Episode 164 – Bullshit Jobs? with Erik Dean

It’s hard to imagine ever having been unaware of the concept of bullshit jobs, but David Graeber made it official and helped us understand their role in our economy. Bullshit jobs are not necessarily shit jobs, nor are they low wage jobs, or dirty jobs. Bullshit jobs are those that are meaningless. The person doing the bullshit job doesn’t believe the work actually needs to get done. 

This week’s guest, Erik Dean, has studied the nature of modern jobs within money manager capitalism. He points out that bullshit jobs aren’t just a product of neoliberalism: 

“Speculative business and these labor hierarchies of the people with secure jobs versus the precariat … those things have been around. and it’s not even necessarily part of capitalism. This is one reason it’s good to read Thorstein Veblen, because in an anthropological sense, he takes it back to prior to capitalism. It’s not like we didn’t have hierarchies before capitalism. It’s not like we didn’t have power and it’s not like we didn’t have bullshit jobs. What the hell is a court jester? It’s a bullshit job to entertain the king or whatever.” 

Dean talks with Steve about financialized capitalism – money market capitalism – and his disagreements with many on its basic characteristics. Just as bullshit jobs existed prior to our contemporary world, so did some of its other qualities, including its speculative nature and “short termism.” 

It was once thought that technology would relieve us of onerous jobs, allowing a shorter, lighter workweek, exchanging bullshit jobs for socially useful work. Steve confesses skepticism about the possibility of such a revolution. Dean responds: 

“If we were capable individually and collectively to reimagine what work is, what your time is best spent doing, and to break free of that encroaching neoliberal finance capitalist ideology that is, again, just gradually soaking into how we think about everything. To some extent, that is a revolution. If you can change the way you think and break free of the wider education of this neoliberalist ideology, that itself is a revolution.” 

**Don’t forget to check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese as well as the Extras page with additional resources. 

Erik Dean is an Instructor of Economics at Portland Community College and researcher at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His core expertise is in heterodox production theory, institutionalist methodology, and pedagogy in economics. His recent research covers a range of topics, including the nature of the modern occupational structure and the place of the corporation in money manager capitalism and the ramifications thereof. 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 164
Bullshit Jobs? With Erik Dean
March 19, 2022

[00:00:03.710] – Erik Dean

If we were capable, individually and collectively, to reimagine what work is, what your time is best spent doing, to some extent, that is a revolution. If you can change the way you think and break free of the wider education of this neoliberalist ideology, that itself is a revolution.

[00:00:28.290] – Erik Dean

It’s not like we didn’t have hierarchies before capitalism. It’s not like we didn’t have power, and it’s not like we didn’t have bullshit jobs. What the hell is a court jester? It’s a bullshit job. Entertain the king or whatever?

[00:01:42.130] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.060] – Steve Grumbine

All right, everybody, it is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I am going to take a deep dive into a couple of different worlds and see if we can make a podcast out of it. The guest that I have, his name is Erik Dean. He’s an instructor of economics at Portland Community College and researcher at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

His core expertise is in heterodox production theory, institutionalist methodology, and pedagogy in economics. His recent research covers a range of topics, including the nature of the modern occupational structure and the place of the corporation in money manager capitalism and the ramifications thereof.

Now, if you’ve been following me at all, you know that I’ve been focusing a lot on Lenin and understanding the role of finance capital on a global scale. And it’s kind of an exciting area because I don’t think enough of us really tie these things together. Jobs, finance. And my guest today—we were talking offline—they seem like they’re disparate items with Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” and finance capital and the role that it plays in the corporate world and work in general. So with that, Eric, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:56.930] – Erik Dean

Thanks for having me.

[00:02:58.380] – Grumbine

Absolutely. This is kind of a cool idea. A lot of people hate the work they’re doing, but are in this neoliberal construct where they try and teach you that you have to be very grateful for the job you have, even if it’s a bullshit job.

But this is a lot of the jobs that are out there and we are looking at corporations full of these bullshit jobs, but they are making money hand over fist through global finance, through finance capitalism and the role that finance plays in the modern corporation and I guess trickles down to the employment that is available within. See if you can come up with an opening salvo for that.

[00:03:42.030] – Dean

That would be interesting, right? Yeah. So the bullshit jobs of course, comes from David Graeber. He was an American anthropologist who ultimately was working at the London School of Economics. If you haven’t read it, he wrote a newspaper article sometime back in like 2013 or something, but then published a book, “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” back a couple of years ago.

And he defines bullshit jobs as, he says, bullshit jobs aren’t shit jobs. They’re not jobs for which you are poorly paid. They’re not jobs for which there aren’t benefits or that are dirty. Bullshit jobs are the jobs where the person who actually does the work doesn’t think the work actually needs to get done. So he uses these interviews with different people to get them to talk about how they feel their work is bullshit, how it doesn’t really need to exist.

And as I recall, the finance people tend to be pretty high in this regard. A lot of people working in finance will tell you just outright “my job, if it didn’t exist, wouldn’t change the world”. So to the extent that we can connect that to this kind of financialized capitalism that we have, especially in the US, but really around the world, the more that capitalism is defined by the machinations, the valuations of finance.

