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On September 29 2014 05:29 silynxer wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2014 02:20 WhiteDog wrote:
I said more than that : value and wealth are created through the division of labor, and jobs that he consider useless play a part in this division, thus enabling other more "productive" or "valuable" work.
That he knows about alienation doesn't mean much : it's a completly different perspective from his moral judgement that some jobs are "bullshit".
I don't want to put words in your mouth but fo clarities sake I will condense your argument as I understand it so that you can point out any misunderstandings: There is no objective measure of usefulness of a job. Thus we cannot know how much a job really adds to the benefits (wealth/security/etc.) we get from the whole system. Thus we should consider every part as equal in this whole process (or at the very least, the difference should be considered indeterminable).The last conclusion is what I reject. There is no objective way to gauge how important a particular task is but surely the people doing it together with the people they are doing it for can make an informed guess. This may entail some form of dialog with even further removed people, weighting benefits and costs, etc. but it's not impossible. Actually, I'm sure that this very process happens all the time and I would guess that the (felt) bullshit part of a job enters especially when there is no dialog between those demanding the task and those having to do it (in a situation where it is not clear why it must be done).
There is no objective measure of the usefulness of a job - yes.
Thus we cannot know how much a job really adds to the benefits we get from the whole system - no.
Thus we should consider every part as equal in this whole process - no.
It's more like : There is no objective measure of the usefulness of one job because labor is in essence a social activity. Thus you cannot value the usefulness of a job in itself, because a job never create value in itself : it is the society and the division of labor that is at the source of the wealth.
When a banker make a loan, he makes an important step in the financing process and permit a lot of activity, but his activity in itself is useless : if you have no activity that needs financing, the process of financing is unecessary. It's the same for our entire labor market : you cannot be a full time "productive" smelter if there are no other citizens that cultivate food (for you to eat) and that needs the tool that you can forge. It's the specialization that permit you to increase your productivity in a specific field : if the smelter had to cultivate food half of his day, he wouldn't be as efficient in smelting.
In a society with no bureaucracy, there is a good chance that all firms would have to do, by themselves, a good part of what bureaucrats are doing, and thus it will naturally decrease their productivity : they will have to allocate more ressources to bureaucracy or infrastructure than they need to now, and thus allocate less ressource in their main productive activity.
Just because we are individualist societies that only see specific field and their monetary face value does not mean that our society does not "exist" and does not enable the specializations. A good exemple for that is the comparaison between China and India : China, a "communist" society, has had higher growth that India, because its heavy bureacratic and state heavy business was not, contrary to common belief, a complete drag on their growth.
It enabled it, despite the corruption and everything else. Meanwhile India, with the same easy and cheap labor thanks to its demographic, never grew at the same rate, because its political institutions never invested in a bureaucracy and the necessary infrastructure to permit specialization and positive externalities to fuel the private sector.
On September 29 2014 05:29 silynxer wrote:Show nested quote +
He point out, in the papers, jobs such as "when you walk into a hospital, how half the employees never seem to do anything for sick people, but are just filling out insurance forms and sending information to each other."
To me it's obvious filing out insurance forms and sending information are important part of the production, mainly because we have a socialized healthcare system in most occidentals countries, and also because knowing the history of a patient is half the work needed to take care of him. That sending information is less fulfilling than directly treating the patient is a given, but that does not make it less productive nor useful. To me, he is just giving his "judgement", or moral point of view, on the usefulness of the people that are filling insurence forms rather than giving me a good insight on the structure of the labor market today.
Maybe we need to change our society for the better, most specifically work, but his arguments are not the good ones for that from my point of view.
About bureaucraty, less bureaucraty would maybe increase the "standard of living", but it is for a completly different reason : the goal of many bureaucraties is not to increase or facilitate production / living condition, but rather to control the population, affirm the power of the state on the population. It's a social matter, much like the role of the police, and it's role is perfectly played - it is not "bullshit", but it's just not responding to economic matter for the most part.
And about administrative task giving stronger feeling of uselessness, it is absolutly right, but if you've observed any administrative firm or governmental bureaucraty, you'd know that the people that work in there have no freedom whatsoever in their job, every action they can make are officially coded and legalized : it's a perfect exemple of alienation, where the individual completly disappear.
edit : sorry I can't prevent myself from writing "bureaucraty" because in french it's bureaucratie...
