Jobs

“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…. 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.”

–Buckminster Fuller, 1970

More on Jobs here…

25 Dying Professions

The most satisfying and fulfilling job I ever had was that of small town radio announcer. About a dozen years from the early 70s to the early 80s. We still played vinyl 45s and LPs on turntables. We recorded on magnetic tape. Nobody much cared (within limits) what we said. Looking back, I can see that I was fortunate to catch the tail end of radio’s best years. From Work+Money:

One in 10 of the nation’s 33,202 radio and television announcers are expected to see their jobs disappear by 2026. Consolidation in the industry, as well as increased use of syndicated content, is fueling the decline. There’s also the explosion of streaming music services. More and more listeners prefer that over their local, drive-time disc jockey.

Party DJs however, are seeing an uptick in business with demand for their services projected to grow about six percent by 2026. And they earn about the same – $32,000 – as their on-air counterparts.

I thought radio was a dying profession twenty years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has some interesting data on the profession but, like the article above, they combine radio and TV announcers. I’d like to know how many of each.

A world without jobs

This article is way too long for anyone with a job to read. So here are a few nuggets:

“Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”

Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”

“I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”

As all such articles do, this one mentioned UBI (Universal Basic Income). I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. But I can almost imagine a world in which — for whatever reasons — there are just a whole bunch of people without jobs. And I can only see two options for dealing with them: Let them starve or provide them with food and shelter. Some way, somehow. I’m counting on smarter people to come up with more options.

Will you ever retire?

What it will mean to be an elderly millennial (Vice)

“Sometime before death, but after your useful phase, there’s supposed to be this in-between time called “retirement” that sounds pretty great—sorta like childhood, but without anyone trying to teach you anything, and with more drinking.”

And if your plan is to keep working…

“There’s no evidence that jobs for millennials in their 70s will exist. “In terms of their ability to work or keep up with their logical progress—the job requirements are changing a lot faster than human beings can be trained.”

The end of capitalism has begun

The provocative headline of this article (by Paul Mason in The Guardian) is enough to make some dismiss it out of hand. I hope you’ll give these excerpts a quick scan and, if you see something interesting, click through to the article.

  • Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
  • We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
  • The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
  • Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse.”
  • By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
  • The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
  • The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.

We’re trained to need bosses

This post by David Cain looks at what it means to be your own boss. I’ve never been my own boss for many of the reasons mentioned by Mr. Cain. Looking back, I think that need to escape was there much of the time.

I wish somebody had pulled me aside and told me that the education system and working culture I’m going to be marched into are places that are ultimately going to need escaping from.

Parents (I’ve never been one) might bristle at Mr. Cain’s take on children but it seems a valid observation;

Many people deal with the vapidity of their jobs by having children, because parenting lends an immediate seriousness and purpose to one’s role on the planet. Providing for a child is an act that feels intrinsically meaningful to a human being, and so devotion to your job, even a dull one, can become an extension of devotion to your role as a parent, giving meaning to the hoops to be jumped through at work.

If you’ve ever thought of escaping the 9-to-5 life, the full post (below) is worth a read.

Bullshit jobs

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. There’s so many interesting ideas in this essay. Here are a few of my favorites.

“What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear?”

I stopped for a few seconds to think of the jobs I had (DJ, postal inspector, middle manager, web monkey) and confess nothing very bad would have happened if they disappeared.

“Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. … It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”

“The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”

“Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. … Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.”

Dignity in doing other things

I’m not sure why Kevin Drum is an expert on robots but he wrote an interesting article for Mother Jones. The excerpts below are from the Washington Post Wonkblog:

“There’s a couple of arguments against the idea that AI is coming soon. One is, as you say, a philosophical argument, which boils down to “However smart machines seem to get, they’ll never have true human intelligence.” I just don’t think that matters. You can call it intelligence or something difference, but that’s semantic. What matters is that they can accomplish the same things humans can.”

“So who has all the money? It’s whoever has the robots. And who has the robots? The people who have all the money. Today’s income inequality will be peanuts compared to income inequality then. […]  If I’m right about what happens with artificial intelligence, there won’t be any work, period, so there won’t be dignity in work. We’ll have to find dignity in doing other things.”

How much of your life are you selling off?

This post below by David Cain is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about retirement. More accurately, it’s about people who are retiring much earlier than “normal” (45, or 40 or even 30) It’s long (for a blog post) but worth a read. A few excerpts:

“Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.”

“When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly absurd.”

“Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car?”

“Common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you need to spend as much as you currently do.”