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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Rise of Bullshit Jobs
By Leith van Onselen, Chief Economist of Macro Investor. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
Back in the early-1930s, renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that technical innovations and rising productivity would mean that advanced country workers would be able to work only 15 hours and still enjoy rising living standards.
In a highly amusing, but also somewhat depressing article in Strike! Magazine, David Graeber asks why Keynes prophecy has not come true and instead we find ourselves working a range of meaningless bullshit jobs that many of us hate:
Graeber goes on to describe how these so-called bullshit jobs are concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers:
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the worlds 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
These are what I propose to call bullshit jobs.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/the-rise-of-bullshit-jobs.html
Dreamer Tatum
(10,926 posts)leftstreet
(36,119 posts)Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)I just can't get over how the complete upside down-ness of our value of real work is taken as normal, or even positive. Yeah I've heard the old adage "The more you make the less you're supposed to do" may have been coined jokingly but US culture makes it the de-facto law of the land so with ruthless gusto.