David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

he means self-determination it's the ability to choose and I think that that's what we all should have a right to and that's what we're all fighting for public debate is vital in a Democratic Society because that the public doesn't take part then the politicians take over and decide everything for themselves and a place like the Bali is important because that's where the public gets to say what they think of shape their opinions and listen to debate it's incredibly inclusive that people continue to speak out in as well acknowledge the limitations and taking responsibility for questioning their limitations with knowledge comes a certain beauty in a position to take action on that particularly in this very noisy fast culture documentary does I think is to take time to make meaning document era films that good cynical for me it's sort of like about amazing about who's et but long enough yokka quantanium of lira and the valley is so bleak very warm welcome to all of you in this evening at Bali yeah that's the good thing if you're the last one it's only in the front we have seats left welcome at this evening my name is Esther phonetic and we are here together because of the Dutch translation translation of David crebbs book about jobs it may be a bit of a scary night how many of you have read the book quite a few I would say for those looking at listening at home probably about 15 percent this night will be streamed so whenever you want to say something please wait for the mic and we're going to be talking to and with you a lot we hope so before I introduce David I want you all to take your telephone because we're going to use that normally I say switch off your telephone do switch it off but now I also want you to take it because we want to get to know you a little bit and so Donna if we can switch to Manta meter it's very easy because you're going to you're going to be using your phone as well to put questions forward but first I want to introduce you to the tool a little bit so please go to mental comb you can just use the browser because it doesn't use a lot of data or anything just do it on your 4G or otherwise take the Wi-Fi from the cafe which is an open Wi-Fi and then if you put forward two code six four two three six seven and then maybe you want to answer this question I am what comes up what are you who are you whatever ah happy we have happy people in the room that's good I hope you're gonna stay happy because I can tell you I was a bit scared when I started reading the book because I was so afraid I was gonna find out I had a job actually and maybe some of you will find out tonight that when you really think about it you do have a job I don't know if that's bad I found out I'm not a concept job because I'm not employed so I was very happy I'm self-employed I think you have to define other ways because still I can be totally useless of course but good so you're all curious you're tired of course intrigued skeptical hungry oh my god a vegan we have a vegan where's the vegan in the house the vegan in the house is earlier there's three vegans in the house good we have makers we have somebody we have energetic with young and lazy we have everything that's good let me put it forward and I'm gonna put you into this funnel a little bit and go to the next question if you want to switch yeah now here you have to really choose now you can't decide for yourself you are what are you employed self-employed like me and you can't have a job which is good our student our there's many employed people so those are gonna find out today if they didn't know already if you have a job good okay that's a clear we have about how many people are there here melanne 160 okay and 106 logged in you can still do it up in front and you can do it whenever you want so this tool we're gonna be using and you can also use it to put questions forward you see a little in the middle of your screen you see this little square and where it says question you could put a question forward there it's very good tool because people sometimes would like to like make a speech which makes my job more difficult but here you have to do it like in maybe 200 signs over there farm and the good thing is if you have a really a good question you can vote for each other's questions so if there's a question with you with the audience and everybody says this really needs an answer do vote for each other's questions and we will definitely put them forward to David I've reserved the last part of the evening for that I really want to take time for that so 2025 minutes but if really and stuff comes up and I will be chatting here with him and if you guys get bored put the questions format there my line will drag me out of it and say yes so this total wrong interview the people here want to know different things so then we'll just switch to you I promise good David I want to go to the next one Murr Lang so what comes to mind when we say David Graeber maybe you don't know him maybe you do what's issued to you yeah philosophy master house some people may have seen him in the master house where he was a couple years ago sociology is bold statements no clue says somebody Switzer he's the guy sitting next to me oh hello well good he's a genius somebody says now if you want to say yeah I too think he's a genius then write it down and it gets bigger and we got a proper word clouds about who day if it really is or at least who we think he is because you'll get to know him better tonight occupy he was he's seen as one of the heroes of Occupy he's an anthropologist he's holistic an original thinker I think it's time we get David here to see if this is all a good picture of David can I have a big round of applause please for David Ragan welcome thank you so what do you think when you see this I'm kind of shocked and disturbed what you what you put in the middle what would be your main thing I don't know I don't know I'll leave it to others to decide who I am yeah I think so too that's probably the best way to go well occupy here oh it's in here you're professor of anthropology is a longer School of Economics you've written a couple of books it's death so there was a book on the history of death or first five thousand years was the title in English yeah and after you've read it then what do you know who didn't they're very short versions 566 pages on you you know that that that existed before money that everything they tell you about the history of economics is probably wrong let's all read it then we know why this to economics is all wrong you have also been called a professor of resistance and revolution why is that well I don't know considering I don't teach it at all I'm actually a very conventional anthropologist in a lot of ways I have been in a kind of a two-track career than that way because I had I write stuff for activist audiences as well but not for academic ones in academic venues I kind of mix it up a little bit I back in 2000 I got involved in the global justice movement and I've been kind of doing that kind of thing ever since and then for some that immediately makes you a revolutionary yeah people my employers of the time we're not happy at all that that's why I'm no longer in America I kind of got kicked out of the American Academy you know you gotta be a little sad being kicked out of your country but I like where I am now yeah seven years I everyplace I applied for a job like I was just next immediately yeah in America everywhere else in the world everybody want to talk now you came to your ear yeah you go far enough and you ended up in Britain that's okay we can always have you okay first we're gonna give you the floor for about 10 12 minutes you're gonna give us I don't know the introduction to the book yeah well we're gonna have them interview and see what happens okay okay another round of applause please I guess what I should talk about is is how I came to write the book these is kind of an interesting story I'm an anthropologist by profession and I've always felt them an anthropologist in two ways the whole idea of anthropology is a a clueless outsider sometimes can see things that people who really know what's going on can't that you know if you're there's got to be some reason that someone who actually doesn't come from a place you know just shows up will have some insights that that people who've lived there all their lives won't have I always think it's a little like learning a foreign language right you know well you you notice connections between words and native speakers and ever notice and in a similar way I was I'm an anthropologist by profession in my fieldwork in Madagascar but I also always felt him a little bit of an anthropologist or an outsider in the world of academia itself I don't come from that kind of background and you know I've always felt there's something a little odd that I don't really understand it I'm trying to figure out the rules and and this is even more true of this sort of professional managerial about classes of people that I've circulate around academia you kind of meet them in parties often they're married to academics