Keep going down the clownhole and you’ll realise that nobody really does any work.
Take a company like twitter. It’s a finished product but you’ll have 10,000 employees there. You’ll have an entire department for youth engagement. You’ll have an internal theatre group putting on shows. But who actually does work? Maybe a dozen people? The rest are just there because somebody needs to be there because that’s what is done.
The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go. You’ll have someone who’s job is to read tweets and rate their suitability. Why? To make sure the suitability from the suitability committee is enforced of course!
> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.
Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.
About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.
All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.
Using the USA as an example of labor distribution in this regard is disingenuous. Like most leading countries, we are supported by an external labor class operating extremely cheaply and exporting critical goods into our system. Agriculture work in the USA would be much more prevalent if 13% of the Mexican population wasn't directly involved in agriculture. In fact ~78% of Mexico's exports go to the USA. Its a vassal state, supplying the USA with cheap and largely unregulated human labor critical for our subsistence. You say we optimized our work, I say we imported $40 Billion in food from China last year.
I think you have to include a lot of "Retail Trade" and/or "Leisure and Hospitality" in those numbers, though I'm not sure where grocery and food service workers fall exactly. Meat packing, prepared foods, etc are a lot more manual than agriculture itself. Most people do not want to eat raw field corn/wheat/soybeans.
It's not some magical automation though. The farmers, in order to be that efficient, need constant input of fuel and fertilizers and pesticides and machines (as they break down and wear out). Digging deeper, they also need financial and physical infrastructure and basically very many components of our advanced civilization, or they wouldn't achieve anywhere near the efficiency they have now.
>It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc.
Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.
As with most things, the truth is in the middle. This is obvious hyperbole but for the purpose of making a point. There are a __lot__ of useless jobs out there.
i dont know how to engage with a comment like this. but i have a feeling that its an example of garbage in garbage out. i recommend you take any one of those specific assertions, maybe starting with "a few farmers can feed the country" and really try to actually substantiate the claim. good luck!
As someone who grew up and live around farms, trust me. It's not just a handful of farmers for most things you eat, unless it's literally just corn, wheat, and soy. So many fruits and vegetables still rely on hand picking as so many automated processes damage the produce.
And as others mentioned, you're then ignoring all the steps between the field and the plate. I guess you see the chef at the restaurant or the person stocking the shelves as non-human?
> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
Yes, Bangladesh is just a country of robots making jeans, and China is just a country of robots making sneakers.
I have no doubt that a lot of the economy is built on bullshit jobs, but most people do at least "some" work. It might not be necessary for our survival, but I'd like to think human society has moved beyond that.
Still, I'd love to see some kind of UBI and acknowledgement that working isn't completely necessary for the entire population if you just want to live.
I'm not following this at all. This narrative is at odds with the cut-throat capitalist narrative which is also popular to characterize businesses today. I.e. If business administrators could cut labour costs by reducing workforce, they would in a blind of an eye. For knowledge workers, I think the "idle capacity" model is more correct. Basically, demands for output are not constant, they ebb and flow. It's expensive to acquire and train staff, so they retain surplus capacity. It's inefficient, but it's more resilient.
> If business administrators could cut labour costs by reducing workforce, they would in a blind of an eye.
But this assumes that they are smart enough to know how to eradicate those extra costs, but bullshit jobs might have co-evolved among labor as a defense mechanism against that sort of thing.
>The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go.
I understand it to be hyperbole but the point that as a rough estimate only at most 1/10th of the available work force is actually "needed" in a developed country to "function" is probably accurate. From a late 19th/early 20th century capitalist pov the optimization point was reached somewhere in the 60s/70s. The problem is we have inherited and institutionalized how to "provide for oneself" from a long gone era.
If the goal was - metaphorically speaking - to reach the West Coast from the East Coast; this kind of capitalism had done a fairly good job until the 70s or so. By no means perfect but at least somewhere in the ballpark of a right trajectory.
Atm however we are past the west coast somewhere at the edge of our outer solar system lost in the Oort cloud. Remarkable engine indeed but way off course. And because it is so confusing out here (e.g. global financial market 10x bigger than world's GDP witnessed by all in 2008) in the vast 2.7 K cold nothingness of uber-optimization, the goal of wealth distribution (participation in the market) to the levels of say the 70s seems futile and utterly romantic - a long forgotten pale blue dot of paradisiacal opportunities. Even if the propulsion system which took us way out here is proof of the exact opposite in principle. Nobody has to starve to death as in "natural law" because of a conceptual eternal idea of how a certain kind of economics which was very successful at some time period (and ultimately had won the Cold War) has to work. But people really indeed do in the millions. It is just a sad state of affairs, still.
... but yet some dream to eventually reach Alpha Centauri with this good old machine: "We are halfway there, look, you can even "see" it."
When in reality it would take approx. 1000 generations at the current speed.
Take a company like twitter. It’s a finished product but you’ll have 10,000 employees there. You’ll have an entire department for youth engagement. You’ll have an internal theatre group putting on shows. But who actually does work? Maybe a dozen people? The rest are just there because somebody needs to be there because that’s what is done.
The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go. You’ll have someone who’s job is to read tweets and rate their suitability. Why? To make sure the suitability from the suitability committee is enforced of course!