I guess it's an excerpt, but I'm only 1% less baffled.
Oh, I was confused. I thought that book had come out years ago.
I'm still sort of confused. It doesn't seem to be an excerpt from another article published elsewhere, is it? But it references the book, so it's not entirely an excerpt of the book.
It looks like the referenced work is the similarly-titled article (2013) that was adapted into the book (2018).
This relationship seems most obvious for lawyers. People like LizardBreath, who are both A) in prestigious positions and B) doing things that are useful, seem about as common among lawyers as tenured professors are among English PhDs. NOT the typical result of getting the degree.
In recent years, Belgium has gone through a series of constitutional crises that have left it temporarily without a sitting government: no prime minister and no one in charge of health, transportation, or education. These crises have been known to continue for considerable periods of time--the record so far is 541 days--without there being any observable negative impact on health, transportation, or education. One has to imagine that if the situation were to endure for decades, it would make some sort of difference; but it's not clear how much of one or whether the positive effects would outweigh the negative ones.
I suppose "democratic government is probably a waste of time and money and we should simply be ruled by a self-selecting and unaccountable oligarchy" is I suppose a coherent point of view, but it's not one that stands up to much critical analysis.
The article also doesn't seem to have much of a solid foundation. Or indeed any evidence that he's done any actual research himself rather than just reading a couple of papers by other people that sort of support his belief. And even then he has to admit plenty of exceptions. Doctors are well-paid. Judges are well-paid. Surgeons are exceptionally well-paid (and no, Dave, they aren't "dispensers of placebos".) Top-ranked sportsmen and actors and musicians are extremely well-paid and Dave defines them as being valuable to society (you may or may not agree).
Drug dealers are extremely poorly paid.
I can't read the link because of the way I have LinkedIn set up, but the thing quoted in 6 is way dumber and dumber in a bigger way than the Apple Computer thing.
I really regret ever defending the guy. Left-anarchism isn't the worst political philosophy but it sure is a moronic one.
5: I'm not doing anything useful by his standards; in his taxonomy, I'm a goon. Not in a bad way, you could think of me as a bodyguard for the state, but I have a job only because other people hire lawyers to attack the state. If everyone disarmed, my job goes away. (Which supports the point you were making -- it's just that not even respectable people like me are all that useful.)
Eh, that's bullshit. The state is important and the state is an important actor in the legal system. The state needs lawyers to defend it to make the system work and to keep the rule of law going. That is an important job, whatever some asshole anthropology professor* thinks.
*I mean come on this is a pretty useless job, can we just admit it.
Oh, here's the thing with the taxonomy of Bullshit Jobs, I thought it was linked in the OP but the link was different: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job
10: It's not that I'm not useful, but that I'm only necessary because other people are being jerks. This is what his definition of a goon is, and the shoe pretty much fits:
These are people whose jobs have an aggressive element but, crucially, who exist only because other people also employ people in these roles. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies; if no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers and corporate lawyers.
So, I don't have to feel bad about getting paid, but in a saner society I would be less necessary.
And it takes a heck of a twist of logic to say that fund managers are less useful to society than klezmer musicians are. Yes, klezmer fans would be sad if all the klezmer musicians went away. (Though they could still listen to recordings.) But everyone in the world would be sad if all the fund managers went away, because every government and corporation in the world depends on having a functioning bond market.
He could have argued that fund managers shouldn't be paid as much as they are; I'd agree. He could have argued that a properly structured society wouldn't have fund managers. But he actually comes out and says that no one in the world as it is would miss them if they went, which really indicates that he has no idea how the world works.
This is Douglas Adams being snobbish about security guards and telephone sanitisers and advertising account executives again, but at least Adams did it as a joke.
Oh my God that is so stupid. "This completely obviously socially necessary function is somehow not necessary because other people make it necessary something something -- hey you're a GOON." What an ass that guy is.
Countries need armies only because other countries have armies; if no one had an army, armies would not be needed.
