>To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?
Quite a lot of it doesn't, and the less value it creates the more profitable it tends to be. Take PPI for instance.
While some of it has value, it swallows up a LOT more of our GDP than it should (much like the rest of the FIRE sector) and creates a multitude of bullshit jobs.
>Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].
I bet those corporate lawyers earn more in aggregate.
>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers.
I don't think so. He is just highlighting the fact that the almighty market is not so efficient and has a lot of us doing a lot of pointless bullshit a lot of the time for no reason.
i.e. we're developing the worst excesses of the Soviet Union.
Quite a lot of it doesn't, and the less value it creates the more profitable it tends to be. Take PPI for instance.
While some of it has value, it swallows up a LOT more of our GDP than it should (much like the rest of the FIRE sector) and creates a multitude of bullshit jobs.
>Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].
I bet those corporate lawyers earn more in aggregate.
>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers.
I don't think so. He is just highlighting the fact that the almighty market is not so efficient and has a lot of us doing a lot of pointless bullshit a lot of the time for no reason.
i.e. we're developing the worst excesses of the Soviet Union.