It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this.
> advertising
I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists.
I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function.
It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.
> Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life".
There's nothing inherent to socialism that would preclude advertising. It's an economic system where the means of production (capital) is owned by the workers or the state. In market socialism you still have worker cooperatives competing on the market.
Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.
An odd tendency I’ve noticed about Graeber is that the more someone apparently dislikes his work, the more it will seem like they’re talking about totally different books from the ones I read.
Because he uses private framings of concepts that are well understood. So if your first encounter is through Graeber you’re going to have friction with every other understanding. If you’ve read much else you will say “hold on a minute, what’s about …”
Please read my comments here engaging with the ideas in the text and specifically your concern that bullshit jobs are just jobs that don’t feel important.
You have written bunch of comments regarding advertising, single comment criticizing Graeber for using concepts in uncommon way, and one reply to my comment that doesn't really connect with the content of that comment.
Yes, David graeber talks a lot about the idea of bullshit jobs but fails to identify them concretely. As we see in this thread, whenever someone puts up an example, there is actually value he misses because he is unfamiliar with the workplace and business.
The example used here was advertising. And then when we push on the example the fallback is to the subjective - feeling unfilled, definition.
So I am still look for concrete examples of bullshit jobs to justify the original comment that AI will find efficiencies by letting us throw these away.
Got any? You are an expert on the text so I’m hoping you can identify one.
> And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.
See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can’t inspect.
And now let me remind you of the context. If the real definition of bullshit isn’t economic slack, but internal dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
"Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"."
Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ...
... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of sabotage.
Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production.
And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were.
All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad management of the stolen assets is just a consequence, because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually bad at managing anything including themselves.
This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy where the state owns everything and people are forced to give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model, not some defining feature of socialism.
Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth that matched or exceeded most capitalist European economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as western societies are today but it definitely wasn't totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's a philosophical question in there about what freedom really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 70s.
I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now and what was better then as that's beside the point, which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to capitalism.
It is the model, introduced basically everywhere where socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that cars with four wheels are just one terrible model, because there were a few cars with three wheels.
Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.
You also shouldn't discount the effect of sending young Yugoslavs to work in West Germany on the total balance sheet. A massive influx of remittances in Deutsche Mark was an important factor in Yugoslavia getting richer, and there was nothing socialist about it, it was an overflow of quick economic growth in a capitalist country.
You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism.
> You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism"
Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization.
> Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.
You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely different from USSR yet still socialist. Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives.
Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system, but people love nothing more than to draw conclusions from these obviously-invalid "experiments".
"You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything that was bad about the USSR". The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that.
" no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system"
That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning team.
"Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives."
Of that infinite number, the violent Soviet-like version became the most widespread because it was the only one that was somewhat stable when implemented on a countrywide scale. That stability was bought by blood, of course.
No one is sabotaging worker cooperatives in Europe and lefty parties used to given them extra support, but they just don't seem to be able to grow well. The largest one is located in Basque Country and it is debatable if its size is partly caused by Basque nationalism, which is not a very socialist idea. Aside from that one, worker cooperatives of more than 1000 people are rare birds.
"The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that."
No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment with that quagmire again. For some reason, socialism is a catnip of intellectuals who continue to defend it, but real-world workers dislike it and defect from various attempts to build it at every opportunity.
We should stop trying to ride dead horses. Collective ownership of means of production on a macro scale is every bit as dead as divine right of kings to rule. There are still Curtis Yarvin types of intellectual who subscribe to the latter idea, but it is pining for the fjords. So is socialism.
> That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning team.
What kind of disingenuous argument is that? Existence of COMECON doesn't neutralize the enormous disadvantage and economic pressure of having sanctioned imposed on you.
> Of that infinite number
I'm glad we agree that Soviet communism is not synonymous with "socialism".
> Aside from that one, worker cooperatives of more than 1000 people are rare birds.