A pedant might argue that, hypothetically, you could have a situation in which an army is fighting a non-state armed group - but that would be ridiculous because nothing of the kind could ever happen in reality.
I thought a Goon made jokes on old-timey radio?
14: It is kind of stupid, but I do spend a lot of time at my desk rolling my eyes and thinking that if people weren't insane jerks I wouldn't have a job.
Not that I understand Graeber's plan for reducing the number of insane jerks.
There is a grain of truth in what he's saying, though. Pressures that currently drive up salaries least affect the kind of professions represented in Richard Scary books.
It's just that it's kind of an obvious point.
Yeah, the Belgium example is strange. It's not like they lost their public sector of (checking) 17% of the labor force.
Honestly, I assume that this is just sublimated anxiety because there's a good argument* that cultural anthropology stopped being a useful discipline and descended into mysteriously-subsidized pure wankery once the period of "recording interesting tribal customs" ended, and it's way down on the social-science totem pole.
*TBC I don't actually agree with that argument, but there's certainly a decent case.
Maybe not strange, maybe just grasping at straws in the way he often does.
The professions represented in Richard Scarry (two Rs, God Damn It) all live in Switzerland and their pleasant alpine existence is literally -- literally! -- dependent on high finance, which lets them keep up their lifestyle.
You know what I think he's missing? It's the thing of Urgent vs. Important. In the world of useful jobs, some useful jobs complete urgent tasks - there'd better be someone at the elementary school in your kid's classroom, there'd better be someone picking up trash - and some useful jobs are not urgent at all, but still important. Jobs that can sit empty for stretches because you can punt on big decisions for a little while, etc. Graeber is seeing urgent jobs as the only useful jobs.
BusyTown is in Switzerland? That would explain why Huckle wears liederhosen and Rudolf von Flugel dresses like a WW1 German officer.
8. Exactly. Belgium was run for 541 days by civil servants. If civil servants aren't part of the state, who is?
26 - Boom! Also, the (partial, architectural) inspiration for Busytown was also the original home of LSD.
Sure, Switzerland explains a lot about Richard Scarry, but does it explain his renderings of Baphomet?
30 - nice.
Richard Scarry was smart enough to know that even Busytown required its goons to function.
(the execution in that link could be better, but)
I'd agree with the hive mind that the taxonomy of bullshit jobs is itself bullshit, but something about the article speaks to me a bit.
There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist?
There's a good reason for my job to exist. However, one tech writer could easily do the work of 5 or more if there wasn't so much redundant red tape, if we were in the position to enforce actual standards about what inputs we get (or if no one cared about how pretty our outputs looked, or if we could get more consistent guidance on that), or if deadlines were better planned, less arbitrary, and more reasonable. I and other writers spend a lot of time sitting around and reading Unfogged because there's a good chance that I'll have to scramble furiously to meet a deadline at the same time as one of my peers.
I and other writers spend a lot of time sitting around and reading Unfogged
Name names!
Heh. I assume you're joking, but just in case you aren't, take it as "Unfogged or other similarly not-work-related Web sites," sorry.
However, one tech writer could easily do the work of 5 or more... I and other writers spend a lot of time sitting around and reading Unfogged
u hiring bro?
I could easily do the work of 5 of me.
(Just to be clear, my current tech writing workload is taking up around 175% of my available time, and I have to conclude that fivefold efficiency gains aren't possible here, after trying all year. We may be hiring, bros.)
if people weren't insane jerks I wouldn't have a job
If people weren't insane jerks they wouldn't be people. And if your theory of how the world works requires you to assume a better human race, it isn't a very useful theory.
I didn't know there were other tech writers around here. If you're hiring, I might be interested.
"Tech writing" meaning journalism or technical documentation?
Mostly I've done writing about tech, which I think is different than tech writing.
Every time I come here to rant, fucking Halford comes and does it better than I ever could. Why must he task me, Lord?
Has everyone here been a technical writer all along? I was a technical writer when I first started commenting here.
Commenting here is technically writing, so.
