Reminds me of the story of the professor who died during Covid but had recorded all the lectures. One of the students randomly learned they were being taught from beyond the.
I can relate. I did my PhD with a £10,000 (per year for 3 years) scholarship, from which I had to deduct £3,465 for the tuition fees per year. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had a second “night” job as a freelance developer I wouldn’t had been able to pay for rent or food. I could write a compendium of tricks on how to live well below the poverty line lol
It is strange to read comments like that, I used to be under the impression that PhD was a paid job as it is that here in Denmark. Here they get around £3400 per month [0].
Copenhagen University [1] has it as 35,250kr/month, which is almost £4300/month.
Taxes and cost of living are higher in Denmark, but it's still more than double what a student in Britain gets. I had friends studying in both countries, and I was shocked when I found out the difference. (It was all science research.)
A couple of years ago, I saw a job advert at a British research institute I was working with. It was a PhD position, funded and managed by Copenhagen University, but living and working mostly in England to use the special equipment the institution had. The salary was higher than a senior researcher position, also listed, and higher than all the developers I was working with.
I think each country has different laws/rules/regulations for PhD. Where I live it's really common for the job to be tied to teaching hours for instance. It's also easier to do a PhD and live on it than going postdoc (it pays less and there are fewer positions).
Currently in a similar situation. I have about £7k after paying tuition, £6k of which goes to rent. The price of food here is increasing here too due to global shortages. I could definitely write some tips on how to live below the poverty line.
Due to COVID, the University is also trying every trick in the book to further reduce any funding and increase costs where possible, due to the lack of foreign student income. That's all good and well, but there's only so far a person can go.
Well, on the plus side universities are about the perfect situation for, uh, alternative living situations. They have bathrooms and showers in abundance, cafeterias, and washer/dryers.
Universities get away with the minimum wage labor because the living experience of universities is basically the only successful mass communal living experience that doesn't look like a prison (like nursing homes, homeless shelters, military barracks, etc) and is arguably more enjoyable to be in than "real life" with apartments, commutes, office jobs, etc.
And despite the fact you typically are living at arguably a sub-poverty line existence, you are either a "professor", "doctoral candidate", or at least "university student" all of which carry substantial prestige over what is basically minimum wage (or sub minimum wage) labor.
Arguably this was a perfectly fine thing for ...centuries? But since the ludicrous explosion in tuition and the rise of various management vampires siphoning off that money, it has become decidedly exploitative, to the point it is beginning to destroy the value, prestige, and appeal of the institutions as a whole.
I keep thinking every 10 years there will be a massive correction, but they are still holding firm to the class paranoia of the upper middle classes and the big lie of upward mobility to the middle and lower classes. And of course an entire generation of people that wouldn't normally have gone to college going there, getting drunk and a rubberstamp degree, and then defending the "value" (really a sunk cost) of that by demanding any new hires also have the same rubberstamp/sunk cost.
In my early years teaching art in the UK, I worked three days in a row in a uni around 60 miles from where I lived. To save money I slept in the studios. Worked well for one year till I was caught.
Before the dot com bust, people who used to work for Sun or SGI who lived out in places like Sacramento or elsewhere would park their RVs (caravan) in the parking lots and save on commute time and also not have to buy expensive housing (even though compared to today it was affordable, but still they liked living where they lived). It wasn’t super common but a few did that.
I used to work with somebody on a long-term contract in Glasgow. He opted to forgo hotel and restaurant expenses (we worked at a large tech consultancy) for a per-night cash credit (I can't remember if it was £30 or £60) and lived out of his camper van. I still don't know how he did it.
After I was caught, I went to live with some students. Paid them in a few beers now and then. There was only one front door key between the four of them. To get it we had to climb up the front of the house. I was nearly 40 at the time, but didn’t mind too much living the student life style.
However, Eventually that kind of thing got to me. The breaking point was realizing that primary school teachers were getting paid more than me. Left for a university management job in Asia.
Without any malice. This sounds miserable but it is untenable - totally untenable - for society to go out of its way to make life easy for someone who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying minority ethnic groups in American literature from a position in the UK.
This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. It is very unlikely that there is a pay off from this degree in this field. Poor economic prospects are sort of baked in.
> This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy.
Not really, no. Studying requires time but little resources. Is there a reason we don't have more free time? At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work. Instead, society took the wrong turn and doubled down on "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber) and the social control apparatus (police, surveillance industry, private security).
If we shared work equally and stopped working for greedy soulless corporate overlords, everyone would have time to spend on a PHD!
EDIT: If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.
Pretty humorous to quote anarchist thinkers and then endorse the government’s arguments, unilaterally telling me my gym is “not essential”, and deploying one of the biggest rollback in public liberties within democracies in history!
More to the point of the article, I’d argue most PhD work meets the definition of “bullshit jobs” much better than Graeber’s unrigorous and widely contested book.
It’s clear to me that we’re moving towards a two-tier economy, with one tier best described as varying levels of “broke” (which includes everyone from homeless people like her, to people who buy second hand BMWs and Mercedes who don’t have even $50,000 in savings), and asset owners. Earning money outside a salary is essential, whether online, or by starting a business, or OnlyFans-style stuff. More resourceful people with multiple, diversified income source will thrive, and people who believe “the system” has their back, and that a salaried life is the “prestigious”, “default” path, will crumble.