and I kept having this experience where I would meet people and I'd say oh so I'm anthropologist what do you do and they'd say oh nothing really and you know I thought they were just being modest right so you know you press them a little bit you get a few drinks later they admit that actually no they meant it literally they literally do nothing all day meeting these people would say yeah I just basically do cat names all day or update my facebook profile I don't tell my boss but really I mean you could do my job in an hour two hours a week you know so that was my first inkling so I started asking people what do you really do these people have office jobs and so more and more of them either said they really didn't do anything at all or are they what they did was totally pointless or they felt it would be easily automated or sometimes they felt their entire industry shouldn't exist I mean I'll admit a lot of people like that they'd say well you know I'm a corporate lawyer it's all yeah I'm a telemarketer it shouldn't you know horrible industry shouldn't exist so I'd be you know wonder how common is this and around that time I had a friend who is starting up a new magazine it was a kind of an arc a feminist magazine called strike and my friend said why don't you publish something in our new issue just anything you want you have anything lying around that no one else would ever publish I thought yeah I got some stuff like that so okay what drunken party rant who would no one ever possibly publish I know all right something about the job phenomena so I put this piece together it was almost like a joke I said no 100 years ago John Maynard Keynes said that by now we'd all be working a 15 hour a week automation will replace most of our jobs and will we be living lives of luxury and leisure and and if you look at the jobs that actually existed in the 1930s well mostly they are automated away I mean most of them no longer exist in fact we could be working 15 hour weeks but instead if you look at what's happened you had this huge increase in these administrative clerical managerial and supervisory jobs basically just the jobs or people say that it's really they're not really doing anything so I said well maybe it's almost as if there was some evil genius out there making up jobs just to keep us working we've all got this idea that everybody should be working all the time we it's wrong the people to get something for nothing so so it's better for us to sort of sit there and pretend to work all day then then to just sort of sit back or live lives of ease and luxury and I wrote it as I say almost as a joke but actually the funny story III my girlfriend at the time decided we needed to get away from the world so he went off to this cabinet in the countryside of a basket of books we went to a place of no wireless I just had my phone and that was the week that this article came out and I was sort of staring slack-jawed of my phones like oh my god this thing it went immediately viral all over the world within two weeks it had been translated and that's what I think 13 different languages it's up to 24 by now actually it the server kept crashing it got reproduced in newspapers all over the world people started writing these confessions on the comment section of he's saying things like oh my god it's true I'm a corporate lawyer I contribute nothing to society I got miserable all the time no one knows my secret pain and there's more and more of this and people starting oh you think that's a job you know let me tell you about my job just became this strange global phenomena I got people sending me notes saying hi I work in the financial services industry I've got this article across my desk 20 times just today you know I've been distributing we formed a team and I was like wow you guys really aren't doing much are you I thought you guys were busy all the time in finance anyway so so went crazy and gradually one thing led to another I mean I thought at this point wow this is much much worse than I thought so I thought maybe 20% 25% of jobs would fit this category jobs and I defined jobs as jobs which even the person doing it secretly believes shouldn't exist either because you know if that job were to disappear they feel that either it would make no difference whatsoever or the world might be a slightly better place so you know what does that do to you everyday walking into a job where you secretly believe the job shouldn't be there what does that do to your sense of yourself and I mean maybe people really are miserable and this is something we can't talk about and apparently it was it was true but um I didn't realize quite how common it was at this point I said maybe 15 20 percent of jobs seem to be this way but eventually one thing led to another and somebody did an actual survey it was you gov and then later apparently says I'm one did one here in Holland and they came up with basically identical results and in the UK 37 percent of all employees said their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world and and here in the Netherlands it was actually higher it was a forty percent and those are people who are sure you know there was also the people who you know maybe I don't know so only only fifteen only half of all workers actually knew for sure that their job made any difference at all I thought that was amazing so what I did was I started advertising on Twitter I have a lot of followers on Twitter so I said all right tell me about your most pointless job if you ever had a job that was just completely useless I want to know all about it you know since I made up a email account do I have ABS job or wat at gmail.com you can still send things to it if you like I think because you know I mean you're not allowed to use the word in a gmail title but I got about 300 different narratives testimonies of people who had jobs and using that I began to put together a little sociological typology of what kind of jobs they are and how they happen so maybe I'll end with that I ended up by distinguishing between five major types based on the things that people sent in I emphasize that these are overwhelmingly office jobs I mean there are people with kind of working-class jobs there's no museum guards who guard rooms of nothing in it that was one guy wrote to me there's things like that yeah and they're really horrible but but for the most part these jobs are actually really good jobs um they're paid pretty well they have good benefits you get treated with respect you know often people would say that that was what made it so bizarre that you know if I have a job where you're actually doing something useful used to be a gardener I used to be a preschool teacher they didn't pay me so I had to get a job working in an office doing nothing but then they gave me lots of money and everybody treated me like I was a success and you know people are really confused what to make of that because is actually one of the things that that emerged from my research is that there seems to be a general rule that the more your work actually and obviously benefits other human beings the less that they're going to pay you to do it so so the more useless or even you know harmful your job the more you get paid and the more respect and and and social status you get from having it so you know there's nothing more useful than a garbage collector but you don't get treated that well and so people would have the situation where you know Here I am I my family considers me to be the member of my family who's been most successful I put on a suit I go to work every day you know but secretly I know that I work in a firm with three times as many managers as workers you know we're all just sitting there staring at each other and do you know what what do what do I make of this do I tell other people do I tell my co-workers as my supervisor know that I'm actually not doing anything you know the the it people are only haunted by this phenomena and and and they the fact that they were treated of such respect and paid so much actually made it worse you know so people had feelings of guilt anxiety depression they tarted treating each other very badly in the workplaces a lot of people would say that the more pointless the job more people scream at each other and mistreat each other and believe other so all right so these are office jobs are well respected but they're pointless and they seem to be a huge increasing sector of economy I came up with a typology of five different types and all as I sell and with that I would distinguish between what I call flunkies goons duct tape box stickers and taskmasters I'll go through them one by one and then we can do the interview part a flunkey that's kind of obvious a flunkies a person who's basically just there to make someone else look or feel good about themselves there's a lot of these jobs in fact often corporate managers executives their status is measured by how many people they have working under them so they have no incentive to fire anybody who's unnecessary so they sort of accumulate these sort of useless people that that are there almost like feudal retainers you know they sort of sit