It's not that I'm not useful, but that I'm only necessary because other people are being jerks. This is what his definition of a goon is, and the shoe pretty much fits
But then that applies to all his "useful job" examples too. You wouldn't need cleaners if jerks didn't make messes, or if they cleaned up after themselves. You wouldn't need childcare assistants if children weren't jerks.
46: "or if they cleaned up after themselves" isn't really a valid argument here; it would still be real work, just more widely distributed and uncompensated.
The childcare/children situation isn't as symmetrical as the situation with armies. Other situations are somewhere in between.
Graeber in general seems to have a knack for finding hypotheses that are *near* important truths, but are themselves, as elaborated in detail, clearly false.
The childcare/children situation isn't as symmetrical as the situation with armies.
The situation with armies isn't as symmetrical as Graeber thinks. Armies are ultimately the means by which states enforce their monopoly on armed force. Right now, that mostly means defending the state's monopoly on armed force within its territory against other states' invading armies. But that isn't all it means and it isn't all it historically means; armies are also there to defend the monopoly against non-state armed groups, everything from the Taliban down to an armed street gang. If no one contested the monopoly of armed force, you wouldn't need an army, just as you wouldn't need police. The army is the ultimate weapon of a country's legal system.
14.last- asses are important and sometimes urgent, but if we didn't have them we wouldn't need toilet paper and plumbing would be a lot simpler.
(Awaiting comment from OPINIONATED HYDRA)
Before the ladies of unfogged come after me I should amend that to "wouldn't need as much toilet paper."
48: I think this is right. There's a perfectly coherent idea of "guard labor", is jobs that are a cost of private property. I assume that since Graeber is an anarchist that he imagines that his preferred system would get rid of these jobs. Instead of talking about this, Graeber instead just bloviates about "bullshit jobs".
Now that we live in Trump's world, somebody likes Graeber feels like a luxury we can't afford. Back when the world wasn't visibly falling apart, somebody spouting off a bunch of unsupported generalities could be amusing. Now that common sense is in short-supply, it's much less entertaining.
52: agreed. But he's not willing to actually lay that out there and say so.
Looking at real world examples, we can be sure that in a stateless society without private property, there would be one type of guard labour still necessary: soldier. In fact, it would be more necessary than ever. Every adult male in non-state societies is a (part-time) soldier, because such societies exist in a state of constant violence like nothing any of us have ever seen.
I find a lot of the linked essay echoes Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption.
42
"Tech writing" meaning journalism or technical documentation?
At the moment, yeah, technical documentation. At my previous job with the same title, it was less technical, and more about being the go-between on a document written jointly by subject matter experts in at least 3 different fields, the person responsible for making it look like it was written by one person.
I find Thorstein Veblen's work on the triple lindy to be far more significant.
To re-dunk on the Belgium thing, it wasn't as if the Belgian government vanished; as well as the obvious point that its civil service continued functioning, the previous government continued in office on a restricted basis. It couldn't initiate any significant new policy or legislate, but the same guy was prime minister, went to the European Council, had audiences with the king, chaired cabinet meetings etc. It was basically a bit like a very long lame-duck presidency.
49,52:
I'm as critical of libertarian freetopia thinking as anyone, but I will note that there is a concept of 'trust' as a valuable -- and perhaps cultivatable -- social asset that I think you're missing. Big reserves of social trust (and related factors like respect and mutual comprehensibility) can, at least up to a point, be a substitute for 'guard labor', and have a lot of real value.
Take bicycles. I assume where must of us live, if we ride our bicycle in to work, and then just prop it up against a wall or stand it on the sidewalk, it's not going to be there for the ride home. It's some other guy's bike now.
But there are a handful of parts of the world where that's not true. Where there's enough general expectation of mutual decency (or at least something that substitutes for that) that you can just roll up, drop your kickstand and leave it all day, and, most of the time, nobody will even blink. This is enormously valuable -- no inconvenient, expensive bike locks, no police having to track down bike thieves, etc.
