the people that perform them. Shop work, changing car tires, cleaning roads/offices/windows/people, mining, warehouse work, digging holes, erecting scaffolding, checking invoices, data entry, driving trucks, painting houses. Dull and exhausting: that's the reality of work for most people right now.

Or worse. At least those dull and exhausting jobs could formerly afford you a reasonably content middle class lifestyle with a modest home, but that is increasingly out of reach of even some of the most successful in society at least in some countries, if you'd like to live where there are actually jobs.

As we continue down this road to a winner takes all society, I'm not so sure this is what I'd call progress, and I'm easily in the top 20% of income.

Both a middle class lifestyle and a modest home are moving targets. People eat out a lot more than in the 70’s, they have larger homes and smaller families, they have safer and more reliable cars, they live longer.

As far as being able to live where the jobs are this is a problem caused by NIMBYs. This is not a problem they have in Japan.

The root cause is fewer desirable jobs. Fewer businesses with a larger share of the market, in fewer and fewer places.

Desirable jobs is also a moving target. I’d bet a lot of money that virtually every job is safer than in the 70’s, more are indoors, fewer are outside or demand physical labour. If you mean that the supply of desirable jobs has increased slower than demand, sure, I can buy that.

Fewer jobs offer job security and decent pay. Because of less job security, you need to be in a market with many employers (aka cities), and this results in more people living in fewer places, which means higher rent.

That translates to needing higher pay, or at least a career where you can outpace rent and insurance costs. There are some manual labor jobs that pay well outside of cities, but you have to watch out for the condition your body will be in since people live longer and there will be less of a social safety net for when you are disabled and/or are too old to work.

Bottom line is more and more people are less and less valuable.

Japan doesn't have an artificial demand problem like some other countries. They're also not mentally disabled by skin color.

> How long before we get to a situation where this is a realistic proposition for many people?

the FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) movement is showing how most people can do this in a matter of 20 years instead of 40, with those who are highly-compensated doing it in 5-10 years.

20 years of drudgery is much better than 40-60, so I'd say we're at least making progress. The hard part of realizing that goal is the much more difficult skill than the math: establishing what is "enough" for a good life.

>also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

I don't think this is ever going to change in human society. If a job is fun to a large group of people, then it will pay poorly because many people will want to do it. And poor pay decreases the satisfaction one gets from such a job.

The only people who win here are those who find a job fun / satisfying that most other people cannot handle.

There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job.

Lots of people would love to play in the NBA and would find it fun and satisfying. It's just that very few of them are 6'8", absurdly athletic, and skilled at shooting a basketball. However, if something like nanotechnology made it possible for all those people to play basketball at that level, then the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away and the desirability of that occupation would go away as well.

Exactly.

Lots of people don't want to play in the Eastern European basketball league. They specifically want to play in the NBA. It's not about basketball, it's about the perks.

Sidenote: Other than the height, the absurd athleticism and skill at shooting ball are grown over a long period of hard work. Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...

> Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...

Of course it can. You don't even have to go nano. Give me a team of people from Boston Dynamics for a year, and I guarantee you they'll be able to make me a wearable exoskeleton that is better at throwing the ball on-target than the best NBA player.

It's just, like GP said, with such tech allowed, "the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away". Sport disciplines are designed to ensure scarcity of good athletes.

> There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job.

That's partly true, but there are other dynamics at work as well.

Expert sewage/waste management workers get paid a lot less than those trades, though their trade is necessary and involves lots of sacrifice/job unhappiness.

On the other hand, private military contractors and undersea welders make a premium, despite being nominally "service" or less popularly lauded jobs.

There are other factors at work in addition to this.

Private military contracting and undersea welding are both dangerous and require fairly specialized skills. Waste management, though critical for the proper functioning of society, is a low skill job and not particularly dangerous, which keeps the wages low.

And medicine, finance, and consulting, require a fair amount of intelligence and the barriers to entry are high, keeping wages high.

I wonder if farmers looked at the rise of manufacturing jobs the same way - a move away from jobs that are producing the food that's required for society to function, to jobs that are producing entertaining novelties. Perhaps Facebook/Snap/... will one day be seen as just as vital to the proper functioning of society as manufacturing is today.

Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Digital-Entertainment don't employ all that many people.

