Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

Picking apart the jobs as bullshit metric directly might not be the only or best path. There is a known and confounding spectrum currently exhibited in most developed economies where some of the most valued labor such as teaching the young and caring for the sick and elderly turn out to be among the lowest paid while some of the highest paid labor is so detailed an specialized that it ends up in being sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.

Is squeezing most sales per advertising campaign or saving a few pennies per unit delivered of a mass market product really worth what the economy is willing to pay for that? Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?

It is really hard to measure bullshit jobs specifically, but it might be more easy and meaningful to try to characterize this strange gradient where abstracted work that is distant from people has value far beyond the simple and necessary basics of human social function. Worry less about the bullshit label and try coming up with a measure more like dollars lost per human life improved.

Saving a few pennies per unit, times millions of units, makes a very big impact - and is integral to how industrialised civilisations became so rich compared to previous ones. Ignoring this kind of math isn't going to help teachers or carers for the elderly.

Yes but saving a few pennies is not how industrial civilization got rich. Mass manufactured goods are orders of magnitude cheaper than their hand-crafted equivalents.

My point is that, of those orders of magnitude, some came out of innumerable penny savings accumulated over 200 years.

Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?

I think the reason this is a problem is that there is no foundational vector for progress which we can universally agree upon a measurement metric for. So capital allocation becomes the default measure, and money becomes a proxy for value.

So in that sense, what is most easily measurable is more valuable, and something which is easily measured and increases the unit of measurement by the largest factor becomes the most valuable.

Eg. If one unit of money is input and some multiple of that unit is the result, the system with the least amount of work or fastest iteration time (high margin) becomes the place where resources pool.

I'm skeptical whether humans could even define in a meaningful or measurable way how to better allocate resources than individual resource allocation on a common unit of measurement aka "markets."

Wages obey supply vs demand. Teachers may do a valuable job but are not themselves valuable because they’re considered easily interchanged (leaving aside the notion that great teachers are rare).

Cleaning staff are often paid orders of magnitude less than the people they clean for but work harder and longer, because the perception is that anyone can do their job.

Many countries are suffering from a shortage of teachers. Yet in spite of this, salaries aren't rising. This isn't really explained by simple "supply and demand".

It is. If the salaries were raising, the supply would follow.

> dollars lost per human life improved

This could be a fun 'fuzzy metric' to kick around for a while, I like it.

It would likely be way too inaccurate across different professions & regions to tie directly to anything with major consequences - especially quantifying "improved" - but it does seem likely to turn up some helpful insights.

I'd certainly be happy to see a more accurate reflection of this in how various workers are compensated. I expect there are more than a few superstars of positive human impact in our world just barely scraping by who are rarely properly acknowledged for their value.

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