Obviously that's just bicycles (well, and other everyday things - forgotten wallets, etc), but I don't think in principle that there's any hard limit on where that could apply if the reserve of trust and mutual respect is high enough in a society. It scales all the way from unlocked doors, to unlocked bicycles, to, in principle, unlocked bank vaults. You'd just have to have a society where everyone feels included enough, and has enough of what they need -- including respect -- that nobody would even think about walking into a bank vault, because it'd be beneath them. Easy!
On the international stage, I think you see something similar: 'War Plan Red' aside, it's pretty plain that the big army the US keeps isn't because of the threat of Canada. Or Mexico. Or even those warlike maniacs in Germany or Italy or Japan. If those were the only countries in the world, with the relationships as they are, I think you could plausibly make a case that dissolving the armies wouldn't change much*.
Hopelessly idealistic? Maybe. I don't know if we can ever get to bank vaults or total disarmament, but there's no reason we couldn't try to work toward bicycles...
---
* I wouldn't blame anyone if the trust wasn't fully reciprocal given the US' current leadership - obviously such things can wax and wane. Nevertheless, spontaneous dives into nationalist madness aside, I think there's still a possibility for long term stable trust relationships to exist which obviate any mutual threat of war.
I'm as critical of libertarian freetopia thinking as anyone
I am skeptical.
Saw a talk by Pa/ul Z/ak where he said trust leads to higher societal prosperity (and claims he knows the molecular mechanism involved in trust) but never explained why it's not that people in poor or exploited countries can't afford to trust because their bicycles and bank vaults are more likely to be stolen.
59: see 49. The US Army (which practically speaking includes National Guard) is there to backstop local police against internal armed threats, not just defend against neighbouring states.
Dunno if you're serious. I am.
I mean, there is an actual how and why to when people do stuff. The local rate of bicycle thefts and school shootings and civil wars varies in proportion to the local preponderance of those factors. Fewer disaffected, shit upon underclasses who have nothing to lose by stealing a bicycle and selling it for $25 --> fewer bike thefts. Fewer guns and less idolization of gun culthood --> fewer shootings. Less worship of money above all else --> less white collar crime and bank bailouts. Etc. Etc.
I think we collectively tend to shrug our shoulders and assume that people = crime, always and ever shall it be, but the rate varies enough to suggest that maybe it's not a totally ironclad relationship. Over space, and time, too. A place like London is a lot more diverse and populous than it was 500 years ago, but IIRC, the murder rate is actually a heck of a lot lower.
Things change, there's got to be a way to make sure we're pushing them in the right direction.
(I don't realistically think you ever get rid of police forces entirely -- but maybe over the next, say, two or three hundred years we can at least get rid of SWAT, or even reach a point where city cops mostly stroll around and practice their whistling, like idyllic small town cops of olde, and the phone at the station only ever rings for kittens stuck in trees or whatever.)
Social trust is definitely a real thing that can really change and improve (or decrease) over time and that it would be good to have more of, and it's not unthinkable that eventually -- eventually -- that would extend to nations. That doesn't seem in and of itself super controversial. Jackholes like Graeber, though, are IMO an impediment to thinking about it seriously.
You may say I'm a dreamer...
I am the software-documentation type of technical writer too. PS, I can drop you a line about the position but am not sure I can recommend my employer wholeheartedly, to put it mildly.
Regarding anthropology, I just found this in my files (I did not click the link, but reference):
from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?_r=1&ref=homepage&src=me&pagewanted=all
Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to "sociological pablum."
"If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding 'everyone's different, but sometimes people help each other out,'" she wrote in an e-mail, "there would be no field of anthropology -- and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will."
I'm also the software documentation type, but not interested in stressful work environments, so I'll pass.
52: There's something important being pointed to with the "bullshit jobs" phrase that isn't obvious in the "guard labor" concept - much guard labor now is part of information warfare, in which people participate in social processes that obscure the nature of production in order to claim more credit for it for themselves. This is pretty different than soldiering or even old-fashioned adversarial lawyering.