I guarantee you, there are people making money online, working 10h a week like you say, living in third-world countries that give you more day-to-day freedom (as long as you’re not a political opponent) than Western democracies. It’s not a dream, it’s reality! If you’re an anarchist, don’t expect the government to bail you out. The “dream life” according to you, is very real, today, and you can get to it with maybe a year of hard work, with the added benefit of being geopolitically independent, and able to bail if things get bad.
> Pretty humorous to quote anarchist thinkers and then endorse the government’s arguments, unilaterally telling me my gym is “not essential”
Sorry if i gave this impression. I precisely put "essential" in quotation marks to indicate that the interpretation is very subjective and variable. What i meant was that in order to have housing and food and what i personally consider basic human needs, most jobs are not needed: many people who previously felt like their job was a form of contribution to society took a step back with the first lockdowns and realized that overall and on average, society did just fine without them working at all. That's what i meant, and i certainly did not intend to imply that a virus can be beaten with cops and batons as most of our governments have tried (and failed), or that breathing fresh air and physical exercise should be illegal. Overall, there were pretty good anarchist analysis of the current Covid 1984 (wink) epidemic [0] [1], and you'll probably be glad to know i defied the lockdown and curfew on several occasions due to militant and/or mutual aid activities.
> More to the point of the article, I’d argue most PhD work meets the definition of “bullshit jobs”
Depends on what you call a job. If you do that to earn money and fame, sure that's bullshit. But in other cases, can we even call it a job? All PhD candidates (not a lot) i ever met here in France were in rather precarious situations and were studying questions that explicitly fascinated them, as part of related militant and creative activities. That kind of active curiosity often reminds me of the hacker spirit, but of course that's not the kind of mindset taught in most academic circles (the original "Watchdogs" for Nizan).
I often see people in various fields engaging in serious study of an issue that affects them. In computing, in cooking, in mechanics. We don't call these PhD because there's gatekeeping in academia, but most people are doing actual research work at some point in their life and i think that's something worth acknowledging/incentivizing. It strikes me that there are often similarities between certain blogposts detailing a problem space, and an actual research paper... but one is certainly less esteemed in our society.
> If you’re an anarchist, don’t expect the government to bail you out.
Even if you aren't an anarchist, please don't expect anything from powers that be. Read some historical propaganda and history of social struggles, or social sciences research papers.
> The “dream life” according to you, is very real, today, and you can get to it
I definitely agree with this part of the sentence, but we don't give it the same meaning. For me autonomy is something that is built collectively: there is no freedom or equality if only i enjoy them (or in other words, and as the saying goes, "none are free until all are free"). Earning a high-enough wage to afford to pay a landlord and supermarkets and dozens of evil corporations for very basic services is not a dream life in my view: i view it as earning a greater share of the pie baked off the back of exploited people. Personally, i'm more interested in free communes and how to build radical alternatives to the dystopian nightmare we're in.
Essential was a misnomer. What it tried to capture without saying it was people who needed to be on-site to perform their duties. The majority was blue collar work and service work -both very manual endeavors, but it also included doctors and supervisory engineers who keep things like water treatment running, drug manufacturing, research moving, etc.
But we still needed “office” workers who support other areas of enterprises. Legal, contracts, compliance, HR, financial, development, management, etc. All still very essential to the viability of an enterprise but who could perform those duties remotely.
Sure there is necessary fluff like all the idiotic “trainings” in different things that are self- perpetuating industries that are in reality box checking exercises, they are a drag but a minority of things.
> But we still needed “office” workers who support other areas of enterprises. Legal, contracts, compliance, HR, financial, development, management, etc.
I precisely meant that society would be better off without all these "jobs". They are useless constructs required by capitalism and competition, but do not build anything useful for society, except maybe for compliance (if by that you meant quality assurance).
Moreover, i would argue that productive jobs don't have to be so many. When you have ten supermarkets selling the same shit, you need storage and logistics for all of them run by different people. If we lived in a society of cooperation not competition, each supermarket could probably be run on half the jobs currently required (if not much less).
Likewise for food production. If canteens were serviced by people who enjoy that and consider it a useful service to their peers, and not to ensure their basic survival through wage slavery, then we'd have overall less venues to feed everyone and much less food waste.
I'm not arguing against free initiative to start some project, i'm just arguing capitalism and its competition places very wrong incentives that wastes tons of human labor and actual resources that a mutualized/cooperative economy would save.
Consumerism is a problem in that it causes ephemeral and superfluous goods. From fast-fashion to overly large autos and search for fame (hollywood or tik-tok) and some of the ready-made options which we could do at home.
But...
The above probably described much of the "essential" workers. Capitalism is not the problem. Consumerism and advertising and the media are the creators of this artificial demand.
Communism or socialism would not fix things either. There you have no choice of what you will be in society. That is determined for you by your school and your connections. And because the economic demands are different, there is usually less automation, meaning more boring work. Now, sure, doctors and bricklayers may get more even compensation, though one may get a better apartment, but you're not in the driver's seat and you don't get to figure out your place in life (ala UBI dream), you get to do what the state (or if cooperative based, the cooperative) thinks they need you. You may ultimately become a parasite, but t will be where they want you as a parasite.
Communism/Socialism can usually do just as well as capitalism in terms of basic research (medicines, energy, etc), but tend to have a blind spot for other life-style centered improvements.
