How central bank employment mandates turned the modern world into hell on earth.

Bull Shit Jobs thread

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right.

In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless.

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound.

It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’s promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the sixties—never materialize?

The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism.

Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true.

Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs >>

and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture

(and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically.

At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment. ” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away.

(Even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s

population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing,

or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.

And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these

industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs. ”

If you look at employment in hyper inflating or just high inflation economies of the past , you'll notice that this kind of employment is a distinct feature.

With that information , we can then say that since the end of the gold standard , the whole world economy has been one big exercise in slow motion hyper inflation.

Back to the book.

And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.

this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is >

going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing,

and maintaining things. Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand.
And more and more employees find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but >

effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted.

Since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets.

Now, I realize any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “Who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s ‘necessary, ’ anyway?

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that,

really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?

Most people in pointless jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit.

There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties ,they will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment?

Me: I think this explains the bulk of unhappiness in modern life

What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.

A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without sciencefiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. 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. 1 (Many suspect it might improve markedly.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing (managers, administrators, etc.)

Provisional Definition:

A bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Some jobs are so pointless that no one even notices if the person who has the job vanishes.

We will get into this later but while that definition is fresh in your mind , know that studies show that 30 to 40% of respondents said their job fit this description.

From Iran to France to the US. This is why I think this has everything to do with monetary conditions.

Before we proceed , also reflect on this. Conservative commentators winge on & on & ON about the welfare state & how the welfare state is killing us. Now I am a conservative & I get that. But it ain't the welfare state ! A welfare state is probably CHEAP compared to having 30%

of the entire economy comprised of parasitic & pointless industry & employment.

BS Job example. This is a public/private example since its the private sector working for govt.

The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work.

The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics

The logistics firm has a subcontractor that does their personnel management, and Kurt works for that company.

Let’s say soldier A moves to an office two rooms farther down the hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.

The IT subcontractor will get the form, people will read it and approve it, and forward it to the logistics firm. The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down the hall and will request personnel from us.

The office people in my company will then do whatever they>

do, and now I come in. I get an email: “Be at barracks B at time C. ” Usually these barracks are one hundred to five hundred kilometers [62–310 miles] away from my home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch know that I arrived,

fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box, seal the box, have a guy from the logistics firm carry the box to the next room, where I unseal the box, fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long I took, get a couple of >

signatures, take my rental car back home, send dispatch a letter with all of the paperwork and then get paid.

So instead of the soldier carrying his computer 5 meters, 2 people drive for a combined 6-10 hours, fill out around 15 pages of paperwork, & waste €400 of taxpayers €

This might sound like a classic example of ridiculous military red tape of the sort Joseph Heller made famous in his 1961 novel Catch-22, except for one key element: almost nobody in this story actually works for the military. Technically, they’re all part of the private sector.

Not only is Kurt’s job absurd, but Kurt himself is perfectly well aware of this.

Govt work inefficiency inspires politicians all over the world to call for a larger role for the private sector—where, it is always claimed, such abuses would not occur.

Still, a rising tide of bullshit soils all boats.

The main difference is that pointless work in the private sector is likely to be far more closely supervised.This is not always the case.

As we’ll learn, the number of employees of banks, pharmaceutical companies, and engineering firms allowed to spend most of their time updating their Facebook profiles is surprisingly high.

A YouGov poll found that in the United Kingdom only 50 percent of those who had full-time jobs were entirely sure their job made any sort of meaningful contribution to the world, and 37 percent were quite sure it did not.

A poll by the firm Schouten & Nelissen carried out in Holland put the latter number as high as 40 percent. If you think about it, these are staggering statistics.

One must assume that the % of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, musicians, tailors, and school crossing guards checked “no” to the question.

My own research suggests that store clerks, restaurant workers, & other low-level service providers rarely see themselves as having bullshit jobs, either. Many service workers hate their jobs; but even those who do are aware that their work does make a difference in the world.

Why does it feel wrong to say a hit man has a bullshit job? 8 I suspect there are multiple reasons, but one is that the Mafia hit man (unlike, say, a foreign currency speculator or a brand marketing researcher) is unlikely to make false claims.

Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless or pernicious; typically, there has to be some degree of pretense and fraud involved as well. The jobholder must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason why her job exists.

