For Graeber, bullshit jobs carry with them a moral imperative: “If you’re not busy all the time doing something, anything—doesn’t really matter what it is—you’re a bad person.” But the flipside of that logic seems to be: if you actually like doing X activity, if it is valuable, meaningful, and carries intrinsic rewards for you, it is wrong for you to expect to be paid (well) for it; you should give it freely, even (especially) if by doing so you are allowing others to profit. In other words, we’ll make a living from you doing what you love (for free), but we’ll keep you in check by making sure you have to make a living doing what you hate.引自 第六章 我們共在一個社會，為什麼不反對無謂雇傭的增長？
After all, most work can’t be said to “create” anything; most of it is a matter of maintaining and rearranging things.
This is why I would insist our concept of “production,” and our assumption that work is defined by its “productivity,” is essentially theological. ... within a generation, “producerism” had given way to “consumerism,” ... the labor theory of value—which had, meanwhile, been knocked out of economic theory by the “marginal revolution”—had so fallen away from popular common sense that nowadays, only graduate students or small circles of revolutionary Marxist theorists are likely to have heard of it. Nowadays, if one speaks of “wealth producers,” people will automatically assume one is referring not to workers but to capitalists.
It seems to me that the main reason lies in a flaw in the original labor theory of value itself. This was its focus on “production”—a concept which, as earlier noted, is basically theological, and bears in it a profound patriarchal bias.
In a 2017 paper, US economists Benjamin B. Lockwood, Charles G. Nathanson, and E. Glen Weyl combed through the existing literature on the “externalities” (social costs) and “spillover effects” (social benefits) associated with a variety of highly paid professions, to see if it were possible to calculate how much each adds to or subtracts from the economy overall. They concluded that while in some cases—notably anything associated with creative industries—the values involved were just too subjective to measure, in other cases, a rough approximation was possible. Their conclusion: the most socially valuable workers whose contributions could be calculated are medical researchers, who add $9 of overall value to society for every $1 they are paid. The least valuable were those who worked in the financial sector, who, on average, subtract a net $1.80 in value from society for every $1 of compensation. (And, of course, workers in the financial sector are often compensated extremely well.)
Here was their overall breakdown:
researchers +9
schoolteachers +1
engineers +.2
consultants and IT professionals 0
lawyers –.2
advertisers and marketing professionals –.3
managers –.8
financial sector –1.5
引自 第六章 我們共在一個社會，為什麼不反對無謂雇傭的增長？The closest I know to such a study that does use such a broader sample was one carried out by the New Economic Foundation in the United Kingdom, whose authors applied a method called “Social Return on Investment Analysis” to examine six representative occupations, three high-income, three low. Here’s a summary of the results:
- city banker – yearly salary c. £5 million – estimated £7 of social value destroyed for every £1 earned;
- advertising executive – yearly salary c. £500,000, estimated £11.50 of social value destroyed per £1 paid;
- tax accountant – yearly salary c. £125,000, estimated £11.20 of social value destroyed per £1 paid;
- hospital cleaner – yearly income c. £13,000 (£6.26 per hour), estimated £10 of social value generated per £1 paid;
- recycling worker – yearly income c. £12,500 (£6.10 per hour) – estimated £12 in social value generated per £1 paid;
- nursery worker – salary c. £11,500 – estimated £7 in social value generated per £1 paid.引自 第六章 我們共在一個社會，為什麼不反對無謂雇傭的增長？
