However, I would state that many software jobs are utterly pointless. "Pair Programming" and "scrum" can lead to a team of unintelligent developers arguing for an entire workday about the color of buttons on a website section the customers did not ask for. To understand the incentive for such meaningless positions, I strongly recommend this article from Professor Axlerod:
It’s such an odd paradox because normally HR produces more value for organizations than the HR payroll takes, but it only does so because employment law exists. If you repealed all employment laws you could lay off the entire HR department, and I could transition into something that produces value from society. Instead, I work in HR to prevent the government from siphoning money from the government, to give to employees that don’t deserve it.
Most relevant is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Other contenders are Occupational Safety and Health Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) , and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). You repeal those, and their state equivalents, HR Departments would be a tenth of their size, if not layoffed entirely.
Maybe before you say we should get rid of them all, find out why they were passed in the first place. Learn labor history. They all exist for a reason, and the time before such laws existed was very bad and dangerous for workers.
I never said we should repeal employment laws, in fact please don’t! I’d hate to have learn how to actually produce something valuable. But it is good to remember that the cost of employment laws are over $2000 per employee It’s just an invisible cost, that only employers pay, so most Americans don’t think about it, and in fact believe the government favors employers!
They were passed because socialists have bad beliefs.
> the time before such laws existed was very bad and dangerous for workers.
The Simpsons parodied this kind of argument like so: "this is my tiger protecting rock. I have not been eaten by a tiger, so it protects me well"
If unions were required to have good and safe workplaces you'd see unions growing and thriving, even in new industries. In reality we don't see that. To pick one example, the computer industry isn't unionized at all and never has been, yet it's one of the safest and most prosperous industries out there. That is true even when people work in environments that could easily be dangerous, like datacenters. To pick another, Hollywood is being crushed by foreign competition because it's not unionized, yet films made outside California aren't full of maimed actors.
That's because unions don't make things better. Even if unions didn't exist and labor laws were never passed, we'd still have a world just as safe and good as it is today, if not moreso.
Oh, you are so wrong. And don’t cherry pick industries as examples of safety. I’m not impressed that computer workplaces are safe without unions. Sorry. But a meat-packing plant — well, there was a book written about that industry that detailed the dangers of that work (not primarily what the book was about — I have read it) — The Jungle. In that book more than one character gets bits chopped off — hands, fingers, whatever, and it gets made into the sausage anyway. You can’t tell me that’s safe! And then the guy with the injury gets fired because he can’t work. He can get in the day labor line once he’s healed and try to get a job, but without a hand, there’s not much he can do and whatever he can get will be paid less. And that’s assuming he can afford to take any time off to heal in the first place. The characters in that book are living barely subsistence and any day off or problem can get them fired and facing eviction and starvation. It’s a horrible existence. And that was the reality for many of our ancestors. They lived hand to mouth, barely making enough to pay for a place to sleep and meager food to eat for that day and hoping they didn’t get hurt on the job or fall behind on their quotas and so get fired and then face starvation if they couldn’t find some other job. So yes, people DID have it worse before labor laws were enacted. And while I gave you a fictional example, look up “triangle shirtwaist fire” and “radium girls” and “phossy jaw” for real life examples of workers who were screwed by their workplaces and quite literally killed by them. If that’s not dangerous, I don’t know what is. You should really learn some history before you seek to doom all of us to repeat it.
That’s most of them. FLSA, ERISA, and OSHA are not getting sued or arrested laws. Wage theft, pension embezzlement, and unsafe workplaces can all lead to felonies.
Take lawyers—a field I know well. Legal work is not a bullshit job. From the moment agriculture allowed large, interdependent communities to form, specialization has multiplied. Today that specialization is so dense that society needs a common operating system to keep the parts from colliding. Law is that operating system, and lawyers are its engineers.
Precedent, likewise, is not arcane trivia; it’s load-bearing infrastructure. If you don’t understand why stare decisis exists, you risk tearing down a Chesterton fence you may not even see. Justice Holmes captured it perfectly; to paraphrase “The life of the law is not one of logic, it is one of experience.” Precedent survives because actual human conflicts have shown—repeatedly—that those rules prevent greater harm.