I define a bullshit job as one that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious—but I also suggest that the worker is correct.

Often it’s pretty obvious why this should be the case:

If an office worker is really spending 80 percent of her time designing cat memes, her coworkers in the next cubicle may or may not be aware of what’s going on, but there’s no way that she is going to be under any illusions about what she’s doing.

One woman wrote to me that she had worked for almost a year selling advertising for an in-flight magazine that she gradually realized did not exist. She became suspicious when she realized she had never seen a copy of the magazine in the office, or on an airplane,

despite the fact she was a fairly frequent flyer. Eventually her coworkers quietly confirmed that the entire operation was a fraud.

Me: This example makes me wonder about the whole magazine industry. Why is the magazine shelf just as full in a post Internet world ?

Me: With this ladies fake magazine job and with the thought of the magazine rack still full in a post Internet world , let's review that quote from the hyperinflation book , Dying of Money again.

The red underlined "almost any business could make $"

Like magazines in 2020

One frequent theme I encountered in my research was of underlings wondering in effect, “Does my supervisor actually know that I spend eighty percent of my time designing cat memes? Are they just pretending not to notice, or are they actually unaware?

The more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good—and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them.

Corporate lobbyists and financial consultants (perfect example of BS jobs) certainly do seem responsible for a disproportionately large share.

In many large organizations like banks, as we will see, top-level managers will hire consultants or internal auditors to figure out

what it is that people actually do; one bank analyst told me about 80 percent of bank workers are engaged in unnecessary tasks and most he felt were unaware of it, since they were kept in the dark about their role in the larger organization.

It’s important to emphasize here, too, it’s not that people mistakenly believed their jobs to be bullshit, but quite the other way around.

Another distinction is between jobs that are pointless and jobs that are merely bad. I will refer to the latter as “shit jobs.

The two are so often confused—which is odd, because they’re in no way similar. In fact, they might almost be considered opposites. Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless.

Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society.

Some jobs are intrinsically unpleasant but fulfilling in other ways. (the man whose job it was to clean up elephant dung after the circus)

If you toss out the notion of bullshit jobs to someone who hasn’t heard the term before, that person may assume you’re really talking about shit jobs. But if you clarify, he is likely to fall back on one of two common stereotypes: he it's just government bureaucrats.

Or, if he’s a fan of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he may assume you’re talking about hairdressers.

Let me deal with the bureaucrats first, since it’s the easiest to address.

I doubt anyone would deny that there are plenty of useless bureaucrats in the world. What’s significant to me, though, is that nowadays, useless bureaucrats seem just as rife in the private sector as in the public sector.

You are as likely to encounter an exasperating little man in a suit reading out incomprehensible rules and regulations in a bank or mobile phone outlet than in the passport office or zoning board.

Even more, public and private bureaucracies have become so increasingly entangled that it’s often very difficult to tell them apart.

If you complain about getting some bureaucratic run-around from a bank, bank officials are likely to tell you it’s the fault of government regulations; but if you research where those regulations actually come from, you’ll discover that most of them were written by the bank.

Nonetheless, the assumption that govt is necessarily top-heavy with featherbedding and unnecessary levels of administrative hierarchy, while the private sector is lean and mean, is by now so firmly lodged in people’s heads that it seems no amount of evidence will dislodge it.

Me : Paradoxically , the real world physical sub sector of the economy (like the delivery drivers you see zipping around) is in many cases are lean. But above that , companies even in the private sector, are top heavy with managerial dead weight.

No doubt some of this misconception is due to memories of countries such as the Soviet Union, which had a policy of full employment and was therefore obliged to make up jobs for everyone whether a need existed or not.

This is how the USSR ended up with shops where customers had to go through three different clerks to buy a loaf of bread, or road crews where, at any given moment, two-thirds of the workers were drinking, playing cards, or dozing off.

This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient

The pressure on corporations to downsize and increase efficiency has redoubled since the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1980s. But this pressure has been directed almost exclusively at the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the ones who are actually making, maintaining

fixing, or transporting things. Anyone wearing a uniform in the exercise of his daily labors, for instance, is likely to be hard-pressed. 26 FedEx and UPS delivery workers have backbreaking schedules designed with “scientific” efficiency.

In the upper echelons of those same companies, things are not the same. When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most timeand energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves

—or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.

As a result, the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms.

