I think we should move towards a twenty hour work week

[CJJ]

@msmith537

“Bullshit jobs” like blogging and anthropology?

That we continue to have a 40 hour work week and, recent economic recession aside, a relatively constant unemployment rate for the past 300 years is exactly what we expect to happen in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, technology frees up resources to work on other tasks besides “non-bullshit” jobs like farming or building stuff with your hands. It allows more people to pursue “bullshit” jobs like being a lawyer, graphic designer or opening a cupcake shop.

You didn’t bother to read the linked article, did you? Graeber addresses these points as follows:

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

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?..I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), 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.

Graeber notes that these “bullshit” jobs are more likely to be higher-paid than productive ones: “In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.” If “technology frees up resources to work on other tasks besides non-bullshit jobs like farming or building stuff with your hands”, why aren’t more people doing exactly that? Graeber’s answer is that the economy generally doesn’t reward non-bullshit jobs to the extent that it rewards bullshit jobs–it simply pays better to do meaningless work as a corporate lawyer than to, say, grow food and sell it.