Of course, many professions could probably be reformed. I’d gladly trade the third year of law school for a supervised apprenticeship. This would help identify lawyers who are smart enough to pass the bar but functionally incompetent in practice. But that’s a far cry from dismantling law as a profession. Dismissing entire fields as useless betrays a shallow understanding of how modern civilization functions and, more important, how its parts interoperate.
Apples to oranges. France is a civil law based system whereas the systems that inherited England’s tradition are common law. Although there are whole treatises written on the distinctions and similarities between the systems, I would point out there is a similar concept in civil law systems, jurisprudence constante. https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/04-15.pdf
You are out of your depth on this topic. That’s okay! No one can be an expert in everything.
Again though, claiming wholesale that most lawyers hold bullshit jobs just shows a lack of understanding.
Law is not bullshit but most legal jobs are. Three forms of bs come to mind: pointless litigation where everyone loses except the legal team; pointless negotiations where the nth degree is debated to the 9th degree and when it goes wrong one has to engage in litigation to recover; and over regulation and overly complex regulation
Apples to oranges. France is a civil law based system whereas the systems that inherited England’s tradition are common law. Although there are whole treatises written on the distinctions and similarities between the systems, I would point out there is a similar concept in civil law systems, jurisprudence constante. https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/04-15.pdf
You are out of your depth on this topic. That’s okay! No one can be an expert in everything.
Again though, claiming wholesale that most lawyers hold bullshit jobs just shows a lack of understanding.
One more thing. Judges are not just cogs in some inhuman machine. They wield real, meaningful power, with substantial discretion and outcomes frequently hinge on precisely how they apply that power. This is a fact that anyone who has spent a material amount of time in a courtroom could quickly come to understand, with or without a bar card.
Your reasoning is precisely the type that gave us DOGE, a program that had a few small wins, but primarily did more harm than good because its operators did not sufficiently understand the systems they were attempting to “reform”.
Agree that law is not a bullshit job - the alternative is resolving our disputes with fists, or according to random factors like how a judge felt that day or whether he fancied the witness.
But DOGE has done a ton of good for the US. A lot of the "systems" they abolished (not reformed) were just broken and clearly corrupt. Does anyone except the Democrat swamp care that USAID is gone? Probably not. Note how conservative parties in other countries like the UK are now trying to copy DOGE right down to the name.
I think the concept that helped me understand this phenomenon most clearly is the Cantillon effect. The closer one is to the mines (or the money printer in the case of fiat currency), the more wealth one can accrue in a given time period. It doesn't matter if you produce value, as you write. "Scoring bureaucratic points" is just another euphemism for getting closer to the money printer.
Like physical entropy, every exchange of money for real value decreases the value of the money being exchanged. Better get it while it's hot and crispy.
This! Plus, when licensing is private, the people who really want those 11-year doctors and are willing to pay for them can identify and get them. Informed consent law would allow others to get the level of expertise they want as well while knowing the associated risks. Instead we're run by people who want to force their values onto others as to how to engage with professionals (and of course the unions which benefit).
I think even for the professionals who theoretically agree with you, the Ponzi scheme works out in such a way for them to be strongly incentivized to justify the status quo to reduce competition. After all, they had to acquire tons of debt and useless training to get to where they are, so allowing more people into the field changes the calculation in a way that seems unfair to those who had to go through the shitty system as it is.
It would be nice to find a way around the drawbacks to the people who are in those transitional stages, much like with things like AI replacing jobs. I lean libertarian on most issues but I think things like student debt forgiveness and job retraining/upskilling should be made more accessible for people who get caught up in the meantime due to unforeseen deregulation or advancements in tech.
There are very few actually bullshit jobs. All jobs create value for someone, the only exception is some jobs in government where they exist despite literally zero people being willing to personally pay for them.
Marketing is required. It's not a BS job, even if the industry is quite inefficient. People have to find out about your products somehow.
I do think that if you spend some time really thinking about some of these jobs and the value they provide, you might understand why they exist. It can be hard to understand why these jobs are useful if you haven’t worked with/relied on one of these people directly
Sure. And why does the government do that? Typically it's because, at some point, somebody did (or didn't) do something that made a lot of people upset. Then the government stepped in with a rule to stop people from doing (or not doing) that thing, and compliance requirements to verify that the rule was being followed.
