And what does a world with less insurance look like? Insurance lets people trade a small amount of money for protection against a loss of a life-ruining amount of money. Without health insurance or fire insurance, people have to save up as much money as they can in the case of a catastrophic accident which they probably won't have, and possibly declining to spend that money on important things like higher education, etc. And when people are underinsured, they're constantly in a state of baseline anxiety, worry about "what ifs."

Is that the world this author wants to live in? One where he's constantly worrying about what might happen if he gets sick? That's not a world I want.

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones.

The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing.

I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.

What, exactly, do you think actuaries do during their 9-5? Do you think they manually compute actuarial tables with a TI-89?

95% of the work involves translating the messiness of real-world into the model-based world. This is the type of thing that's obliviously difficult to automate: e.g. more difficult to build a robot-nurse than a robot-surgeon.

What society, and by secondary intent technology should aim to do is to enable everyone to be capable of performing the job for which they have passion for.

My parents are farmers, and love it. I love it too. It is far from a bullshit job. But for the average joe slaving away on a rice paddy in China, they may dream of something grander than the opportunities afforded them.

I have been fortunate enough to have more education and opportunities than even 0.001% of the population could wish for - excellent schools, 3 bachelors degrees, 10 years at uni, mostly having the time of my life. I'm a doctor performing a job I find fulfilling, and I have a startup that grew out of a hobby. And it's profitable. Society should aim to give everyone the opportunities afforded to me. Because then there would be no bullshit jobs.

I know this is probably not what you've meant, but: I do think that this can be seen as pretty judgemental. Contribution (without parameters/scale) to society (without further specification) feels very subjective to me.

This is naive techno-optimism.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425; "The title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to 'spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw' ([1]).... The project schedule allocated one summer for the completion of this task. The required time was obviously significantly underestimated, since dozens of research groups around the world are still working on this topic today."

Spacex was founded in 2002 [2], and is expected to have a successful first stage powered vehicle recovery this year. 13 years from incorporation to revolution.

IBM's Watson diagnoses cancer better than a human doctor [3].

Keep you skepticism sir. I'll bet on the future; its winning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

[3] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me...

What Graeber seems to mean is jobs that serve the interests of some people at the expense of others and overall contribute very little, nothing, or actively work against the interests of society at large.

Sitting in a corporate cubicle churning out CRUD apps on spec for customers you're isolated from probably feels like it's contributing less to society than co-founding a "change the world" startup that fails to achieve product market fit, but the former probably achieves more good for society, even if it's only the sort of good that involves people having to do less paperwork manually...

Wasn't how I read it. He mentioned that technology "freed up" people from working in the field, though, meaning they could then be put to work in bullshit jobs.

>his arguments against "bullshit jobs" conflate jobs which don't serve society with jobs whose employees feel they're worthless because they much preferred being poet-musicians

I derive a lot more benefit from poet-musicians than I do from corporate lawyers. Admittedly, corporate lawyers are never employed for my benefit, but I think was kind of the point.

Shareholder return isn't an especially useful gauge of the redeeming features of sleazy corporate lawyers or artistic merit of moderately unsuccessful musicians either, but calculations of social benefit are a lot more complex than they first appear

Not very soon? If that were possible, don't you think insurance companies would have long ago jumped at the chance to drastically reduce their labor costs?

>The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing.

As you say, you can see this happening today. This is already how the economy works. No company is going to pay workers if they can avoid it. So what's the problem?

who decides what jobs people dont like doing? Just because you might not like being a taxi driver, farmer, actuary, etc, doesnt mean you should demolish the job with automation -- plenty of people find these jobs provide a fulfilling workday and are passionate about them. any automation there would deprive them of doing them as a profession, which is somewhat sad.

ill take it a bit further: how would we feel if tomorrow, we woke up and some guys from stanford published new research on AI which can automagically produce working software given a set of requirements -- and they give it away for free. the role of software development is no longer required, since this AI can do the job in seconds without bugs (you know, assuming requirements can be written without bugs!). what then of software developers? our jobs no longer make economic sense. you'll need to find one of those jobs not solved by a computer.