You're applying pointless capitalist metrics to non-capitalist organizations and moralizing about how they don't live up to them.
> No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment with that quagmire again.
You're experimenting with socialist policies and values right now, you just don't want to call it by that name because of your weird fixation. Do public healthcare, transport, education, social security benefits ring any bells?
If you talked to people from ex-Yugoslavia, you'd know that many would be happy to return to that time.
> We should stop trying to ride dead horses.
We should stop declaring horses extinct when it's just your own horse that has died.
This is not really a contradiction. When the world became bipolar, there was a lot of alpha in arbitrage. The most valuable Yugoslav (state owned) company was Genex, which was an import/export company -- it would import from one bloc and export to the other bloc, because neither bloc wanted to admit that the other bloc had something they needed. (This set the Yugoslavs up for failure, like so many other countries that believed that the global market would make them rich).
The Soviets and their satellites (like the DDR), had another problem related to arbitrage, and that is that their professionals (such as doctors and engineers and scientists, all of whom received high quality, free, state-subsidized education), were being poached by the Western Bloc countries (a Soviet or East German engineer would work for half the local salary in France or West Germany, _and_ they would be a second class citizen, easy to frighten with deportation -- the half-salary was _much_ greater than what they could earn in the Eastern Bloc). The iron curtain was erected to prevent this kind of arbitrage (why should the Soviets and satellites subsidize Western medicine and engineering? Shouldn't a capitalist market system be able to sustain itself? Well no, market systems are inefficient by design, and so they only work as _open_ systems and not _closed_ systems -- they need to _externalize_ the costs and _internalize_ the gains, which is why colonialism was a thing to begin with, and why the "third world" is _still_ a thing).
Note that after the Berlin Wall fell, the first thing to happen was mass migrations of all kinds of professionals (such as architects and doctors) and semi-professionals (such as welders and metal-workers), creating an economic decline in the East, and an economic and demographic boom in the West (the reunification of Germany was basically a _demographic_ subsidy -- in spite of the smaller size, East Germany had much higher birth rates for _decades_; and after the East German labor pool was integrated, Western economies sought to integrate the remaining Eastern labor pools (more former Yugoslavs live abroad in Germany than in any other non-Yugo part of the world [the USA numbers are iffy, but if true Croatians are the only exception, with ~2M residents in USA, which seems unlikely]).
The problem, in the end, is that all of these countries are bound by economic considerations (this is thesis of Marx, by the way), and they cannot escape the vicious arbitrage cycle (I mean, here in the USA, we have aggressively been brain-draining _ourselves_ since at least 1980, which is why we have the extreme polarization, stagnation, and instability _today_ -- it is reminiscent of the Soviet situation in the mid 1980s to late 1990s). Not without something like a world government (if there is only one account to manage, there is no possibility of deficit or surplus, unless measured inter-temporally), or an alternative flavor of globalization.
Internationalism is a wonderful ideology, and one that I support. You can make the case that Yugoslavia, the USSR, etc, were an early experiment in Internationalism, that each succumbed to corruption and unclear thinking (a citizenry that is _inclusive_ by nature and can _think_ clearly is a hard requirement for any successful polity). Globalization, on the other hand, has a bit of an Achilles Heel: when countries asked why they should open their borders and economies to outsider/foreigners, they were told, "so that we can all get rich!". The problem is that once the economic gains get squeezed out of globalization, countries will start looking for new ways to rich, even if it means reversing decades of integration. Appealing to people's greed only works to the extent that you can placate their appetites. We should have justified Internationalism using _intrinsic_ arguments: "we should integrate because learning how others see and experience the world is intrinsically beautiful, and worth struggling for".
Note that most of these economic pathologies disappear, when the reserve currency (dollar) is replaced with a self-balancing currency (like Keynes' Bancor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor). We have the tools, but everyone wants to feel like the only/greatest winner. These are the first people that have to be exiled.
It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this.
> advertising
I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists.
I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function.