around making you look impressive and there's a lot of those kind of jobs and for example there's a lot of companies that have like two or three receptionist even though there's only they only get one call a day they're just therapies they want to have someone making them look impressive with their millions of jobs like that the second type are goons goons are a little weird because I hadn't necessarily thought that they were jobs myself but so many people wrote to me and described themselves as having a job but people who are telemarketers people who were corporate lawyers people who work in public relations merchandising marketing those people often said well you know I'm useful to the company but I'm only useful to the company because our competitors also employ someone like me you don't need to tell a marketer the only reason you might need a telemarketer is because if your competitor as a telemarketer so that's a little like you know if the first one is a little like fetal retainers the second one is a little like futile lower right he's a feudal lord you know in theory their job is to protect the peasants but who are they protecting the peasants from other feudal lords right so if there are no feudal lords you don't need a feudal lord similarly if there are no corporate lawyers you don't need a corporate lawyer if there are no telemarketers you don't need a telemarketer and so forth so people would say well my job is useful but the entire industry is okay so that's a goon then you have duct tape I'll speed up through the last ones a duct taper is basically someone who is there to solve a problem that shouldn't exist a great example of this hi I ran into when I was at my first university I was out in England there was one point when I needed a carpenter the shelves collapsed in my office there's a big hole in the wall books everywhere and I tried to get the carpenter and they office like ended up calling the carpenter for every day calling buildings and grounds I ended up calling for two weeks we spent trying to get the carpenter and we realised there was one guy and his entire job was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter didn't come there's a very nice man you know he's good at his job you really felt bad you know sorry to bother you it's okay you know but you can't imagine he was very happy doing that for a living and you know there was always his voice going through my head saying can't they just fire that guy and hire another carpenter had two carpenters they wouldn't need it right so that's a classic example of a duct tape er yeah it's as if you have a hole in the ceiling and instead of fixing it you put a bucket there and you hire some guy to empty the bucket every hour all right okay so there's a lot of jobs like that Bach stickers are people who basically are there that are so that an organization a company a government whatever it might be an organization can say that they're doing something that they're not actually doing so there are people in government they're the people who write English Commission's of inquiry there's a problem you pretend you're investigating but a lot of a lot of businesses like it's all about filling out forms saying you've done something there's whole industries like compliance compliance and banks you know there's all or corporations have to have legions of people to make them pretend that they're following regulations are not following so that's one whole industry and then finally there's task masters and task masters are there to essentially either a supervise people who don't need supervision and there's a lot of that like most middle managers actually I mean they wrote to me people would say I'm a middle manager it's a job I mean I used to do this job I know they don't need some middle manager to tell them what to do or alternately to make up for other people to do and that's actually what middle managers will eventually do if they figure out that you know just sitting there is boring people don't need supervision so you assign them pointless tasks you make up box picking rituals for them to do so so those are the five basic types and and the big question is why these have multiplied over the years but perhaps we'll get to that soon take a seat fix eat have some water and I'll go maybe already go into the audience bit because there's there's not a lot of fighting going on but there is a leading question and it's immediately we're getting a bit scientific I think who post posted the question how do you prevent election bias since people with jobs are more likely to respond to a questionnaire all the way in the back I'll come because this is how I'm gonna thank you guys for posing a question so it's are you saying I can't get there yeah now I was going to ask you if you're a scientist and it's the rationale behind it if you can done if you can put it on the screen if you go to men tomater then I will put it for it's a rationale behind it is it may be that you say because they have jobs they probably don't have anything to do and they're filling in the question ok that's the question David that's it into zyb I'm not a pollster I assume that they thought of that as him you know basic stuff like that but a polling organization that did the survey it wasn't me I'm sorry but the people at home can't hear you if you if you go into a debate from there so either tell me and I'll tell him so what's your question yeah if you come up with figures okay is it scientific scientific okay yeah the Guv in England and I don't remember the name of the polling agency but these are the people who do political surveys who do all the you know they're the standard scientific survey people no I'm sorry I'm gonna have to stop you because nobody can hear you and also we want to move on to the next one I'm there's the the voting has gone up that's why I put the wrong one in front first but let me this one now has seven files is there a correlation between the prevalence of the jobs per country and the rate of depression seems to be that some people think well maybe it's oppression that's that we're measuring well it's very interesting because a lot of people who had these jobs were very depressed and often they couldn't quite figure out why you know part of the reason part of the experience is you know you're saying well I'm getting something for nothing why am I so sad you know and and I think that has to do a very deep misunderstanding about human Nate you know we have this idea that people are economics teaches us that there were these all kind of we are these rational engines of maximization we we all want to put out the least effort and get the most reward but in fact these are people who basically are asked to put out almost no effort in many cases and get all sorts of rewards and and they're very very unhappy people I think it shows us that people are not really the way we are taught to imagine that they are but but it causes people to be very depressed and if you think about it what is depression I mean a lot of it has to do with a sense of pointlessness you know nothing has any meaning there's no real reason to do anything there's and it's almost as if these jobs are objectively trying to create the experience of depression by making depression objectively true at least during the time that you're at work so I think it's true I mean there are statistics yeah yeah Devin what's gonna be my question do you know if it's true or do you think it's no I know that there are statistics that have shown that rates of depression go up in societies in consumers design we don't know if those people who say I have a job no but societies which the societies which our consumer societies do seem to be the ones which have a higher rate of songs but no one's actually looked directly at that okay let's go and see if you guys think you have a job Murr Lang if you can close this question and go to the next one maybe but we have really didn't at the yeah you you are very eager okay good sure wait for the mic please because otherwise the people at home can hear it because we're being streamed that's approaches a little bit too nasty question it stinks in my mind so I have to ask it can we hear it is it wrong so you talk about jobs but you mentioned five categories but what about the world academia where you come from there are lots of people there produce paper staff to produce you have to publish or perish they get all the time free actually this whole world maybe 70% and the world of the free enterprise you mentioned already in your book as many shale does they are very critical the same how we cannot have two people explains in the beginning that you're the reason we're using the tool good question so how are your colleagues you ask them I mean the entire course you did the entire criteria that I use is is that you know if you have a job you know it the best the best only method to use is to ask people what you say yes yes I'm not deciding yet has but we're asking to be nothing more obnoxious than me going out saying you your job is you you're okay now I do not claim to know whose job is worthwhile what I'm interested in is people who feel their