No, we should encourage automation full-tilt. Jobs are lost every day to automation, and the promise of a world where the workweek is short to nonexistent is one we should embrace, not reject because some people like their jobs. If we work hard enough to bring this to fruition, the actuary can crunch numbers on his own time if he wants -- or is free to explore thousands of other hobbies.

It might be inconvenient for me in the short term, but the world would be much better off overall. Trying to forbid that technology so that I could keep my current job would be selfish and destructive.

Programming is often times fun, but at the end of the day I program to get a job done, back then to develop a game, not because i love solving Sudokus.

I don't write software because I like typing commands, I do it because I want to create something. We assume people do work because they want money, but real satisfaction is solving problems, and there are no shortage of those.

you know the sort "children's play area green sustainability consultant"

Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption.

To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe.

There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies).

More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.

I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance premiums), would risk-taking increase to the point where the cost to the state became untenable? Then again if we lived in a futuristic society looked after by self-maintaining solar-powered robots then any service would essentially be free so maybe it wouldn't matter.

The only thing close to actuarial science that the NHS actually needs is QALYS calculations. This is only really used for calculating how worthwhile very expensive treatments that target the very old or very disabled.

The number of people needed to do that is very small, compared to the number needed to calculate prices in a non-single payer context.

If they get it wrong, he doesn't magically get treatment anyway. He either has to wait, or travel elsewhere (and someone still has to figure out where and when). Otherwise, they waste money on unused capacity.

Aside from economies of scale and protection from risk this was also incredibly useful in that one could (if qualified) legally drive any vehicle displaying a valid windscreen ticket.

There are still plenty of jobs which are bullshit though. For example my girlfriend is an auditor. Most of her job would disappear if the infrastructure existed to have her clients financial records completely digitised. A program could then analyse the data (which is mostly done at the moment with a bunch of spreadsheets right now) and with higher audit coverage (they can only check/test a fraction of records and transactions). Her workload could go from 5-6 days a week to 2.

In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind.

A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more.

Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money.

That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.

Some countries have figured some of that out: Distribute the health and education risk between every citizen (it typically achieves a 50% discount vs. privatly insured countries)[0]

[0] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...

Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these?

* Private equity CEOs

* Lobbyists

* PR researchers

* Telemarketers

* Bailiffs

Tell us how the world would be worse off without them.

You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.

Like 'sama? Remember, the whole world of VC is a subcategory of private equity.

> * Lobbyists

Lobbyists are the ones that tell the government that if they pass the new environmental regulation, the coal plant employing 300 workers will have to close. Other lobbyists tell the government that if they don't pass the new environmental regulation, that coal plant will impose tens of millions of dollars of healthcare costs on the surrounding neighborhood. Both are important functions.

> * PR researchers

Are cosmetics companies also bullshit in your calculation?

> * Bailiffs

So courts in which dangerous criminals are prosecuted shouldn't have people providing security?

The reason company X needs a lobbyist is often because company Y has a lobbyist. That's certainly why Google and the tech industry started spending heavily; they were losing out to other players. It's basically an arms race to manipulate government. With the additional problem that the battleground is our own country, so that the harm caused by the ongoing war is not borne by lobbyists but by taxpayers and citizens.

Lobbyists are paid to advocate the viewpoints of their clients, but their clients are people: businesses, organizations, and individuals with a stake in the society.

> If we had exactly zero of them, legislators would still learn things and pass laws. They might need to hire more researchers.

Sure, you can move that function into the bureaucracy. Instead of lobbyists presenting information on behalf of clients, you could have technocrats that were part of the bureaucracy. But someone has to present to the legislators the impact a proposal will have on various stakeholders--it would be a bad thing if nobody did that work.

And it's not clear that moving the research function into the bureaucracy would be a good thing. The benefit of the lobbying system is that it's adversarial--Google's lobbyists can attack the evidence and reasoning of Sony's lobbyists. But who attacks the evidence of the faceless unelected technocrat? Non-adversarial processes have failure modes too.