> Capitalism is not the problem. Consumerism and advertising and the media are the creators of this artificial demand.
Consumerism is a direct consequence of capitalism. Capitalism rests on private property and competition, so you need either structural monopoly or mind-control techniques (advertisement) in order to grow against your competitor.
In an economy based on cooperation where you life is not dictated by pieces of paper (property titles) and imaginary numbers (money) these things simply do not exist.
> Communism or socialism would not fix things either. There you have no choice of what you will be in society.
I don't think we have the same understanding of communism, though the confusion is easy because most people who advocate for "communism" actually promote "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as theorized by Marx and Lenin) which they view as a necessary step to build communism which is the exact opposite of that (classless society).
I'm guessing all countries you think of as communist (USSR, China?) have never been communist in fact, at least not according to marxist/anarchist definition of communism which means there is no class or privileges and everyone is free and equal. You may be interested to read "There is no communism in Russia" or "Trotsky protests too much" by Emma Goldman about how communism in USSR is a lie.
As an anarchist, my understanding of communism is that everyone gets a choice, which we don't get in this society. If we remove chiefs and profiteers, then suddenly we are all free to enjoy life and decide for everything.
And i should point out that this is not merely a theory. Anarchist ideas have rarely been applied on a grand scale (though they have historically, and continue to live to this day in the hearts of revolutionaries of Chiapas and Rojava), but i've been living most of my life in free communes where money is not a thing (except for interactions with "the outside world") and property is ruled by needs not paper (the house is yours because you live in it).
> At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work
Similarly, John Maynard Keynes, who probably had access to better data, predicted that increased productivity would allow us to work 15 hours / week by now. And his projections for productivity growth were accurate—however the benefits never materialized.
You see something similar with women entering the work force. It used to be that married men worked 8 hours a day, and that provided for their wives, who stayed home and took care of children, etc. Then it became more common for married women to work as well. You would expect that this would mean that husbands and wives would split the work and do 4 hours/day each and likewise share domestic responsibilities. But that's not what happened. Instead men still work 8 hours a day, and women work nearly as long and also bear most of the responsibility for childcare and the home.
> John Maynard Keynes, who probably had access to better data
Why? To be honest, my "10 hour" estimate was not a direct quote, i don't remember if the authors i read said 4 or 15, but i do remember it was on this scale.
> You see something similar with women entering the work force.
> At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work.
Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.
Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure. It's an unconscious choice for most - they can't even fathom living beyond a certain standard, so they in essence HAVE TO work fulltime. But the option to work less is there, they just don't realize it is.
> Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.
This is a dangerous lie that makes it sound like most people's money are going to luxuries. They don't.
You might think people are spending money on TVs and iPhones and cars but most people buy a TV or iPhone every month - to their landlord, and once in a while buy a new car to their hospital.
>> Over 30 % of average household spending in the US goes to rent or other housing, with insurance and healthcare being next 20 % and transportation next 15 %
Well housing is a great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. At the end of the 19th century, the average new house size was around 1,000 square feet and the average household size was close to 5 people. So 200 square feet per person. Today the average new house size is around 2,500 square feet and the average household size is 2.5 people. So 1,000 square feet per person. That's lifestyle inflation. If you're OK with 1,000 square feet shared with 4 other people, you can live more cheaply.
Health insurance wasn't common then and health care was close to non-existent. Penicillin hadn't even been invented yet. If you cut yourself and it got infected, you might die. If you're OK with living the way your great grandparents lived, you can live more cheaply. If you get sick, pray.
The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. I think I might have spent $40,000 in total on the 7 cars I have owned in my life. If you're OK with people at work making fun of the car you drive, you can live more cheaply.
What's the median of the actually-inhabited dwelling? You're talking about new houses. Most people can't afford new or a house, and live in crappy old apartment buildings. Also, most constructions are due to speculation: there's already plenty of empty dwellings. There is no housing crisis, the crisis is created by the rich to profit off the poor;
> The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation.
Yes and no. People don't really have a choice because the incentives are skewed. It's hard to find old parts because there is no regulation forcing the industry to provide them and/or make inteoperable parts. Once again, capitalism is ruining everything, otherwise we could very well drive old cars and they would be well-maintained, and it would be illegal for a manufacturer to make a product that's incompatible with others (except for very compelling technical reasons).
> Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure.
That's definitely not how it works.
First, because people in the global north spend most of their resources on basic survival (unless you're from the upper classes) imposed on them by capitalist system based on private property where imaginary pieces of paper (property titles) means you need to pay ransom to reside somewhere.
Second, because the material comfort in the global north is not ensured by the workforce from the global north (i mean, partially yes, but mostly not) but by the quasi-slave labor from the global south, be it in mines or factories or sweatshops.
Third, because we have a global abundance of resources and so much of it is wasted. Estimates vary but i believe ~30% of food is wasted globally, yet people go hungry in most countries. There's millions of empty apartments in US/France, yet hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets. We live in a monstrous system where we have the means to make every one well-off but consciously decide some people must suffer.
Fourth, because even not accounting for obvious waste, planned obsolescence means stuff that is produced goes to replace shit-broken stuff instead of going to people who could get access to it for the first time. I believe planned obsolescence is a crime against humanity (and other species pollution and climate change are threatening).