Of shifting assets and liabilities around, of creating new ones, that sort of thing. The more I think you’re going to have a capitalism dominated by bullshit jobs. So we haven’t really talked about what finance capitalism is, or money manager capitalism is the term I like from Hyman Minsky, but there’s definitely going to be a connection there, I think.

[00:05:20.970] – Grumbine

Why don’t you take a stab at breaking down what that money manager capital is, and let’s just start from there.

[00:05:30.030] – Dean

Yeah. Okay. So what finance capitalism is—this is something that I did quite a bit of research on a few years ago now—and it’s something where I tend to disagree with some people on some of the key characteristics. My disagreements usually come in the form of what we’re describing as finance capitalism or money manager capitalism is the characteristics of that that we think define that version of capitalism really have existed in capitalism prior, so short termism, for instance, is one of those things.

We think of finance or money manager capitalism as capitalism dominated by Wall Street or your C suite executives who really only care about stock prices day to day or quarterly returns or what have you. So that kind of short term focus as opposed to long term investments. But if you really think about it, capitalism has been about short termism from the get go to some extent.

There’s all sorts of instances where you can think of businesses taking kind of a short term approach rather than a long term approach to their own profitability. But even beyond that, to the actual expansion of productive capacity in the world. So you don’t need a kind of finance-dominated capitalism to get that short-termist approach. And then. The other thing is the idea that it’s speculative.

So one of the things that’s a common critique of stock trading and finance in general is that it’s speculative. But if you think about it, all business is essentially speculative. Thorstein Veblen said, back in the early 1900s, any business that’s going into business to sell something is essentially speculating on whether or not they’re going to be able to sell that thing that they’re investing in the production of.

And Veblen actually went as far as say that if you really think about this, the finance capitalism approach to business is less uncertain than, say, a small business. And you can kind of see this, right. Goldman Sachs hasn’t had any trouble staying in business over the years, especially over the last several decades. Whereas if you were a small business starting up a food truck or whatever, that’s a much more speculative enterprise and much less certain that you’re going to stay in business.

So that’s kind of what money manager capitalism to me actually isn’t. Those are the things we focus on this instability for the businesses themselves, the speculation, the short termism, and so on. Really what money manager capitalism is to me is just a different way of running businesses. It’s running businesses even within the corporation itself. I have in mind here the big businesses, not the food trucks.

But even within the corporations, the C suite tier top executives, they run the business, in essence, the way you would run a mutual fund. There’s a phrase that came out of the 1960s and 70s, mutual funds with smokestacks. Essentially, by the early 70s, your large corporations in the United States were being run by management, at least not the workers, but the managers.

They thought of these corporations as stock portfolios. You buy a division, you sell a division, you allocate funds from one division to another the same way you would if it was just the stock portfolio. So that’s kind of the short idea of this. And this was kind of a point of—some of my research back then was—that when we start to understand the institutional evolution of modern corporations, you start to realize that this era of finance capitalism isn’t so much this distinct thing.

It’s just how corporations themselves have evolved. And this is a point, by the way, Neil Fligstein made. He’s an economic sociologist worth reading. If you look back, say, 120 years ago, your biggest corporations are going to be run by people that have at least some direct knowledge of the production process of whatever it is the business produces.

Whereas if you look back 50 years ago, the top management are probably going to have sales type experience. They don’t necessarily know how to produce the stuff, but they’re going to know how to sell the stuff, how to market it. By the 1980s or so, at least into the 90s, your top management isn’t going to have sales experience. They’re going to have finance experience.

They’re going to know how to allocate funds between divisions. They’re going to know how to talk to Wall Street, how to go on CNBC and make a good show of the company’s record, that sort of thing. So it’s really kind of an institutional and organizational development rather than this distinct phase of capitalism. At least that’s how I look at it.

[00:10:17.550] – Grumbine

Sure. So within these corporations, you can go back 50 years, even large corporations, you have the managers that were involved in their employees lives. They would have birthday parties at the office, they would go visit you in the hospital. There was a whole lot more interaction. And over the course of those 50 years, you’ve seen the distance grow between the C suite and the rank and file worker, and a denigration of work of sorts, where all the protections and different perks that went with the job, for the regular worker have vanished.

All these different changes that have occurred in the structure of employee compensation and basically what they value as work, some automation has changed things. The corporation of today looks nothing like the corporation of the 1960s, but we see a precarity of the workforce. While the corporations are secure and operating through this financial space, it’s not so for the worker. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened to create that precarity and the elimination of that relationship between the employer and the workforce?

[00:11:38.490] – Dean

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. And when I do my research—as a heterodox economist, I always have to know the history of whatever it is you’re trying to study, get away with not knowing that if you’re neoclassical, if you’re heterodox, you don’t have that option. So one of the things when I’m doing that historical research is I look for things that we think are new or novel, and I try to see, well, are they really or have they kind of always been here?

And we just think that it just came around. And when it comes to that precarity of labor, to some extent that’s always existed. We go to Marx and the enclosure movements. This is a concept of creating precarious labor. If you used to be able to feed yourself off of the land that your house sat on or the commons—the common lands in the community—and you can’t do that anymore, then you have to go work at the factory.