Also, it's not like without lobbyists big corporations wouldn't have influence over government, or even less influence. Companies like mass retailers, oil companies, coal companies, etc, will always have tremendous pull because they employ lots of people or control products vital to the economy. Companies like Google merely have money, rather than hundreds of thousands of voters' livelihoods as bargaining chips. It's a huge credit of the lobbying system that such companies can have as much influence over government as they do.

Protip: no matter what Romney says, corporations are not people. Having started a number of companies, and having also met a few people, I am quite sure they are different. Only one of them is supposed to be running the government.

> But someone has to present to the legislators the impact a proposal will have on various stakeholders

If only there were some organization that could do that. Maybe we could call it the Congressional Budget Office or the Congressional Research Service. Maybe legislators could have aides who specialize in particular areas. Or heck, maybe our legislators could find some way to hear what knowledgeable people say. Like they could invite experts to come by and hear what they have to say. We could call it a hear-ing.

> But who attacks the evidence of the faceless unelected technocrat?

Everybody. Which is basically what happens now. Also, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that most legislative aides and researchers have faces.

>Companies like Google merely have money [...] It's a huge credit of the lobbying system that such companies can have as much influence over government as they do.

Absolutely. Thank god money can have incredible influence. Lord knows what would happen if the power were actually held by the people. Cats and dogs sleeping together, I'm sure. It'd be anarchy.

As for the rest, I agree.

Countries where it takes 10 years to force a company/person to pay a debt are not highly ranked and thus people are a lot less willing to do business or invest in them.

Eg You little startup won't be able to lease office furniture if the hiring company doesn't think it can at least seize it back..

Low regulatory protection means stuff like this is deemed acceptable - http://www.tnp.sg/news/sim-lim-squares-phone-scam-makes-head...

It also means that stuff like this, which is regarded as a basic right in other countries, is deem jailworthy - https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-bus-driver-strike-makes-...

This is what it really means to be top of that list.

On the other hand, you seem to be under the misconception that there can be no "common ground" in a society without a state-mandated "common ground". Here are some links to start you off on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organization

#Note. Sorry for detracting from the main topic being discussed here. But I sometimes do feel compelled to enlighten individuals that seem to have some very "spoon fed" definitions about the possibility of a state-less society, and how it might look like.

Did that country also have laws against carrying firearms? How about laws that prevent individuals from defending themselves? E.g. Castle-doctrine, self-defense, private security firms, etc. You may hail it as proof that without a state, safety is not ensured. But I see it as an unfortunate limbo position where there is no protection provided by the state to the inhabitants, and there are also legal/state obstacles in place to prevent private individuals from performing that function.

I live in a country that is in the top 40 on the list of per-capita murder rates in the world. Probably much higher up on the list if you take into account violent crimes, etc. South Africa. It also has a huge industry for security services provided by private companies. Not only that, but a huge population of the country has opted to live in little "security" estates that have controlled access, private security guards, security cameras, electric fences, etc. Neighborhoods that spend large amounts of money on aiding the police in securing their neighborhood using cameras, volunteer patrols, paid private security company patrols, etc. In order to take private security any further, laws need to be removed because they are not being implemented effectively (like the rest of the country, but that's a separate debate). E.g. neighborhoods can't currently cordon off access to their streets, even if they had permission from all the land owners in the neighborhood. This is also the main reason why so many are moving to security estates, because they're huge chunks of private land and as such bypass those rules.

>"Even if 90% of people don't use violence, that just creates an enormous incentive for the other 10% of people to do so. And those 10%, organized into gangs, can terrorize the other 90%."

One of us is right in this regard. Perhaps it's also some sort of gray area where everything except X, Y, Z can be provided for privately without the need for a state. But would you at least concede that we can never know the true point in this spectrum without testing it? I.e. By slowly allowing private companies/individuals to take over safety/security. Note, removing state protection/security services in one go would be disastrous, I would never advocate it as I think it would cause total violent anarchy overnight.

