Yes there's absolutely cheap stuff made in China.
But it's also critically-acclaimed novels and television series that speak to the issues of our day. It's desire to travel and experience other cultures. It's things like wanting to learn the basics of another language with Duolingo. Or it's medical advances.
Yes I do think consumers will always want more improved or up-to-date things. But I also think it's awfully judgmental to perjoratively label those things "garbage".
1. Conspicuous consumption is purely competitive. There will never be a point where running faster stops being an advantage in a marathon. If everyone could afford five cars, then some people would still try to gain a status advantage by buying ten.
2. The dopamine hit from spending money is purely relative to the amount of money you have. As you earn and spend larger sums of money your brain adapts to expect even more. It's just like any addiction – a drug user will keep increasing doses forever until they reach some medical or financial constraint.
3. New "needs" are simply created. People get chemotherapy instead of simply dying at age 60 from cancer. People receive expensive mental health treatment from high-skilled practitioners which didn't used to exist. Most people used to be illiterate but now everyone needs a high school education, and more than half even need an expensive college education.
90% of people in the first world have enough money to get all of the things that very poor people "need". But we simply adjust to the new reality. People move to high COL cities and spend all of their money bidding up the cost of houses. It never ends.
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/NFLX
Yes.
This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
> As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers.
People say stuff like this all the time—Paul Graham famously trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay gap—but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of my personal notes on this topic last week:
There's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest, following both from the irrationality of the people who make it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally operating in their own individual self interests, counter to the organization's.
There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around].
... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is being addressed.
We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell–Mann amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.
Management isn't and never will be perfect. But just because some small percentage of existing positions are actually unnecessary doesn't mean that's a primary or even secondary explanation for preventing mass unemployment, which was the original topic.
Obviously corporations aren't perfectly rational. Nobody is. But the fact remains that rational profit-seeking is a systemic incentive pushing corporate behavior in a particular direction -- e.g. to eliminate useless jobs. There is no similar general systemic incentive that rewards keeping useless jobs around.
Contrary to your personal notes, capitalism absolutely seeks out efficiency. It isn't perfect, and it isn't the only force. But it is by far the strongest force. In other words, there is an extremely strong trend where the most efficient companies stick around, and the rest go out of business.
> Obviously corporations aren't perfectly rational.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
> the rest go out of business.
Right, which is why it's so odd when people respond to criticism about a business's practices with the institutional bias that I referred to.
[EDIT: FWIW, I don't agree with either you _or_ the person you're responding to about "the real reason we avoid unemployment". I don't think they're more right about it than you are, but they're aren't more wrong, either. Not really interested in discussing that, though. I am (was) narrowly interested in the existence or non-existence of paper pushers, and where they're tolerated.]
It seems to me that you're taking this too personally. First of all, the person you're responding to wasn't even talking to you or about you when they wrote the "Just because you don't understand..." line, so you're out here taking offense on behalf of everyone who posits the existence of unnecessary jobs. (#NotAllPeopleWhoPositUnnecessaryJobs?)
Taking "personal truth" out of the equation, as an impartial observer, reading the assertion on the part of a username on HN I don't recognize that useless jobs exist is insignificant evidence in support of that hypothesis - exactly the same as if I heard someone I don't know claiming they saw bigfoot or UFOs. To improve the situation, you could provide supporting details about the examples of useless jobs you have seen.
Assume that I'm not. (I'm not, and it seems surprising to me that it seems that way.)
> "personal truth"
I don't recognize this as a term, and really, I'm just not interested in any discussion about the other things you've mentioned: usernames not recognized, who was talking to whom, advice about improving my situation, and so on. This is both too meta and in a direction that doesn't pique my curiosity.
Fine - maybe I misread simple annoyance as personal offense.
> I'm just not interested in any discussion about the other things you've mentioned: usernames not recognized, who was talking to whom, advice about improving my situation, and so on.
What I said wasn't really about any of those things, so let me try again.
Your response here
> > Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary.
> This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the same position as me at least as well as they understood their jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
struck me as a thoroughly unproductive way to debate. You made a bare claim to have seen something that others allege to be rare. Obviously the fact that you have seen it is enough evidence for you, but it shouldn't move the needle on anyone else's state of belief. Therefore, IMHO, it's not a useful contribution.
When I said improve the situation, I was not giving "advice about improving [your] situation"; I meant improving the quality of discussion.
[tone edited]
As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass layoffs after mergers. Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not necessary.
The real reason we avoid unemployment is the same reason we've avoided it ever since 90% of households were farmers. It's because however efficient we get, consumers always want better things.
We avoid unemployment not because of "bullshit jobs". We avoid it because humans have an insatiable demand for more travel, novel restaurants, video game consoles with more realistic graphics, fancier theme parks, new blockbuster movies. Our desire for new and better things will never stop. So the desire for people to take jobs to invent and provide those things will never stop.
"Unnecessary managers and paper pushers" has utterly nothing to do with it.