own jobs aren't worthwhile on why my impression is there are some academics who feel that way about themselves but not that many because teaching is I mean if nothing else even if you feel your research is people usually do not feel the teaching as a pointless exercise you know you see your students learn things and understand things that they didn't understand before in a way it's the best least labor you can possibly do in the meantime the audience has been answering this question I had a job it's kind of what you were it's pretty much it's quite a lot you also write warned me that if we ask them if they've had one once they will admit but if we go to the next question do you have one now obviously no one's gonna say yes yes I mean that was a whole nother topic where it's right moments that you have a job or a boyfriend or a blitz well yeah I mean I think that whoa let's just turned around how does it go down yeah how did it go so we probably don't know isn't it I'll have one now yes well they're exactly so everybody had them in the past but no one has one now right so is it kind of the same as having a boyfriend without knowing it no because because I mean it's possible to have one and not know it and this is something which is actually interesting because people will often say oh you're just asking people that doesn't make any sense because you know how a lot of people might not understand how their work really contributes to the company and you know yes in theory that is true but if you're working for 10 20 years at a job and it seems like it's pointless but actually there's some way that it's really important what's the chance no one's ever gonna tell you that you know on the other hand look at it the other way imagine you're sitting there gathering data which is going to be used for a report that actually no one ever reads well that no one's gonna tell you that they don't read it and that's a very thing they won't tell you so it's much more likely that along you know you're gonna get people under reporting the real numbers if you just ask them do we think do you think we have to celebrate those 15 people who sit there I think they were very brave you know do you think we get them to stand up no that's really mean okay anybody wants to I want to get people fired so you you have a job sir let's keep it a name but I work in finance interesting your point of view I really like my job but my clients like what I offer them and things go well etc but the added value of what I do is equivalent to someone going to casino basically at the end of the day there's no NFL we don't raise capital or help companies do anything we make people have money make more money or lose bit of money just equivalent of playing a slot machine but then high finance telemetry how happy are you in your job I I enjoy going to work every day every morning I come home I enjoy myself working job my colleagues international and have fun together everybody speaks three four languages who pays the bills the pays bills really well it's true so I can't complain about that but when I hear that one of my interns after six months left start up his own firm works with artificial artificial intelligence to disrupt the recruitment industry for example then I think maybe all our intelligence etc and our university experience could be you feel like being disruptive is so much more useful yeah I would just be creative or have a social impact so it's not that I dislike my job okay or it's not necessary okay David can you be happy thank you so much give a big applause please for this guy can you be happy can you be happy in a job it is possible but it's not common I think according to the statistics from here from the Netherlands about 6% of people said they both had pointless jobs and enjoyed them a much larger number were unhappy I think that there's various reasons that could be the case of a few people did write to me and said I have a job it's great only three or four but the thing they all hadn't won is a substitute teacher one was a French tax official one was and and the thing they all had in common was a they knew what they were getting into yeah they were under no illusions that this was going to be something it wasn't - they liked their co-workers and three well they didn't have anybody supervising them okay so it made them autonomous yes when you think I'm checking my email I'm not I'm taking whatever you're posting and we have her wait wait a minute we have a last one here let's move to the next slides meringue so this is actually only for those 15 people or maybe some of you were in doubt no no I they can all answer it this is actually interesting because how it's your job how does a job have to be before you say it's a job you know that's that's an interesting question there's a lot of people say my job that 52% but the 48 percent I do is really important yeah like a nurse nurses spend half their time doing paper yeah and the other half the other half is really important yeah well we're ending up here at a 4.3 so everybody knows a bit what you're talking about and we all run into it's okay there was a survey done of American office workers and it said that the average office worker spends at three point seven hours out of their eight-hour day actually doing something useful and the rest is just wasted effort yeah mails paperwork yeah okay okay thanks so much let me put forward another one that has the most votes from the audience so we'll put this one in I don't think we're thinking yeah here in the front yes that's a good question or there are they saying yes it will it's artificial intelligence okay can we have your name please yes my name is Darwin determine that you have 13 votes so everybody really likes your question thank you for now can you will artificial intelligence skillet know no artificial intelligence is making it worse in certain sectors even though it's making it better than others basically digitization computers have I would argue have had opposite effect depending on whether you're dealing with something which is more like manufacturing or something which the other poll would be what I call carrying labor you know anything that's an education health taking care of attending to the needs of other people now if you apply AI computers in general digitization to to manufacturing or even sorting fruit you know that'll make it much more efficient more productivity goes up and prices go down at least in terms of quality so you have deflation and techno Google deflation they call it however if you look at education and health and things like that actually there's inflation the reason why is actually digitalization AI as so far as I can make out makes it less productive because you know you know if I'm if they apply computers to what I do what that means is I have to spend half my time taking what are basically qualitative human relations and turning them into something that a computer can even understand and only humans can do that work and that's work they have to do when they could have been doing their actual jobs are you saying that those qualitative human relationships are very important yes sube nothing can be more important okay that brings us to the next question Merline because aren't we basically talking about what is the value of work yes okay let's see what you guys think when we ask you what is the value of work if when I'm managers here the interaction on that computer is a bit weird can you manage to get it away the little cross on the top right yeah and then we go to the next one ah what is for you guys the value of work and I would guess that the the banker guy would say well it's whatever they pay me not actually the banker guy said so he said that yes and people do have a conception of social value which is different than I mean I'm a simple economist I don't say to tell you is whatever somebody else wants to pay for you that's what it's that's what an economist would say but it's obviously more meaning it's getting bigger impact but that means love has no value some people pay for yeah I was moderating an event last week for a group of organizations that work in with people who have a very high distance to the labor market so there's also she Oliver Platt for the social working places and there people are begging to work and to do maybe sometimes even the silliest things but I really really want to work so to fail you for dance working yeah it's doing something other people are doing being part of a group stuff like that how would you define it well this is very interesting because I was just trying to get a sense of what people mean when they say social value yeah because people would often say that like my work it gives me lots of money but it has no social value well what is social value and I think really caring for other people and taking care of you know in a way all meaningful work is an extension of caring labor I mean even if you're making a bridge you know you're making a bridge because you care that people can cross the river you can we can't read the tiny letters here but sharing friends but still money is quite big money and meanings seem to be owe