Someday I'm planning on doing a big write up on "Bullshit Jobs" that you brought up here. I've read some of that book and I'm just taken aback questioning why it was ever taken that seriously to begin with.
If the book was simply "An Anthology on the Phenomenon of Jobs that seemingly have little purpose" that would be a fine book. But instead he treats it as sort of "Social, Political, and Economic Treatise against this endemic intentional feature of late-stage capitalism" and that just loses me.
Sure, there really are some bullshit jobs out there. But the ones he cited were the absolute worst cases, that he only heard about from a survey he ran. Did some of the people working feel real psychological distress? Yes! But he also goes on to claim that since in some survey some majority of people thought their jobs were bullshit, then we must treat it as such!
As the economy becomes bigger the little sliver of work anyone might do becomes smaller and more abstract, which is good! But it also means some people "don't see the point" of their jobs. Some jobs are for reserve corporate capacity, some are for handling weird edge cases, some jobs are just designed poorly, and some are just forgotten on the org chart. But there is still value in most jobs, business owners aren't in the business of employing people for shits and gigs.
Anyway, as a former middleman I appreciate the post! Coordination involves so many little details that are annoying to even the middlemen whose job it is, much less the primary parties. If the pig is really great at butchering he shouldn't be spending his time haggling the exact supplier of transportation on the new butchering equipment he bought, that's not using his talents well!
I lost interest in reading the book based on what others criticized about it. I heard the author thinks highly useful jobs like “corporate lawyer” are bull shit jobs, as if the ability of companies to make and enforce contracts is useless!
It’s a shame because his book on money and debt was flawed but a good counterpoint to economists equally flawed fairytales. This one is just “I’m a leftist academic and don’t actually understand the economy at all”
The bullshit jobs thesis, or at least the popular discourse version of it (since I haven't read Graeber's original work), to me has always felt like an argument from ignorance: "I don't understand what the point of this job is, therefore this job has no point."
Even in “real jobs” coordination is underrated. I work on manufacturing, a good team of machinists can be lifesavers, but even better is an engineering team that makes designs and fixes that can be done without skilled machinist. Those meetings and design work look and feel less real but provide lots of value
To me, the danger isn’t that middlemen aren’t important – as they are – but that it’s not very difficult for middlemen who enable effective coordination to be outcompeted by middlemen who actively impede it.
It’s not necessarily that Dilbert’s Boss is in a useless position; it might be really important for someone in it to be good at it. But I think a lot of people – very much not just nerds, at least here in Britain – sense that “being good at it” does often not really seem to be what’s being selected for in these positions.
And there is a plausible reason why, as well: in a field where the qualitative impact of your work is abstract and difficult to grasp, someone might do better just by… well, telling a story that’s concrete, and easy to grasp. The storytellers might spread until they dominate a system, even if their stories are wrong, and even if their stories are destructive of productivity.
Presumably in a non-monopoly *eventually* this might have catastrophic consequences. But I’m not convinced that ruthless market drive is actually stronger than… well, the story of a ruthless market drive, the impression of “a good boss who does good boss things.” The thing which is being optimised is not, necessarily, “being good at being a middleman.” And this is completely compatible with the idea good middlemen are vitally important; it just implies a great many middlemen won’t be good.
I agree that when your work is more abstract and harder to measure, it's a) easier for incompetent people to skate by, and b) the competitive dynamics are harder to assert on an individual level.
FWIW my guess is that mediocre (eg) managers are still significantly net positive in most for-profit organizations, and probably non-profit ones too, whereas people with the "folk" model I sometimes argue against would say things like "oh sure I agree that maybe the best managers in the world are great, I had one like that when I was 23, but the vast majority of managers are useless and should just get out of the way, right?" Which is not my position; I think both managers and ICs can be net negative maybe 5-30% of the time.
Also, I'm not actually sure whether practical variance in output quality among managers or ICs is higher. Eg, 10x and 100x programmers are a thing, I actually don't have a sense whether 10-100x difference in output quality between best and median managers are at all common (Though programming is just on the more measurable side of "knowledge work", less abstract jobs like say farming or factory work probably has lower output variance by individual).
Other relevant literature here includes "principal-agent problems" and "industrial organization/"
Dilbert's boss's one actual skill was knowing how to look good to his superiors regardless of what actually happens on the projects his engineers work on. For example:
Dilbert: I analyzed our only two options. One costs too much, and the other is impossible.
