The Job Solution

For years I have been wondering how the world's 7 billion people will cope with the lack of jobs. It turns out that the answer is built into our system, and all of us know it.

In BULLSHIT JOBS by David Graeber, the author estimates that about 40% of the jobs in America are pointless nothings without social value. An obvious example is deans in a university. Their job is to invent useless committees to absorb faculty time. There are entire industries that contribute nothing (telemarketing, spamming).  

To some extent, this is reassuring. What we have done for centuries, as we industrialized and robotized work, is invent make-work non-tasks to keep people employed filing papers and so on. They get pay checks. Socialism by another name. We don’t have to fear that a robot will take our jobs, because we will end up in supervising people who supervise computers generating reports on robot oil maintenance.  

I had already noticed that deciding whether colleges deserve accreditation is infinitely expandable in terms of work. It alone can provide jobs for every adult in the United States. First, you insist that every citizen must get a Ph.D. That will require immense college staffing. Second, you set each college to evaluating another.  I'm oversimplifying, but that's how the centuries-old system maintains full employment and leaves time free for Facebook at work.

Graeber argues that instead of continuing this old form of socialism, we just give everyone enough money to live on and free people to decide on their own how to spend their time and enjoy their lives. But a system like that would lack certain things we badly need (we apparently need to punish the poor, segregate people of color, underpay women, etc.).