me money okay well I write love has gotten really big anyway yes but but I think caring love is just kind of the same thing is is in fact I actually tried I came up with an idea I don't have time to develop it now that instead of production and consumption we should substitute caring and freedom maybe caring is necessary taking out what signals what is that that's something somebody put a silly word I don't know if we should like it as silliness yeah you have really a you will probably spend your day with exactly doing that yeah well actually one of the arguments of my book is that if you look at the kind of popular culture you saw in them to say the 1960s you know and all the stuff that took a lot you needed a lot of time like Bo if you take LSD it lasts for hours you're just out of commission all this like poem but beat poetry went on and on yeah the 20 minute drum solo and and you know nowadays is like cat memes YouTube rants all these little self-contained things like that do you prefer one over the other kind of halfway in between myself but yeah I actually agree with Brian Eno the problem with drugs as they last too long but that's another story that's too quick but but but I think that most of these popular culture forms you have nowadays are things that you can do while you're pretending to do something else so these are all things that people do while they're pretending to work yeah most social media Instagram yeah how did we get here I don't know I'm talking about the value of work we're talking about it no but I mean how did we get into it here okay I mean we did five thousand years of death how did you manage to get into the jobs and wasn't it always there in some way well sure there was always pointless jobs or jobs that we might consider pointless but you see the difference between a futile retainer in the Middle Ages and some guy whose job is to you know design the graphics for a corporate report that somebody's never going to look at but just gonna slam on the table in a meeting equally pointless it's kind of the same thing but the difference is that people nowadays feel they should be contributing something you know back 500 600 years ago you know if I were sitting there Fanning the Empress I'd think that was a good job you know it's important it's a lie because people thought it was important to do you know and they had different standard values nowadays people want to contribute something to society and they feel kind of pointless of it I wonder if they do because if we all admit that we once had a job yes but the jobs we have now are not which is more statistically kind of doing something that is important and it and until we've left it behind we wanted me to know I think it means that nobody wants to get fired and doesn't want to publicly admit that their job is pointless I think that the way we got here is actually I told the story in the book and I think what happened is that back in the 19th century when people thought said wealth creator they thought that meant workers you know nowadays I think that means capitalists back in the 19th century you know you read politicians even I was reading the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and you know from to a modern ear he sounds like a Marxist everybody sounds like a Marxist you know they're all saying all capital is derived from labor labor is more important and and there was idea that the world is something we produced through work and and work was valuable because it's productive and around the turn of the century there was a counter-offensive they said don't get the meaning of your life from your work you should get the meaning of your life from what you consume at home you know you shape your identity through your consumption and and it's you know Ross capitalist we're the people who actually come up with the ideas you're just like robots working in the factory that's not important that's you know so we are the producers of wealth you know the rich people basically and that's what people seem to think nowadays it was very very successful but they changed people's minds about where value comes from you know used to people thought it comes from work well the P basically P industrialist if you want to go into history actually Andrew Carnegie and a bunch of robber barons actually started this called the Gospel of wealth and they sent people out to like schools and Rotary clubs and I mean there's a whole history but I don't want to yeah yeah there's consumerism but however it happened it doesn't matter how it happened once you say you know you shouldn't get do the meaning of your life from what you make or what you do but rather what you go home and consume then the question becomes well what is the value of work why do you want to do work at all you know other than if you have to and that's when old religious ideas came back you know it was a long-standing idea that labor is sort of its suffering you know it is our punishment for original sin we have to work to produce our world and we suppose our work anyway yeah we're supposed to hate our work yeah in fact it's very interesting that like sociologists who study work there's like this great paradox because they always discover the same thing which is one people get a lot of the meaning of their life from their jobs and to most people hate their jobs you know how can both these things be true at the same time and apparently people get meaning from their jobs because they hate them you know their work is like a sign that they're a good person I am willing to undo or suffering and thus I deserve my consumer toys you know and and and this seems to be a very deeply embedded idea but if you think about it if work is supposed to be this kind of terrible suffering that you endured to deserve the good things in your life well anything you get out of your job anything that makes you happy that makes the job easier more pleasant is a negative it's not a positive and that's why I mean I feel that way sometimes I I catch myself saying I really enjoy my job it's amazing people pay me for this you know yeah why should it be amazing I mean I'm doing something useful right already much that people are paying you means it's useful for them yes but yeah I mean I feel that somehow the fact that I'm enjoying it means like they shouldn't be paying me and and people feel that so strongly that they feel that people who get any out of their jobs even the knowledge that they're helping other people shouldn't be paid as much and you hear people say that you say you hear people say you shouldn't pay teachers too much because you wouldn't want people who are just interested in money to teach children you know it's anything you do for altruistic reasons you shouldn't pay them much so not only is it true that like the more useful your work the less they pay you people think that's why let's see what the I think that's a lot of how our audience would want to know from you I've got the question which 15 votes Danah if you can put the screen back on this one what would happen if people would actually work 15 hours a week wouldn't they be a ward for living so who put this question forward what's your name Tim and I have no clothes for team because 917 votes yeah yeah it's very interesting that that I often get this question and there's been a series of even novels about this kind of thing if you ever a player piano by Kurt Vonnegut back in the 50s what's gonna happen when automation comes the entire working class is just gonna be sitting around playing pool and being depressed you know I think that's very interesting I am an anthropologist right and as an anthropologist I know that working an eight-hour day historically is really unusual it's a lot I mean your average oppressed medieval surf on average across the year probably worked four hours a day and and you know people living in Amazonia or probably work 2 or 3 it's really important yeah so you know most people have not worked this much and you know something they figure out things to do you know I mean the only reason we can't imagine what we do if we had time on our hands is we don't have enough time on our hands to actually imagine it people who don't work really want to work sure and people would work they just wouldn't they would do work tonight it's 40 hours a week they wouldn't yeah I mean they'd and they do it at a normal pace so you know they like work really hard and finish something and then they lie around for a while and that's what normal pieces actually a goodness because you still have colleagues and you can do the hoochie deformity and you put yourself into doing some big project and then you'd relax and drink and be happy and you know and people would have social lives they'd all be having all sorts of complicated godsnet friends yeah I'll have friends I lived in Madagascar for two years in a village where people worked you know I over there a peasant so they probably worked on average four hours you know in the agricultural season they work 12 hours in the winter they worked one or two okay how about this yeah but listen it's about competition why aren't jobs compete it's out of the equation