PHB: Let's do the impossible one.
Dilbert: Perhaps you can explain your reasoning.
PHB: According to you, we will fail either way. But if we fail in a slow and inexpensive way, no one will even notice for months. With any luck, we'll have a corporate reorganization that forever hides our gross incompetence.
I would agree that middlemen, in general, are necessary and that most jobs have a purpose, or people would cut costs and eliminate them.
However, what I think is a fair complaint that many my fellow bureaucrats have is that we don’t have enough work to fill 40 hours, but still are required to be present and find a way to look busy for a good chunk of time, so as to not get fired.
My job isn’t useless. But it could be done in half the time, realistically.
Societies where all jobs consist of things you can imagine a pig in storybook doing are uniformly very poor places - and believe me, I have traveled to them.
Disagree by virtue of this article clashing with the example of teacher vs admin salaries. Somewhere in the guts of being a middle manager they have control over who makes the money out of productivity and they crank the knob to 11 for themselves and dial it down to 1 for the productive class.
The summary is that admins get paid way more than teachers so people sign up to be admin, so admins grow 10x more than teacher pools for very obvious reasons since people want to make money. The Middleman carves out more and more of the overall earnings for themselves away from the producer until they have enough money and institutional control that the producer becomes a de facto slave of the middleman.
eh decontextualized data like that doesn't really tell me anything, presenting percentage growth next to each other without telling us the base(s) should be a chart crime.
"Harvard is spending about $1.4 billion a year on “Salary Outlays for Full-time Non-medical School Non-instructional Staff,” according to its most recent filing with the federal government, a figure that is about double what Yale and the University of Chicago pay, and more than triple what Harvard devotes to paying professors and other teaching staff."
Looks like 1.4 bil for the admins, maybe 500 mill for the teachers. I think they measure starting from 2017 and I don't think the admins have turned out enough superior product (super students) to justify this increase.
Harvard is a world-class research institution and investment fund that also happens to have a teaching arm, modeling Harvard as "Instructional staff" vs "non-instructional staff" is missing a pretty obvious point.
Wait that's not what I said. My specific claim is that you misunderstood what Harvard does. Most non-teaching researchers at Harvard are technically "non-instructional staff" but you're imagining they're admins somewhere instead of people doing research on one of the best research institutions in the world.
The existence of bad middle-men or inefficiencies does not negate the basic premise that coordination jobs are important. Are there too many ed admin jobs? Are ed admin paid too much? Possibly. But is the proper number of admins ZERO? Definitely not.
Well this doesn’t make any sense at all economically. If people are being paid way too much to be middlemen, won’t the companies that pay their middlemen too much suffer if the middlemen don’t add enough productivity for what they’re paid or the “bang for their buck” is less than that of the producers?
Actually this might make sense under a public education system, where no profits are made and more of others’ money can be used. Yet another argument for privatization I guess, but that is obviously not what the David Graeber socialists want of course!
You can believe that the principle-agent problems are sufficiently large and uniformly distributed that even if individual firms without those problems would succeed economically, in practice none emerges.
I don't believe this model, but it's logically consistent.
Most "bullshit" jobs have nothing to do with coordination, and are more about a mutual rent-seeking arms race.
Companies hire DEI consultants and lawyers not because they solve some coordination problem, but simply to defend themselves from other lawyers and lawsuits.
Coca-cola and Pepsi spend billions on advertising even though their products are will known, but simply because its necessary to stay competitive with the other in an advertising arms race.
Middle managers and bureaucrats waste time with pointless meetings and make-work red tape as a way to keep more of the firm's resources within their fiefdom rather than having it go to a rival department.
Middlemen can be good, but there's tons of instances where they're not good. e.g., when employees are promoted to their level of incompetence in managerial positions (peter principle), when the perceived value of one's job is tied to how many people one employs ("flunkies"), when people intentionally inflate the importance of their job ("box tickers"), when the perceived value of one's job is tied to how much extra work one can assign ("taskmasters"), etc
What about the relative proportions, doesn't that matter? For example, in the US, ~40% of jobs are considered "white collar." They're significantly better compensated and theoretically produce more value (they definitely produce more GDP per job.).
And I haven't looked for a specific chart of it, but I'd bet that number has been steadily growing for a couple hundred years.