Private security can't replace the state. In South Africa, the rich can hire private security because the state exists as a backstop to prevent security companies from turning on their clients. Without the state, any organization effective enough in the exercise of violence to provide real security has every incentive to simply enslave its clients.

> One of us is right in this regard. Perhaps it's also some sort of gray area where everything except X, Y, Z can be provided for privately without the need for a state. But would you at least concede that we can never know the true point in this spectrum without testing it?

We have tested it. In Somalia and Yemen and Pakistan. Feudal Europe. States didn't always exist. They arose as defense mechanisms to the power of organized groups to terrorize the majority with violence.

Three simple words derail all idealism in your post:

Corruption. Power. Poverty.

You don't smash people's knees in because you've never had to so you can solicit a payment that you entered a contract and need to eat for the next couple of weeks and you approach the authorities and they've been paid off or don't give a shit.

Humans don't look after each other very well, even if you do.

I simply admit that smashing kneecaps is a valid recourse in a world with the above concerns.

You might want to live in Brazil or South Africa for a bit.

I DO live in South Africa, thank you. I have for the last 8 years. So then, how does that affect your point? Are you implying I don't know what it's like living in a dangerous country because I don't live in one?

The often extreme violence of creditors against debtors, and the way that has debt has been used to control (and often enslave) others is another theme of Graeber's books.

I imagine that you are not a fan.

Lobbyists are critical to the functioning of the American system of government. They're even mentioned in the Constitution.

Private equity firms make retirement possible.

PR researchers enable companies to not have to deal exclusively with the populist swaying of public opinion. Public opinion, generally speaking, is an awful way to do business and to make decisions. Mobs are cruel.

I could go on but this method of dealing with your issues is unsustainable. Suffice it to say that you're just going to have to live with the fact that you don't understand everything and that's okay.

Telemarketing is useful in some way to the person who employs the telemarketer. Otherwise he/she wouldn't pay someone to do it.

It's also useful to the person earning the salary, who then spends their salary consuming in the economy. Not everyone is lucky/brave enough to pursue what they are truly passionate about.

Finally, even if the job doesn't generate any sales, it's still redistributing wealth away from one set of people (shareholders of the company) to others in the economy. Is this useful?

This job is based on lying and/or deceiving to people to trick them into buying somethng. Whoever is paying for it is actively hurting other humans. In a way it's worse than bullshit - it's a malicious job.

Yes, please do. I want to hear what kind of bizarre reality you live in where telemarketing is useful.

I recently received a call to remember to sign up for a charity race before the early signup deadline passed.

It was good for me because I had done it for the past 5 years, but hadn't remembered to sign up yet. The reminder saved me money for early signup.

It was good for the caller because they then had another person committed to doing the event.

----

The college I went to was funded in part by donations from alumni. Without donations received by telemarketers calling, there would be less resources available for my education.

The point being made here is whether Private Equity CEOs are contributing anything substantial apart from concentrating capital. The answer to that has to be no. Private equity firms (the refashioned lbo firms, not vc) have a history of preying on medium-sized solid businesses where they strip the company of assets, load it with debt, and eventually pocket gains at the expense of employees and other stakeholders.

That said, I agree with you in that a PE CEO is a bad example to use in this case. A PE firm is not neutral-useless, it is deleterious to society.

I think that's a different discourse. Slave labour was not a "bullshit job", it was productive. However, it was unethical. You can have productive jobs which are unethical, but that's a separate discussion from bullshit jobs.

That depends on how you do the accounting. If you account for slave labor as the cost of minimal food and housing, then it's not only productive, it's cheaper than almost anything else, especially because the slaves are property, so you can breed them and get a return-on-investment while also extracting labor.

Of course, if you account for slave labor in terms of some equivalent to wages, then all of a sudden society has reason to stop using slave labor and innovate instead. Ditto for today's low-wage labor in which sub-living wages end up subsidized by state antipoverty benefits.