yeah that's a very interesting question um you see first of all either a capitalism isn't really about competition or be the system we have now isn't actually capitalism and you can take your pick which one you want it's a game what's your name job 20 people really what do you go for the ladder I think it's name is job Josh it jazz in Europe Oh as in like the biblical character or or having a job yeah actually both are appropriate yes but what do you think okay listen it's working we should make capitalism work better I think that like we have this idea that capitalism is marked by efficiency and it's not I mean it's very clear you know we think of you know you think of useless jobs you think of the Soviet Union you know they had a policy of you know everybody should have a job universal employment so they had to make up jobs so you know if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread there are three different people to have to give you a ticket and take the ticket they're constantly making up jobs why is it capitalism that's the same thing that's a really interesting question and I think the answer is that the system we have now in a lot of ways I've been making all these sort of futile metaphors I don't know if they're entirely metaphors I mean I think it a lot of ways we are stealing we're you know we're going back to one yeah I think that that if you look at where the profits in the City of London and Wall Street where the profits of the top firms are coming from it's from Finance you know even car companies it's the financial division that actually makes the money now so finance is about rent extraction it's about taking you know taking money through legal dural means you know and and back when I was in college that was called feudalism you know capitalism is when you pay people like and less than you get for selling the product they make that's capitalism you know feudalism is when you just take it that's what they're doing now I mean I don't know how much the average household in a country like this or a country like America how you know how much of their income is directly taken away by the fire sector finance insurance and real estate but I've heard estimates anywhere between 20 to 40 percent you know so that money is extracted and redistributed and when you have that kind of system there's a totally different dynamic than what you have under classic capitalism and we think of capitalism either if you're a Marxist very libertarian you still think of this sort of 19th century version of like medium-size competitive firms we're making and selling things that's not what most firms do now they're mostly bureaucratic they're tied in different levels of the government and and they're about extracting rents and if you're extracting rents well actually efficiency is not the most important thing in fact I got a lot of testimonies in the book from people who worked for insurance companies law firms financial firms that basically had a big pot of money and had to distribute it to people sometimes because there had been a claim settlement or something like that and you know so here's a billion dollars you have to give it out to people and and they would be intentionally inefficient you know they would miss trained people they would put officers in the wrong place they would lose the paperwork systematically because the longer it took them to distribute the money the more the more they got to keep right so in a way that's the dynamic that's taking over it's not capitalism as we normally imagine it before we go to the question of how do you want to solve it yeah the next one that's a runner up it's this one no different use of the word well I mean you know I've never understood that I mean anthropology is about understeering different societies understanding social possibilities why would you not want to know that who often post it forward you wanna do you think anthropology is not necessarily I'm not going over there because about individual anthropologists around the world where are the most jobs and do you also see societies where they manage to kind of deal with it and do really well and if someone is good I have not compact on comparative research on this topic I definitely got a lot of people from India China Brazil Egypt you know so it's not just Europe North America you know industrialized rich countries developing or newly emerging market countries a lot of them have a job problems too but I don't know how many I don't know I don't have numbers I don't really know this research still needs to be done you said in the beginning that I said I'm a freelancer or self-employed and I in your book you said and then I can't have a job or at least I'm not part of the definition isn't a job I mean you know well you're doing work but it can also be yeah you could I mean if you're a con man but but in a way it's different actually in the beginning of the book I mapped that out you know you can be or a conman and you're not actually contributing anything to the world but it's not really a job you know mafia hitman isn't really a job you know implies working for someone else what and like pretending that your job is useful when in fact it isn't so that's your definition you have to work for somebody else I do I do I think our solvents maybe count I think artificial intelligence will kind of hit I have to find another job because the questions are so good I'll just move on to the ones to the next one here we've had this one and topology how about this one you kind of mentioned it already so it's not the lower pay jobs mostly it's yeah I mean some people are gathering statistics which imply otherwise but I don't I don't quite know yet my impression is that sometimes I distinguish between jobs and just shipped jobs you know like jobs us a bad job oh you don't get treated well you don't get paid much but those jobs are usually useful you know if you're digging a ditch you know usually people don't employ people to dig ditches that aren't needed for some reason you couldn't be you know doing a job that's also a job and that would be really bad you know like that's as bad as it gets but for the most part jobs are pretty well paid and they're pretty nice to have so a lot of people complain about that specifically they say you know I wanted to do something useful with my life but I couldn't you know I was a preschool teacher or someone told me and you know it was great it was important work to be done or I was caring for disabled people it was great but I couldn't pay the bills you guys won't pay you enough I had debts so finally I got a job where I'm you know highlighting forms for a insurance insurance monitoring corporation or you know something completely useless and you know they pay you so much that you can pay your bills and they're hoping eventually they can save enough they can go back to doing something useful and maybe they won't I feel that the questions are changing too we should go to ok what should be done then basically you're saying where there's too much around some people may not acknowledge it or they may not admit their inability up and we can of course a big debate on the value of work and well how we all fail you a difference but so here's the first question so what should we do should we do something about it maybe that's why are you just showing us this phenomena or are you saying we should change the way we do it I'm saying it's a this is the surest sign we live in a completely stupid and absurd economic system and it's really got to change yeah this is ridiculous I mean what could be more dumb than like 40% of the population going to work every day and saying nobody should be doing this I don't think that's a very good criteria for socially you know acceptable it hasn't caused the zombie apocalypse it must maybe you would say listen let's let's get the psychologists in if it's 40% you would expect some kind of well that's Reformation or something that's what's fascinating I mean why aren't people getting more upset about it and I think that that think about it this way okay you have all these jobs that people know to be pointless and then there's a jobs that people don't know that they're pointless because they are in support of pointless work so say you know you're the cleaner in a building where they're just doing some tax scam you know you don't know that you're in a job so in fact you know there's useful work being done in support of that all the people creating the electricity for those buildings or watering the plants are doing pest control so so I guess at least half the work and especially if you count the ization of real jobs more than that maybe 60% of work can be eliminated but now you are at saying what a job is wait wait I'm just saying no I'm saying that if you take what people think is a job and assume they're right and then use that to like say that other people are doing real work I mean it's not work to clean but if you're cleaning a building where everybody else thinks they're doing a job I mean that work could be eliminated and and so if that were the case we'll think about it what would happen to global warming if we suddenly