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Perhaps I am too economics pilled but at a sufficiently high level your outcomes (2) and (3) seem like the same thing to me. Or, to the extent they aren't, (3) seems like it contains a contradiction. On the one hand there are still going to be unmet human wants and desires. On the other hand I am supposed to believe there is no scalable use human labor could be put to in order to satisfy those desires. I am skeptical that both these facts can obtain.
I guess I'm also skeptical of the concept of "bullshit jobs" more generally. I have not read Graeber's book but browsing the wikipedia article for some examples does not give me confidence. For basically all the listed jobs it does not seem difficult to me to describe how the people doing the jobs provide value for the people who are paying them. Maybe "bullshit" is supposed to mean in some broader societal sense but then you are just saying you value things other than what market participants value. That's fine, but you shouldn't expect the market to produce outcomes as if it valued something else!
Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.
Graeber, to be clear, was a shit academic when he reached outside his field (I have no way to vouch for his anthropological work). 'Debt' is riddled with sloppy work and treats 1800s economics as the state of the art to beat up on.
Graeber was a sloppy academic and Debt is broadly terrible and ignores a lot of good economic history. Nevertheless, the “bullshit job” concept has outlived him, and arguably in places like this now means something a little different to what he meant (which was more about caaapitalism, maan) which is why I was careful to imply that in my post.
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I guess I see Molochian incentives create bullshit jobs. Sure, locally speaking, I value hiring a super expensive lawyer to defend me in court, but only because the guy suing me hired his super expensive lawyer. We could take away those two jobs and be in the same place.
Yeah. Purely PVP roles, ego boost retinues
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I think that's the point. There is a gap between what people think is a valuable use of their time and what their boss / the market thinks is a valuable use of their time. For example, if some guy is being ordered to dig holes all over the place then being paid to fill them in is providing a marketable service to your employer, but nevertheless the overall work is going to feel stupid and pointless.
Sure, but what fraction of jobs does that describe? The examples in the wikipedia article are things like store greeters, lobbyists, academic administrators, and managers. I think it would be pretty hard to characterize those jobs, depending on the specifics, as being like digging a hole and filling it back in!
It is often argued that management is, by and large, a bullshit job because it has expanded so hugely and yet the same organisations (eg universities and hospitals) used to run perfectly well with smaller numbers.
Management seems to have grown with the ability of people to generate, communicate and store paperwork. If Person A is spending all of their time sending emails to other departments and then Person B is filtering a department’s incoming mail to sort out the dross, we can be back at digging a hole territory.
Previously, if someone took the time out of their day to physically travel to you and tell you something, you could reasonably expect it to be important.
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