<story><title>Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless</title><url>https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spacephysics</author><text>Population rate is declining, and in the next couple of decades many first world countries are expected to have a population collapse.&lt;p&gt;I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.&lt;p&gt;However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.&lt;p&gt;Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.&lt;p&gt;Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.&lt;p&gt;A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.&lt;p&gt;Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.&lt;p&gt;I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.&lt;p&gt;But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>The &amp;quot;Bullshit Jobs&amp;quot; phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1&amp;#x2F;2 the population digging holes so the other 1&amp;#x2F;2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn&amp;#x27;t fall apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bovermyer</author><text>If I didn&amp;#x27;t have to work, I would spend a lot of time building things (whether code things or physical things).&lt;p&gt;I know people who, if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to work, would just sit around binging TV all day.&lt;p&gt;I also know people who, if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to work, would probably somehow discover faster-than-light travel or solve world hunger or something.&lt;p&gt;It might not be culture. It might be personality that determines what we do in &amp;quot;idleness.&amp;quot; More likely, it&amp;#x27;s a mix of both.</text></comment>
<story><title>Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless</title><url>https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spacephysics</author><text>Population rate is declining, and in the next couple of decades many first world countries are expected to have a population collapse.&lt;p&gt;I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.&lt;p&gt;However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.&lt;p&gt;Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.&lt;p&gt;Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.&lt;p&gt;A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.&lt;p&gt;Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.&lt;p&gt;I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.&lt;p&gt;But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>The &amp;quot;Bullshit Jobs&amp;quot; phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1&amp;#x2F;2 the population digging holes so the other 1&amp;#x2F;2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn&amp;#x27;t fall apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vharuck</author><text>&amp;gt;A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.&lt;p&gt;Reminds me of an Onion article that&amp;#x27;s stuck in my mind: &amp;quot;Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theonion.com&amp;#x2F;man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-psychologically-taxing-1843004933&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theonion.com&amp;#x2F;man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-ps...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren&amp;#x27;t about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn&amp;#x27;t collapse during &amp;quot;shut downs&amp;quot; of certain activities, but we can&amp;#x27;t get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice.  We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID&amp;#x27;s medical specifics and surrounding culture war.&lt;p&gt;For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn&amp;#x27;t know if they&amp;#x27;d find a job by then.  It wasn&amp;#x27;t a good analogue to UBI.</text></comment>