But when we think about the things that actually matter for quality of life, it's mostly stuff. Building houses, and the fact we don't / can't do that is why houses are so crazy and everyone is priced out. Public transport that lets the masses of people get where they need to go quickly and affordably. Manufactured goods - your TV's and cars and all the crap people buy on Amazon and Tik Tok. Infrastructure - cheap power only happens if we have a ton of power plants, and for that matter, an AI-or-compute oriented future only happens if we have a ton of power AND data centers.
Do we make ANY of that stuff? We do not, we basically suck. We can't even build houses, much less power plants or subways. There's 5 year backlogs on power plant interconnects because China makes the only grid-scale transformers. China makes every manufactured good, and can build power plants and subways and data centers way better than us.
So sure, we're "winning" by GDP, but in a "quantity has a quality all it's own way" we're probably losing in most futures that end up truly competitive. If we went to war with China? We're COMPLETELY screwed, because we literally don't and can't make anything, and they make approximately everything. Did you know China basically manufactures as much as the entire rest of the world combined? https://imgur.com/gVs8KSb
So sure, we have a bunch of insurance salesmen and HR ladies and finance bros coordinating their brainpower to milk pension funds in zero sum games, we have a ton of developers coordinating to harvest eyeball-hours such that time staring at phones has gone from 2 hours in 2014 to 4.5 hours today, and 7-9 hours in Zennials, but what value is that REALLY driving in the ways that matter?
We're "solving coordination problems!" Yeah, but those are mostly made up, solving coordination problems that are oriented around stuff that doesn't matter, or around smart people coordinating to milk dumber people at scale.
Eh I think this comment is confused for much of the same reason as what the original post was criticizing. I could make some comments on the object-level but it probably isn't enough to dispel the overall confusion.
- You're treating "lots of middlemen" and "can't build things" as evidence that middlemen are the problem. But the lack of building is stronger evidence of coordination failures than object level failures (It's not like the US lack cement, or is physically or economically unable to source cranes).
- It certainly is not evidence that the US has too much (?!) effective coordination relative to China in this domain.
- China's manufacturing successes (especially compared to other developing countries) are more due to decades build up in effective manufacturing processes, etc, than in (say) skilled factory labor. Skilled factory labor is relatively easy to train, compared to manufacturing processes, management, and logistics supply chains.
- It's mostly not true that what makes us happy is more stuff, at least on the margin.
- War is won through advanced technology, better logistics, and yes, greater manufacturing capacity. Effective coordination is often a bottleneck for all of these things.
- Your comment takes a very US-perspective even tho my article should be more generally applicable.
- I'm cynical of a lot of the direction that the US has gone but I think it's more due to values and cynical optimization against normal people, as you say. Certainly it's not evidence of superior coordination writ large.
- A coordination-first framing would probably point out that consumers are poorly coordinated compared to, say, a16z startups optimizing for ways to make a quick buck out of destroying the social contract. I don't think that framing is the entire story, but it's a lot of it.
My guess is that this is not enough to convince you, because the abstract primitives you operate on are quite different and I have not find a sufficiently clear way to dispel them. I do feel a bit bad about this; t means my article was not sufficiently clear.
> - You're treating "lots of middlemen" and "can't build things" as evidence that middlemen are the problem. But the lack of building is stronger evidence of coordination failures than object level failures (It's not like the US lack cement, or is physically or economically unable to source cranes).
Yeah, you're right my comment was a little muddled, but this is basically the core of it.
"Lots of middlemen" is the problem when A) we can't build things, and B) all those middlemen are used to dumb / bad ends.
The reason we can't build things is there's so many middlemen that have been used to create bad laws and regulatory apparatus around any actual doing of things, and which other middlemen can use to stop the building of anything.
> Skilled factory labor is relatively easy to train, compared to manufacturing processes, management, and logistics supply chains.
Okay, but we're bad at all that other stuff too!
You don't remember all the Covid shortages and supply chain problems? We couldn't manufacture cars for a few years. We couldn't do something as simple as unload our ports!
It's exactly the dynamic of managers over-optimizing all the slack out of systems to bump 10k's so they get their bonus that led to all our systems being so fragile that they broke when stressed.
Badly directed middlemen, used towards dumb ends, again.
> Certainly it's not evidence of superior coordination writ large.