Of course, one can ask whether people were justified in being upset in the first place; whether the government's rule actually works; whether the compliance burden is worth the benefit. Often the answer to one or more of these is no, and that's a problem. But other times the thing that made people upset was, "You knowingly poisoned several thousand workers and now their jawbones are necrotizing and they're developing cancer."
The whole creaking bureaucratic edifice persists because it contains a lot of load-bearing elements. It would be really great if someone could identify which elements are load-bearing and which can be safely cleared away... and there we go, another non-producing white-collar job.
What I meant was engineering jobs are white collar jobs that produce tremendous value and they are not talked about enough. Even software engineering, which is very different from software development (AI will replace must software developers).
I think this argument only applies to certain white-collar jobs. Government spending in most economic sectors is simply not enough to be a driving force in white-collar competition.
No tests for dexterity unfortunately. Mostly based on brains, test scores, drive and personality. The dexterity part can be learned, but some are always better than others, just like any other profession (think athletes).
I imagine there are plenty of knowledgeable doctors with poor motor skills and the inability to look with complete professional detachment at an eviscerated human body. I assume you tell students when they should consider another track in medicine? I'm thinking about military aviation candidates who are sorted rigorously and ruthlessly for who flies the fighters, who flies cargo, turboprop vs jet etc. I'm kind of surprised medical schools don't have more formal selection but I assume when the scalpels come out people get sorted pretty quickly.
However, I would state that many software jobs are utterly pointless. "Pair Programming" and "scrum" can lead to a team of unintelligent developers arguing for an entire workday about the color of buttons on a website section the customers did not ask for. To understand the incentive for such meaningless positions, I strongly recommend this article from Professor Axlerod:
https://www.professoraxelrod.com/p/the-tech-job-meltdown
It’s such an odd paradox because normally HR produces more value for organizations than the HR payroll takes, but it only does so because employment law exists. If you repealed all employment laws you could lay off the entire HR department, and I could transition into something that produces value from society. Instead, I work in HR to prevent the government from siphoning money from the government, to give to employees that don’t deserve it.
What are the most relevant employment laws?
Most relevant is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Other contenders are Occupational Safety and Health Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) , and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). You repeal those, and their state equivalents, HR Departments would be a tenth of their size, if not layoffed entirely.
Maybe before you say we should get rid of them all, find out why they were passed in the first place. Learn labor history. They all exist for a reason, and the time before such laws existed was very bad and dangerous for workers.
I never said we should repeal employment laws, in fact please don’t! I’d hate to have learn how to actually produce something valuable. But it is good to remember that the cost of employment laws are over $2000 per employee It’s just an invisible cost, that only employers pay, so most Americans don’t think about it, and in fact believe the government favors employers!
They were passed because socialists have bad beliefs.
> the time before such laws existed was very bad and dangerous for workers.
The Simpsons parodied this kind of argument like so: "this is my tiger protecting rock. I have not been eaten by a tiger, so it protects me well"
If unions were required to have good and safe workplaces you'd see unions growing and thriving, even in new industries. In reality we don't see that. To pick one example, the computer industry isn't unionized at all and never has been, yet it's one of the safest and most prosperous industries out there. That is true even when people work in environments that could easily be dangerous, like datacenters. To pick another, Hollywood is being crushed by foreign competition because it's not unionized, yet films made outside California aren't full of maimed actors.
That's because unions don't make things better. Even if unions didn't exist and labor laws were never passed, we'd still have a world just as safe and good as it is today, if not moreso.
Oh, you are so wrong. And don’t cherry pick industries as examples of safety. I’m not impressed that computer workplaces are safe without unions. Sorry. But a meat-packing plant — well, there was a book written about that industry that detailed the dangers of that work (not primarily what the book was about — I have read it) — The Jungle. In that book more than one character gets bits chopped off — hands, fingers, whatever, and it gets made into the sausage anyway. You can’t tell me that’s safe! And then the guy with the injury gets fired because he can’t work. He can get in the day labor line once he’s healed and try to get a job, but without a hand, there’s not much he can do and whatever he can get will be paid less. And that’s assuming he can afford to take any time off to heal in the first place. The characters in that book are living barely subsistence and any day off or problem can get them fired and facing eviction and starvation. It’s a horrible existence. And that was the reality for many of our ancestors. They lived hand to mouth, barely making enough to pay for a place to sleep and meager food to eat for that day and hoping they didn’t get hurt on the job or fall behind on their quotas and so get fired and then face starvation if they couldn’t find some other job. So yes, people DID have it worse before labor laws were enacted. And while I gave you a fictional example, look up “triangle shirtwaist fire” and “radium girls” and “phossy jaw” for real life examples of workers who were screwed by their workplaces and quite literally killed by them. If that’s not dangerous, I don’t know what is. You should really learn some history before you seek to doom all of us to repeat it.
