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As the Skidelskys note, we are pretty nearly on target for the standard of living that Keynes forecast, yet, they say, he was mistaken about the amount of work. “The central puzzle remains: we in the rich world are four or five times better off on average than we were in 1930, but our average hours of work have fallen only a fifth since then.” They supported this passage with a chart showing that weekly hours worked, which, by Keynes’ estimate, should have fallen from fifty to about eighteen by now, are still stuck at forty.
The Skidelskys review three possible explanations:
First, that people take joy in their work. They find that plausible for artists, skilled artisans, and authors but not for most people.
Second, that the capitalist system forces people to work because employers, not workers, get to call the tune. They approvingly quote sociological theories supporting that view, but in the end, they do not find it entirely persuasive.
Third, that wants are insatiable. Although that sometimes seems to be the case, they think that insatiability is not a fixed feature of human nature, but a flaw of our economic system. Keynes, they say, “did not understand that capitalism would set up a new dynamic of want creation that would overwhelm traditional restraints of custom and good sense. . . . Capitalism has achieved incomparable progress in the creation of wealth , but has left us incapable of putting that wealth to civilized use.”
2013.08.17 - Strike Mag - On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
YC comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080
- This guy is clueless.
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
[NW: I disagree. See my comment for the next paragraph.]
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While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
[NW response: It isn't strange alchemy; it's just the scaling-up of systems to benefit from economies of scale and the continued division of labor. For example, in a village you might have one person making hammers for the entire village; the hammers may not be very good but he will be able to easily see how his efforts benefit others. In the 21st century global marketplace you might have a multinational corporation doing that job, and because of the division of labor and economies of scale they can provide hammers which are 1,000x better and 100x cheaper. But to do that you need to have an army of people, where each person is doing a very small piece of the entire process. So to each person it may seem like their contribution isn't important, and it may very well be the case that some of them are working on things that won't end up contributing to the final product, but if you understand the big picture you can see how seemingly-unimportant jobs can actually be very important.]
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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. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
[NW response: This is the "paradox of value", something discussed by many intellectuals, including Adam Smith.]
2013 - Eureka! The shorter workweek is here!
http://www.shorterworkweek.com/obamacare.html
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