But it is! On both fronts - not being able to build anything, the Covid shortages, smartphones stealing everyone's eyeball hours, online gambling bankrupting a ton of people while banning anybody actually making money. These are all the result of superior coordination, used towards bad, mostly short-term ends. Our coordination power is so puissant it's been used to shoot us in the foot really effectively, on a lot of fronts.
Having "more coordination" doesn't help if all the coordination is used against people, or to prevent anything good from happening. And that's exactly what's been happening.
> - A coordination-first framing would probably point out that consumers are poorly coordinated compared to, say, a16z startups optimizing for ways to make a quick buck out of destroying the social contract. I don't think that framing is the entire story, but it's a lot of it.
I agree, I personally frame this as the degree of optimization power on both sides.
In any big company, you have thousands of Phd's building incredibly fine grained models using oceans of data, to reach in and yank on whatever neurological and behavioral hooks they can find in the populace at large. I call it "the ten thousands Phd's," and it's been used on junk and fast food (result, 80% of Americans are overweight, and nearly 50% obese), it's been used on apps (result, the phone stuff I mentioned earlier), it's been used on online gambling, etc.
When thousands of Phd's with vast computing resources on one side of things target average people on the other, it's pretty obvious which side is going to win.
But that's "coordination!" They're doing coordination REALLY WELL. Just badly directed, towards bad ends, with purely short term thinking and financial goals.
And moving to a world with even more brain-and-optimization power on one side with the advent of Phd-smart AI's doesn't bode well for our society overall.
Back to your framing, I personally think the only solution is enlisting those Phd-smart minds on average people's sides. People need a Phd-smart assistant in their ear making arguments framed in the rhetoric and ways most likely to appeal to them and change their minds and behaviors for the better. A super-ego that works, in other words.
Because I truthfully don't think there's any cultural or legislative solution. All those big companies own a LOT of politicians, and everyone wants their stocks to keep going up. Strong coordination again!
With China’s recent rise and success with centralized planning, it’s too early to tell if the west really “won” the economization argument. We’ve become mired in regulations and private property to the point where we can no longer build. Perverse to say that is progress or ideal. Meanwhile China bulldozes whatever it needs to build thorium reactors and has ending poverty as one of its goals.
I agree a lot with this dichotomy between value creation and value coordination, and I agree that value coordination is often not appreciated to the extent it should, but I still largely think there’s an optimal balance between the two and that modern society has leaned too far into value coordination.
Take financialization for example. Having a financial system is almost certainly good! Having a stock market to decide where capital should be allocated is probably good. Having pump-n-dumps and insider trading and Korean stock market streamers seem far less straightforwardly good.
No system of value coordination is perfect, and there’s always money to be made by exploiting the flaws in the system. But that also means the more elaborate and abstract the system of value coordination, the more flaws bad actors can exploit. And so there’s an optimal amount of financialization, and an optimal amount of overhead in businesses, which balances the benefits of middlemen from the non-obvious ways the system of value coordination can be exploited. I think this is the mechanism that drives a lot of the ickiness people feel towards too much value coordination, and I don’t think it’s wrong (especially in our current day and age).
I don’t think there’s such a dichotomy between value creation and value coordination. If you believe that’s the point of my post, then i clearly failed in articulating my ideas well! :)
Re your point about breadth, I think I'm pushing back against a very large category of populist intuitions. "Middleman" was the best term I could think of. I agree it's not the best word, and if I was smarter I'd use a better word here.
As for your points about evidence, I have an argument. I laid down why I believe this argument is true. I agree that the article would be improved with hard data (eg RCTs of companies firing middle managers, or more clever natural experiments purporting to emulate the same). But convincing data wasn't easy to gather here, and I don't think it's necessary for people to understand the argument.
Someday I'm planning on doing a big write up on "Bullshit Jobs" that you brought up here. I've read some of that book and I'm just taken aback questioning why it was ever taken that seriously to begin with.
If the book was simply "An Anthology on the Phenomenon of Jobs that seemingly have little purpose" that would be a fine book. But instead he treats it as sort of "Social, Political, and Economic Treatise against this endemic intentional feature of late-stage capitalism" and that just loses me.
Sure, there really are some bullshit jobs out there. But the ones he cited were the absolute worst cases, that he only heard about from a survey he ran. Did some of the people working feel real psychological distress? Yes! But he also goes on to claim that since in some survey some majority of people thought their jobs were bullshit, then we must treat it as such!
