this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Graeber had a bit in Bullshit Jobs about how the more societally necessicary or directly helpful a job is, the worse the pay is generally. Teachers, Firefighters, ect. He posited it was because subconciously in an time with so many meaningless or actively alienating jobs, to have a career that has a visible impact on the world is considered part of the pay package.
I know its not really an answer to your question, but I work in public service and i think about that a lot.
i'd say cleaner/janitor/garbage collectors are the perfect example tbh
without those we'd all be dying of disease and they are some of the worst paying and looked down upon jobs
He uses striking bankers vs trash collectors in the book as an example. Banker strike went on for weeks and people were trading checks like paper currency while the sanitation worker strike lasted 5 days after the city was swimming in garbage
Similar in private sector stuff too.
I work for a firm that does wastewater, community water treatment, and storm water.
There isn't a lot of money in it because treating wastewater better doesn't provide more value to the company, they just have to hit a minimum standard to be able to operate.
We just make sure people have clean drinking water and that people aren't polluting natural waterbodies which doesn't generate profit so everybody up to the owner of the firm makes less money than my buddy who's a rep for a major beer company so he goes to different bars and buys people drinks all day.
I remember some lolbert saying that people needed to own rivers and bodies of waters otherwise the market would never be able to recognize the need to keep water clean. It was as if I could no longer listen to any other argument they had in good faith, as if I were launched out of the dream of entertaining their POV
LMAO, has he paid attention to all the porkies squealing about "but muh freeedumz" whenever someone says pollution is bad?
There's some pretty notable exceptions to that, medical specialists and some engineering disciplines get paid a lot because they're hard careers with very real demand. Not all engineering disciplines, of course, but nuclear engineers, chemical engineers, etc.
Even then though, I’d argue nuclear engineers are the least necessary type of engineer, but they get paid the highest. Civil engineers are the most necessary, and make the least money.
Same goes for doctors, GPs are more important than other types of doctors and make far less than others
Kinda depends on how you quantify how much they're needed. Yes, civil engineers are necessary for every single state project ever, while a nuclear engineer is highly specialized, but I'd argue the nuclear engineers working on ITER and on safer, more affordable fission power have some of the most important jobs on earth. Maybe my point falls flat a bit since there also are lots of civil engineers working on those projects, though. It's a bit harder to make that point for a neurosurgeon vs a GP because a GP does straight up save more lives than a neurosurgeon, and it's not like the value of a life is proportional to how difficult it is to perform the surgery procedure that would save it.
The example used in Bullshit Jobs is nurses vs doctors. Nurses do much more work but are paid significantly less. I'm sure there are areas where doctors are more specialized, however I've heard plenty of stories of nurses catching potentially lethal mistakes by doctors. Either way, the medical field needs more people so the end of overworking can stop these mistakes and improve patient care
I'm making a career move from bullshit tech sales to engineering. My prospects with a sought after degree from a highly ranked program pay what I made in my first year of tech sales without a degree or requirements to get licensed to eventually stamp plans that make me legally responsible for failures. End of career pay is about a quarter of what end of career pay in tech sales was. It's absurd
oh my god
i thought Graeber was some sort of marxist based on the amount people bring him up
He is, read Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.
This analysis isn't wrong, it's just partial. There's stuff like labor exploitation, gendered hyperexploitation, etc. But there's also something where desirable jobs have less bargaining power because the labor pool is flooded (Firefighters are an example of this). Graeber's argument is a non-structural articulation of the same phenomena. In the case of teachers, the amount we pay them is very much a decision made fairly arbitrarily. It's mostly a matter of public investment, the decisions around which are massively over-determined to the point where you do have to talk about things like subconscious decision-making and cultural values.
If your issue is with taking the subconscious into account in your analysis, then you're putting yourself in opposition to incredibly influential Marxists like Adorno.
but are the material considerations of systems of exploitation not more pressing? it just seems silly to be talking about subconsciousnesses when everything you said (and i'd tack on the capitalists' control over bourgeois government) is so much more salient
e: but yeah you got me, it isn't inherently marxian or not to talk about psychology shit.
I agree, they are, but Graeber's the type of dude to prioritize making a playful argument over making a rigorous one. Debt has a whole chapter arguing that Muslim banking is better than European Banking because it obeys Abrahamic usury laws. He then included a footnote basically saying "I know it's still capitalist, I mostly wrote this chapter to troll evangelicals."
Like, he has brilliant insights, but not necessarily brilliant analysis. Take him as a supplement to your theory, not your main meal.
lmao he sounds like a fun read. i might do him eventually but i want a stronger sense of theoretical standards around those subject matters beforehand. i don't want him to be the only one telling me how ancient banking worked
uhhhhhhhhh yeah can i get a Mao sandwich hold the Deng, with some of those Graeber fries? and some Villa dip on the side please
Throw in the Situationist International and Midnight Notes and this is just my politics
IME, he's solid on the anthropology, so he can be your guy on ancient baking. Just don't let him be your guy on revolution.
It is. We already know that highly exploited employees are often time the backbone of society. What’s more left to say other than bringing up math and statistics in a pop-socioeconomic book?
Dude can write a book that isn't super deep sometimes.