If you take these points into consideration, i believe sharing work and resources more fairly could lead to everyone having decent material comfort for very little weekly work.
I'm sorry, but living in a detached house with 500+ sqft per person, frequently eating out, changing cars every 5-10 years, having a closet full of clothes, eating food from all around the world etc. etc. is way above "basic survival".
Watch a documentary about rural parts of third world countries, they're much closer to "basic survival" than pampered middle-class members in the West. For reference, in China, not that long ago people were subsiding primarily on rice - that the majority they ate every day throught all of their lives. Not to mention, they went hungry quite often (but not often enough to starve to death). That's "basic survival".
Here in the West, we can cut out so much fat out of our lives without really losing out anything truly substantial. For example, check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/. He's living in Chicago on $700 a month, around half of which goes to health insurance and real estate taxes. But, people think it's "hard" or "miserable", and they prefer to chain themselves to their full-time jobs for decades so that they can fly on vacations, get new shiny cars and go to McDonalds every other day. That's the choice I wrote in my OP.
> ...anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work...
On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? I've found people tend to aim a lot higher when given the option.
> On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at?
In some regards, yes. In others, not. I'm not saying we should throw away all medical progress from the last century if that's what you're wondering. Or that we should have factories in city centers spilling toxic byproducts directly into the street as was common back then.
I'm arguing our modern comfort standards are not correlated with how much work takes place, because most of what we consider work today does not produce anything meaningful/useful.
I believe a 10h work week is a high estimate for how much we need to work to maintain our lifestyle [0], accounting for the dismantling of slave labor in poorer countries which produce everything we consume.
The amount of work necessary to produce food over a century has been cut by at least two orders of magnitude, and although there's a lot to learn from some mistakes (monoculture destroys soil and exposes plants to sickness, and fertilizers make the land sterile) we can benefit from scientific discoveries applied to traditional techniques, such as permaculture in the field of growing stuff.
Also, you can take into account how much infrastructure has been individualized, which also accounts for resource/energy waste. Do we really need one oven/fridge per person? Mutualizing infrastructure saves resources.
Overall, i'm convinced a decent modern life is possible [1] if we as a society decide to investigate the topic, instead of planning the next great scheme to steal money from the public for the already-insanely-rich known as "Green New Deal" which will certainly not do anything to save the environment.
Only a global revolution can save us from doom. The people in power and the people who own the industry are precisely the classes of people who put us in this situation. They are both incapable and unwilling to address issues. I'm not exactly saying we need to chop their heads (though that is tempting) but we as humans must do our best without expecting anything from these psychopaths running the show.
[0] Though it requires other measures such as fighting planned obsolescence and resource waste.
[1] Not exactly as we know it. We would probably use different materials, build less tall buildings and live in overall less-urban cities (etc). But we could still enjoy what we consider modern comfort (abundant medicine/food/heat).
Indeed. It’s not about productivity but rather maintaining the social pyramid intact.
The tragedy is in this assumption that extending opportunities to the middle and bottom layers will detract from the privilege of the top. While it is true to some extent that innovation and change does result exactly in that, in reality we’re all just missing out on the tide of prosperity.
But we’re hell bent on differential wealth and competitive advantage, all slaves to the egotistical gene
> If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.
That is ridiculous. Many, many businesses closed, and many, many more were impacted in ways that will take years to recover from. Many employees took short term cuts in pay or benefits just so the companies they work for could survive.
Then add to that many of the jobs that couldn't be done during covid aren't useless, but the impact of not doing them scales over time. A good example of this is a sales person for a company that makes a product. Sure, if they can't bring in new clients for a few months, the company will hurt but may be ok. But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.
You are arguing based on the assumption that capitalism is the essence of life and nothing can be done without it. That companies are hurt does not have to mean that society is hurt. Companies are not persons, and if we lived in a fair society everyone would be well-off no matter what imaginary numbers (money and markets) have decided for them today.
> But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
When you say sales people, are you talking about a merchant behind a booth? Or a PR person? The latter should not exist at all in my opinion and is definitely a useless job which does not produce anything useful for society. The social function of marketing is to direct part of the revenue stream in one direction and not another, which is only "useful" (huge quotation marks) in an economy based on private property and competition. In a cooperative economy where as long as there is food people are fed, what matters is how to produce food and maintain infrastructure and heal people, and of course culture/science/education.
> Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.
I agree we cannot study these problems in isolation. However, you are the one not looking at the bigger picture. Another world is possible if we stop following the laws of Capital and State which are not laws of nature. Also, to be fair, many useless jobs kept going: i would have gladly done without cops and bankers and politicians for the lockdowns (and forever) but unfortunately these bloodsucking vampires grew even more virulent. Well I guess that's how species feeding on our misery operate.
> You are arguing based on the assumption that capitalism is the essence of life and nothing can be done without it.
No, I'm arguing based on the assumption that a LOT of countries ARE capitalistic. And recognizing that fact and designing things to work within that framework is a reasonable approach.
> if we lived in a fair society everyone would be well-off no matter what imaginary numbers (money and markets) have decided for them today.
But we don't. And we never will. Period. Full stop. Human nature doesn't work that way. I can't even see a way that you can argue that it does with a straight face. Even if there were no bad people (and there will always be bad people), there's always luck/randomness coming into play. Life is not an can not be fair. The best we can hope for it to make it as far as we can, and mitigate the cases where it isn't.
you're kind of agreeing with the parent. salespeople are clearly required by capitalism, but aren't directly responsible for extracting resources or converting them into something useful.
