David Graeber was an anthropologist and anarchist writer, and his site hosts essays on bullshit jobs, debt, economics, and human history.
HN commenters cite his essays on anarchism and pointless work in debates about the meaning of work, and link his books page.
Graber was an anarchist and a leftist. For example, quoting from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/is-your-job-bullshit-on-capitalisms-endless-busywork/
> I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.
> A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.
He thought there were multiple ways people considered themselves on the left. For example, from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/from-managerial-feudalism-to-the-revolt-of-the-caring-classes/ :
> The conclusion that I came to is that essentially, the left is applying an outdated paradigm: they’re still thinking in terms of bosses and workers in a kind of old-fashioned industrial sense, when what’s really going on is that for most people the key class opposition is caregivers versus managers. Leftist parties are trying to represent both sides at the same time, but they’re really dominated by the latter.
and that "mainstream left" wasn't barely on the…
GDP doesn’t need to grow indefinitely. It measures industrial output, but not wealth or prosperity. Here are economists whose perspectives you may find offer a way out of the trap it feels like we’re in:
Mariana Mazzucato (https://marianamazzucato.com) talks about the spectrum of models capitalism can take in this interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prof-g-show-with-scott-galloway/id1498802610?i=1000579550742.
“Betterness” by Umair Haque talks about the need for metrics that augment GDP by serving as indicators of wealth: https://store.hbr.org/product/betterness-economics-for-humans/11135?sku=11135-PDF-ENG (also available on Amazon, iBooks, etc.).
The David Graeber Institute (https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/) has done a lot of work to explore how we allocate labor to tasks. The book “Bullshit Jobs” is a worthwhile overview of the Institute’s research.
Edit: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker (not an economist) is another look at progress. While Pinker acknowledges it’s possible to be born during a local minima, the book charts how things continue to improve for people across many metrics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
The tragic end to the Knights Templar brings to mind David Graeber's idea of bringing back the jubilee: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/after-the-jubilee/
Excerpted from Wikipedia:
The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades; as they became unable to secure their holdings in the Holy Land, support for the order faded. Rumors about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312.
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Perhaps if they were not so scrooge-like, their order would still be around today.
The financial stress of our debt-laden culture has led to deep mistrust, cospiracism, disfunction, environmental harm, and the stunting of growth for developing nations around the world.
We should learn from these stories of the past.
David Graeber: Oh, absolutely. After all, the alter-globalization movement grew out of a broad
global reaction to the Washington consensus, which was never any sort of consensus,
but rather, a vision of the world forcibly imposed on the global South through the third
world debt crisis. I was involved in “drop the debt” campaigns of various sorts since at
least 2000. What got me interested in some of the philosophical issues I ended up ex-
ploring in the book was the peculiar moral power of the notion of debts. So many oth-
erwise sympathetic people, even when told of the terrible, almost unimaginably inhu-
man suffering inflicted on people in the global South because of the depredations of
the IMF, would still respond, “well, that’s terrible that so many children died slow and
painful deaths, but still—surely one has to pay one’s debts!
https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/debts-history-implications-and-critical-perspective.pdf
Did he speak about the pandemic much? I think the responses to the pandemic from anarchists are interesting. They seem to range the entire spectrum: from the anti government conspiracy theorist to the enthusiastic state coercion supporter. Maybe the academic theorists were more level headed? He seemed to be saying "lets see what good can come from it afterwards", but I'm curious if there's more he said.
I did see a paper he wrote in 2020: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/the-museum-of-care-reimagining-the-world-after-pandemic/
"Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control."
This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy.
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
[1] https://davidgraeber.org/articles/