As the economy becomes bigger the little sliver of work anyone might do becomes smaller and more abstract, which is good! But it also means some people "don't see the point" of their jobs. Some jobs are for reserve corporate capacity, some are for handling weird edge cases, some jobs are just designed poorly, and some are just forgotten on the org chart. But there is still value in most jobs, business owners aren't in the business of employing people for shits and gigs.
Anyway, as a former middleman I appreciate the post! Coordination involves so many little details that are annoying to even the middlemen whose job it is, much less the primary parties. If the pig is really great at butchering he shouldn't be spending his time haggling the exact supplier of transportation on the new butchering equipment he bought, that's not using his talents well!
I lost interest in reading the book based on what others criticized about it. I heard the author thinks highly useful jobs like “corporate lawyer” are bull shit jobs, as if the ability of companies to make and enforce contracts is useless!
I wrote this piece on bs jobs that I link to when the topic comes up: https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review
I think it's easy to be dismissive since Greaber's original book wasn't very rigorous, but fundamentally the idea is solid imo.
It's a really dumb book. It significantly lowered my respect for Anthropology as a discipline.
It’s a shame because his book on money and debt was flawed but a good counterpoint to economists equally flawed fairytales. This one is just “I’m a leftist academic and don’t actually understand the economy at all”
The bullshit jobs thesis, or at least the popular discourse version of it (since I haven't read Graeber's original work), to me has always felt like an argument from ignorance: "I don't understand what the point of this job is, therefore this job has no point."
Even in “real jobs” coordination is underrated. I work on manufacturing, a good team of machinists can be lifesavers, but even better is an engineering team that makes designs and fixes that can be done without skilled machinist. Those meetings and design work look and feel less real but provide lots of value
To me, the danger isn’t that middlemen aren’t important – as they are – but that it’s not very difficult for middlemen who enable effective coordination to be outcompeted by middlemen who actively impede it.
It’s not necessarily that Dilbert’s Boss is in a useless position; it might be really important for someone in it to be good at it. But I think a lot of people – very much not just nerds, at least here in Britain – sense that “being good at it” does often not really seem to be what’s being selected for in these positions.
And there is a plausible reason why, as well: in a field where the qualitative impact of your work is abstract and difficult to grasp, someone might do better just by… well, telling a story that’s concrete, and easy to grasp. The storytellers might spread until they dominate a system, even if their stories are wrong, and even if their stories are destructive of productivity.
Presumably in a non-monopoly *eventually* this might have catastrophic consequences. But I’m not convinced that ruthless market drive is actually stronger than… well, the story of a ruthless market drive, the impression of “a good boss who does good boss things.” The thing which is being optimised is not, necessarily, “being good at being a middleman.” And this is completely compatible with the idea good middlemen are vitally important; it just implies a great many middlemen won’t be good.
I agree that when your work is more abstract and harder to measure, it's a) easier for incompetent people to skate by, and b) the competitive dynamics are harder to assert on an individual level.
FWIW my guess is that mediocre (eg) managers are still significantly net positive in most for-profit organizations, and probably non-profit ones too, whereas people with the "folk" model I sometimes argue against would say things like "oh sure I agree that maybe the best managers in the world are great, I had one like that when I was 23, but the vast majority of managers are useless and should just get out of the way, right?" Which is not my position; I think both managers and ICs can be net negative maybe 5-30% of the time.
Also, I'm not actually sure whether practical variance in output quality among managers or ICs is higher. Eg, 10x and 100x programmers are a thing, I actually don't have a sense whether 10-100x difference in output quality between best and median managers are at all common (Though programming is just on the more measurable side of "knowledge work", less abstract jobs like say farming or factory work probably has lower output variance by individual).
Other relevant literature here includes "principal-agent problems" and "industrial organization/"
Dilbert's boss's one actual skill was knowing how to look good to his superiors regardless of what actually happens on the projects his engineers work on. For example:
Dilbert: I analyzed our only two options. One costs too much, and the other is impossible.
PHB: Let's do the impossible one.
Dilbert: Perhaps you can explain your reasoning.
PHB: According to you, we will fail either way. But if we fail in a slow and inexpensive way, no one will even notice for months. With any luck, we'll have a corporate reorganization that forever hides our gross incompetence.
Dilbert: Have you done this before?
PHB: Every six months.