reduced all work by 50% you know I mean we'd save the planet there's there's a good reason to stop that's a yeah I think so and think of all the psychological damage all the depression all the anxiety I mean people report terrible symptoms I think you you know have a much happier population you'd have a population that could start doing think of all the art and culture that people would produce if they actually had some time on their hands yeah but we aren't sure you said we need more research so know that you in the Netherlands we had said Fabian Dekker who responded to your research he said it's not 40 percent it's more it's closer to 5% well he said a nine actually but but yeah he changed the question like but you know so there's two polls and two are the same big claims people will be less depressed we will we will save climate change well I think that that that even if there's any possibility of this it definitely gets 10% like he says you know that would make a big difference you know in terms of of general health and well-being so what should be done okay I think there's a lot of things that could be done but I think that first of all the key thing is to come up with a solution that doesn't make the problem worse this is the problem of bureaucracy because it basically a lot of these are useless bureaucratic jobs right the the classic problem of bureaucracies what do we do about the fact that we have too many committees well let's create a committee to look into the problem of too many committees right so how do you not do that how do you address jobs without creating more jobs to investigate the problem of jobs and this is what I've been trying to figure out I think there's two approaches that might work one is to massively reduce working hours um the question oh yeah that's the problem I'm a little I'm a little worried about that for that reason how to do that in a way that won't create a larger bureaucracy to enforce it or revolution well a revolution will be nice in my opinion I'm an anarchist I said I think there should be a revolution but I know people the Labour Party in the UK we're talking about a four hour day now you know Webb sorry a four hour four day week a week four day a week for our day would be harder but see the problem for our day is how do you enforce it because so many people now are working casualized hours or their contractor in the Netherlands we are actually the the kings of for our four-day work weeks and we work a lot of part-time so so you would expect a little suspicious of the the reduction of working hours the argument would be that if companies have to hire more people to replace the ones they let go they'll keep the useful ones and get rid of the useless ones I don't know if that's really the case the job so now you're reducing the amount of hours but this will well the idea is if they have if companies have to redistribute the hours they'll look at what's useful or not that's that's the assumption I don't know if it's true outlining I it's not my preferred solution I'm just explaining which I believe in basic income yeah because I'm a revolutionary I just think we need to separate work and livelihood I think that everyone should receive a livelihood everyone should be guaranteed the basic means for a minimally comfortable life and after that it's up to you because let's face it the only reason anybody's sitting there in the job where they're not doing anything all day long you know just like taking one phone call today and pretending to work the only reason people are doing that is because they need the money to pay their basically no one's gonna take those jobs if they have a basic income but you had the example of the teacher had the primary school teacher and she really loved her job and left because she wanted more money no she couldn't she didn't have enough money to pay the rent okay basic income would have to be enough money to pay the rent so it would be higher than enough to live on yeah okay and with a basic income you don't you don't think that people will still do jobs because then they have more money than just a paid rent no because because nobody wants to do these things I mean people say you know I want to do something useful but they won't pay anything to do it so I think people will do things use that are useful you know and if they don't pay them that much it's okay because it'll be on top of you know the money they already have there's so much research you can do because we have all these pilots now with basic income and you can yeah I find out if there's less jobs there I would be very interesting unfortunately a lot of the pilots are very limited yeah but but the ones I've seen from India and and I think it was Namibia are quite promising I think that there's left wing and right wing versions of basic income and I should emphasize that everything depends on whether it is used to expand or to contract what I call the zone of uncondition ality so you know the right wing version is let's give them money and then get rid of free healthcare no III I'm not saying that I'm saying we need to expand the zone of what you get unconditionally just because you're alive you know expand it from things like education and health which you should still have to things like the means to pay your rent and eat but I think that it's very important that if the universal that there's a principle that you know need a big revolution then you want a universal basic income well I mean if you think about it even a lot of capitalists are starting to think about it because they realise that there's a problem you know if if they have automation to the point where they don't have any workers anymore well who's gonna buy their stuff and who's gonna pay the basic income well you know I mean then we get to my other book about money basically money is not something that you know like isn't a limited supply unless you want it to be money is created by banks by making loans right so we can be happy that he's still working then yeah we make up money money is easy money is a bunch of promises we make to each other we can make up as much as we like okay and from the audience who put this one forward what's the engine behind jobs what is the engine behind good name well done your ass and eleven folks okay very nice I think that there is more than one I think that part of it is the internal dynamics of corporations the creation of finance capitalism leads to a phenomena that I refer to as managerial feudalism that managers you know in corporations hold empire building you know they are trying to assemble like the biggest crowd of supporters and and flunkies and and this is often they're not just their prestige but sometimes even their salaries are based on how many people they have working under them I there's a guy wrote to me who's an efficiency expert for a bank and he says you realize he had a job because for 15 years he's been writing plans on how they can make the bank more efficient and every time they said you know there hasn't been single time they actually adopted any of his proposing so he's a box sticker he's you know and and what's the reason every time would involve somebody losing power because they wouldn't have as many employees so so that's one engine but I think there's a political element to think about it the one thing that the left and the right both agree on is that more jobs is good you know they don't agree on much else but you know you go to a rally they'll be saying you know jobs jobs money for jobs not for war money for this jobs not for whatever it is we're protesting but it's always jobs jobs plenty for jobs and and you know the left-wing version of how to create jobs is you give money to consumers and they'll buy stuff and that'll stimulate production and then you know factory owners will hire people and merchants will hire people to sell people things okay the right wing version the supply side they say no rich people are job creators just give them money and they will hire people but if you think about it okay you just give Pete rich people a lot of money and say you are job creators go and create jobs well they're not gonna hire factory workers or people to sell stuff if there's nobody to buy this stuff so what are they gonna do well they feel they have to create jobs are most likely thing they'll just create a lot of meaningless flunkies to make them feel good about themselves that is indeed what happens this is maybe related to this one do you think because it's somehow also sounds like you're you really want us to work less yeah not just to get rid of the but in the end now there's a choice for a lot of people be between being unemployed and having a job I think it depends on the conditions I think people who are unemployed in the sense of looking for jobs and unable to find one and don't have the means to do anything else of their time tend to be profoundly unhappy but it's also the case that people in both their jobs are profoundly unhappy I think that we have made unemployment into a miserable phenomenon and then we're back to basic income yeah exactly I mean if people could relax if people weren't under pressure