"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 15-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." Source.
How do they know me? How do they know what I am thinking all the time? I spend most of my working time on fulfilling permitting demands, forms and the caprices of regulators (typically a middle-aged educated female trying to tell herself that she is doing something vital, important).
My only salvation is being paid. Sometimes, because my clients are aware of the futility of the permitting obligation and the waste of its cost and the consequent investments it always implies. They demand from ME (ME!) an explanation why they should spend money on fighting imaginary, non-existent risks to the Earth (like my zero water and energy consuming projects). I have no convincing answers.
I'm surprised - if it's true - that Keynes really believed in a 15 hour work week.
ReplyDeleteI could believe in one third of the population working full-time. But most jobs couldn't be done very well if you only worked two days, and then handed it off to someone else (or however you structure it). Any complicated project would have three times as many people involved, and communication would be a nightmare. It wouldn't work for long-distance truck drivers or pilots, they'd keep getting stuck away from home. It doesn't work for anything done in a remote area - you'd need four times as many people at every oil field, mine and farm, with 4x as much housing and all the associated infrastructure. It would take 40 years to train as a surgeon. And on and on.
I do think the BS jobs phenomenon is real, but it can't be because we've run out of useful stuff to do. Much of the planet is still poor, and even in the wealthy countries, most people want more than they have. There must be some other cause.
I think bullshit jobs are not make-work jobs created purposefully to get people occupied and paid. It is caused by Parkinson's Law, of inexorable growth of bureaucracy and regulation. Bureaucracy needs data and papers so they demand it. There are not under any restrictions. These days in Israel three or four construction workers fell down from the high and died. The bureaucratic reaction is to demand detailed plans, and safety programs and continuous reporting and several safety supervisors on a building site. It was calculated that 10 to 20% of the cost of building is for regulatory requirements. We used to laugh of street work teams where one man was actually digging surrounded by five others managing and reporting, but today that is the way it is normally done. The Ministry of Building decided to create an additional layer of supervision by private engineering firms, and several multi-professional teams were organized (I am member of the team headed by an Arab engineer firm) but now we are waiting for the new Minister.
ReplyDeleteAt least in the USA, it does seem that socially useless work proliferates, and the government at all levels has lost any interest in trying to stop it. Why kill jobs?
ReplyDeletePerhaps the most blatant example is income tax compliance. The tax code gets more complex every single year (notwithstanding a certain president who promised radical simplification.) An ever-increasing army of humans create "tax compliance." Despite all the complexity, we have not achieved "fairness" and never will, and the system does not seem any better at raising revenue than some extremely straightforward system would be.
I agree that it isn't deliberate make-work. And yet, it is effectively the same thing. People who make a living creating tax compliance are always going to push for more of it. And they don't seem to get much push-back.
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