So to some extent, there’s always been at least a group of workers in that situation. And I was just listening to the episode not too long ago with Bill Mitchell. I know he was talking about dual labor market theory. There’s a group of people who are in that kind of white collar work usually who have that kind of protection of the corporation, and the boss actually does come see them in the hospital, that sort of thing.

But then you have that other group of people who don’t have those protections who live in those unstable lives. So that existed fifty years ago. It existed 200 years ago. But that’s not to say it hasn’t changed and probably at least gotten worse in more recent times, since the last 40 years or so. The reasons for that, of course, are connected to this money manager capitalism idea.

Fifty years ago, the C suite, your top managers were thinking in terms of their corporations and its sales and usually how to market the product rather than how to produce the product. Then at the very least, you would have some connection between those managers and that giant bureaucratic apparatus of salespeople and market research analysts and maybe scientists and engineers doing R&D, because that used to actually be done to some extent.

Whereas today, when you’ve got this money manager capitalism, when the C suite thinks in terms of all this corporation really is a portfolio of stocks, it’s just a bunch of different divisions that I can sell or buy or do what I want with. I think it’s obvious that once you’re thinking in terms of this corporation is just a portfolio of assets, then the people in that corporation just don’t really exist in any meaningful sense.

They’re just numbers. So that’s been kind of an obvious—might even call it ideological—shift that is forcing essentially the entirety of the workforce within that corporation to be just not even names on a sheet of paper, because the names don’t matter. It’s just the numbers.

[00:14:32.910] – Grumbine

I got to jump in here. I read a book years ago called “Execution” by a gentleman named Ram Charan, who was with Larry Bossidy, who worked under Jack Welch. And what they got into was understanding Jack Welch’s portfolio management approach to running this huge global leviathan. And the belief was any business that they owned that wasn’t either number one or number two in the industry, they purged.

Sounds similar to what a stock trader might do. Ultimately, all of this came down to their portfolio management, and they had a belief that the bottom 10% was going to get turned over every year regardless. And that created this internal precarity. The overachievers were always sitting at the right hand, but the rank and file workers were competing with each other.

In the book, they praise it like this is some great revolutionary way of ensuring the corporation’s success while the corporate stewardship and taking care of the people—considering that relationship we just talked about—it seemed like it was very much missing. Is that what we’re looking at here? Is that the portfolio you’re talking about?

[00:15:44.990] – Dean

Yeah, exactly. And Jack Welch, if you think about his tenure at GE, he was kind of the mascot for this changing cultural environment in corporate governance. My mother actually worked at GE back in the 90s. And I can tell you one thing about the whole cutting the bottom 10%, you could fudge the numbers. That’s one thing we all know about finance and accounting.

Just thinking back to the Enron scandals or any number of scandals we’ve seen in the last several decades, those numbers can always be fudged. So the bottom 10% that’s getting cut isn’t necessarily the lowest performing because exceptions are made to the golf buddy and that sort of thing. But yeah, in a kind of ideological sense and the sense of marketing this ideology, Welch I think is the top cheerleader.

But that’s exactly the issue once you start to think of these corporations as portfolios. And I’m talking about once the top management thinks of the corporations as portfolios because nobody else does, everybody else thinks of themselves as I’m running a division or I’m working in a division or I’m working on this new product or what have you.

But the top management, once they think of these things as just stock portfolios, they just start to figure out ways of expanding the value of the stock portfolio. And at that point – and this is one of the things I want to emphasize – this is really an institutionalist concept. An original institutional economics concept is if you want to think about the social implications of this, you have to realize that what this means is your top management don’t know a damn thing about producing products.

They don’t even know a damn thing about selling products. So at that point, they’re essentially completely divorced from what people need, whether it’s in terms of producing good products or what people want in terms of what would actually sell. They just want to boost the value of their assets. And Incidentally, when you think about Welch, that in its crassest sense of just do whatever to boost the company’s bottom line, that itself doesn’t work very well necessarily.

You can see what’s happened to GE since those days. It has not fared well. So you need more than just that portfolio management hardass approach. But Welch definitely represented it. He was the Paragon of that new thing.

[00:18:10.110] – Grumbine

What kind of employee is a corporation that is basically a stock portfolio looking for? Are they looking for someone who’s a big producer, given the fact that what are they necessarily producing? Or are they just managing external vendor relationships without any actual physical production? And this outsource model, a lot of groups like Cisco and other major technology companies do no direct selling whatsoever.

They strictly live in a wholesale environment where they’re dealing with other corporations that will in turn become their de facto sales force. And the booking of sales – at what point is it an actual sale? Is it a sale when it leaves the warehouse? At what point do you recognize that sale? And this corruption that has crept into this model?

Because during the great financial crisis, Countrywide and the rest of them were making these huge sales on faulty loans that they knew had no chance of being paid off. They would get full compensation for it and they would walk away. So this whole finance capital is happening completely devoid of production. How do you get employment out of this? Talk about Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”, that whole concept of portfolio management.

[00:19:34.530] – Dean

Yeah, and I think that’s a great question. And Graeber actually talks a bit about how many jobs out there are bullshit. And he puts it at a high estimate, probably 40% or something like that. But maybe that’s not actually that high because to the extent that the corporations don’t have any real connection to production or to some extent even sales, especially when they’re able to adjust the perceived sales so that their finances look like whatever they want them to look like.