But many, many countries are capitalistic, so those roles that are required for capitalism are contributing and/or required for those societies.
If everyone grew their own gardens and was a vegetarian, only consuming what they grew themselves, then the people working in grocery stores wouldn't be essential. But our society doesn't do that, so they are.
You can have an economy without capitalism. Capitalism is defined by private property and shareholding. But you could have a modern society based on consented cooperation.
Have everyone who wants help in the fields (more people like that than you think), and if my neighbors think it's useful we'll have a grocery store but without money. We'll just take turns to feed the shelves and clean the floor and worry about the logistics. And if we grew too many potatoes for our local consumption, the people from other neighborhoods may well enjoy them and have some other stuff to send in our direction as well.
Are there any large scale examples of this actually working? It seems like, in practice, there are too many bad actors for it to actually play out like you're describing.
Mind you, capitalism certainly has it's issues, too... but it seems to better limit the negatives than every "share everything utopia" I've read about beyond tight knit groups of friends/family. Every single large scale example of what you describe seems to end in "and then it all burned to the ground", more or less.
My grandparents ran away from agricultural villages to a heavily industrial city, because living there was comparatively easier, even though grandpa had a lot of work running a steam engine. (Steam engines require a lot of heavy manual work to run.)
Agriculture without mechanisation is absolutely brutal on human body, plus you are dependent on random fluctuations in weather. A bad year or, God forbid, two bad years in a row meant a credible threat of starvation in the 1910s or 1920s for "ordinary" peasants.
And if the men were called to military service, as in the Great War (some were exempt, but not nearly enough), then women and the elderly had to do all the heavy work such as tiling, which they often could not.
People have all kinds of romantic concepts of rural life. It was rather harsh.
Note that your source does not argue the point you make directly after it. The graph explicitly covers only "non-agricultural activities". As for non-agricultural activities, 1870 marks the early peak of industrialization before unions and worker parties forced schedules down to the now-established 40-hour-per-week mark.
Unfortunately, the primary source for the graph (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours) does not say anything about agricultural working hours pre-industrialization. They note efficiency increases in agriculture through automation, but since the agricultural workforce declined at the same time, there is no clear answer at least from this source.
Thanks for pointing this out. My thought process was trying to highlight that many more of us would have been farmers 100 years ago :) The farmers I know seem to have a 24/7-esque job in terms of all the things they juggle.
The weird thing is that they are so ridiculously productive compared to the past having learned all these new tools, but their compensation is about in line with prior generations, because most all the productivity gains have gone to capital owners.
Yes, we are working less. While in the 19th century anarchists were shot by police for daring to claim an 8h workday (see also: may first history), that principle is now enshrined in most worker protection laws around the planet.
That's a good thing! But what i'm arguing is that:
1) Productivity increase has led to more shit being produced (thanks to planned obsolescence) instead of creating abundant material comfort for everyone
2) Productivity increase has not correlated with decreasing actual workload, and instead we have created new jobs which do not produce anything meaningful but continue to justify the protestant work-hard-or-die philosophy of life
Pretty sure anarchists were not shot in the face for daring to claim an 8 hour workday, but rather for setting off bombs, blowing up factories, executing political opponents, assassinating elected officials and royalty, and triggering world war 1 :P
I get the romantic appeal of anarchism, but these people were not calling for more government regulation of labor markets.
It was unions, not anarchists, who were advocating for 8 hour work days, and some of them were attacked by police as well as private security, but also some of them were pretty violent themselves, for example attacking strike breakers and immigrants. There was a lot of street violence going on.
> Pretty sure anarchists were (...) shot (...) for setting off bombs
And you would be wrong. In the USA, you can look up the Haymarket Square affair or Sacco & Vanzetti trials, for example. These are just the most famous examples, but obviously not the only ones. More recently (1950-70s) you can take a look at Cointelpro which oversaw the assassination of dozens (hundreds?) of revolutionary militants.
In the history of France, the Paris Commune (and other Communes) have been repressed in blood by the government, killing dozens of thousands of civilians. Defecting from a military draft was also punishable by death, eg. during WWI when "decimating" was the norm.
But beyond that, the rule of law explicitly states that you have basic human rights that should be respected no matter what. In a democratic country, you don't execute people because they may have killed someone else previously; you arrest them to stand trial.
> I get the romantic appeal of anarchism
I don't see anything romantic about it. In my view, it's just the only fair system (or rather, systems) we can come up with to ensure freedom and equality for all. It's very pragmatic: changing chiefs has not helped us, so why not change the rules of the game entirely and let everybody decide?
> It was unions, not anarchists, who were advocating for 8 hour work days
Some unions are anarchist. Famously, IWW was founded by anarchists (such as Lucy Parsons) and they for sure advocated for the 8 hour work day: not as a great solution to all problems, but as a rallying point for further social change through a global revolution. General strike was articulated by Émile Pouget and other anarcho-syndicalists back when the CGT (in France) was anarchist, as a tool for the exploited to demonstrate their power and help topple the capitalist system.
> attacking strike breakers and immigrants
Not saying it couldn't happen, but i'd be interested in sources and numbers. Especially in regards to immigrants, considering labor unions and anarchist circles in the USA were especially populated with immigrants who published propaganda in their own languages.