It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs. (As we’ll see, in some companies, this was literally the case.)

The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes (sic) somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.

Once you put aside the notion that you’re only talking about government bureaucrats, many will assume you must be talking above all about secretaries, receptionists, and various sorts of (typically female) administrative staff.

Now, clearly, many such administrative jobs are indeed bullshit by the definition developed here, but the assumption that it’s mainly women who end up in bullshit jobs isnt true.

It’s far more likely that the (female) administrative assistant for a vice dean or “Strategic Network Manager” is the only person doing any real work in that office, and that it’s her boss who might as well be lounging around in his office playing World of Warcraft. & probably is

Before moving on, why is a hairdresser not a bullshit job? Well, the most obvious reason is precisely because hairdressers do not believe it to be one. To cut and style hair makes a demonstrable difference in the world, and the notion that its unnecessary vanity is subjective.

I was going to make this thread into parts but I'll add pictures for some reference if you want to zoom around & find a certain part.

I don’t think I know anyone who has had the same job for thirty years or more who doesn’t feel that the bullshit quotient has increased over the time he or she has been doing it.

Me: this makes sense because as time passes ,we get further & further away from 1971

According to this survey, the amount of time office workers say they devoted to their actual duties declined from 46% in 2015 to 39% in 2016, owing to a proportionate rise in time dealing with emails, up from 12% to 16%, “wasteful” meetings, 8% to 10%, & admin. tasks ,9%to 11%

Figures that dramatic must be partly the result of random statistical noise—after all, if such trends really continued, in less than a decade, no US office worker would be doing any real work at all—but if nothing else, the survey makes abundantly clear that

(1) more than half of working hours in American offices are spent on bullshit, and (2) the problem is getting worse.

Me: This is stemming from inflation (see the attached from earlier remember) and yes , inflation is getting worse.

Consider the figures cited earlier. If 37% to 40% of jobs are pointless, & at least 50% of the work done in nonpointless office jobs is equally pointless, we can conclude that at least 1/2 of all work being done in our society could be eliminated w/o making any real difference.

Over the course of my research, I have found it most useful to break down the types of bullshit job into five categories. I will call these: 1)Flunkies
2)Goons
3)Duct tapers
4)Box tickers
5)Taskmasters

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. They're normally given some minor task to justify their existence.

Gerte: In 2010 I worked as a receptionist at a Dutch publishing company. The phone rang maybe once a day.

So I was given a couple other tasks.
Keep candy dish full of mints.

Mints were supplied by someone else at the company; I just had to take a handful out of a drawer next to the candy dish and put them in the candy dish.

Clearly, one call a day could be handled by someone else at the press in the same manner it is in most people’s home land lines : whoever happens to be the closest to the phone and isn’t in the middle of something else picks it up and answers.

Why shell out a full-time salary and benefits package for a woman—actually, it would seem, in this case, two women—just to sit at the front desk all day doing nothing?

Why?

(Me: this is an important answer because we can see it all the time and its in the private sector !)

The answer is: because not doing so would be shocking and bizarre. No one would take a company seriously if it had no one at all sitting at the front desk.

Any publisher who defied convention that blatantly would cause potential authors or merchants or contractors to ask

themselves, “If they don’t feel they have to have a receptionist, what other things that publishers are normally expected to do might they just decide doesn’t apply to them?

Receptionists are required as a Badge of Seriousness even if there’s nothing else for them to do. Other flunkies are Badges of Importance.

Ophelia: My current job title is Portfolio Coordinator, and everyone always asks what that means, or what it is I actually do? I have no idea. I’m still trying to figure it out.

My job description says all sorts of stuff about facilitating relationships between partners, etc

The reality of my working life is functioning as a Personal Assistant to the Director. And in that role, I do have actual work tasks that need doing, simply because the people I assist are either too “busy” or too important to do this stuff themselves.

Some days I run around frantically, whilst most of the midlevel managers sit around and stare at a wall, seemingly bored to death and just trying to kill time doing pointless things.

a perverse dynamic began to set in, whereby managers off-loaded more and more of their

responsibilities onto the lowest-ranking female subordinate (her) to give the impression that they were too busy.

It occurs to me that this is what they really mean in job ads when they say that they expect you to make office procedures more efficient: that you create more bureaucracy to fill the time.

END OF PART ONE