It never ceases to amaze me how liberals simply lack the cognitive ability to distinguish between fiction and reality. The Jungle is a novel.
Can I sum all of those up as ‘not getting sued’ laws?
That’s most of them. FLSA, ERISA, and OSHA are not getting sued or arrested laws. Wage theft, pension embezzlement, and unsafe workplaces can all lead to felonies.
Respectfully, you are just wrong.
Take lawyers—a field I know well. Legal work is not a bullshit job. From the moment agriculture allowed large, interdependent communities to form, specialization has multiplied. Today that specialization is so dense that society needs a common operating system to keep the parts from colliding. Law is that operating system, and lawyers are its engineers.
Precedent, likewise, is not arcane trivia; it’s load-bearing infrastructure. If you don’t understand why stare decisis exists, you risk tearing down a Chesterton fence you may not even see. Justice Holmes captured it perfectly; to paraphrase “The life of the law is not one of logic, it is one of experience.” Precedent survives because actual human conflicts have shown—repeatedly—that those rules prevent greater harm.
Of course, many professions could probably be reformed. I’d gladly trade the third year of law school for a supervised apprenticeship. This would help identify lawyers who are smart enough to pass the bar but functionally incompetent in practice. But that’s a far cry from dismantling law as a profession. Dismissing entire fields as useless betrays a shallow understanding of how modern civilization functions and, more important, how its parts interoperate.
You are just wrong. France is an advanced, complex society and they manage to get by without stare decisis.
Apples to oranges. France is a civil law based system whereas the systems that inherited England’s tradition are common law. Although there are whole treatises written on the distinctions and similarities between the systems, I would point out there is a similar concept in civil law systems, jurisprudence constante. https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/04-15.pdf
You are out of your depth on this topic. That’s okay! No one can be an expert in everything.
Again though, claiming wholesale that most lawyers hold bullshit jobs just shows a lack of understanding.
Law is not bullshit but most legal jobs are. Three forms of bs come to mind: pointless litigation where everyone loses except the legal team; pointless negotiations where the nth degree is debated to the 9th degree and when it goes wrong one has to engage in litigation to recover; and over regulation and overly complex regulation
Apples to oranges. France is a civil law based system whereas the systems that inherited England’s tradition are common law. Although there are whole treatises written on the distinctions and similarities between the systems, I would point out there is a similar concept in civil law systems, jurisprudence constante. https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/04-15.pdf
You are out of your depth on this topic. That’s okay! No one can be an expert in everything.
Again though, claiming wholesale that most lawyers hold bullshit jobs just shows a lack of understanding.
One more thing. Judges are not just cogs in some inhuman machine. They wield real, meaningful power, with substantial discretion and outcomes frequently hinge on precisely how they apply that power. This is a fact that anyone who has spent a material amount of time in a courtroom could quickly come to understand, with or without a bar card.
Your reasoning is precisely the type that gave us DOGE, a program that had a few small wins, but primarily did more harm than good because its operators did not sufficiently understand the systems they were attempting to “reform”.
Agree that law is not a bullshit job - the alternative is resolving our disputes with fists, or according to random factors like how a judge felt that day or whether he fancied the witness.
But DOGE has done a ton of good for the US. A lot of the "systems" they abolished (not reformed) were just broken and clearly corrupt. Does anyone except the Democrat swamp care that USAID is gone? Probably not. Note how conservative parties in other countries like the UK are now trying to copy DOGE right down to the name.
Regarding DOGE: “day ain’t over yet”. Just because Musk himself went back to blowing up rockets, that doesn’t mean the team or department is gone.
I think the concept that helped me understand this phenomenon most clearly is the Cantillon effect. The closer one is to the mines (or the money printer in the case of fiat currency), the more wealth one can accrue in a given time period. It doesn't matter if you produce value, as you write. "Scoring bureaucratic points" is just another euphemism for getting closer to the money printer.