Society has always faced a choice between exploitation and innovation, a zero-sum arrangement and a positive-sum arrangement. Unfortunately, rarely has it been wise enough to choose the latter.

Private equity is one of the most valuable functions of a market based economy, and that's understating its importance. To say the head of a private equity firm serves no purpose, is to claim allocating private capital in a market economy needs nobody in charge of that process at the company doing it.

Nearly all venture capital is private equity. Sam Altman is the President of a private equity company.

Private equity is not about concentrating capital, it's about allocating capital to productive use. It's no more vile than the stock market, which allocates capital from investors during the IPO process and afterward through the common purchase of shares.

Further, your comparison about slavery is obviously entirely false. An angel investor - aka private equity investor - like say Mark Cuban, who owns his own investment company and is the head of it, is not performing a function similar to slavery. Mark's capital is his own, and it was not stolen from people held in slavery by force. There is no similarity, and one cannot simply say they're similar because slavers were re-allocating capital too, that would be an intentionally nonsensical comparison.

Having a good understanding of what KKR does, I fail to see how they're so bad. Most of KKR's deals have involved voluntary buyouts, which were then spun back off and voluntarily purchased by other investors. Almost all of the deals that made them famous in the 1980s were friendly deals.

Can you give me a better understanding, in a short summary, of why KKR is so terrible?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/guitar-center-private...

The theory and reality of private equity do seem to be worlds apart. Much like the theory and practice of high speed trading.

In theory they reallocate capital more productively. In practice they seem to make money by squeezing workers, taxpayers, investors and even their own customers (some of whom seem content to squeezed - CalPERs, for instance).

Because it sure seems to me that all they are doing is squeezing their employees and vendors ever harder as per the Bain "how to run a company into the ground" handbook.

A successful company is worth vastly more than a destroyed one, or one that has had its assets stripped.

The ideal LBO is one in which you take an undervalued company private, maximize its operations, and then spin it back out at a time when you can achieve maximum return (eg when the market is high).

If Guitar Center is such an amazing business, how did they end up in a shark's mouth to begin with? It's precisely because they were a poorly run business that they were consumed by Bain. If Bain sells pieces of the business, who does that harm exactly? If Bain maximizes profitability and spins GC back out, who does that harm? Fired employees? Well it's business, not charity, nobody is entitled to a job; most businesses exist to generate a profit, not employ people. I find that most people dislike that fact, however that's how every economy works, on profit not charity (which derives from having earned a profit in the first place).

Not to mention that even if you were right, and a company is extremely valuable and all Bain does is destroy good companies, that opens up vast opportunities for good competitors to grow and hire new employees.

Your response might be: and how about the employees of said destroyed company? Sure, and how about the employees of a million businesses that go under every year due to incompetence, we should obviously outlaw bad business operators and entrepreneurs. If you're an employee of any company, anywhere, you're assuming risk of employment, that your employer may go under, weaken, or restructure. There's no avoiding that risk.

When you get down to details, this is basically a euphemism for what I just wrote.

Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?

Real income is rising, BTW. It's only real wages (i.e. income excluding benefits) in the US which have not due to a shift of comp from wages to non-wage benefits (the total is also rising).

Pitting third world workers against first world workers isn't good for either of them in the long run.

The same threat that hangs over US workers (we will offshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wages) actually hangs over 3rd world workers too (we will reshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wage).

It's a win/win situation for private equity though.

> It's true that the wealthy Americans who formerly collected rents

Wages are rents now are they? That's doubleplus good doublethink.

>Real income is rising

Median incomes are in decline.

>shift of comp from wages to non-wage benefits

...if you do some creative accounting on healthcare costs. Theoretically you might be getting $150,000 worth of benefits if your company insurance pays for your appendectomy. You and I both know that those absurd prices only really apply to the uninsured.

I'm born to the middle class in Norway. I have done little productive with my life and yet I enjoy better personal financials than 95% of the world's working population. After I'm done with my education I could go into unemployment and be even better off. All because of where I was born. I'm just collecting on the rest of the world's wealth because... Norwegian passport. I am clearly collecting rent.