I would agree that middlemen, in general, are necessary and that most jobs have a purpose, or people would cut costs and eliminate them.
However, what I think is a fair complaint that many my fellow bureaucrats have is that we don’t have enough work to fill 40 hours, but still are required to be present and find a way to look busy for a good chunk of time, so as to not get fired.
My job isn’t useless. But it could be done in half the time, realistically.
In government or in industry?
gov
Which country?
Societies where all jobs consist of things you can imagine a pig in storybook doing are uniformly very poor places - and believe me, I have traveled to them.
Nothing has ever baited my rage so precisely.
Disagree by virtue of this article clashing with the example of teacher vs admin salaries. Somewhere in the guts of being a middle manager they have control over who makes the money out of productivity and they crank the knob to 11 for themselves and dial it down to 1 for the productive class.
Then you end up with this: https://www.americanexperiment.org/district-admin-growth-10x-greater-than-student-teacher-growth/
The summary is that admins get paid way more than teachers so people sign up to be admin, so admins grow 10x more than teacher pools for very obvious reasons since people want to make money. The Middleman carves out more and more of the overall earnings for themselves away from the producer until they have enough money and institutional control that the producer becomes a de facto slave of the middleman.
eh decontextualized data like that doesn't really tell me anything, presenting percentage growth next to each other without telling us the base(s) should be a chart crime.
Here's one with some numbers: https://www.theeditors.com/p/harvard-spends-1-point-4-billion-a-year-on-noninstructional-staff-bloated-bureaucracy-ackman-garber
"Harvard is spending about $1.4 billion a year on “Salary Outlays for Full-time Non-medical School Non-instructional Staff,” according to its most recent filing with the federal government, a figure that is about double what Yale and the University of Chicago pay, and more than triple what Harvard devotes to paying professors and other teaching staff."
Looks like 1.4 bil for the admins, maybe 500 mill for the teachers. I think they measure starting from 2017 and I don't think the admins have turned out enough superior product (super students) to justify this increase.
Harvard is a world-class research institution and investment fund that also happens to have a teaching arm, modeling Harvard as "Instructional staff" vs "non-instructional staff" is missing a pretty obvious point.
>The data isn't good enough
>Harvard doesn't count as a group with middlemen
Ok I give up. I can't find a unicorn example that fits your increasingly higher bar.
Wait that's not what I said. My specific claim is that you misunderstood what Harvard does. Most non-teaching researchers at Harvard are technically "non-instructional staff" but you're imagining they're admins somewhere instead of people doing research on one of the best research institutions in the world.
The existence of bad middle-men or inefficiencies does not negate the basic premise that coordination jobs are important. Are there too many ed admin jobs? Are ed admin paid too much? Possibly. But is the proper number of admins ZERO? Definitely not.
I think it's the cumulative salaries that are a bigger problem then the existence of the job, at the very least.
Well this doesn’t make any sense at all economically. If people are being paid way too much to be middlemen, won’t the companies that pay their middlemen too much suffer if the middlemen don’t add enough productivity for what they’re paid or the “bang for their buck” is less than that of the producers?
Actually this might make sense under a public education system, where no profits are made and more of others’ money can be used. Yet another argument for privatization I guess, but that is obviously not what the David Graeber socialists want of course!
You can believe that the principle-agent problems are sufficiently large and uniformly distributed that even if individual firms without those problems would succeed economically, in practice none emerges.
I don't believe this model, but it's logically consistent.
Most "bullshit" jobs have nothing to do with coordination, and are more about a mutual rent-seeking arms race.
Companies hire DEI consultants and lawyers not because they solve some coordination problem, but simply to defend themselves from other lawyers and lawsuits.
Coca-cola and Pepsi spend billions on advertising even though their products are will known, but simply because its necessary to stay competitive with the other in an advertising arms race.
Middle managers and bureaucrats waste time with pointless meetings and make-work red tape as a way to keep more of the firm's resources within their fiefdom rather than having it go to a rival department.
And so on.
Middlemen can be good, but there's tons of instances where they're not good. e.g., when employees are promoted to their level of incompetence in managerial positions (peter principle), when the perceived value of one's job is tied to how many people one employs ("flunkies"), when people intentionally inflate the importance of their job ("box tickers"), when the perceived value of one's job is tied to how much extra work one can assign ("taskmasters"), etc
What about the relative proportions, doesn't that matter? For example, in the US, ~40% of jobs are considered "white collar." They're significantly better compensated and theoretically produce more value (they definitely produce more GDP per job.).