Ultimately, you can expect that you’re going to have a lot of workers that don’t really do anything in the traditional sense of actually producing or for that matter, even selling things. And this is one of the things Graeber talks about is it’s something like a corporate feudalism or something like that. Managerial feudalism. When you’re working at one of these corporations, if you’re doing a white collar job, you got your bachelors and you’re going into the corporate workforce.

My suspicion is what they want when you’re interviewing is they want somebody subservient. It’s going to look different depending on what kind of job you’re looking at. But I don’t want to overstate that this is 100% of the corporate workforce anymore. But to a significant degree, some significant number these jobs, you’ve got serfs, or rather not the serfs themselves.

The serfs are producing something in some factory somewhere in Nebraska or China or whatever. But then you’ve got these large corporations that are just packed with the managers who act as the King, and then there’s the Lords and the ladies, and then they’ve got their coterie of various servants. And that’s something Graber argued is a huge chunk of the American workforce is just essentially servants to people who have no connection to actual production.

They just kind of extract from it through the corporate bureaucracy itself in a similar way as somebody at a private equities firm extracts by purchasing and selling corporations.

[00:21:34.110] – Grumbine

This is such an interesting paradigm shift that I’m experiencing right now as I consider this. If you were to describe the modern corporation today, what might some of the characteristics be in this job creation within that corporation? Is this just sort of a veneer to explain why all this money is passing through the shell? It feels completely foreign to anything that makes any sense to me.

I understand investment. I’m not good. I’m terrible at it, but I understand it. What I don’t understand is the role of these jobs. What’s in it for the Corporation? Why do they do this? What is the value of creating these bullshit jobs?

[00:22:18.630] – Dean

Actually, bit of a side note, but connected to what you’re asking. One of the things we looked at, me being me and a couple of colleagues, Rich Dadzie and Xuan Pham, when we did some empirical work on this bullshit jobs concept is we looked at whether this is a private corporate problem or a government problem, because you wouldn’t have to go far to find somebody who would say, well, yeah, of course, government jobs are bullshit because the government bureaucracies just create bullshit jobs.

Everybody knows that. And one of the things we found is, no, that’s not really true. Government does create bullshit jobs, too, but at least statistically, we couldn’t find any difference between government jobs and private sector jobs. Ultimately, this is kind of a situation of bureaucracy once you’ve got a stable organization.

And this is something I wrote about with regard to money manager capitalism and businesses. Businesses operate as going concerns. That concept comes from Thorstein Veblen, but it ultimately comes from the accounting changes that happened back in the 19th century with actual businesses. Going concerns, all that means is this business is going to stay in business for the foreseeable future.

We’re not running this business to make money today and get shut down. And as much as we like to talk about how destabilizing this new era of financialized capitalism has been for businesses, it really hasn’t. They’re still operating as going concerns. So there’s no real shake up in the corporate community. There was back in the 1980s when we’re making this transition. But that shake up is over.

So once you have these businesses that are operating as going concerns that have a degree of diversification and product lines or in markets or what have you that have pricing power. We’ve been talking about pricing power and inflation the last couple of years. Once they have that stable environment where there’s no real reason to expect that this business is going to go out of business in the near future, then you can start thinking about, well, this business doesn’t do the competitive thing where it sells the best product for the lowest price.

That’s all bullshit. That’s neoclassical textbook stuff doesn’t really bear on this. And you can start thinking about what is the business going to do? It’s going to sell products, it’s going to make money, or it’s going to go out of business. So that’s going to happen. That’s already locked in. So what else is there to do in these bureaucracies of businesses?

And one of the things to do is to vie for power and then to demonstrate your prowess within the organization itself. So how do you demonstrate your prowess if you’re a middle manager somewhere? You probably know the answer to this, Steve. If you’re a middle manager and you want to demonstrate your prowess in the corporation itself, how are you going to do that? What do you think?

[00:25:05.250] – Grumbine

I’m probably going to show them some innovative idea that I have. I’m going to happen to be in a place where I can talk to them about something that I feel maybe would resonate with them and get under their skin and might send an email. There’s a bunch of things I’d probably do.

[00:25:23.020] – Dean

All right, so innovative idea. You’re middle management. If you were capable of innovative ideas, you wouldn’t be here. I’m sure I’ve got friends that’s going to piss off. That’s fine. It’s a joke kind of. Emails is fine. But what you really need—this is what Graeber talks about—what you really need is some really nice PowerPoints.

So when you go into those meetings to show some whatever ideas you might have, which are probably dumb anyways, because you’re middle management, you need those PowerPoints to look fancy. It needs to have pictures and needs to have PowerPoint templates or something to make them look good.

[00:25:57.380] – Grumbine

Oh, yes.

[00:25:58.130] – Dean

So you need somebody to do that for you because you don’t know how to do that shit. You’re middle management. You make decisions. You don’t make PowerPoints. So you need to hire somebody to do that. Another thing, who’s got more prowess, the person where you call them if you want to talk to them, or the person where you call their secretary if you want to talk to them.