>Pitting third world workers against first world workers isn't good for either of them in the long run.

>The same threat that hangs over US workers (we will offshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wages) actually hangs over 3rd world workers too (we will reshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wage).

Unionisation's purpose is to increase workers' bargaining power and thus change the wealth distribution in favour of workers. 3rd world workers' problem is that there isn't all that much wealth to be redistributed. 3rd world workers have more to gain from the industrialization of their countries than from unionisation. Your emphasis on the different factors is way off. Eventually we will need international unions to deal with mobile multinationals, though, but it doesn't make sense as long as the income inequalities across borders are as high as they are.

As for income (not wages, which is a subse of income), data is easily googleable.

http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=COMPRNF...

The rent is not 90k in that case. The rent is negative, in favor of the US; the US economy has benefited most other countries far more than those countries have benefited it. Most of the world gets a vast free rider benefit from what the US economy accomplished in the last ~140 years.

The fact that the US benefits most other countries a lot (primarily due to trade) doesn't mean that anyone collects a rent.

Oh really. What is the price delta between a logically-impossible perfectly competitive market and the current labor market?

>Only part of their wage is rent - if deepika earns 10k rs/month and Danielle earns 100k rs, the rent is 90k.

Assuming deepika and Danielle are the same person.

None of this changes the conclusion that Deepika (a real person and a friend of mine, albeit not named deepika) has escaped poverty thanks to her job at a call center. Based on our previous conversations I know you dont consider her as valuable as a hypothetical american (ugh, dirty foreigners with animal gods and spicy foods), but that's simply a normative difference.

Most labor off-shoring from the US has not gone to corrupt countries (if we're talking about corrupt being Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Somalia, etc).

Most of it has gone to India, Mexico, China, Philippines, Vietnam, etc. Rising, former third world nations. US companies obviously don't like to off-shore to countries like Sudan because those countries are neither safe nor stable for investment or operations. It does a company no good to build a factory in Somalia if it's just going to be arbitrarily nationalized or destroyed.

The ones you mention have all problems with corruption, to the point that as a Westerner doing business there you have to be aware of it.

Certain parts and certain businesses are worse off than others, of course, and for example the textile industry which is probably the most discussed and studied, have had huge problems with everything from organized crime to outright slave labor.

A general statement that off-shoring helps poor people is simply too easy to find counter examples to.

b) If you have a private equity investor stomping around your startup, it's because you solicited their investment. If you didn't want it, don't take the money. Simple.

b) So you're saying founders have a choice between accepting bullying or being starved of funding? Perhaps that's not the positive argument for PE it might appear to be.

The reality is that PE culture vampirises and kills real businesses and real affluence. It's only investment in the most toxic and predatory sense.

I will assume what is being referred to here, is LBO or more aggressive acquisition type firms like Bain.

The parent is right however, if Bain comes knocking on your private business, it's up to you as to whether you take their money. They do not use force to make you take their money or terms. I don't think the parent is making an argument in favor of these companies being saints, rather, that they function on a voluntary basis.

They do extend the capacity of democracies dramatically.

eg: Nobody linked mahogany with dying rainforests before Greenpeace.

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/

The oil industry for example is making a mess of the environment, but many people rich. Like wise the guy who invented tetra packs is rich, but what a waste - a plastic carton for every litre of milk? Better off when we were recycling glass.

They also make our mega-sprawl suburbs possible. It's a cop-out to pretend like oil companies aren't getting rich giving people what they want.

edit: I'm not saying that Tetrapaks will turn out to be terrible, just pointing out that things are priced with complete ignorance of their eventual externalities.

And how is the cost of the plastic fragments in the ocean factored in in this example? It won't be zero in the long run.

    a person who performs certain actions under legal authority, in particular.

    North American:
    an official in a court of law who keeps order, looks after prisoners, etc.

    British:
    a sheriff's officer who executes writs and processes and carries out distraints and arrests.

