Another Good Book, etc

     In addition to my standard comment "it's all crap" regarding the bureaucracies and inefficiencies of modern life, I also say "well, people don't farm anymore, so what are they supposed to do?"
     This book offers a detailed analysis of why modern society has become the way it is and why 37% of people say that what they do is meaningless-hence the title of the book. Bullshit jobs are jobs that if they disappeared, no one would really notice, and include mostly white collar paper pushing administrative type vocations that have proliferated in the last 30 to 50 years. Mr. Obama gave this informative description of them while formulating the Affordable Care Act:
      " Everybody who supports single-payer health care says,

  'Look at all the money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork'. That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people who are working at Blue Cross, Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
        Which, as author Graeber ( a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics)  states, is precisely why the present inefficient system was/is maintained...Because to some decision makers it is "better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do."    (...like I said...nobody farms anymore..)
       Personally, I have always thought the farmers and plumbers and child care givers and all the genuine Workers in a society should be the highest paid, because what they do has the highest value. If all of the 'illegal' immigrants were deported, society would quickly notice the lack of food, housing, clean hotel rooms.etc etc.. In "Anti-Clock" I wrote that the true worth of manual labor is revealed when it's time to move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs. No lawyer or doctor or banker or writer will be of much help then, or when the electricity goes out. .This book helps explain how priorities have gotten so skewed.
          At any rate...one example of a job that is Not bullshit is a dentist, because one can directly see the productivity. I had a broken, infected tooth pulled last week, the first in my life. My reasoning at age 63 is that saving some of them with root canals and crowns no longer makes economic sense.