Don't you find the contrast between those two paragraphs strange? I would guess that the amount of paperwork in hospitals is directly related to bureaucratization and growing administrative bodies within and without. This is only anecdotal but my father is a doctor at a hospital and according to him the administrative work has grown considerably over the years. One of the most annoying new things in his mind is getting certification. Until very recently this process of auditing by private firms was unheard of in Germany (I can only speak for hospitals and universities), now basically all hospitals and universities have to undergo it for rather nebulous reasons. The benefit on the ground, so to speak, seems marginal compared to the amount of work that needs to be put into it. This work entails producing swathes of documents that are literally made up and will never be used for anything else than auditing. Now, I don't critisize the process of auditing on principle and maybe the above has a hidden benefit that doctors and nurses at the hospital cannot see but I can at least imagine the possibility that somehow actively detrimental processes can be institutionalized and that in this situation the people who carry it out might actually know that it is detrimental/useless. Finally, I do agree that the essay is not a particular great analysis of the labour situation but since I never felt that it was intended as one I am not too angry about that. For me it doesn't fail as a polemic but it's alright if you disagree for the reasons above.
I do not intend to say that all activity have equal value (if we could measure that value) and that the labor market is working perfectly (for the matter I don't even believe that labor market is a market like others). But the idea that there is a core misallocation of labor and that there are "bullshit work" that now constitute the main part of the available job is to me an absurdity.
Now it's sure that there are problems, but most of the things you guys point out are related, directly or indirectly, to the state, which is not a market and thus is by essence imperfect (not that market are perfect but whatever) and "second best" as economists says : they create misallocation but enable a lot of things that would not if the state was not there.
You can certainly "rationalize" most production process in most fields, but I'm not sure that rationalization will necessarily end up in an increase in productivity for the reason I've posted above.
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Upon reading my post again not even I agree with the point it implies I'm making, unfortunately that happens regularly to me, i.e. I get lost in some logical argument while losing sight of what I is important. It looks like I'm concerned with effectivity and productivity* but that couldn't be further from the truth. Personally I would like to lessen the tasks that alienate the most (feel the most useless) even at the cost of effectivity (and even at the cost of our societies most holy cows like life expectancy and economic growth).
Still I don't completely agree with this:
There is no objective measure of the usefulness of one job because labor is in essence a social activity. Thus you cannot value the usefulness of a job in itself, because a job never create value in itself : it is the society and the division of labor that is at the source of the wealth.
People can and do value the usefulness of certain activities, just not to an objective standard. You could say the act of evaluation is also societal and shapes not only perception of these activities but ultimately also to what extend they are done (though this connection is of course not direct). Perhaps now I understand better what you meant by moral/descriptive differences but I would disagree that these differences are useless (because they are not objective). Especially if you think about actively shaping society and not just being a part of it.
*In regards to effectivity (and productivity), do you think that the term is useless if it is not used for one particular business? What I mean is that the rise of productivity could very well be due to more work from other people at a different place (for example introducing a new software may make some process more effective but somebody had to create the software and maintain it etc.). I have not thought about this until now but it makes a lot of sense on the surface.
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I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
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On September 30 2014 19:46 dizzy101 wrote:
I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
People who sound intelligent will always be regarded as intelligent to the masses. This is why so many people talk about Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Anti-Vaccine movement, etc. When in fact the information that person used is well over a few decades old, heavily quoted out of context to make their side seem more reasonable/accurate, or simply the musings of someone trying to understand the world.
I'm not saying those individuals aren't intelligent, they might be correct, but the only things we can really use are hard evidence, statistical analysis, quantifiable results, and specialized equipment to get an objective, correct, and indisputable meaning.
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On October 01 2014 02:31 Nacl(Draq) wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2014 19:46 dizzy101 wrote:
I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
People who sound intelligent will always be regarded as intelligent to the masses. This is why so many people talk about Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Anti-Vaccine movement, etc. When in fact the information that person used is well over a few decades old, heavily quoted out of context to make their side seem more reasonable/accurate, or simply the musings of someone trying to understand the world. I'm not saying those individuals aren't intelligent, they might be correct, but the only things we can really use are hard evidence, statistical analysis, quantifiable results, and specialized equipment to get an objective, correct, and indisputable meaning.