> some of them were pretty violent themselves
What does that say? Desperate people calling for justice will defend themselves against the oppressors crushing them. It cannot be compared to the cold violence used by bosses and politicians to silence any form of opposition. Or, put as a meme: https://i.imgur.com/LMCJBpU.jpg
Strongly agree. And yet the system didn't collapse. I don't know about where you're from, but here in France:
- products shortages was due to people piling up, and was very localized
- the services shortage was organized by people in power to create drama: hospitals refusing non-covid cases, food banks and other NGOs closing their doors... it was all architectured as part of a "shock doctrine"
All in all, i agree some useful jobs have been deemed non-essential and stopped, and that's a problem. But still, i think a lot of people usually working in offices (which are 99% useless jobs [0]) suddenly realized how their employment does not contribute to society.
[0] You could argue working behind a desk to help people fill forms for social security and whatnot is a useful job, but i personally consider it a useless job because it's only required because the bureaucracy makes it hard to access social services on purpose (so people don't get it). If we had free healthcare, housing and food for all, there would be close to 0 (though never 0) useful office jobs.
While teaching myself web development I spent 4 months in a tent (Texas), then later 2 months in a tent (Alaska), and later 2 more months in a tent (Oregon). In the first two cases, I worked part time (event marketing; fish smokehouse) in order to focus on learning new skills rather than working dead-end jobs.
If one is financially destitute though, definitely do research on skills which are in demand-- such a person can't afford to specialize in something which is financially unproductive.
I learned software development primarily because I saw Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showing its high demand and future growth. (Fortunately I found that it suits my personality and interests)
But to live in a tent (or make lifestyle or financial sacrifices in general) as a PhD student studying something which doesn't have a high economic demand nor utility... To me is just unwise.
In other words: it's old news that only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist. But the country doesn't have a workforce development policy either. You have to be independently wealthy to take a few years off to train for a career in a field that's actually in demand!
I don't think that's true these days. While we may not have that much more free time compared to our ancestors, we have access to way more things. There are wealth of free knowledge online, wealth of free tools to do digital painting, digital music and things like that. There are also more forms of art and expression than before. Art has never been so democratized.
But living from your art is still hard, because you need an audiance. It's always easier to find someone that needs you first and then work for him (getting a "regular" job) than producing something for a public that you don't yet have.
There's also the fact that lots of artists don't seem to want to do "things that don't scale" (in reference to http://paulgraham.com/ds.html). For example, I have a few friends that want to work in the film industry. A minority of them do things like film clips for not well known rappers, take pictures at weddings, stuff like that. The majority just try to make a film. The first group can get more experience this way, meet professionals, get connections, see if that fields is really what they like. The second can't, and don't even make money.
It's not "supposed to be" any way whatsoever-- Neither The Universe nor The Global Economy depend on human senses of fairness or opinions.
>only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist.
"study", "afford", and "productive" to me sound vague and subjective. One needs only sources of knowledge (even if its simply experimentation), willpower, food, and water, in order to download knowledge into their brain (and then to apply that knowledge by building small projects to demonstrate skills to future employers).
Nor does a person need to be independently wealthy to take time off. I was in debt $3000 on a credit card by the time I arrived in Juneau, Alaska and within two weeks started working at $13/hr at a fish smokehouse, while camping on a nearby mountainside. And I had a janky 2003 toyota corolla (trip was in 2015).
From where in your mind do you generate these fearful presuppositions? Success is determined by many factors, but they include Strategy, Willpower, Resourcefulness, Willingness to fail. And sure, you can throw preexisting wealth into there and weight it however you want, in a predictive equation. But ultimately that is taking the accountability away from the individual and presenting a false dichotomy ("a premise that erroneously limits what options are available.") [1].
There's no rulebook that says "You have to be wealthy to study art" or "You have to pay money to study art" or "You can't take time off to study <thing>."
You definitely can. You can live in a tent, you can use your company's lunchroom for breakfast and lunch, and cook dinner on your camping stove. You can find public bathroom facilities. All of this can be done. Is it inconvenient? Does it require sacrifice? Hence one should do so strategically, and only for goals with high ROI (such as investing in yourself by building skills that are in high demand).
____________
Heck, Wealth and Art is a conversation all its own. The value of artists and art is different in different cultures. And the utility of art, in most cases, is very low. Hence it is a "luxury pursuit" that even primitive tribes engaged in back in prehistory-- when they had the "luxury" of some ... "time off" :)
Lastly, just using basic reasoning, I ask you this: Has Art not existed before wealth? Are art and poverty mutually exclusive? I think your argument is lacking, in addressing these two questions, especially given the amount of artists (especially in music) who arise from impoverished conditions.
I would also encourage you to do some research on artists from unconvential backgrounds. Such as former boxer and world-renowned architect Tadao Ando. Do a quick online search for "Famous Artists Who Were Self-Taught" to find many more.
I think you missed the main point of the comment to which you were replying. You shouldn’t have to spend months living in tents, working part time, to develop an in-demand skill.
In other words, in-training software developers aren’t supposed to suffer. Artists, maybe they are supposed to be wealthy or do some suffering.
I don't recommend reasoning from a position of exercising one's ideology.