Like physical entropy, every exchange of money for real value decreases the value of the money being exchanged. Better get it while it's hot and crispy.
I made a video about that exact topic a few years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRHwyUNCNqk&t=644s
Besides the slightly schizoid presentation format, I found this informative. I hope you are using this knowledge effectively to your benefit.
This! Plus, when licensing is private, the people who really want those 11-year doctors and are willing to pay for them can identify and get them. Informed consent law would allow others to get the level of expertise they want as well while knowing the associated risks. Instead we're run by people who want to force their values onto others as to how to engage with professionals (and of course the unions which benefit).
I think even for the professionals who theoretically agree with you, the Ponzi scheme works out in such a way for them to be strongly incentivized to justify the status quo to reduce competition. After all, they had to acquire tons of debt and useless training to get to where they are, so allowing more people into the field changes the calculation in a way that seems unfair to those who had to go through the shitty system as it is.
It would be nice to find a way around the drawbacks to the people who are in those transitional stages, much like with things like AI replacing jobs. I lean libertarian on most issues but I think things like student debt forgiveness and job retraining/upskilling should be made more accessible for people who get caught up in the meantime due to unforeseen deregulation or advancements in tech.
What are your thoughts?
I would add all marketing jobs. What do you suppose the Senior Vice President of Customer Journey Enablement does?
I don’t know much about marketing but I was under the impression that some people had to have actual knowledge of how different ad platforms work.
Good point. Better to say "many" marketing jobs.
There are very few actually bullshit jobs. All jobs create value for someone, the only exception is some jobs in government where they exist despite literally zero people being willing to personally pay for them.
Marketing is required. It's not a BS job, even if the industry is quite inefficient. People have to find out about your products somehow.
I do think that if you spend some time really thinking about some of these jobs and the value they provide, you might understand why they exist. It can be hard to understand why these jobs are useful if you haven’t worked with/relied on one of these people directly
I understand very well why they exist. I worked one of them! They exist because the government punishes you if you don't have someone to perform them.
Sure. And why does the government do that? Typically it's because, at some point, somebody did (or didn't) do something that made a lot of people upset. Then the government stepped in with a rule to stop people from doing (or not doing) that thing, and compliance requirements to verify that the rule was being followed.
Of course, one can ask whether people were justified in being upset in the first place; whether the government's rule actually works; whether the compliance burden is worth the benefit. Often the answer to one or more of these is no, and that's a problem. But other times the thing that made people upset was, "You knowingly poisoned several thousand workers and now their jawbones are necrotizing and they're developing cancer."
The whole creaking bureaucratic edifice persists because it contains a lot of load-bearing elements. It would be really great if someone could identify which elements are load-bearing and which can be safely cleared away... and there we go, another non-producing white-collar job.
Nope, that’s not how it works at all https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Introduction-Public-Choice-Introductions/dp/1785362062
You don't mention actual engineering at all: civil, mechanical, electrical are some of the "realist" jobs on the planet. Get in em kids!
There are more lawyers than civil, mechanical and electrical engineers combined. And lawyers make more money.
What I meant was engineering jobs are white collar jobs that produce tremendous value and they are not talked about enough. Even software engineering, which is very different from software development (AI will replace must software developers).
No way is there more lawyers than engineers. There’s probably more civil engineers than lawyers
The bureau of labor statistics keeps data on this. Look it up.
I think this argument only applies to certain white-collar jobs. Government spending in most economic sectors is simply not enough to be a driving force in white-collar competition.
I'm a surgeon who trains surgeons. It's actually more like 13 to 15 yrs. It would be possible to shave off about 3 yrs, but not much more.
Serious question: how are med students who want to be surgeons selected? Are their tests for dexterity?
No tests for dexterity unfortunately. Mostly based on brains, test scores, drive and personality. The dexterity part can be learned, but some are always better than others, just like any other profession (think athletes).
I imagine there are plenty of knowledgeable doctors with poor motor skills and the inability to look with complete professional detachment at an eviscerated human body. I assume you tell students when they should consider another track in medicine? I'm thinking about military aviation candidates who are sorted rigorously and ruthlessly for who flies the fighters, who flies cargo, turboprop vs jet etc. I'm kind of surprised medical schools don't have more formal selection but I assume when the scalpels come out people get sorted pretty quickly.