Yes Graeber is the Ayn Rand of the far left. When challenged by even progressive economists on the chapters of his book pertaining to the present he cant defend them, he simply launches polemic attacks. But his fans love his half truths.
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Bisutopia19320 Posts
On October 01 2014 02:31 Nacl(Draq) wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2014 19:46 dizzy101 wrote:
I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
People who sound intelligent will always be regarded as intelligent to the masses. This is why so many people talk about Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Anti-Vaccine movement, etc. When in fact the information that person used is well over a few decades old, heavily quoted out of context to make their side seem more reasonable/accurate, or simply the musings of someone trying to understand the world. I'm not saying those individuals aren't intelligent, they might be correct, but the only things we can really use are hard evidence, statistical analysis, quantifiable results, and specialized equipment to get an objective, correct, and indisputable meaning.
You last sentence personifies views of certain people from Atlas Shrugged. I've just picked the book up recently and it is well worth the read. I'm not aligned with left or right party and am having a really good time reading it. I honestly picked it up because I've experienced both left and right wing people in my life make comments on the book and wanted to understand what the outrage was. I think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible.
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On June 28 2014 23:53 nimbim wrote:
The average work hours are just the symptom of the working class being exploited, as they have always been. With the amount of unemployed people and money that goes to already rich people we could easily have 2-3 workdays for everyone with almost 0 unemployment. Capitalism yo
I don't think there are many pointless jobs, just the way we see labour is inherently flawed.
I think this is probably the most profound post in the thread. We ought to be working with our governments to eradicate this nonsense. For those of us in Democratic nations, this is exactly what democracy was designed to hopefully overcome. Capitalism can be great, but not when it's done multinationally. That's how we end up with the veiled class system that we have now. The article mentioned "corporate law," which is inherently bullshit itself as (at least in the united states) corporations are considered as personal entities (i.e. a person) so the law is inherently exploitative. If we quit supporting overarching companies (multinational, nationwide as much as is possible, etc) and focus local the system can work great.
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The "corporations aren't people!11" thing is actually very trendy on the internet, but it actually makes a lot of sense that companies are considered to be legal bodies/entities. It would be highly impractical for someone to have to sue fifty thousand shareholders every time some legal dispute happens.
think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible.
Yes, and all of it is completely made up a priori stuff with no connection to the real word whatsoever
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
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On October 01 2014 03:40 Nyxisto wrote:The "corporations aren't people!11" thing is actually very trendy on the internet, but it actually makes a lot of sense that companies are considered to be legal bodies/entities. It would be highly impractical for someone to have to sue fifty thousand shareholders every time some legal dispute happens. Show nested quote + think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible. Yes, and all of it is completely made up a priori stuff with no connection to the real word whatsoever Show nested quote +There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
There's a difference between corporations being a legal entity and corporations being full-blown people.
Can a corporation breathe? Can a corporation feel?
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On October 01 2014 03:45 Millitron wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2014 03:40 Nyxisto wrote:The "corporations aren't people!11" thing is actually very trendy on the internet, but it actually makes a lot of sense that companies are considered to be legal bodies/entities. It would be highly impractical for someone to have to sue fifty thousand shareholders every time some legal dispute happens. think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible. Yes, and all of it is completely made up a priori stuff with no connection to the real word whatsoever There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. There's a difference between corporations being a legal entity and corporations being full-blown people. Can a corporation breathe? Can a corporation feel?
How are corporations currently treated as full blown people other than that there exists a legal framework that makes handling legal disputes possible? What specifically is wrong with the current way of how corporations are legally represented? I have trouble understanding the problem in the first place.
Corporate personhood exists so corporations can be sued and may sue, it allows for easy taxation and regulation. As far as I'm aware corporations also don't have all constitutional rights that wouldn't apply to them.(fifth Amendment for example)
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On October 01 2014 03:18 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2014 02:31 Nacl(Draq) wrote:On September 30 2014 19:46 dizzy101 wrote:
I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
People who sound intelligent will always be regarded as intelligent to the masses. This is why so many people talk about Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Anti-Vaccine movement, etc. When in fact the information that person used is well over a few decades old, heavily quoted out of context to make their side seem more reasonable/accurate, or simply the musings of someone trying to understand the world. I'm not saying those individuals aren't intelligent, they might be correct, but the only things we can really use are hard evidence, statistical analysis, quantifiable results, and specialized equipment to get an objective, correct, and indisputable meaning. You last sentence personifies views of certain people from Atlas Shrugged. I've just picked the book up recently and it is well worth the read. I'm not aligned with left or right party and am having a really good time reading it. I honestly picked it up because I've experienced both left and right wing people in my life make comments on the book and wanted to understand what the outrage was. I think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible.