So you need a secretary because it’s not going to look good if you’re answering your own calls. And this isn’t new by any means. We understand this. Veblen actually talked about this. Veblen complained about the advent of the telephone, and as I recall, Mark Twain did as well. Both of them agreed—if I’m not misremembering this—that all you’re going to end up with is a bunch of extra kind of bullshit where you got to talk on the phone now about stupid ideas.

So that’s how you do it, though, right? You want to demonstrate your prowess now that the organization is stable—again, get this competitive product innovation idea out of your mind and think—this organization is stable. It produces stuff. It buys up companies that might actually innovate because those could be dangerous to the company. So you buy them up.

This is how pharmaceuticals work. Everybody knows the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t produce new pharmaceuticals. Yeah, it buys up the smaller firms or grabs the patents out of the universities, and it might not even use them. It could sit on them. It could shelve them. Once you’re stable, once the business can keep the cash flow coming, you start thinking about how to expand your little mini fiefdom within the organization.

So you start hiring people. And this is where we get a lot of these bullshit jobs, these white collar jobs, whether it’s secretaries or the middle managers themselves. Although I’ll note, managers will never admit that their jobs are bullshit. That’s just empirically what Graeber found, and we found it statistically, too. Anybody with real decision making authority is going to be disinclined to say “My job is bullshit”. Something about decision making itself strikes people as not bullshit.

[00:28:01.950] – Grumbine

I can see that.

[00:28:14.770] – Andy Kennedy [intermission/music]

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[00:29:05.910] – Grumbine

Let’s take a deeper dive on Graeber. What do you think his idea of future labor was? How did he see the future of jobs?

[00:29:15.570] – Dean

Graeber was an anarchist, and he was one of the promoters of the UBI concept, which I didn’t find his arguments particularly compelling. That’s kind of the end of that “Bullshit Jobs” book. But he had the standard idea of why don’t we all just work 5 hours a week and spend the rest of the time learning to play guitar or doing whatever it is we wanted? And Maynard Keynes had that same idea.

The economic possibilities of our grandchildren, I think was what it was called. He said we can cut work hours and we will in the future. The obvious problem, of course, Maynard Keynes is writing that in the 30s, I want to say. The obvious reason that didn’t happen – the American workforce is massively more productive now than it was 90 years ago – is we have this kind of idea of, no, you have to work for an income.

And there’s benefits to that because people do want to work. But there are perverse outcomes with an overly strict adherence to that idea, because then you start to get the proliferation of bullshit jobs. In one sense, all we’re really saying you have to work if you’re going to participate in the economic system, if you’re going to be able to eat, basically.

And then we’re saying, okay, well, we don’t really need workers. We live in this affluent society, as Ken Galbraith called it. So what are we going to do, let all these people starve? We’re just going to make up bullshit jobs for them. Changing that – Graeber thought a UBI would take care of that. I’m inclined to say that’s not going to take it very far.

And the reason is that in a very real sense, incomes, the kind of hierarchy of incomes in modern capitalism, are determined by the corporations. They determine the prices, they determine the wages and salaries. So if they can determine both of those, then to a large extent, they are looking for the spread between the two that’s their profits.

And then they’re creating the hierarchy of who gets the money. If you just give everybody money, the corporations are just going to adjust the numbers to make that hierarchy and those profits come out. But that’s what he thought. He thought somehow, ideally, we get people not working so much and doing whatever it is they want.

[00:31:28.110] – Grumbine

I like the idea of automation making lives better by enhancing everyone’s work week and value. But I recognize that if I can adjust my prices based on the idea that you have more income and it doesn’t really matter whether the cost to produce these things raised or not. I can create inflation simply because I have the power of the pen and I slash the price, look at rent-seeking behavior and subsidizing shit wages.

That’s where the UBI comes in. It creates that gig-afied economy and the fertile ground for the Uber-isation of America and the world, really. We would all like to have work that is fulfilling, and why not job share, and 20-hour work week, and allow people to telework, as we’ve experienced during this pandemic.

There’s a lot of things that can green the economy, give us some power over climate change to mitigate the carbon footprint. There’s so many things out there that you could do to change that. But I see the danger of just saying here’s money because we know capital would boost the price. And without price controls, there’s probably not much you can do to stop that.

So my question is, if the answer to bullshit jobs isn’t necessarily a UBI—and in the Heterodox MMT space, we typically point to a federal job guarantee—what might be an alternative to the job guarantee while still in the corporation, while not the UBI? Because without having universal basic services or something to peg the economy to labor without being able to extract more through subsidizing bad wages I don’t see a way for rank and file people to survive the inflation that would be baked into the economy based on gouging.

[00:33:25.890] – Dean

Yeah, and a couple of things on that. You mentioned this pricing power. I just met with Rich Dadzie last night. We’ve been working on the inflation data and we’ve been going through the 10ks of the largest corporations in some of the industries or markets with the highest inflation—so autos and that sort of thing—and it’s just amazing how stable their margins are.

Now the margins in some instances have increased over the last year or so, but even at least through 2000, you look at some of these large corporations and they’ve had the same margin within one or two percentage points at most going back several years. And it’s when you look at their most recent 10ks, it’s as if the pandemic didn’t happen for most of them. Same margins.

So they have significant pricing power. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re gouging. So if you look at what’s going on with cars right now, that’s your highest inflation component in the whole basket. The auto makers aren’t price gouging. They’re targeting their margins. They’re having trouble actually meeting supply, but they’re not really jacking prices up. It’s the dealerships, interestingly.

