Bullshit Jobs Explained

In this article*, the late David Graeber did an admirable job of explaining how well Bullshit Jobs fit into neoliberal society, but less so in explaining how they come about, or how they actually justify themselves to Capitalists, who are always trying to cut labor costs.

The answer is quite simple: as useless as they may seem to a rational or even just human being, bullshit jobs are part of the strategy-developing, monopoly-protecting, profit-seeking, cost-minimizing, tax-sheltering, regulatory-satisfying, legal interfacing, public relating, and contracting parts of organizations.  The ultimate neoliberal corporation would be in which no other labor costs exist, indeed many of the above categories could be contracted out well (though they still have to be done somewhere) and indeed many organizations are just like this, with perhaps nothing left in house except ultimate executive authority.

All the neoliberal approaches increase the need for these kinds of work.  One egregious example is health insurance (vs national healthcare).  Doctors need large staffs to collect from insurance companies and patients as much as possible, and insurance companies have large staffs to keep payments for services low.  Quite often the complexity of operating a payment for services collection agency motivates doctors to form corporations with other doctors, adding the need for even more bullshit jobs.  None of these kinds of work actually provide or improve healthcare.  Adversarial relationships, competitive relationships, profit seeking, and particularly patent and copyright oriented economies maximize the needs for these kinds of jobs, as do economies with large financial operations--wherever finance is a large part of the economy, as it requires intermediaries, traders, speculators and all their required ancillaries.  Vast ranges of downtown buildings are devoted to holding merely the more centrally required staff.

In most respects, the need for these kinds of work diminishes by 80% or more under socialism.  There still may be competitive local and central interests that require adjudication, but the web of complex and most often adversarial relationships is not required.

Perfect communism would mean no bullshit jobs.

(*David Graeber also wrote a Book Bullshit Jobs which probably spells out better how they come into being.)

A Billion US Americans?

There is a certain thread of Cornucopian who believes that if we just had enough people, way more than now, we could solve all problems and build the Utopia.  Matt Yglesias is now proposing 1 Billion US Americans.

Science and Technology get better and better as you have more people, they claim, making this inevitable.

Meanwhile, in the world we actually live in, science and technology hasn't kept up with making the vast global human population more sustainable than it was in the past with fewer humans.  For sure, as the human population gets larger, the problems get more and more intractable.   In large part, we rely on natural processes to clean up our wastes and "accidents," and generate the oxygen we need to live, pollenate our crops, etc.  As the human population gets larger, we squeeze these natural processes that make our lives possible into dysfunction if not collapse.

And there's also an assumption here that natural species have no claim on the earth's resources.  We can just take over the planet and snuff all the species that don't fit into our technology into extinction.  We've already created one of the largest extinction events in the history of Earth, and it' just getting started as we "develop" or despoil all the planetary space from the deepest ocean depths to the stratosphere.

So, in short not only do the problems get worse and worse, they get exponentially worse even with linear increases in human population.

Meanwhile, does science and technology get better and better with more people?  Well, if so, why hasn't it "kept up" with making the technology and human population of Planet Earth more sustainable than it was, say, 500 years ago?

I fail to see that science and technology are even doing more now than 120 years ago.  Sure, there may be a billion scientific papers written per year or whatever.  But all of them combined may well be qualitatively less important than the 5 papers written by Einstein in 1905.

Back between 1850-1950 major breakthroughs were made in "time saving" technology.  What we invent today might better be described as "time wasting" technology.

It's not even clear to me that progress in science and technology grows linearly with linear increases in population.  Imagine this: larger classrooms, more distracted students getting less personal attention, larger and larger and increasingly politicized committees determining which scientific projects to fund, more and more crap for scientists and technologists to read through to find important ideas, more and more channels to present it in diverging shades so as to favor different competing interests.

In no way do leaders seem more and more wise or even intelligent as the human population increases either.

I would rather guess that "true" progress in science and technology grows way slower than the growth in population--if at all!  It may be simply proceeding more or less at it's own timetable, more like eclipses and other astronomical events.  

What's needed is one good observer to see and report the eclipse, little or no additional scientific benefit is added by having 10 billion observers report it.  And when you have the 10 billion scientific reports, how do we end up highlighting the best ones?  We might well end up highlighting the worst reports, so it would have been better if there were few enough reports that everyone could read them all to find that one good one.

Beyond a certain level, additional human population doesn't add wisdom or even useful intelligence.      Diminishing returns proceed to become negative returns, as the entire human project becomes mired in it's own amplified idocy, after the cost of coordination and similar factors have eaten more than the whole cake.

The reckless race to catastrophe we are now part of is not just the result of bad luck of having peculiarly evil people in charge (though that is true) but by the intersection of problems caused by overpopulation and wisdom lost to overpopulation; that's how those peculiarly bad people came to be in charge in the first place.