And I haven't looked for a specific chart of it, but I'd bet that number has been steadily growing for a couple hundred years.
But when we think about the things that actually matter for quality of life, it's mostly stuff. Building houses, and the fact we don't / can't do that is why houses are so crazy and everyone is priced out. Public transport that lets the masses of people get where they need to go quickly and affordably. Manufactured goods - your TV's and cars and all the crap people buy on Amazon and Tik Tok. Infrastructure - cheap power only happens if we have a ton of power plants, and for that matter, an AI-or-compute oriented future only happens if we have a ton of power AND data centers.
Do we make ANY of that stuff? We do not, we basically suck. We can't even build houses, much less power plants or subways. There's 5 year backlogs on power plant interconnects because China makes the only grid-scale transformers. China makes every manufactured good, and can build power plants and subways and data centers way better than us.
So sure, we're "winning" by GDP, but in a "quantity has a quality all it's own way" we're probably losing in most futures that end up truly competitive. If we went to war with China? We're COMPLETELY screwed, because we literally don't and can't make anything, and they make approximately everything. Did you know China basically manufactures as much as the entire rest of the world combined? https://imgur.com/gVs8KSb
So sure, we have a bunch of insurance salesmen and HR ladies and finance bros coordinating their brainpower to milk pension funds in zero sum games, we have a ton of developers coordinating to harvest eyeball-hours such that time staring at phones has gone from 2 hours in 2014 to 4.5 hours today, and 7-9 hours in Zennials, but what value is that REALLY driving in the ways that matter?
We're "solving coordination problems!" Yeah, but those are mostly made up, solving coordination problems that are oriented around stuff that doesn't matter, or around smart people coordinating to milk dumber people at scale.
Eh I think this comment is confused for much of the same reason as what the original post was criticizing. I could make some comments on the object-level but it probably isn't enough to dispel the overall confusion.
- You're treating "lots of middlemen" and "can't build things" as evidence that middlemen are the problem. But the lack of building is stronger evidence of coordination failures than object level failures (It's not like the US lack cement, or is physically or economically unable to source cranes).
- It certainly is not evidence that the US has too much (?!) effective coordination relative to China in this domain.
- China's manufacturing successes (especially compared to other developing countries) are more due to decades build up in effective manufacturing processes, etc, than in (say) skilled factory labor. Skilled factory labor is relatively easy to train, compared to manufacturing processes, management, and logistics supply chains.
- It's mostly not true that what makes us happy is more stuff, at least on the margin.
- War is won through advanced technology, better logistics, and yes, greater manufacturing capacity. Effective coordination is often a bottleneck for all of these things.
- Your comment takes a very US-perspective even tho my article should be more generally applicable.
- I'm cynical of a lot of the direction that the US has gone but I think it's more due to values and cynical optimization against normal people, as you say. Certainly it's not evidence of superior coordination writ large.
- A coordination-first framing would probably point out that consumers are poorly coordinated compared to, say, a16z startups optimizing for ways to make a quick buck out of destroying the social contract. I don't think that framing is the entire story, but it's a lot of it.
My guess is that this is not enough to convince you, because the abstract primitives you operate on are quite different and I have not find a sufficiently clear way to dispel them. I do feel a bit bad about this; t means my article was not sufficiently clear.
> - You're treating "lots of middlemen" and "can't build things" as evidence that middlemen are the problem. But the lack of building is stronger evidence of coordination failures than object level failures (It's not like the US lack cement, or is physically or economically unable to source cranes).
Yeah, you're right my comment was a little muddled, but this is basically the core of it.
"Lots of middlemen" is the problem when A) we can't build things, and B) all those middlemen are used to dumb / bad ends.
The reason we can't build things is there's so many middlemen that have been used to create bad laws and regulatory apparatus around any actual doing of things, and which other middlemen can use to stop the building of anything.
> Skilled factory labor is relatively easy to train, compared to manufacturing processes, management, and logistics supply chains.
Okay, but we're bad at all that other stuff too!
You don't remember all the Covid shortages and supply chain problems? We couldn't manufacture cars for a few years. We couldn't do something as simple as unload our ports!
