[bcg1]

Sorry, but this article is kind of full of assumptions and it has more storytelling than facts. Multiple times author says "I have no objective measure but one time I met a guy..."

Perhaps the worst assumption is that we have a capitalist economy/society and thus its ills can safely be attributed to capitalism. In America at least, we have a mixed economy in which the state is deeply influential in most industries through regulation and/or outright participation. Additionally, all income can potentially be taxed and interest rates and money supply are controlled by a quasi-governmental corporation (and since barter is rare, money is in general half of every transaction).

I would suggest that it is possible that many (or a majority?) of the "pointless" jobs exist because the income tax (if people aren't working, they aren't being taxed) and because of government laws and regulations (more laws and regs = more pointless paper pushing = more people being taxed). My theory has as much logical support as the author provides at least.

Also might want to look up the term "contrafreeloading"

[padobson]

You nailed it.

Look at the jobs he cites as meaningless: It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.

Bailiffs, lobbyists and legal consultants are directly tied to state actions. Private equity CEOs and actuaries directly benefit from a century of monetary policy that slants the playing field toward finance. 5/7ths of the examples he came up with rely on state intervention for their existence, and yet he blames capitalism.

Even his musician/corporate lawyer friend owes his own employment to the vast swaths of corporate laws and regulations that exist.

Then he finishes with this: If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job.

Again, how can you not point to government monetary policy and say this is exactly what's happened?

[gus_massa]

My favorite is "all-night pizza deliverymen". It's not pointless. They have this work because someone buy pizza at odd times.

If someday in the future drone delivery is allowed, and it's cheaper to use drones than humans, then they will get unemployed an no one in the evil elite will drop a tear.

[It's more complicated, because the delivery guy sometimes help with the other activities in the pizza shop while not driving, like cleaning or moving the sacks of flour. So the dismissal will not be immediate.]

[jbmorgado]

That's the exact point of the all article that you seem to miss: just because there is a market for it, it doesn't meen there is an actual need for it.

Hence the motto of the article: capitalism creates unnecessary jobs.

[gus_massa]

Then what is an useful job?

* There is no need of professional potatoes farmer, because everyone can have a personal (family?) potato plants in the backyard.

* There is no need of professional general doctors, because everyone can look up the symptoms in Wikipedia. (I strongly recommend a professional surgeon!)

Jobs specialization is very useful. For example in a small software project someone can do all the job. But in a big software project usually there are some divisions. Someone does the UI, someone the server stuff, someone the Android port, ... It's not a flat organization where everyone just add code wherever they want willy nilly. Perhaps someone can fix an obvious typo in another part, but for big changes most of the work is done by the official or unofficial owner.

[jbmorgado]

Yes, let now try and mix basic food needs like planting potatoes with you getting the munches at 3 AM and asking for a pizza delivery just because you know there is a service like that available. Whatever wins you the argument in your head, right?

[EpicEng]

Define 'unnecessary'. If I run a pizza shop and there is sufficient demand to justify late night deliveries, then that position is absolutely necessary as I'm trying to maximize profits.

[jbmorgado]

"then that position is absolutely necessary as I'm trying to maximize profits"

Yes, that's the all point of the article and also the one I explaining: Capitalism is about "maximizing profits" not about social, intelectual, or even productive efficiency.

[heynowletsgo]

That's not his point. He's saying people buy pizza at night because they are unnecessarily working at night. Selling pizza at night shouldn't be necessary because its an artificially created market.

[SnowingXIV]

It's not artificial. I want pizza at night so I need someone to bring me pizza at night.

[dcdanko]

So the article is a moral tirade against all night pizza delivery?

[JamesBarney]

That actuaries and private equity CEOs benefit directly from monetary policy is a non-mainstream idea, I was wondering if you could go into more details about this.

[notahacker]

The idea that an active monetary policy [indirectly] boosts the earnings of the finance sector by trying to facilitate stability, providing a direct subsidy in the form of coupon payments on bonds, and managed steady inflation encouraging people to invest their savings through financial intermediaries rather than bury banknotes in the garden is pretty mainstream. And financiers certainly have more knowledge and lobbying power than the average organisation when it comes to calling for a particular monetary policy shift.

