The idea for
this post started innocently enough, researching the concept of what I called
“make believe jobs”, or jobs that really added very little value (technically,
whose cost to the employer were beyond the marginal benefit they added to the
organization of said employer). It was to be an additional step in the series
developing the General Theory of the Organization, as my initial hunch is that
those jobs are much more prevalent of what neoclassical economic theory would
predict (well, for that theory those jobs shouldn’t exist in the first place,
so they could only be understood as a temporary deviance from equilibrium, and
set to disappear as soon as possible as the market regained a minimum of
efficiency). Such prevalence would be both a cause for pessimism (in this blog!
Who would say!) , as significant amounts of improvement in aggregate demand
could be absorbed without any improvement in the overall employment picture (as
companies had a tremendous cushion of “hidden capacity” lying dormant as a
fixed cost that they could turn to before they started hiring from the outside,
and thus reducing the unemployment numbers) and an additional argument in favor
of the rollout of a UBI, as that would be the only way to reduce such
population of non-value-adding employees without the trauma of depressing even
more the already paltry labor participation figures (as many of those are old
enough to never be employed again if they were laid off).
Unfortunately
(or fortunately), pursuing that line of thought I found myself having netted a
much bigger fish (so big, indeed, that a single post may very well not be
enough to tackle with it), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and try to
present all of this in a somewhat orderly fashion. I’ll go through the three
steps it took me to reach the overall conclusion (unsurprisingly, it all comes
down to us being doomed in the short run… but do not worry, as I wrote about in
another post Our sunny future
500 years from now our descendants will laugh at our current tribulations)
1. They pay
for it, but it’s still bullshit
Anybody that
has worked in a big firm, doesn’t matter how apparently ruthless its HR
policies, knows that they all harbor a great deal of slackers and deadbeats. In
some cases they are astute, cunning fabricators that convince enough of their
supervisors that they are actually doing something useful, and that their lack
of results (for definition a make believe job produces no results, if it did
produce some it becomes an overpaid job, or even a sinecure if It is safe enough,
which is a totally different category) is due to some set of circumstances
entirely out of their control. One would expect that time would put everybody
in its right place, but that would be grossly underestimating human ingenuity,
and the number of counterexamples I’ve seen to that maxim would be enough to
fill a book to rival with the telephone directory of a city the size of New
York.
However, the
guy that really hides is inability to do anything mildly productive for years
on end, while he collects his monthly salary and even get the occasional
promotion, is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are not that many of them.
Let’s call this class “the fancy dress make believe job”, as they really have
to carefully camouflage their valuelessness, and pass it for some useful
activity, apparently performing some valued function within the enterprise
(normally accompanied by a fanciful job title). Needless to say, these species
can only be found in the upper echelons of the corporate world, where “results”
are notoriously difficult to measure, as in the lower ones a complete lack of
production would be more immediately apparent (an engineer that didn’t produce
any calculations, a designer that didn’t produce any drawings, or an operator
that didn’t turn out any manufactured piece from his workstation would be soon
reprimanded and duly fired if persisting in his lack of work, whilst an
executive that didn’t do much at all is more difficult to detect).
There is a
whole additional category of make believe jobs, reputedly more prevalent in
government and the public sector, which we could call “the paper pusher of
papers that should have never been printed in the first place”. Paper pushing
(getting approvals of forms filled by somebody else, which has done the thinking)
is already a questionable activity, which could add a sliver of value (even in
these times of electronic forms, automated workflow information systems and
paperless offices) sometimes, but surely could never justify the brigades, the
divisions, the full armies of administrative staff that people most offices
where the administered (that is, the whole of the population) has to deal with
the administrators. Not just for government service (like filing taxes,
registering the acquisition of landed property, transferring a business and the
like) but for any modification the supply of most utilities, regardless of how
much they are supposedly in private hands (water, electricity, gas and
communications, and in most places the provision of health services).