What full blown Cornucopians have is hubris.  And where this leads is hell, even quicker than the slightly less hubristic path we're already on--aided by hubristic neoclassical economics which relies upon pure fantasy assumptions.

We'll be lucky, if enough good people through better organizing can wrestle the rudders of civilization out of the hands of the sociopaths and sociopathic forces that rule the world today quickly enough to prevent our own extinction--the otherwise fitting climax to humanity.

When we finally do, if it's still necessary, we would be well advised to set a course for human degrowth to the sustainable levels that cause no excess extinctions to other species and the promote the optimal development of human wisdom and avoidance of social idiocy.

Another Day, Another Useless Argument about the Electoral College

A friend keeps sending me articles defending the Electoral College, this one in the blue state LA Times.

Meanwhile, other friends keep sending me their ideas to bypass the Electoral College.

My reply:

"Our constitutional system wasn’t designed for this dysfunction."

Nonsense.  It was re-designed by slaves states precisely for this kind of dysfunction.  Madison had proposed a popularly elected President.  It wasn't that he was so fond of Democracy, but it would have balanced out the whole system which lacks democracy elsewhere.  There had to be, or should have been, one place where popular coalitions of the entire nation would compete against institutional forces which bend towards power and wealth under the current system which was re-designed to offer only local "democracy" if that.

That being said, it's hardly the only problem now, and it's essentially impossible to change because the mechanism of change has identical anti-democratic features, and therefore futile to think much about (though many of my friends still do).  It's an impediment to useful change but not a barrier if there were better organized popular forces.

Reforming campaign finance and dismantling systems of information monopoly and control offer more attainable opportunities at this point.  "Electoral College" arguments are a distraction which only causes further alienation.  The only scenario in which the Electoral College can be eliminated OR bypassed would be after small state bias has paused or ceased to have a significant effect.

The author goes on to say the EC "was intended to foster stability and compromise, while protecting the rights of political minorities and, crucially, individual liberty."  

No, it was intended to preserve states rights to continue chattel slavery and/or other ways of suppressing minority civil rights, and crucially, the sense of any common good at the national level or beyond.

Government Must Run A Deficit

Prof Keen has created a system dynamics (stocks and flows) economic modeling tool (unlike anything mainstream economists use).

He has long beeen somewhat ambivalent about the MMT crowd, those that take the "deficits don't matter" to extremes.

One central claim of MMT turns out to be true, the government should always run deficits.  The average deficit run by the USG over the past 100 years seems to work out very well in the model.

If government does not run a deficit, then correspondingly private accounts have to be in deficit, and such deficits are much harder for private entities to maintain.

In the rare historical cases where US government didn't, the 1920's and the 1990's, there was runaway private speculation followed by a crash.  That seems to logically follow (though his modelling does not include such things yet).

The bottom line is that a turn towards austerity would be among the worst things Biden could do.

I would also add that it matters what the government is spending money, which it must spend, on.  Craters and potential craters in foreign countries are not wise investment.

Quoting Prof Keen

 the sensible conclusion is the one MMT reaches: that the government should run deficits and be in negative equity, to enable the private sector to run surpluses and be in positive equity. Periods of apparent prosperity that coincided with the surpluses of the Coolidge and Clinton eras were the result of private sector levered speculation by a private sector that was experiencing (identical) deficits at the time. Rather than "saving for a rainy day", these government surpluses helped set off speculative bubbles whose later crashes caused the greatest economic downturns in America's pre-Covid history.

Private sector deficits are "unsustainable, irresponsible, and dangerous". Public sector deficits are sustainable, responsible (subject to their impact on inflation and the balance of trade), and safe. It's time for the "Deficit Hawks" to worry about private sector deficits, not the public sector deficit.

Violence

Comment from a resident of Portland in the New York Times.

I live in Portland and I want outsiders to have some context. 1) The nightly protests here mostly stick to one half of one city block downtown, and occasionally pop up at law enforcement facilities elsewhere. Our city is definitely NOT under seige. 2) The vast majority of protesters are peaceful although more aggressive tacticians do come out late at night. 3) It appears that our police force is not meeting violent right-wing protesters with nearly the same force as violent left-wing protesters. 4) It sounds like general calls to the police are going unanswered city-wide. The impression is that they are spread too thin. However, police cruisers can be seen driving around during the day, all over the city, seeming to do nothing but kill time. (Makes me suspicious.) 5) I don't know anyone in the suburbs who can legitimately claim to feel threatened by the protests because they don't see or feel any of it. They live too far away. 6) The Trump supporting truck caravan met at a suburban mall just south of the city center. It's likely that many of those people came from rural areas further South and East. These folks have expressed frustration in the past - before Trump - feeling that politics and culture are being shaped by urban centers without their input. They feel like hostages to "liberals" in their state. 7) Most Oregonians don't want federal intervention, regardless of their political bent. I hear that even Ammon Bundy and Joey Gibson wanted the feds out of Portland.