David Graeber is one of those guys who finds a nugget of truth and surrounds it with mountains of convenient and crowd pleasing BS. Everyone loves to hear that their "real jobs" are being cut while the boss that "does nothing" gets to stay, and nobody wants to be told that the "people who make things" are being rapidly replaced by a single "creative" and machines. Of course, all of this "progress" ends up generating a lot of paperwork so we end up with "pointless" corporate lawyers (who, in the article, had a very interesting life and is probably paid quite handsomely) who bitch about not having a philosophically interesting career as if that's some sort of inalienable right.

The true "pointless jobs" are the thought leaders who try to warp political and economic philosophy to their own solipsistic psychological needs by pandering to the baser wants and desires of their audience. Most else is a circumstance of market inefficiencies or people not actually being worth the salary they used to be paid.

And yet GDP per person has trended upwards in a pretty global fashion. [0, 1] So either those providing "real" value are so productive that they support all that dead weight and yet still continue to grow, or those "bullshit" jobs are actually providing real value and increases in productivity.

[0] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01

GDP measures GDP, not 'real value' or 'productivity'. Also, just because the mean is increasing does not mean the median is, too.

GDP is a (attempted) measurement of economic value-add. I cannot think of a better definition of productivity in the context of this conversation. The value-add per person has been increasing despite the claimed existence of "bullshit" jobs, with that being roughly defined (by me) as a zero-value-add position. My proposal is simply that if they are zero-value-add, then the value-add demonstrated by the rest of the population must be enough to completely cover those losses and then some. I'll let the audience decide if they consider that viable.

Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.

What about "GDP is detached from the production of hard physical goods and services that satisfy human needs."???

I won't go as far as to claim that Economy is a pseudo science, but like many other disciplines it uses words that are already in use by the general population and redefines them to mean technical concepts. The end result is that economist can make statements that are technically true but that end up conveying a completely different message when listened by a lay person.

In this case, when an economist talks about "productivity", it has a very specific concept in mind. One that has more to do with ROI than with the manufacturing of any thing of value at all. Of course, both concepts are not completely detached from each other (it would be useless to grab a concept to mean something random instead), but they are not 100% aligned either, and this results in misunderstanding, if not actual misleading. By example, when some troubled company talks about "increasing employee productivity", naive employees expect some sort of training program to help them be more effective at their jobs. What they get is a pink slip instead; if productivity is ROI, you can lay off half of your people and use the company's momentum to keep turning 80% of the income, so on paper it will look like you are having better ROI (even if the cuts get too deep and are damaging the long term viability of the business).

We'd like GDP to track what we would consider value, but it need not. It's not hard to find people who will complain that some contribution to GDP is unhelpful, detrimental. It wouldn't be hard to find sour words speaking out against financialization, for example. Economic rents in general can contribute to GDP but intuitively are not 'real value' because otherwise we wouldn't call it rent. Governments can create a lot of worthless work that contributes GDP, but unsustainably. It would be debasing to the word 'value' or 'productivity' to ignore that.

We'd like at least for 'real value' or 'productivity' as intuitively understood to contribute to GDP. That is, from an increase in value one may infer an increase in GDP (usually). I can accept that. I take issue with an inference in the other direction. If I knew how much 'real value' contributed to GDP and how much was in excess of that contribution, I would be an incredibly accomplished economist.

I can buy both yours and TeMPOraL's [0] argument, which I think are roughly saying the same thing. Thanks for the well-reasoned response.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123

Maybe you and GP think about different concepts of "productivity". Economic value-add has only a loose correlation with work benefiting individuals and societies. That's the point of "bullshit jobs" concept - we're inventing occupations that feed on one another, wasting people's time and resources but making the numbers go up.

It's like in this story of soldiers who dig up latrines one day, and fill them up on another day. Yes, a lot of people were busy, but in the end, nothing useful got done and lots of man-hours were wasted.

>GDP is a (attempted) measurement of economic value-add. I cannot think of a better definition of productivity in the context of this conversation >Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.

HDI

"The ideal economic or GDP hero is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a 20-car pileup, while munching on fast-take-out-food and chatting on a cell phone. All add to GDP growth. The GDP villain is non-smoking, eats home-cooked wholesome meals and cycles to work."