I'd be surprised if the ratio of entertainers / audience is much different than it was for, say, stars of silent movies 100 years ago, even though Charlie Chaplin wasn't doing something that could be termed "needed for society to function".

Ah, but he did. See [The Great Dictator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator) for example. For us to function we need people like Chaplin to show us (in a way or another) what's going on in the world.

The Great Dictator is one of the few films with obvious value beyond entertainment, because it's a vaccine against Triumph of the Will. Triumph of the Will is a skillfully made propaganda film, and if you have no awareness of how it works then it would be easy to leave with positive feelings about the Nazis, even if only subconsciously. But once you've seen The Great Dictator it becomes a joke. E.g. the low camera angles don't make Hitler look powerful, they just remind you of the extending chair scene. His exaggerated gestures no longer project confidence, and instead make you think of slapstick routines.

John Cleese's silly walk had the same effect on the goose-stepping scenes. It's art that makes people more rational, by transforming emotional manipulation tricks into comedy. It's beneficial even if you don't agree with all of the politics of it (e.g. Chaplin's call for open borders).

Oh, that's an interesting question. I've seen a graph of (US) advertising spend vs GDP which seems to hold constant over the last 70 years.

But to lump all FB/snap/twitter into entertainment+advertising and get % of the population working for those companies would be interesting.

But then you start doing violence to the categories. Twitter/Facebook certainly have entertainment functions, but they also have tentacles reaching deep into publishing and news. Now, suddenly a like for like comparison needs to include newspapermen, typesetters, printers and papermill workers.

Well get to work then : )

But seriously, I hope data-minded grad students/sociologists are investigating this more.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs.

Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads.

Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing.

Then there's the entire middle management strata of the the economy. Mostly a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder.

The economy is already large enough to produce plenty for everybody, guarantee food, housing and healthcare for all, and with shorter working hours at that.

Unfortunately we're trapped in this bizarre economic system that works us to the bone in pointless jobs we hate, and can't even guarantee us the basics.

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit. Obviously, they (the company) derive value from these jobs or else such jobs would not exist (or at least not for long).

The parent argues that it's "a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder"

And you argue "If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit"

This is the same argument, just with a different spin. In the instance of Facebook, it was able to provide it's core utility with some software cobbled together by one guy in his dorm room over a couple weeks. So what are the other 25,000 employees for? It's not to make Facebook more useful, it's to prevent some other college kid from building a social media network that displaces it. It's all just a silly game that isn't very fun to play. One could argue that Facebook's core utility is now in delivering ads, but nobody likes looking at ads, and companies would rather not spend on ads if they didn't need to to compete, so again, it's all just a silly game. Very little of it is doing anything that is either useful or wanted.

To be fair, the stock market is bullshit. Its legalized professional gambling where some participants have way more information than others. The fact the vast majority of business exists to try to "win" the stock market game than provide real productive returns to the economy reaffirms the bullshit economics involved.

IE, vast amounts of effort from major globalcorps is dedicated towards tax avoidance. You spend tremendous amounts of resources to avoid taxes, which is only beneficial to the shareholders in the short term, because the long term economic damage of tax fraud and avoidance cripples economies and stunts growth. But the stockholders need not care since they already made their dividends off all the smuggled money as the country burns around them.

I think you're a bit too cynical. The financial system isn't optimal, and the stock market is less important now than it used to be (because it's easier to raise private capital), but it's not gambling. The rate of return is positive over pretty much any long-term horizon, and it allows companies to raise money when necessary. I agree that many companies engage in unproductive, but short-term profit maximizing behavior though.

the whole point of capitalism is to align incentives s.t. when businesses act selfishly to "win" in the markets, they are producing real returns to the economy

The jobs are useful to the company, they're not useful to society.

Companies are far from all-knowing and perfectly rational agents. They are made of people.

Also, growing from a lean company into a too-big-to-fail behemoth (which happens all the time) is very valuable to CEOs & co. It what makes you graduate from billionaire to billionaire with political power.

Yet large companies often have hugely bureaucratic and wasteful practices. When I was contracting I would go from one business with an IT department of 100 to another employing 1,000. They were broadly similar organisations, yet there was plenty of variance in their efficiency.

It is a little counter intuitive, but it's real.

Check this article out: http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

Spoken like somebody who has never actually worked in a large company.

