‘I’d like to do the job sooner’, said a roofer in France. ‘But I can’t find workers. They all want to go to college and get jobs in the city. Air conditioned offices. Coffee machines. That kind of thing.’
Today we wonder what kind of thing that is.
Business Insider:
‘A 2021 survey by Pew Research… asked people from around the world what made their lives meaningful… in the US, only 17% mentioned work as a source of meaning. That was a sharp decline from when Pew asked the same question four years prior — a full one-third of Americans mentioned their jobs as a source of meaning in 2017, double the 2021 rate. Increasingly, it seems that more people feel like their jobs don’t matter.
‘The academic David Graeber coined the term ”bullshit jobs” in 2013 to describe jobs where, he wrote, “the person doing it believes it pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.”’
Elites get the good jobs. They get the money. They get the beautiful women and the handsome men. And the big houses. And the fast cars. They live in the good neighbourhoods, shop at the high-end stores, live longer and eat in the fancy restaurants.
Is it any wonder that every mother wants her babies to grow up and join them?
Roofing? Forget it. Plumbing? Dirty. Farming? What, you want to live in Nebraska? Mining? You’re going to destroy the earth. Manufacturing? Let the Chinese do it; they sweat… we think… remember?
Over time, elites ‘solve’ more and more problems. Their problem solving inevitably brings directives, statutes, agencies and commissions… along with fees… jobs… power… and more wealth — for themselves, of course. Then, the gap between them, and the rest of the population, widens.
But the elites are elite for a reason. They have more training, more education and more expertise; they are better connected, better informed and richer.
They don’t stock the shelves at Walmart; they manage its advertising, its recruiting, its legal team, its product development and marketing. They analyse the numbers and make decisions. The elite have the prestige jobs — judges, architects, doctors, foreign policy specialists, scientists, priests, and engineers. Naturally, they earn more.
But a society only needs so many judges. And only so many people can make it through the rigors of medical school.
So, as the number of young people who want to enter the elite classes grows… something must be found for them to do. This creates a whole ‘second tier’ of faux elites… who fill government, universities and health care industries. They are not professors of physics… nor are they qualified teachers, anaesthesiologists or trained emergency room nurses. Nor are they elected politicians (for which, too, the need is very limited).
Instead, they are DEI officers… inspectors… clerks and paper pushers in a society swamped by decrees, rules, and red tape.
They are ‘educators,’ rather than real teachers. They are ‘health administrators,’ rather than real doctors or nurses. They are ‘security professionals,’ rather than real cops. They are ‘artists,’ who depend on grants rather than paying customers. There is even a whole group of people who call themselves ‘scholars,’ even though they actually do no research or scholarly thinking. They are just hangers-on in the education industry.
Taken together, they are the college-educated foot soldiers of the empire… fetchers, water carriers and porters for the real elites.
They add to the complexity and the costs, doing meretricious busywork… often with ‘bullshit jobs’ that slow us all down… and make us all poorer.
Regards,
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Bill Bonner,
For Fat Tail Daily