-- Mark Anielski

Something to remember when you next start going on about "real value".

There is another possibility: per capita GDP is an increasingly unrealistic measure for estimating "real" productivity.

None of the three possibilities preclude the others, so there could be combinations. It could be all three.

It could be that the best workers have a crazy productivity that accounts for the major part of the GDP while the rest has a low productivity.

Especially if you realize how quickly is the public sector growing in many (most) countries.

Not to mention centralized efforts, such as QE, which are literally aimed at jobs creation, regardless of their value.

Certainly you can't believe there's only two possibilities.

... The options presented are either "bullshit" jobs provide value or they don't. So yes, there actually are only two possibilities. Which other ones would you propose to exist?

There's a third one, in which I believe - that bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use.

A typical example would be political campaigns and/or advertising in highly competitive sectors - all work done there serves only to cancel out the work done by other people, thus creating a negative feedback loop that can consume infinite amount of resources for little marginal gain. Think about how much time, paper, paint and fuel is wasted printing leaflets and billboards and notice that if everyone collectively agreed not to do this, the results would be the same.

> bullshit jobs provide negative value by using up natural resources and man hours that could be put to a better use.

Touché. See, this is why we should all unit test with a fuzzer...

I suppose I would need to amend it to zero-or-less-value-add. This thought intertwines with the other line of discussion, in that these proposed "negative" items would likely be seen as GDP-positive. After all, someone needs to print all those pamphlets, and that's a value-add over paper and ink.

Interesting aside: São Paulo, Brasil has a ban on all outdoor advertising. Of course, that's only a limited subset of possible advertising, but it seems to have gone over well with the general populous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

I think that would still fit pretty well with "those providing 'real' value are so productive that they support all that dead weight and yet still continue to grow".

That they add some value, but considerably less than "real" jobs?

GDP is all inflated meaninglessly by central banks. Inflation rates aren't particularly accurate either so you can't count on real GDP as well.

So bullshit jobs are a tax paid by big corporations? Why are they willing to pay this tax? If most of their workforce is improductive, why not get rid of it altogether? Why do these jobs exist?

Because corporations aren't monolithic rational actors, but rather large bureaucratic bodies made of people who operate in a broader social and cultural context.

A thousand times this.

One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity.

And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?"

But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways.

There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself:

"Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?"

"Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?"

"If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?"

It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations).

The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation.

TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology.

Exactly.

Because most industries are consolidated by oligopolies. If newly formed, smaller and far more efficient companies begin to seriously threaten these oligopolies, they simply throw their weight around via acquisition, regulation or other quasi-legal means to destroy them.

Doesn't make for an exciting and optimistic story, but it is what it is. Pure capitalism is just as impossible as pure socialism, due to the exact same moral hazards. Human beings tend to use power to leverage their advantages in any way imaginable, regardless of the prevailing laws and ideologies of the day.

Hierarchy and structure has costs. Maintaining hierarchy requires inertia and increased transaction costs. Capitalism is predicated on hierarchies and market structures. A lot of jobs exist just to prop up the order of things.

I can think of one easy reason from a micro-economics perspective. A firm has "organizational rents" from being more productive as an organization than the individuals would be in aggregate on their own. This begs the question of how to divide them. The answer is usually along the lines of having a hell of a lot of political maneuvering to assign as much of the extra value to yourself as possible - salary, prestige, power, and favors.

It's not a big tax at these interest rates.

That kind of assumes that we'll be at these interest rates forever, though.

It doesn't assume anything. It does however, say watch out when interest rates rise..

Yes, low interest rates allow for a lot of meaningless labor to be performed .. why not? You can borrow at near 0% to pay for it, so who cares.

The fed is pushing interest rates lower and lower to keep people employed - even if it is in purposeless, pointless jobs. When they stop though, we'll see how many of these jobs remain.

Zirp did the same thing in Japan, by the way. Japanese hate unemployment and with Zirp they were allowed to keep a lot of people employed that otherwise would be laid off in a normal functioning capitalist society.