I will not go
into the vast swathes of workers in sales and marketing, as it should be
self-evident that in a sane society we wouldn’t have millions upon millions of
clever guys doing their best to try to convince us to buy (and sometimes pay
outrageous amounts of money) things we don’t need. In this case, each
individual salesperson can be extremely valuable for the company that employs
him (indeed, in professional services organizations selling is the only ability
people consistently need to show to get to the top, as the great challenge they
face is convincing their clients once and again that what they bill them for is
of any significance, or may cause any kind of improvement to their bottom line,
regardless of it being true or not), but if we apply the rule of “imagine what
happens if all the people doing this were suddenly abducted by aliens and taken
to a far away planet” is difficult to envision a planet Earth significantly
worse off (or worse off at all) by the sudden disappearance of all the Don Draper
lookalikes…
Finally,
there is the category of honest-to-god workers that are doing some activity
that requires skill and commitment, and they are doing it competently and even
with gusto, but for a completely counterproductive end, dictated by a society that
has lost its bearings (more on that later on). Engineers, architects, middle
managers, tradesmen, secretaries, the full works engaged in the construction of
megalomaniacal infrastructure works that nobody will use, be them airports with
no actual demand, trains that run empty, and the tons upon tons of advance
weapon systems that were devised for a type of conflict that the world may not
see again. It is amazing that, given how petty the public investment in most
advanced countries has come to be seen, I raise the possibility that there are
still spades of money being thrown at inexpedient projects, while basic
infrastructure seems to be rotting at the roots and in a state of utter
disrepair, but such is the sad state of things, and while well used highways,
bridges and airports crumble and rot new, wholly unnecessary ones are being
built everywhere, following decisions taken for political expedience (to favor
the career and election prospects of their proponents, when not to inflate
their secret bank accounts in fiscal paradises) rather than the ones dictated
by their measured contribution to the greatest good. Let us call this last
category the “good soldiers deployed in the wrong battlefield” to complete our
categorization of jobs that add nothing to the collective output and would not
cause any diminution in the real GDP if the people performing them were
suddenly dismissed without notice (the third category is a bit more
problematic, at least in the short run, as building a completely useless
airport or train line does indeed count as part of the GDP while the
construction is taking place, although it stops doing so the moment it
finishes, as nobody then is willing to pay to use the service).
2. The
economic impact of bullshit jobs
So I would
ask my less experienced readers to take my word regarding the enormous number
of people belonging to the three categories previously described (the more
experienced ones already know it is true). No exhaustive measure of their ranks
has ever been attempted, but I dare to say they constitute between 30 and 40%
of the total working population (well above that in certain well-established
sectors and industries, and below that figure in the ones subject to more
competition and change). To have a better grasp of such figure, the current
occupation rate of the USA (in theory a super-dynamic economy, with a most
frayed and uncomfortable safety net that forces almost everybody to swim or
sink) is roughly around 60%, after decades slowly falling. That means that a
40% of the population of working age is not working at all (and, given that the
unemployment rate is just 5%, 35% of them are not even looking for a job,
although much could be discussed about how voluntarily that giving up may
happen to be).
If we take as most likely figure of make
believe jobs a 35%, that means that more than half of the working age
population (40% + 35%*60% = 61%) doesn’t add zilch to the GDP (that probably
includes you, kind reader, that instead of working is reading this silly post…
just kidding, we both know you are a hard worker and a productive citizen), and
the remaining 39% is doing all the work. Let’s not forget we are talking of
working age population here. If we consider the fact that people is living
longer thanks to the increase in life expectation at birth (and at any age,
really, except if you are a middle age North American Caucasian, in which case
you are expected to kill yourself by overdrinking, substance abuse or similar
expedient methods any day now) we have to conclude that roughly 20% of the
people keep society going, another 10-15% just goes along for the ride and
pretend to work just as hard in order to have a solid claim in the distribution
of the benefits, and the rest basically expect the truly working ones to
maintain them in different levels of opulence.
That puts the
claims of many conservatives about the unsustainability of the welfare state in
some perspective, as really if 20% of the population working can achieve our
current production level the idea that we can somehow magically find
occupations (through creative destruction, technological advance, development
of entirely new industries, the right incentives and whatnot) for at least the
40% that nominally could work is ludicrous. The size of the problem is not increasing
the amount of jobs available by a 10 or a 20% by “unleashing the energies of
the free market” or similar claptrap. To really materialize the rightists
utopia of full employment for everybody (achievable by making any life
situation different from full employment for each individual as utterly
miserable as possible) you would need to more than double (and most likely
triple) the size of the economic pie.