I never read more than a few pages of Atlas Shrugged. Same with most of those books. I'm sure they're great, just not for me. I jump to the end and look up the person's life and ideas on it.
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On October 01 2014 03:48 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2014 03:45 Millitron wrote:On October 01 2014 03:40 Nyxisto wrote:The "corporations aren't people!11" thing is actually very trendy on the internet, but it actually makes a lot of sense that companies are considered to be legal bodies/entities. It would be highly impractical for someone to have to sue fifty thousand shareholders every time some legal dispute happens. think your first paragraph makes an accurate statement about people using this literature, meanwhile I think the book simply does a clear job of describing her views and the most clear and uncontroversial way possible. Yes, and all of it is completely made up a priori stuff with no connection to the real word whatsoever There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. There's a difference between corporations being a legal entity and corporations being full-blown people. Can a corporation breathe? Can a corporation feel? How are corporations currently treated as full blown people other than that there exists a legal framework that makes handling legal disputes possible? What specifically is wrong with the current way of how corporations are legally represented? I have trouble understanding the problem in the first place. Corporate personhood exists so corporations can be sued and may sue, it allows for easy taxation and regulation. As far as I'm aware corporations also don't have all constitutional rights that wouldn't apply to them.(fifth Amendment for example)
They do have all constitutional rights. They have fair trials when the are charged with crimes. They have freedom of speech (go google Citizens United). Some of the constitutional rights don't exactly make sense, like the 4th amendment; how can you arrest a corporation anyway?
Really the biggie is freedom of speech as it relates to campaign finance.
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On October 01 2014 02:51 Sub40APM wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2014 02:31 Nacl(Draq) wrote:On September 30 2014 19:46 dizzy101 wrote:
I think it's exactly the opposite from the way Greaber thinks.
The world (which includes our society) is getting more and more complicated, people specialize further and further. This means that you need tons of people with knowledge of very specific things, and you need tons of people to move this knowledge back and forth (to translate it, to apply it, to collect it, to explain it, to store it). So you need tons of desk jobs ('knowledge jobs'). These are not bullshit jobs, instead, the opposite: these jobs are essential in keeping things running.
Back in the middle ages, one single person could be up-to-date as far as science and technology was concerned. In one human brain, you could store almost everything there was to know about science and technology. But of course, nowadays that's impossible. You need people who specialized in tiny, tiny fields. The same thing applies to: law, medicine, manufacturing, government, the arts, etc. Everything there is to know about everything is stored across millions of brains.
To make sure that society can actually benefit from this huge amount of knowledge, and from the increased specialization, you needs tons of jobs. They're NOT bullshit jobs.
Besides, I think this Graeber guy is overrated. I tried reading his book 'Debt: 5K years' and it's a very unsystematic, non-rigorous text. Whatever it is he's doing, it's not actual research or scholarship.
Yet, he gets many readers because of his politically progressive orientation. It seems to me that people from the Left should choose better thinkers, not people like Greaber.
People who sound intelligent will always be regarded as intelligent to the masses. This is why so many people talk about Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Anti-Vaccine movement, etc. When in fact the information that person used is well over a few decades old, heavily quoted out of context to make their side seem more reasonable/accurate, or simply the musings of someone trying to understand the world. I'm not saying those individuals aren't intelligent, they might be correct, but the only things we can really use are hard evidence, statistical analysis, quantifiable results, and specialized equipment to get an objective, correct, and indisputable meaning. Yes Graeber is the Ayn Rand of the far left. When challenged by even progressive economists on the chapters of his book pertaining to the present he cant defend them, he simply launches polemic attacks. But his fans love his half truths.
got a link? I'd like to read a critique of his work.
and of course... tu quoque 
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