Chomsky on David Graeber

be quick but um did you um first of all did you actually have any um uh uh Association or any comments on on the passing of David Graber uh in the past year public intellectual uh did you know him I didn't I didn't know him personally but I knew his work very well very important figure did wonderful work did wonderful work yeah he was a leader in the Occupy Movement uh and he was uh oh constantly talking about he was an anthropologist but also it was one of the big supporters of the Kurdish movement a scholarly work broke up in a lot of areas of the richness and achievements of pre what's called increased our exercise meaning they showed a lot of cultural wealth richness and there's an anarchist these days strong arguments to show that the imposition of the state system undermined lots of achievements that have been made very valuable work very valuable work yeah and that was what one thing to touch on is um you know uh he uh talked a lot about um kind of how our Notions of you know efficiency and you know public uh you know public good and private good are are pretty Twisted so I wrote a great book on jobs yeah uh most of the work that's being done is just kind of shuffling papers to keep something happening get through it and they could be really productive work that people need so that's worth thinking about when you think about the alleged threat of automation I mean there's an awful lot of work that's done just in managing systems that isn't really necessary at all I mean you can see it in the United States one place where you see it dramatically is if you go into a hospital um before you can you know you go into the emergency room to try to do a number of times and before you can even be looked at you have to fill a lot of paperwork out you know is the insurance company going to pay for it is there a smoke something in the small print you didn't notice that so you have to show I can pay for it myself and on and on and if you walk through the wards of it the best hospitals in the country Mass General I mean go through the cancer award uh there's a at the center of the floor there's about bunch of disks where about 20 people are working on Administration yeah no because I mean in Canada you know in fact it was a study by Harvard Medical School comparing the best hospital in the United States Mass General with the best hospital in Toronto and just comparing it in many respects and one of the questions they looked at when they went to the Toronto Hospital as they asked where's the billing department but the kind of blanks there finally somebody said oh yeah there's an office down in the basement for Americans who come here we have to have a feeling in the United States that's half the hospital

Channel: Institute of David Graeber

Views: 18,008

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Id: BqHUld22H1s

Length: 3min 41sec (221 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022