That is not
only incompatible with the increasing automation of more and more activities,
but with any kind of social organization we can dream of. As a member of the
tory government one commented drily answering to the drive of their leader to
turn the UK into a service economy, “we can not survive on cutting the hair of each
other”… somebody somewhere must be doing something originally valuable to
enable the distribution of such value in exchange for the provision of services
(be such services cutting hair, flipping burgers or advising in innovative
financial strategies to minimize the tax exposure). But when that somebody is
so hard to find (one in five people) the problem should not be making more
schlubs act like that uber-valuable (and most rare) individual, but in
distributing fairly the product of that individual’s labor (product that is not
only obtained thanks to his or her superior ability and moral worth, but also
thanks to circumstances beyond his control, like a functioning society, the
capital accumulated by his ancestors and pure and unadulterated luck).
There is
another way, of course. Pay everybody a basic income and fire all the people in
make believe jobs. But that's the kind of solution we would expect only a fully functioning civilization to settle on, and not a decaying one…
3. Can civilization pull it off?
Sounds
sensible, doesn’t it? The problem is, as we mentioned, everybody is pretty good
at identifying the “bullshitness” of other people jobs, but quite blind to
their own job’s. We have reached a point in the development of our complex,
multiply interconnected, half real - half virtual economy when we do not know
what is valuable any more, we do not know who is adding value to a product or
an activity and thus, we do not know how to maximize the utility we derive from
a certain allocation of our resources with alternative uses (which, by the way,
is the definition of what Economics does, but in my last post I already said
that Economics is basically a gigantic amount of malarkey with a side dish of
baloney, so nothing new here). Not that such inability would keep me awake at
night, as I have always said that thinking in those terms is counterproductive,
and the whole maximization of utility thing is the wrong way of approaching how
to live (a wrong way that, by the way, is enshrined in the dominant reason of
the age, and foisted upon unsuspecting and innocent children since their first
day on this planet, so those of them that have not been exposed to any countervailing
influence may find it somewhat hard to adapt to a reality without those guiding
principles), except for the little fact that I don’t think our civilization can
survive without it, and that I see more and more signs around us that it has
already lost it for good.
Because the
proliferation of bullshit jobs is just one (especially salient) manifestation
of the deeper malady I have just pointed to: the complexity of our current
social organization and adjacent productive system has just surpassed a point
of no return that makes it impossible to assign any intersubjective value to
any good or activity. But as all (or most of) our institutions have been
designed (and derive their legitimacy) from their ability to maximize value
(under the guise of “utility”), the fact they can not discharge the duty they
were constructed to fulfill (or that they can not satisfy the expectations that
have been put upon them) will surely, sooner or later, lead to their demise.
And the demise of a functioning civilization is never a nice thing to
contemplate (even less to live), although I’m afraid that’s the lot we are
bequeathing our children.
This is the
“big fish” I mentioned at the beginning of the post, and it surely needs more
than one entry in a paltry blog to be fully explained. It may also seem like
too big a conclusion to extract from the fact that in some companies (OK, in
most of them… OK, in all of them) there are a few slackers that do not really
pull their own weight but their bosses don’t seem to notice (or if they notice,
they don’t seem to care). The casuistic of make believe jobs was just the
pointer, but once that particular clue leads you to suspect that may be the
problem with our world-system affects something pretty foundational, reveals something
truly rotten at the very root of it, you start to see a number of apparently
disconnected (or very loosely connected) threads in a completely different
manner:
·
Global
warming: may be it is incredibly urgent (like catastrophic floods and total
disruption of the climate patterns in 50 years), may be it is not (like the
same but in 200 years, whopeee!). May be it is 100% caused by man’s activities
(most pointedly their burning of fossil fuels) may be man is causing just 90%
of it. Fact of the matter, the climate is getting warmer, the potential
consequences for the livability of the planet (its ability to sustain an
enormous population of primates with very high metabolic demands) are
devastating, and we are doing essentially zilch (if anyone seriously think the
Paris climate accord are going to do anything at all to curb the emissions of
greenhouse gases I have a bridge in Brooklyn I may be interested to show him).
The whole thing is too complex, the temptation to free ride the efforts of
other actors too big, the penalties for individually doing nothing too small
(or inexistent) and the lure of being just plain old complacent (“it’s all a
giant hoax, surely things are not going to be that bad, why bother at all”) has
proved to be just overwhelming…
·
Part
of what makes global warming intractable is that it is mainly caused by the
most widespread of producing energy, and energy production in a complex,
commercial, capitalist society as ours is non negotiable. Not just old style
manufacturing, but communications, agriculture, construction (air conditioning
in a sweltering planet!), sanitation, provision of health services,
transportation (increasingly, if we move from internal combustion engines to an
electric powered fleet)… all require modern societies to produce vast amounts
of energy. And the news on that front are pretty dismal. Yes, photovoltaic
energy is so cheap as to be close to (or have already reached, depending on who
you trust) “grid parity” (a price low enough to be competitive without being
heavily subsidized… which makes you wonder then why it keeps on being heavily
subsidized everywhere, and why threatening to rationalize –i.e. reduce- such
subsidies cause a universal cry of outrage from a misinformed public opinion).