It’s not the big companies, it’s the smaller dealerships that are just jacking prices up wildly. Anyway, so they do have this pricing power, and that ultimately is going to make it tricky to try to adjust this environment, this hierarchy of employment, and also the hierarchy of organizational control, between governments at the federal level, state level, local level, and corporations, the big corporations like the auto manufacturers or the smaller ones like the dealerships.

And I think that’s kind of the point is we think of these economic issues as financial issues. And we think, well, if you can adjust the money, subsidize green energy, tax tobacco, that sort of thing, you can adjust things correctly. But ultimately those dollar values are really just the artifacts of power processes. These hierarchies of the feudal Lords and the managerial components of the corporate bureaucracies and their secretaries and the people that get them lunch and the people that serve the margaritas after work and all of that good stuff that didn’t just happen.

That’s an evolved social hierarchy of who gets to be where in a structure of power. So ultimately that’s the main problem with the UBI, is throwing more money at it won’t change that. So you need to do something that creates more institutional change—you might think of it as a cultural change. The job guarantee could do that. A poorly implemented job guarantee could do the opposite too.

Like I said, bullshit jobs aren’t really specific to private or public institutions. Governments got bullshit jobs at about the same rate the corporations have. So job creation itself doesn’t mean you’re not just creating bullshit jobs. I don’t think anybody who argues for a job guarantee doesn’t recognize that, but it is there for sure.

[00:36:35.730] – Grumbine

Yeah, I think instead of a UBI, think of a UBS or universal basic services, because it’s really the resource we want, not the cash. And so a job guarantee properly implemented, you would have local communities deciding what social value work, socially useful service work. Maybe it’s helping old people that are nearing hospice, reading to kids, any number of things.

You look at our local schools and our kids no longer going to gym every day or music class every day. And the local community is then putting the cost of participating on the families. And not all families have the same financial situation, and transportation situation. So there’s a lot of real, meaningful community based work that is not considered profitable, that is there, and that concept of the public purpose reclaiming that, I think is a missing component because we have it into our head that if it’s not worth a corporation paying you for because they see profit motive in it, then it’s not useful.

And I would take issue with that. That socially inclusive work, especially for people that have kids, that are in tough situations—the opportunity to work and serve in your local community—maybe that’s a new way of providing balance to employees, to rank and file workers, so ending generational poverty by allowing people to have access to a local job in the community.

I wonder what that would do to freeing up other jobs that maybe people are just staying in because they need the benefits and allow them to serve in their local communities in a job guarantee role. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:38:19.510] – Dean

Yeah. I think that’s precisely why the job guarantee is very radical. If you think about it, we have a current ideological trajectory, which is this Uberification that you mentioned, where it’s not just that you’re going to work in a precarious job, it’s that your entire life is going to be reconstructed so that your every moment is treated as though you are this contract worker for everything you do, in a sense.

Your car doesn’t just get you around now, you’re actually a taxi driver, whether you knew it or not, because you can drive Uber. Your house isn’t just where you live, you can Airbnb it now, so now you’re a landlord, I guess. Gerald Davis, another sociologist, called this the Portfolio Society. It’s a component of the neoliberal era where the encroaching ideological movement is towards essentially the exact opposite of what you were talking about in terms of socially useful work.

Everything that isn’t work is being treated as though it’s a portfolio. And to the extent that my thinking is right here at all, that this portfolio thinking in corporations is largely associated with bullshit, what that’s meaning is your whole life is being deconstructed into these component assets of bullshit work. So my point here is that the movement is towards that.

The movement is not stable where there’s bullshit jobs out there, there’s bullshit jobs out there, and more and more of your life is going to be kind of like just having some bullshit job, usually as a servant to people with higher income. That’s what you are as an Uber driver. You’re driving around people who can afford Uber. So, yeah, the trajectory is that way.

Thinking in terms of creating socially useful work then becomes that much more difficult. It makes that job guarantee or any other efforts to create socially useful work as opposed to this current capitalist system we have that much more, I don’t want to say unlikely. I try to be optimistic, but it’s hard. Definitely more challenging, I guess. How about that?

[00:40:29.430] – Grumbine

Yes. All right, so let’s dial this back. I think this has been pretty fun so far because I wanted to do two different podcasts. We were able to blend them into one because they’re very complimentary. But the idea of the corporation as a stock portfolio, a series of asset investments that they manage through capitalism. And then we’re looking at bullshit jobs, which are these soul-sucking jobs that are really doing nothing of value. Maybe they pay well, maybe they have some prestige that goes with it.

[00:41:02.740] – Dean

But some of them do. A lot of them do nothing.

[00:41:05.450] – Grumbine

And then you have self fulfillment. This is the other aspect of this that maybe we should close out on. What do you see as that self actualization phase in terms of dealing with this short of a revolution, which I am 100% for, but we’re nowhere near that. Whether you want to look at this through a materialist perspective, or realist perspective, we’re nowhere near a revolution, sadly. How do we make self actualization happen in this neoliberal era?