But I'm not convinced the idea promoted in the original article that the real objective is to persuade the masses to give up their free time to work 60hr weeks in finance (as opposed to because the masses prefer predictable payrises and not losing all their savings) has enough theoretical underpinnings to elaborate on.

If anything, the more controversial aspect of mainstream monetary policy is the opposite: that its theoretical underpinnings assume that there can be too high a proportion of the population in work...

[bko]

I agree that there are a lot of bullshit jobs but I would note that these bullshit jobs tend to be concentrated in protected industries. For instance, finance has a lot of bullshit jobs and I personally know many people who work at banks and their sole responsibility is to create inconsequential reports and spreadsheets. Every once in a while there will be a round of layoffs to trim the workforce but overall these jobs persist. The incentive on managers is to hire people and build their team to exert more power and justify higher title/salary. There is little shareholder power to trim the workforce of these bullshit jobs and political pressure to not lay people off. Competition is not really an issue due to the existing regulatory barriers to entry.

Take an industry that is more competitive such as restaurants in a large city. The manager there would never hire someone for a bullshit job. In fact, that manager often performs menial tasks that are normally above his pay-grade.

Of course there are transaction costs to anything. It's a lot easier to hire/fire a busboy than an office employee. This keeps some employees around in bullshit jobs to serve as a flexible workforce. But I still believe that this does not account for the majority of bullshit jobs in these protected industries.

[08-15]

> ...thus its ills can safely be attributed to capitalism.

I don't think Graeber is trying to say that. The word "capitalism" shows up exactly once:

> In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. [...] Still, somehow, it happens.

He isn't saying that bullshit jobs are created because of capitalisms, but despite it. The title says something different, and IIRC the original title when it appeared on "Strike!" was just "Bullshit Jobs".

The vibe I get from the article itself is that bullshit jobs happens because of the intervention of law makers. (At least to me, law makers are the same sort of self serving scum everywhere, whether they carry a socialist, capaitalist or any other flag.) The real question is whether it happened by malice or by incompetence. Or maybe through tax law compounded by incompetence.

[gizmo]

> He isn't saying that bullshit jobs are created because of capitalism, but despite it.

Graeber is unapologetically anti-capitalist. As an anarchist, Graeber doesn't think the government is the solution to all society's ills either.

[wz1000]

You confuse capitalism as it has existed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution with "free markets". When anarchists like Graeber talk about Capitalism, they mean "really existing Capitalism", just like when most people criticize Communism, they criticize "really existing communism" in the Socialist states of the 20th century, not the concept of a "classless, stateless society with the common ownership of the means of production".

If you spend even the smallest amount of time studying the history of Capitalism, it is quickly apparent that the state has been vital in its formation. Indeed to form "capitalist" markets, you need the state and its apparatus to divide up the world and apportion it out. For example, Enclosure[0] in England was the process of dividing up the land and handing it over to private interests in order to create markets, and it was absolutely vital to the development of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

More recently, you have the dividing up of the ethereal with Intellectual "Property", the very idea of which must seem like a joke to most theorists of property. The very concept of non-exclusionary, indefensible property is a contradiction in terms. Yet, Capitalism in the 21st Century is deeply dependent on this legal fiction, from pharma-giants and agricultural companies like Pfizer and Monsanto, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google, entertainment and media conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney, to restaurant franchises like McDonald's.

Then there is Graeber's central thesis in Debt, that taxes in themselves are vital to the very creation of money and markets.

Once you have divided up the world according to your concepts of "property", you still need to enforce it. And what better way to do that than use the state. So you use the state and its massive military strength to destroy labor movements[1][2], police international waters to make sure your oil tankers cargoships arrive at their destinations, and bully other nations into signing "free-trade" "agreements" to enforce your bullshit notions of property all around the world. And in the end, if all this still fails, you do it the old fashioned way and get the state to stage a coup[3][4].

[0]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_Mine_massacre [3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A... [4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...