One of those rare insight articles at http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week.[…]
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? […]
The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism.[…]
I am not sure how consumerism translates into science. Is it the mass production of papers? Papers that are never read? Pointless jobs also have massively increased in the science industry basically with all the pointless competition being preached every day.
Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away […] But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.