Are many jobs meaningless?

[dismal]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

If someone is voluntarily willing to pay you to do it and you are voluntarily willing to accept the pay to do it, it seems entirely meaningful to them and to you.

 

[barbos]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

If someone is voluntarily willing to pay you to do it and you are voluntarily willing to accept the pay to do it, it seems entirely meaningful to them and to you.

So robbing banks is a meaningful job then. As long as someone hires you to do that.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

(Raises hand)One that doesn't leave me suicidal to contemplate at the end of the day?

 

[Worldtraveller]

Most of my post college career I would consider meaningful in terms of the work I do. The early part not so much, although the pay was good. I started off working on aircraft VIP interiors. Think really high end multi-millionaire's aircraft. Not the little 'private' jets, although we did those too, but large, commercial sized aircraft as a private jet.

The work gradually transitioned into more commercial support. So if you fly at all, there's a decent chance I've at least done some of the math that keeps that aircraft flying. I realize on a daily basis that people's lives depend on me getting it right. Not just the pilots, but the hundreds of passengers and potentially people on the ground as well. So it's important, but I don't know how I'd define meaningful in this case.

Probably the more meaningful work was when I supported helicopters that are used in firefighting, and rescue.

 

[dismal]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

If someone is voluntarily willing to pay you to do it and you are voluntarily willing to accept the pay to do it, it seems entirely meaningful to them and to you.

So robbing banks is a meaningful job then. As long as someone hires you to do that.

As defined yes. Why do you think it is not meaningful?

 

[barbos]

So robbing banks is a meaningful job then. As long as someone hires you to do that.

As defined yes. Why do you think it is not meaningful?

Because it makes your definition not meaningful.

 

[Bronzeage]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

If someone is voluntarily willing to pay you to do it and you are voluntarily willing to accept the pay to do it, it seems entirely meaningful to them and to you.

So robbing banks is a meaningful job then. As long as someone hires you to do that.

Only if I rob rich banks and give to poor banks.

 

[skepticalbip]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

I think that the definition may be in the same category as "how do you define pornography".

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart had to resort to this to make a decision:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

 

[SimpleDon]

Are many jobs meaningless?

Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are – Bloomberg View – Medium

Then noting David Graeber's work on "bullshit jobs".

Some sizable fraction of people polled in the UK and Holland seemed to agree with this position.

Perhaps even more surprising is the nature of these “bullshit” jobs, as Graeber calls them. They aren’t in teaching, cleaning, garbage collecting or firefighting, but seem mostly to be in the professional services sector. ... human resources, public relations, lobbying or telemarketing, or in finance and banking, consulting, management and corporate law.

Then some examples of corporate makework that seem more like empire building and power struggles than anything valuable. But the trouble is that's where the money tends to be.

Many like to laugh at the absurd inefficiencies of the Soviet Union, where so many people only pretended to do useful work, yet this may be significantly true in Western economies as well (only in the West they actually get paid for it).

It is true. There are many factors that go into it.

We use to have a much more rounded idea of what businesses were suppose to do. They were the backbone of American exceptionalism, they built things, they looked after the welfare of their employees, they innovated, they invested, they took pride in their products, they were citizens of the country and the leaders of the community, the states and the nation.

This all started to change about forty to fifty years ago. Businesses had only one job, to make as much profit as possible for the owners or the shareholders of the businesses. Greed became a good. The business was fulfilling its responsibilities to the common good by making as much profit as possible, no matter how that was done.

There was nothing that the government did that private business couldn't do better and cheaper and if it did cost more for private business to do something that the government use to do it was the government's fault for putting too many regulations in the way of the businesses. Government itself should be run like a business. Government should be run primarily to satisfy the needs of business not the needs of people.

That economics had to change. We had to overcome the foolishness of Keynesian economics and its obsession with how the economy actually works and to return to the classical and the neoclassical economics of trying to change our economy into a self-regulating free market economy, which is the natural economy in spite of the fact that it has never existed in the entire history of man's civilizations.

And that the way to change our economy into a self-regulating free market was to treat our current economy as if it was a self-regulating free market and eventually it would be one. This is the new economy of neoliberalism that is actually the old economy of the gilded age and the many depressions and recessions leading up to the Great Depression. Before Keynes said we need to rethink our economics to one that looks at the real economy, not the fantasy economy of the free market.

And that in this new/old economics investment is more important than consumption, capital is much more important than labor, supply is much more important than demand. That demand is nothing more than the desire to own things and therefore is infinite. That investment creates demand, that you have to have investment before you can have demand.

This new/old economics and this way of treating the economy as if it was a self-regulating free market benefited the already rich and specifically the FIRE sector, the financial, insurance and real estate sector of rentiers.

The FIRE sector became filled with high paying jobs that attracted the very best and brightest because this is the way that it works in the new/old economics where the most valuable jobs are the highest paying.

But this isn't the case. The FIRE sector is not filled with exciting and fulfilling work. What the economy needs from the FIRE sector is pretty boring work, 90% of which could be accomplished with a not very complicated computer program. The economy and we need someone to make loans that the borrowers can pay back, a safe place to keep our money, a way to get paid and to pay our bills, a way to save and to grow our savings, some mitigation of risk to protect us and a way to buy and sell real estate so we don't have to steal it or to worry about ours being stolen.

All without these simple services costing an arm and a leg which would seriously burden the productive sectors of the economy because the FIRE sector isn't productive. Anything that they charge is non-productive and is overhead like rent. The most successful capitalistic economies are the ones that minimize things like rent, banking fees, interest, profits, etc., because not only is the FIRE sector a burden to productive parts of the economy, if we give them too much money they become unstable in a way that can bring the productive parts of the economy to a complete halt.

The new/old economy actually maximizes the money that goes to the FIRE sector.

And yes, I have done what I always do, bend the OP around to my pet theory, the evils of neoliberalism and of libertarian economics. This is because I do believe that it explains about 85% of the problems that we see today. But what ever you want to call it, neoliberalism and neoclassical economics doesn't explain any of it. They were baffled by the Great Depression, finally they said that the Fed caused it. But they couldn't back this idea up with any actual evidence. They were baffled by the Great Recession, and many of them said that it was the Fed, again, or the CRA or the various government sponsored mortgage re-purchasers, Fannie Mae, Gennie Mae, etc., but once again they were unable to come up with any real evidence for these assertions.

 

[Bronzeage]

Has anyone managed to define a "meaningful job"?

Slartibartfast spent a lifetime designing and constructing fiords. He received an award for them, but conceded it was only because fiords had suddenly become very trendy and there was no more meaning to it than that.

I think that the definition may be in the same category as "how do you define pornography".

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart had to resort to this to make a decision:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

There is a paradox concerning definitions. The more specific the definition is, the easier it is to be something very close to the defined thing, and yet not be the thing.

There is not a possible definition of "meaningful" job which would not exclude many jobs which have great meaning and include jobs which are vacuous.