[00:41:35.610] – Dean

It depends on what you mean by revolution when you talk short of that. And to some extent, if we were capable individually and collectively to reimagine what work is, what your time is best spent doing, and to break free of that encroaching neoliberal finance capitalist ideology that is, again, just gradually soaking into how we think about everything.

To some extent, that is a revolution. If you can change the way you think and break free of the wider education of this neoliberalist ideology, that itself is a revolution. Now it’s probably the sort of revolution that gets beat back pretty quickly by the facts of soaring housing prices and stagnant wages and all that good sort of stuff.

And it’s probably a revolution that gets beat back by the fact that at least for the college educated people that have the opportunity of getting these middle management type bullshit jobs, it’s probably going to be hard to reconcile your 40 hours at work with an ideology that doesn’t really comport with the nature of the bureaucracy you work in. But to the extent that you can think differently about things that’s kind of revolutionary in its own right.

[00:42:54.350] – Grumbine

Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

[00:42:55.710] – Dean

In terms of doing it with policy, I’m fairly cynical about policy. I was a Bernie supporter in 2016. I mean, hell, I was a Bernie supporter back before he ran for President. And the last five or six years now have made me more cynical than I was about politics. And I was pretty cynical to begin with. One thing I wanted to mention—I underlined here—when Rich and Xuan and I did this empirical work on bullshit jobs, we got a big data set and looked at which jobs were associated with people who felt like they weren’t really contributing to society.

One thing we found that was interesting is the computer programmers, all the people in software, basically, they had a really high prevalence of thinking their jobs were bullshit. Which, one, puts the lie to that “learn to code” idea, at least in terms of actually creating socially useful jobs, but two, begs the question: Well, what are we doing with all this automation, with all the apps we have on our phones and just computers in general?

What have we been doing? And my suspicion is that most of the computer-based innovations, whether it’s on your phone or in the cloud or on your laptop or whatever, most of those are fundamentally managerial in nature. A lot of what we’re calling innovation is really just a push for this managerialism, this surveillance and control that characterizes modern corporate bureaucracies wrapped up in this idea of technological innovation.

So that’s another thing. If we’re talking about breaking free of these ideologies, you have to look for things that might seem like they’re good, might seem like they’re different from the stodgy old world of large corporations or whatever and ask yourself, well, are they or are they just the same bullshit wrapped on a new package?

[00:44:51.090] – Grumbine

That’s great insight. I want to provide a juxtaposition to this. We just had a Super Bowl and everybody watches the halftime show and the great commercials. I enjoyed the show. It was neat to see Dre and Snoop Dogg. And I’m not a big hip hop fan. Maybe it’s because I’m an old fart.

[00:45:09.570] – Dean

It was very nostalgic.

[00:45:11.490] – Grumbine

It was definitely nostalgic. But that said, they’re selling you this vision of you too could be part of this thing. And you can have this great life. All you have to do is buy this thing and everything’s going to be better. And so they promise you this better life. And it’s not about production. It’s all about consumption.

But then this pandemic comes around and we got supply chain issues, semiconductor shortages, all these different things that break down our ability to get to things. Ultimately, the combination of this consumerism: buy this thing and you’ll feel so much better about yourself. And then it’s selling you to go to college, and we got 2 trillion in student debt chasing a dream for bullshit jobs, and there’s no market to pay off that student debt.

Thank you so much, Biden, for making it impossible to get rid of student debt. But you put all this together and our cynicism starts ramping up. You start wondering how we can overthrow this shitty system and you can’t. Is there a future for mankind that is utopian? I don’t see a path forward. I know there’s people out there lining up to start door knocking and phone banking for the next messiah of a candidate without a political or mental revolution or some other parallel system, we have no power in this.

People say, well, we’ll just stop working because the power is in labor. But in reality, it’s not true. The idea of a strike is very different today than back in Eugene V. Debs world. Where’s the power? Is there any power or is it an illusion?

[00:47:00.810] – Dean

Short answer, no. The ruling elite power is obviously considerably stronger now than it was 50 years ago. And it was stronger 50 years ago than it was 100 years ago. It’s clearly getting stronger every day. If I were a betting man, if I made enough money to bet, then I would say, no. We’re moving inexorably towards an end state of some sort of totalitarian fascism or something.

I’d say that just to express my natural cynicism. But also to say that one of the things that’s important is to recognize that there is movement and the movement is in that direction. It is in increasing power amongst a smaller and smaller group of global elites, really, if I’m not sounding too much like Alex Jones.

[00:47:50.390] – Grumbine

No, you sound like me.

[00:47:53.950] – Dean

To some extent I think maybe it’s worth just thinking about we’re on the defensive in that regard because we’re definitely not on the offensive and we weren’t on the offensive at the peak of the Sanders movement. Asking for things like universal healthcare is not exactly strongly pushing back against this trajectory by any means.

That said, labor does have power. Individual strikes can only go so far. General strikes could be much more effective, which is why, of course, they’re illegal. Distribution is still strong, though. If one of those Amazon joints unionized, it wouldn’t be a major blow because they just shut down the plant. But it would be a signal.

[00:48:35.970] – Grumbine

It’s happening right now in New York City. The union busting has been going on hard. I work on another platform, Status Coup with Jordan Chariton, formerly of TYT, and watching the efforts and the arrests that are going on, but they won the right to an election. And, Starbucks as well. But unfortunately, as soon as they do that, people are getting fired immediately.