"You shouldn’t have to spend months living in tents, working part time, to develop an in-demand skill."
One has to develop in-demand skills to participate in the economy, and to therefore have a reasonable degree of assurance they can financially depend on themselves. Some folks might have savings or family help, others might have to camp in woods for a few months. No one should expect handouts.
In some cases, people make mistakes that result in going broke financially. I can't claim that they should be shielded from consequences, I certainly can't shield them, nor do I expect taxes to be used to shield them. And, no one can force such a person to develop skills.
Take me: I made the mistake of not using college wisely-- I studied liberal arts. Later, I lived in a tent while building my IT skills.
In large part I lived in the tent so I wouldn't have to work 40 hours/week in front of a computer, just to come home to sit and try to learn to become a web app developer after work. That would be terribly unhealthy mentally and physically.
There's no solution (in my opinion) except to accept accountability for ones' career development. See, you've brought up that WEALTH leads to different outcomes. But guess what-- So does EFFORT.
You can't force a person to put in the effort into a career. Even if you give them money, they still might not put in effort (example: trust fund kids)-- they have to do it for their self, from a place of intrinsic motivation.
The recently common this anti-merit, neo-marxist, pro-identity political ideological stuff reminds me of just that: People forgetting the influence of Personal Accountability and Differences in Effort, on life outcomes.
I'd suggest taking your ideology out of your reasoning and assessments. It might fog up or clog up those reasoning abilities.
> Success is determined by many factors, but they include Strategy, Willpower, Resourcefulness, Willingness to fail.
I believe you. I think the many factors also include dumb luck, in large measure. You didn't fall and break a leg. You didn't get food poisoning. Your laptop upon which you were learning all these valuable skills didn't die.
You took the risk to fail, and succeeded. I congratulate you - really. What you did isn't a trivial thing.
If you had failed maybe you'd still be smoking fish. (Though smoking fish might not be such a bad life - I have no useful experience in this matter). I contend that many more people who took a path like yours are still smoking fish than are well-employed programmers. So, your grit and determination notwithstanding, do you believe we should discard those who didn't make it to the soft-handed indoor work?
After that trip to Alaska, where I studied some JS (ember, knockout), I went to Oregon, interviewed for frontend web dev jobs but failed, and just went back to working in corporate marketing. But I kept studying JS. I quit the job, went to grad school, graduated. Got a business analyst/programming job. Got laid off within a few months. Then, started building a full stack app.
While building it, I stopped, applied to Jobs. Failed to get one. Then traveled to california, camped on the coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz for about 3 weeks, going to cafes daily to applied to jobs. Still failed to get one (had interviews though).
Then realized "Why dont I just go rent a room in Mexico rather than camp in California?" drove to Mexico, rented a place for about 4 months, built most of web app. This, while about $15k in student debt from grad school. Luckily one of my parents gave me cash to pay off my credit card & student debt interest each month.
Then I moved to my home state and lived at friend's property (doing landscaping labor to pay my rent) for 4 more months. Published the web app. Got my first 100% programming job. Then a few months later got an even better one.
And then... burned out after about a year as a full stack dev at a digital marketing consulting agency, and went on sabbatical.
So, I definitely failed several times. But I knew that once I had demonstrable skills & showed them via a website and open source full stack app, that I would succeed in landing a SWE job.
compensation on psuedo-homeless adventure:
$13/hr in Alaska, fish smokehouse, age 28. (previously made $20/hr in digital marketer, and afterwards $25/hr in general marketing management)
total compensation 5 years later at age 33:
$180k/yr (includes 2/3rds salary, 1/3rd equity)
current total compensation: none. quit the above job after just 3 months b/c I didn't like the management culture. Down to about $4k to my name, uh oh! luckily doing some interviews now... And the winter is coming, so down here in the South, if I need to camp again, I know what it's like-- it ain't so bad :D
Alaska is huge, and has a wide variety of living conditions throughout the year. I live in southeast AK, and our winters are really mild because we're on the Pacific coast. Our summers are 50s and 60s, occasionally getting into the 70s (F). Our winters are 30s and 40s, occasionally dipping into the 20s. The hardest part about living in a tent here in the summer is the presence of brown bears, and the long periods of rainy days.
In other parts of AK it regularly gets into the 80s in the summertime. In many of those parts one of the hardest parts about living in a tent is the bugs.
In the area I set up my tent, I found many tents from previous campers-- transient laborers and fishermen I imagine.
Meals: Had fridge space at company's lunch room. I'd arrive early and have breakfast there, and lunch as well. For dinner, a Trangia camping stove and simple meals (canned soup; mixed vegetable & sausage soup; instant noodles, etc.)... or sometimes splurge and buy decent fresh, ready-to-eat food at a grocery store (such as a chicken/vegetable meal).
Showers: the local indoor public pool's locker room
Bathroom: At work. Train yourself to systematically drop #2 in the morning like clockwork, and everything else is a breeze. Disposable wet-wipes to reduce the need to shower.
Dating: I actually met a rock climbing/wilderness medicine instructor lady at a bar who was interested in checking out my tent and she even spent the night. Whereas, a different women, when she heard I was temporarily staying in a tent, lost all interest in me (I don't blame her-- totally normal).
All in all, I suffered some depression, social isolation, and general lifestyle inconvenience. But looking back, it sure helped me get through my graduate statistics course! "If I can live in that tent in Juneau on the mountainside, I can get through this stats course"
>who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying ...