In terms of personal insurance, a world with less insurance looks like a place where people don't suffer just for the small risk of such a loss.

Catastrophic events such as fire and health could be dealt with more sympathetically by society rather than being handled by a profit-making industry that only really wants to help people who are rich enough.

By charging premiums below market risk valuation, the program has encouraged building in vulnerable areas. This has led to destruction of resources and government transfers to the rich people in a position to own coastal property.

I think that is the bigger picture that he is getting at. In an "ideal society" these jobs wouldn't need to exist.

Worth noting, my girlfriend is a Neurologist. She and her colleagues say if you have anything serious wrong with you, go to the public healthcare system. You will probably have to wait longer, but you will get the treatment the doctors want you to have.

When the same doctors have to deal with private patients (many doctors have both private and public patients here) then its basically a battle with the insurance companies trying to justify why they should pay for the better drugs.

So you have doctors time being wasted on bureaucracy and form filling on one side (they would rather be treating patients), an insurance company person wasting time on the other side. Doctors time isn't cheap. I doubt actuaries are either. It seems blatantly obvious to me that the system without that aspect to it is way superior.

And it has been well documented that the American system is very inefficient compared to Europes.

It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.

The way the law is brought to action is that the private clinics have specific service tiers which they offer to employers, of which even the basic one covers consultation by a general practitioner. The easiest way for employers to fulfill the letter of the law is to buy the service.

Which means that working adults seldom tend to the public services unless they are really ill, which means more business for the private clinics and increases the appeal of a health insurance (it's easier).

This is getting really obscure for this forum, but as a reference: The specific law is

https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2001/20011383

Which in google translate is

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Yes, this is obscure for this forum (perhaps that's why some people downvoted the previous comment) but just for the note, in Finland the employer is not really required to buy any services from private clinics. The legal requirement is for existence of a preventive plan, and a specification for what other services the plan covers. It's okay by law if the coverage effectively evaluates to nil, and employees just are off to the public system's queue.

I know in some other countries, like Germany, it is set up much more closely to insurance, in the sense that procedures have prices, are billed out to patients, who are covered by insurance plans that reimburse patients for costs, etc., in which case I imagine the bureaucracy is much more insurance-like.

Private clinics which are the main receivers of insurance money are often owned by the doctors. Thus, they have an incentive to over-charge, over diagnose and run expensive labs whenever they can. I'm not saying it happens, just that the incentive is there. Government provided healthcare offers no financial incentives for practicioners to over-diagnose - on the contrary this system then incentivizes to be as prudish as possible with the public resources.

I'm not saying one or the other is better or worse, just that they are not equal in every way.

It also has voluntary private health insurance.

What you probably are referring to is that USA has not private health insurance at all.

In the US only your employer could give you insurance, so it is not personal and private, but collective, if you try to do on your own it is prohibitively expensive.

As an industry, it effectively taxes savings and distributes those taxes to the employees within the industry, sometimes as eye watering salaries and bonuses.

One may argue that the consumer is free to choose not to consume the service, but the reality is that most countries have mandated retirement savings mechanisms that efficiently funnel employee pensions and savings into the industry.

[1] http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Picki...

[2] http://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

It could be that if everyone only invested passively, then there would be untapped alpha in the market which would lead to greater profits to the active asset management industry. This in turn would lead to more active management firms leading to an equilibrium where alpha is nullified.

Not an expert on economics. Just saying this form of bullshit may be vital to the system.

I wouldn't quite use the word mandated. But at least in the case where I am currently, South Africa, all sorts of financial instruments such as the ones you mention, are heavily "pushed" by government via various means. I.e. tax-exemption benefits, incentivizing insurance/financial brokers into pushing by making it a regulated license industry (protected status), and plain out funding the industry by using it to give government employees plushy "retirement packages" in the form of these instruments.