It's exactly the dynamic of managers over-optimizing all the slack out of systems to bump 10k's so they get their bonus that led to all our systems being so fragile that they broke when stressed.
Badly directed middlemen, used towards dumb ends, again.
> Certainly it's not evidence of superior coordination writ large.
But it is! On both fronts - not being able to build anything, the Covid shortages, smartphones stealing everyone's eyeball hours, online gambling bankrupting a ton of people while banning anybody actually making money. These are all the result of superior coordination, used towards bad, mostly short-term ends. Our coordination power is so puissant it's been used to shoot us in the foot really effectively, on a lot of fronts.
Having "more coordination" doesn't help if all the coordination is used against people, or to prevent anything good from happening. And that's exactly what's been happening.
> - A coordination-first framing would probably point out that consumers are poorly coordinated compared to, say, a16z startups optimizing for ways to make a quick buck out of destroying the social contract. I don't think that framing is the entire story, but it's a lot of it.
I agree, I personally frame this as the degree of optimization power on both sides.
In any big company, you have thousands of Phd's building incredibly fine grained models using oceans of data, to reach in and yank on whatever neurological and behavioral hooks they can find in the populace at large. I call it "the ten thousands Phd's," and it's been used on junk and fast food (result, 80% of Americans are overweight, and nearly 50% obese), it's been used on apps (result, the phone stuff I mentioned earlier), it's been used on online gambling, etc.
When thousands of Phd's with vast computing resources on one side of things target average people on the other, it's pretty obvious which side is going to win.
But that's "coordination!" They're doing coordination REALLY WELL. Just badly directed, towards bad ends, with purely short term thinking and financial goals.
And moving to a world with even more brain-and-optimization power on one side with the advent of Phd-smart AI's doesn't bode well for our society overall.
Back to your framing, I personally think the only solution is enlisting those Phd-smart minds on average people's sides. People need a Phd-smart assistant in their ear making arguments framed in the rhetoric and ways most likely to appeal to them and change their minds and behaviors for the better. A super-ego that works, in other words.
Because I truthfully don't think there's any cultural or legislative solution. All those big companies own a LOT of politicians, and everyone wants their stocks to keep going up. Strong coordination again!
With China’s recent rise and success with centralized planning, it’s too early to tell if the west really “won” the economization argument. We’ve become mired in regulations and private property to the point where we can no longer build. Perverse to say that is progress or ideal. Meanwhile China bulldozes whatever it needs to build thorium reactors and has ending poverty as one of its goals.
I agree a lot with this dichotomy between value creation and value coordination, and I agree that value coordination is often not appreciated to the extent it should, but I still largely think there’s an optimal balance between the two and that modern society has leaned too far into value coordination.
Take financialization for example. Having a financial system is almost certainly good! Having a stock market to decide where capital should be allocated is probably good. Having pump-n-dumps and insider trading and Korean stock market streamers seem far less straightforwardly good.
No system of value coordination is perfect, and there’s always money to be made by exploiting the flaws in the system. But that also means the more elaborate and abstract the system of value coordination, the more flaws bad actors can exploit. And so there’s an optimal amount of financialization, and an optimal amount of overhead in businesses, which balances the benefits of middlemen from the non-obvious ways the system of value coordination can be exploited. I think this is the mechanism that drives a lot of the ickiness people feel towards too much value coordination, and I don’t think it’s wrong (especially in our current day and age).
I don’t think there’s such a dichotomy between value creation and value coordination. If you believe that’s the point of my post, then i clearly failed in articulating my ideas well! :)
Re: rent-seeking, I agree rent-seeking is real and it's legitimately a hard problem to disentangle rent-seeking from real coordination work. But most populist critiques go too far in the other way (eg examples in David Graeber's book includes HR departments). See eg https://inchpin.substack.com/p/inconvenient-facts#:~:text=other%20things)%2C%20etc.-,Bullshit%20jobs%20do%20exist.,-Belief%3A%20Middlemen
Re your point about breadth, I think I'm pushing back against a very large category of populist intuitions. "Middleman" was the best term I could think of. I agree it's not the best word, and if I was smarter I'd use a better word here.
As for your points about evidence, I have an argument. I laid down why I believe this argument is true. I agree that the article would be improved with hard data (eg RCTs of companies firing middle managers, or more clever natural experiments purporting to emulate the same). But convincing data wasn't easy to gather here, and I don't think it's necessary for people to understand the argument.