She's teaching classes that are being attended by students. Doesn't that mean she has a product that has some demand? Maybe she should be better compensated? I guess the problem is there's really no way to sell education products outside of the two sided markets that universities function (with one side being sort of captive...).
I don't think that applies to all PhDs. People studying things in computer science can often put in practice their skills, because big tech companies do a lot of research. But no big company does research on "minority ethnic groups in American literature". That's for studies in general. In my country lots of people study psychology, which doesn't have a lot of jobs opportunities, because way too much people study psychology. In software, it's the opposite, we're missing people.
Lots of young people seem to follow a "do what you love" way of thinking. My parents always told me "try to find a balance between doing what you love and earning a living", which I think is a bit better advice.
Personally, I think going to the industry straight from college was a mistake.
In half a decade of working in the real world I've learned nothing more than dealing with office politics and the importance of delegating work while still getting credit. I also learned that I suck at those things and get no fulfillment from them.
If you are finishing your first degree and enjoyed studying, learning, and actually doing something with your life, I'd recommend continuing in academia.
In an ideal world, we would all pursue that which was our own passion, without the concern of income. There’s probably enough money in the world for that if it were distributed and if we all could reduce our consumption a good bit. After all, who needs to buy dreams when we are living them?
I live in the US. When I was done with my Bachelors, which I did in the evenings while I worked full time, I had a choice of two local universities for graduate study. The CS grad course in one was really a PhD that granted a Masters part way through. Classes were in the day and students were expected to TA. The other school's was a Masters-only program and offered classes in the evenings. I had a wife and two young children, there was no way I could support them on a TA's salary. So I went with the Masters-only program. Tuition has skyrocketed, educators' pay rates have not.
I feel for this woman because it sounds like her situation was really hard. At the same time, I have a hard time believing she didn’t hear what literally everyone who wants to do a humanities PhD hears: do not pay for it. Do. Not. Pay for it.
She was paying £8,000 a year in fees! Nearly any professor in any humanities department will tell you that’s a terrible, terrible idea. Especially while trying to survive in London!
A PhD can be a good idea or a bad one depending on what you are studying and where, but paying to do a humanities PhD is never going to be a good idea unless you are independently (very) wealthy.
It would be consistent with my repeated personal experience if promises were made to this woman and then not kept. Higher academia uses all sorts of dark patterns on students.
In two summers of undergrad, I was "casually" promised a summer stipend by a lab which went on to vigorously avoid making it concrete or putting it in writing until I twisted their arms with a competing offer. I don't know that they wouldn't have paid me, but I later learned that they had done this to other students, so it's a thing that happens. When I was applying to PhD programs, my favored lab accepted me on the understanding that I would be funded through a particular grant and "discovered" after the admissions cycle was over that there wasn't room for me on the grant after all and could I please make up the difference? I refused, of course, and fortunately my second choice made a schedule exception for me. That worked fine for a while, and then they straight up altered the deal to the tune of $20,000 in my second year. I hit the "eject" button on Academia and didn't look back.
The institutions involved were Harvard, Cambridge, and Carnegie Mellon, so this isn't a matter of getting caught on a sinking ship. They do it because they can.
That's pretty horrible. Through circumstances I ended up dropping out of highschool, if not for that I would have loved to go to University but after hearing stories like these I'm wondering if I didn't dodge a bullet. It did cause me to end up in the employment cycle at just the right time to launch a small software development company and that would have never happened if I gone to university instead.
To be fair: The article says that was awarded multiple fellowships. So it was not the PhD but the rent she could not afford after being forced out of an affordable place after starting.
In the UK, international fees are deducted from the standard fellowship. While already low, it then becomes a poverty wage. This practice should really be banned, if funding someone the university should do it a livable level.
Yes, I agree with the OP who noted the frequent warnings about doing humanities doctoral degrees without being payed in total to do it. However, higher education is full of all of these dark patterns where people get looped into something, and gaslit into accepting certain conditions under some promise that it's temporary, etc and so forth. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not.
The real scandal to me at some level is that the administration isn't just paying some livable wage with benefits, and so forth. If it's more expensive, pass those costs to the students and see if they pay for it. If not, don't string people into it as a career.
Politicians constantly call for there to be some sort of costs to universities in terms of return on investment, with demands that degrees be paid as a percent of future wages, etc. But often the problems are more straightforward, with universities burying the true costs on the supply side. It's very similar to the textile industry, or fishery industries, where you get a nice-looking affordable shirt, and all the horrors involved in its production are hidden from society. Add in administrative largesse and it all becomes frankly immoral. I suspect if universities just paid people as they should be paid, with benefits, at the faculty levels that are necessary, and charged a true price, people would respond in kind.
Higher education is a disaster at the moment. Sometimes we get news coverage of what matters, but often it gets wrapped up in tangential distracting political debates. Fraud, abuse, and corruption are the norm. It's not just the humanities either.
On a different note but not allowing student debt to be dischargable is a crime against humanity. This caused massive inflation in higher education costs and millenials got caught in this trap. There’s so many stories of people paying 5 figure student loans for decades and all that is because politicians value banks over the vast majority of their citizens.
Why is no one looking to reverse this horrible law?
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22262230/online-colleg...
Great Halloween story?