Picture a stereotypical manager who does nothing but attend pointless meetings all day. (S)he attends reliably, and is good at appearing busy and authoritative and otherwise managerial.

This manager will not be fired, as (s)he's outwardly doing work duties and not doing anything specifically incompetent or negligent.

Other management-layer folk like this person as they confirm to middle class white collar norms socially.

Nevertheless, this person is useless. Every company is full of people like this.

Adding complexity often makes it harder for others to compete. So companies do that(via regulation, or technology, or contracts, or ad campaigns,etc...). And than complexity breeds complexity.

Companies are awful at culling bullshit jobs when the economy is good. That's why they never hire back as many as they laid off during recessions.

Those kinds of jobs are only sustainable when the audience is 100-1000x + the size of the pool of creators. It's not a broad panacea.

Just look at patreon. It is fairly unreasonable to expect even your fans to spend more than $1 a month on you, so if you want a reasonable income (and I'd consider reasonable to be peak happiness if you want success in life) than you want around 100k USD in yearly earnings. Take out the 40% self employment tax, the 3% Patreon takes, and you need roughly 12,000 people giving you a dollar a month to "succeed" in terms of income happiness as a creator on Patreon.

Now, some of your audience are going to be whales that have vastly more money and are willing to treat $100 like $1. But you also have a huge portion of your audience that pays nothing, by nature of the default state of Patreon being a free main product with only supporter bonus content rather than paywalling your main focus (because how are people going to discover your stuff if its paywalled?). I imagine the best conversion ratio is like 20% and that is wildly optimistic. Twitch subscriptions are comparable, where most streamers float around 20% of their average viewership as subscribers.

So you need 60,000 fans, at least, to make happiness income creatively. Now, each fan would probably support more than just one creator per month, and there are additional revenue sources including ads, merch, cons, kickstarters, etc. But no matter how you subdivide this economy the ratio of creators to consumers has to be drastically biased towards consumers over creators.

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown.

Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but there isn't a week where BusinessInsider isn't writing about some youtube celebrity.

So what? If you have a place to live and food, then satisfaction is next on the list. Is the youtube life not satisfying?

For the vast majority of content creators, one cannot live off youtube wages alone.

Maybe. On the downside; maybe those jobs won't be available to everyone because there is a skills gap or there aren't enough of them.

If there are people who are left behind; what do we do about it?

As long as it isn't profitable to help the people left behind there won't be much done. Hopefully the people left behind will start making it unprofitable for the elites to ignore them. Probably won't happen though due to the vast amount of surveillance we're subjected to along with possible robotic police force in the future.

Yes. What is being suggested by the zeitgeist is that we are in a transition period; and that the scale of the problem is going to be so large that it cannot be ignored.

That is, if 75% of the population has no job in 2150 you have a huge ethical and societal problem.

This article is about unemployment rates, but wage drops in lower paying job sectors is already a huge ethical and societal problem. It can already not be ignored. It is, nonetheless, still being ignored.

In my mind large corporations like Facebook are a good example, because not all of their 25,000 are programmers or "high skilled workers". Their will always exist an ecosystem around large groups of people that are diverse enough to satisfy most types of people.

I'm not saying that this is the end-all solution to the larger problem described by the article, but I do feel some hope that it will work itself out. However, the advent of self-driving cars will be interesting to follow, considering how many people work in human transportation. But I'm optimistic!

I'd like to see numbers here. There are huge industries that have been built around entertainment and recreation forever: sports, hunting, movies, television, books, music, etc. I expect, as a ratio, we're collectively spending far less on e.g. baseballs and far more on video games. It'd be interesting to see the net real change in society's total non-essential expenditures. I would be quite surprised if it was all that large especially if we do not consider ultra-high end recreation to account for the fact that there are far more upper class and rich individuals now a days, so their recreational spending could make it look like all of society is spending that much more - when that's certainly not your hypothesis.

And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?

While I believe industrialization has certainly improved in the last 50 years, it feels that there has been a trend towards displacement of the vital work/product generation towards under-powered regions of the world. Potentially only very fortunate humans may now pursue careers in a more ethereal environment that is both profitable and emotionally fulfilling.

Problem is that most of the people in the new industries make no money.

Whether you look at the app economy or you look at the influencer economy few people make most of the money.

>It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative.

Yes. Those + unwanted human surplus (most of us in the future) or some UBI scheme.