It's such a sad state of affairs (at least in this small subset of discussion). I've actually been wondering about it quite a lot recently. While I watch perfectly smart, educated individuals being effectively "tricked" into putting huge amounts of their monthly earnings to save up for "retirement" because it's "tax-exempt". Ironically, all those savings get taxed as "income" anyways when they withdraw from it in retirement. Wait, it's not funny.

Meanwhile, whilst they are busy being coaxed into this scheme due to "tax exemption" benefits, they're paying mounds of interest on car and home loans that they could pay off ridiculously sooner. Those loans that are constantly funding financial institutions? You could argue that it's another way in which the government is "funneling" capital into it.

</rant>

Many have looked at this and presented the data far more eloquently than I could:

https://hbr.org/2013/05/just-how-useless-is-the-asset/

http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Malki...

The bulk of asset management is in listed equities and government/corporate bonds and this is what I was primarily referring to.

I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a very few people. Maybe it's time to redefine what we mean by "work" and why we do it.

https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500...

I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate".

I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like.

(Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)

We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings.

"What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link between supply and demand.

Universal basic income doesn't intrinsically mean less work being done. It just means different leverage in the negotiation process.

I think people have a natural need to work and contribute things, but we also have laziness tugging at us. Enabling someone to waste their life is not doing them a favor; it impoverishes them in a way that lacking money alone cannot.

So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.

Printing money isn't the only way to finance a basic income, however. A much more sane approach is through effectivization, by eliminating bullshit jobs and (most) existing means-tested benefits, as well as increased taxation. There's nothing inflationary about this approach.

Also you're assuming people have the right incentives today. Is working two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet really what you want people to do?

This is really about changing the relative negotiating power between employers and employees. Having some fallback income makes it easier to take time off to go to school, start a business, or find a better job. Also it goes right back into the economy as revenue for some business, so it's hard to see how it can be bad for business.

It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place.

I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments.

Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit.

That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high.

It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry.

He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh".

Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)

There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders."

It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense.

In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.

I agree with this. I also think there's an inescapable analogy here with software projects - I think people are just really bad at handling large amounts of complexity. In software, large projects are notorious for high failure rates, in the same way that large organisations seem to collapse under their own weight. We don't see able to administer or manage on a large scale effectively.

This is just thinking out loud, but the conclusion I draw from this analogy is that small focused projects and small focused teams work best. Don't try to create a behemoth. Hence the effectiveness of startups and the UNIX/Pythonic way of keeping things simple.

Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_.

Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it.

But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.

I completely agree; the public sector part I was in is probably a bad example as it's probably some of the worst places for bureaucracy and politics. It was incredibly difficult for anyone who wants to use tax dollars wisely to make headway.

Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of privilege.

Takes <1s in reality. Takes <1s in Germany because it's enforced by law that operations like that cannot be artificially made longer.

Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA. Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automated printing facility. 5 minutes, made into 6 month...

The examples are countless.

Sounds about right actually...

Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction.

So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters".

Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.

I don't agree. The answer is strictly economic. There are bullshit jobs just because people want to amass fortunes. The problem is not to have a guy working as a "legal consultant" or as a "ska drummer" but to have thousands of them doing the same thing. There's a point when a 101 legal consultant adds no value, but the job still exits. Why? because companies in that industry need to grow and to do so they expand beyond the target to whom they add value. This is it, they expand where the service is not actually needed.

So services/products expanded to targets to whom they add no value is when bullshit jobs are created, and the reason behind this is just to make more money instead of solving problems to the world.

You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout.

Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits.

I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.

Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?

I have also a very tentative idea that this might actually lead for more democratic organizations - because removing the inefficiencies that come from the complexity will bring a lot of advantage for the companies that would do it - and this will require more creative thinking and good will from everyone in the organization. This is just like science would not thrive in a too autocratic institution - so the universities had a lot more internal democracy than for example production companies. And today production companies will have the same need for creativity and good will as the universities had in the past.

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/why-do-people-hate-thei...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-...

http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...

It's basically what Salesforce does.

The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason.

Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs.

One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling.

The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting.

Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century.

I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states.

Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic".

I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.

http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workpla...