to prove they're looking for work all the time they could actually find useful things to do you know I and feel more yeah and feel a lot happier part of this is one of the arguments against basic income you know one of the arguments is that give people money they won't do anything I just don't think that's true I think it's if people just wanted something for nothing all those people and both their jobs wouldn't be unhappy right but on the other hand the other argument is that well people would do something it would be something Dom you know a lot of them will be doing things that are useless so so the idea is like if you just give people money and say go decide what you have to contribute to the world well lots of them are going to become Annoying street musicians or they're gonna become like crank scientist or bad poet sir you know so the one thing that maybe you'll fail you to them but not anybody nobody will want to pay I have two responses to that one is that if 40% of people already think they're doing useless work what's the chance that 40% of all people would choose something like that and second of all you know even the ones who are doing that will be a hell of a lot happier than they are doing you know filling out forms all day and number three all you need is just like one of those bad musicians to be you know Miles Davis or John Lennon or something or one of those scientists be Einstein we will end up with more yeah yeah and the world will be better off you'll be German I think we can take menti away and go back to the the the other the photo slide so to kind of wrap it all up what if people read your book which I hardly have to do anymore I think there's lots of copies small enough to give to your friends and large enough to throw at you what what will do will they acknowledge how their own gops or will day what will how will they change the world from that moment well I think it's important to understand the world you live in and this is something that a lot of people recognize intuitively but they realize they you're almost taught not to see it it's right in front of your eyes so in a certain way I'm just giving people an excuse to like be able to talk about something they they kind of already know but somehow you're not supposed to say so so I think that's one thing you know so you could just leave the book on your desk till you know to start a conversation or give it to a friend as a way of dropping a hint and so you can cause conversations that that need to happen the old fashioned to end up yes what's your name Rio two short questions okay what will happen with the questions and the other question is what would you have written if the article did not go viral what else did you have you were you know and then this came like up oh yeah well the book that I am writing next you want to hear about that yeah okay I am working with an archaeologist and we've been working for five years on a book about what started as a book on the origins of social inequality but it has evolved into a book about why the entire question of the origins of social inequality is kind of a dumb question I basically we have this story in our heads that you know once upon a time there were these little happy bands of hunter-gatherers and they were egalitarian but they were small you know when things get big you have to let you can't do that anymore so first they invent agriculture so you got private property and then you get cities and the cities come to state and bureaucracies and Wars and all this bad stuff right so that's the story that we all know right but it also means high culture and writing them you know so civilization love it or leave it that's the story every single element in that story is factually wrong that is not actually what happened at all hunter-gatherers even in the Ice Age could be very hierarchical but usually only in one time of year so people would go back and forth between equality and a hierarchy sometimes you know over the course of a year agriculture was a sort of feminist reaction against slaveholding it wasn't what we think at all early cities are often extremely egalitarian there's no signs of hierarchies and and so you know what isn't what we thought happened isn't what happened we just have to start over again right an entirely different story so I'm working on that so next year here people still are putting up their hands so maybe you put this one in but didn't get enough folks and then why not try I see you kind of started to touch on it there but my point is I'm also believer in ubi but I think that what do you mean ubi Universal but the fact is that that's never gonna pay people anywhere near as much as corporate lawyer or most of those tick box jobs that you mentioned but I think the flipside of all of those overpaid jobs and maybe it doesn't matter in a way that they exist is that we can't find a way or that they are the other side of an economic system which doesn't value teaching caring you know healing people who are sick and how could we actually design a system which could do that at the other end isn't that the bigger problem than the existence of the jobs I would say yes yeah I I agree with you very strongly on that I think that universal basic income is a policy but what we need is a fundamental moral and conceptual revolution about what is the value of work and we need to move away from the notion of production which is very patriarchal you know and and and back to a notion of caring labour is the fundamental fundamental form of value creation I mean you know most work isn't about producing anything most work is about maintaining and taking care of things I mean I always say you know you make a cup once but you wash it a thousand times work is about maintaining things keeping things nice keeping them the same taking care of animals plants people things buildings you know and and and that's what people actually do they take care of each other and their environment and and I think if we start from that and come up with an AI conception of value that is the primary form of value then then that would be a society that would make sense and the more we have computers taking care of actual production the more it makes sense to that's where value comes from because it's not just that it's not just that AI and and and and robots and computers can do production better it's also I mean probably they can do carrying labor but you don't want them to do that you know this is the kind of labor that you want people to be doing and you want to be doing you want to be freed up from drudgery so that we can take care of each other and that's a kind of society we want but the quest it's very difficult politically i actually coined the phrase the revolt of the caring classes as as what we need but in a way it's starting to happen i I feel that occupy was in a way the first kind of stirrings of this revolt if you look at the people especially the people who kind of couldn't come to the occupations would express their support on the we are the 99% tumblr page overwhelming majority were in what I would call the caring professions they were in health education and social services and they all said the same thing I wanted to have a job where I could benefit other people well at least I wasn't hurting them you know and and if you want to do something where you care for others they'll give you put you so deeply in debt and they'll give you so little money that you can't even take care of your own family your own children this is ridiculous and that was the sort of that was the the the real cry of outrage that drove the movement and if you look at like strike movements you know around the world but are you saying this is still happening yes it is yes it is happening I mean look at who's on strike in England there was professors and junior doctors in America you have teachers strikes all over the place and in France I was in France they said care home workers went on strike for the first time in French history okay thank you so much so the next book when oh I don't know I have to write it I'm working on it now so we'll be seeing you back here in what may be a year to do okay let's make an agreement of it can I have a big round of applause please stop the dribble thank you so much [Applause] and I'm guessing that you will be running up to the table where we can now yeah and you'll sign it yeah and then after that straight on to the bar I hope okay I hope to see you there thank you so much you

Channel: De Balie

Views: 53,698

Keywords: Balie, DeBalie, #debalie, Amsterdam, Holland, Nederland, Netherlands, NL, Europa, Europe, EU, Euro, E.U., world, wereld, politiek, politics, political, culture, cultuur, art, arts, arte, kunst, kunsten, video, tv, archief, archive, debat, debate, debatten, grote, zaal, discussion, discussie, lezing, lecture, discour, job, jobs, meaningless, labor, labour, work, working, workers, employment, happiness, happy, capitalism, society, anthropology, meaningful, bureaucracy, economy, economics, finance, boredom, bored, boring, employed

Id: R07TlNqz9X4

Length: 84min 1sec (5041 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018