Yes, eolic energy is expanding (in this case, without even pretending to be
cheap). In the most wildly optimistic scenario both may account for anything
between 20% and 40% of humanities need (and that requires a massive overhaul of
the distribution grid and a similar enhancement of our storing capacity, which
today is for all practical purposes nonexistent at any scale bigger than your
AAA batteries). As for the rest, carbon capture has not advanced much in the
last three decades, ditto for nuclear, and fusion… is still a good two decades away,
and will probably be three (or four, or five) decades from now. We have just,
as a society, lost the ability to innovate technically. We have literally
thousands of designs for new reactors (and for improving the efficiency of the
current ones) but it is just too damn tough to get them approved by the
regulator, so they sit for decades on the shelves, without ever being built
(or, if we attempt to build them, the costs and schedules spiral out of
control, see Flamanville, Olkiluoto and ITER). But hey, Moore’s law is alive
and well, and we still get faster computers and mobile phones, and better
software running on them (only the software is actually worse and more buggy,
as that is other area where we have not learned to deal with complexity, and
even the rate of replacement of technological wonders seems to be slowing, as
people realize that the latest version of their expensive geegaws only serves
to reduce the weight of their wallet, for very, very little additional
convenience or functionality)
·
But
probably the worst of it: in one of the most gripping pieces of journalism I
have found in the last months I read in The
New Yorker how the USA pacific coast will sooner rather than later be wiped
off by a devastating Tsunami (as it has regularly been for most of its
unrecorded history, the lovely advantages of the advances in the science of
seismology allow us to gain this kind of knowledge): The really big one will not be where you expect it . and knowing this, we are just collectively unable to do anything at all about it! I find almost unbearable the
mention, in the final paragraphs, of the schools and day care centers that are well into the
inundation zone of a tsunami that has roughly one in three chances to strike in
the next half century. We are collectively letting hundreds of kids stay as sitting
ducks to inescapably drown under forty five feet of water and debris (along
with a good number of hundreds of thousands adults and elders) because it is
just too complex to take any fucking measure at all to put them in a safe
place. They may make it to adulthood, but then it will be their cousins, or their own children the ones subject to such fate. But hey, the Germans shut down ALL their nuclear power plants after the
Fukushima earthquake and Tsunami for no friggin’ reason at all! And when
disaster strikes in the NorthWest of the USA (notice that it is when,
not if, as it will strike for certain
sooner or later, it’s just the way of blind nature following its unbending
rules) we will wonder if there is a God and how could he allow such a terrible
thing to happen, and so much suffering and grief…
So all in all
pretty grim prospects, uh? When I first read Toynbee’s A Study of History I wholeheartedly agreed with him that our
particular civilization (western Greek-Judeo-Christian, or whatever you want to
call it) was the first one to have escaped from the iron law of rise,
consolidation and decay that had affected every other major human culture until
now, and that with the scientific method and the knowledge we had gained about
how nature (including ourselves) really work (as opposed to convenient
rationalizations of whatever false superstition happens to be widely believed
by the mass of the people) we had for the first time in history the opportunity
to learn and adjust our mores to the circumstances we found ourselves in.
Probably the same that Egyptian noblemen thought 2,000 years BC.
That I read
short after Spengler’s The Decline of the
West (an abridged edition, I’m toying with the idea of going for the full
thing, may be in the original language… we’ll see), and it was a good antidote.
But now the thesis of the German seems like more and more plausible, and the
one of the British less and less so, its optimism more and more unfounded.
Again, to
deduce from the fact that a good deal of the workers in most advanced societies
are not really doing much that our whole (apparently robust and solid) culture
is about to collapse may seem a bit unwarranted. I’ll develop in a subsequent
post why I think we have reached “peak civilization”, and the true explanation
of why we can not achieve the kind of feats (technological, ideological,
religious, demographic) that may get us some reprieve from such collapse.
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