There’s got to be a way. I know Sarah Nelson talks extensively about, “There’s no such thing as an illegal strike, there’s only an ineffective one.” And I talked to Joe Burns, who is one of the power lawyers for labor movement that works with Sarah, and he basically says, “I don’t think a general strike is the answer.

I think it really comes down to recognizing very targeted strikes for transportation.” That’s where a lot of that comes from. It’s just the idea of what do we still have meaningful control over? And if the trucks pull over, stuff isn’t shipping, you’re going to create the conditions necessary. Things will start percolating at that point.

That’s my mindset, anyway. It was neat to see the stuff going on at Amazon. It’s terrifying the shitty tactics they’re using to union bust, but that and a bag of chips gives you a bag of chips because there’s still not a whole lot of power there.

[00:49:52.580] – Grumbine

And you’re right, they’ll just shut that thing right down and put somewhere in Texas, where Texas is always welcoming that kind of stuff. Race to the bottom still very much in play. I’ll leave you with the final parting thought there, Eric.

[00:50:06.810] – Dean

Yeah, I think you’re right. And if it helps to summarize, I think one of the reasons it’s important to understand this era of money manager capitalism within the broader history of capitalism and to understand that a lot of these things, they didn’t just show up in the 80s. Speculative business and these labor hierarchies of the people with secure jobs versus the precariat (I think is Guy Standing’s word)—those things have been around, and it’s not even necessarily part of capitalism.

This is one reason it’s good to read Thorstein Veblen, because in an anthropological sense, he takes it back to prior to capitalism. It’s not like we didn’t have hierarchies before capitalism. It’s not like we didn’t have power and it’s not like we didn’t have bullshit jobs. What the hell is a court jester? It’s a bullshit job to entertain the King or whatever.

So we’ve had all these things and to the extent that it’s possible to realize new socially useful activity, whether it’s work or call it something else or even just in the milder sense of pushing back against what could be this trajectory towards an increasingly authoritarian and consolidated ruling elite, I think it’s useful to recognize that these are really fundamental social problems that are certainly worth fighting. You’ll never get to that utopia, but you’ll get to someplace better than where you would have been if you hadn’t fought.

[00:51:36.930] – Grumbine

I love it. This was a great talk. I really appreciate it. It’s great to meet you. So glad that we could do this. This is wonderful.

[00:51:44.390] – Dean

Yeah, me too.

[00:51:45.550] – Grumbine

Whenever you’re available. I’d love to have you back on.

[00:51:48.930] – Dean

Yeah, absolutely. I’m usually available. I don’t do much.

[00:51:53.310] – Grumbine

I’m really grateful. And folks, I hope you enjoyed this. Please check out the rest of Macro N Cheese. We are a 501(c)3 donor-supported organization. Please consider becoming a monthly donor. And with that, I hope you enjoy this. We’re out of here.

[00:52:09.050] – Dean

Thanks, Steve.

[00:52:15.190] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Erik Dean

Research scholar at the Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an instructor of economics at Portland Community College. He has presented papers on heterodox microeconomic theory, institutional economics, and methodology at meetings for the Association for Institutional Thought and the Union for Radical Political Economics, and contributed a chapter to the recent volume Advancing the Frontiers of Heterodox Economics: Essays in Honor of Frederic S. Lee. Dean received his Ph. D. from the University of Missouri – Kansas City.

Publications

David Graeber 

American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time 

Books

Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

An independent public policy think-tank dedicated to the promotion of interdisciplinary research in the service of an improved quality of life for all members of society. We believe that providing decent employment opportunities for everyone ready, willing and able to work at a socially established living wage is an institutional prerequisite for social justice and sustainable prosperity.

Thorstein Veblen

A Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. 

Books

Goldman Sachs

American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City.

Neil Fligstein

American sociologist, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work in economic sociology, political sociology and organizational theory.

Books

Ram Charan

World-renowned business consultant, author and speaker who has spent the past 35 years working with many top companies and CEOs.

Website

Jack Welch

American business executive, chemical engineer, and writer. He was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001.

Enron Scandal

Enron Corp, a company that reached dramatic heights only to face a dizzying fall. The fated company’s collapse affected thousands of employees and shook Wall Street to its core. At Enron’s peak, its shares were worth $90.75; just prior to declaring bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, they were trading at $0.26. 

Rich Dadzie

Assistant Professor of Economics at Seattle Pacific University. Previously he was an Assistant Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Hawaii-West Oahu and an adjunct faculty member in economics at Whitworth University. He has published in industry and academic journals on topics including but not limited to, profit splits within a multinational enterprise, the role of the state in economic development, and the comparative development experiences of Southeast Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries.

Xuan Pham

Publications

John Maynard Keynes

English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. 

Books

John Kenneth Galbraith 

Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. 

Books

Gerald Davis 

American sociologist, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, known for his work on corporate networks 

Books

Status Coup

Jordan Chariton, Status Coup CEO, is an independent progressive journalist who’s worked inside, and outside, the belly of the corporate media beast for over a decade.

Website

Sara Nelson

American union leader who serves as the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. 

Guy Standing 

British labour economist. He is a professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network. 

 Website 

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