idea

Increase of efficiency in the production means and techniques should have left to a drastic reduction in working hours. Common explanation today is that society collectively chose more toys and pleasures rather than less work. But this doesn't hold scrutiny.

The net amount of manual workers keeps decreasing, and so jobs displaced and created have nothing to do with these additional toys and leisure. Instead, they are bullshit jobs: jobs that even people who perform them realize they are not doing anything meaningful.

Examples of bullshit jobs:

corporate lawyers,
tax accountants,
a large portion of the software industry,

links

Conservatism only benefits the well-offs

references

David Graeber / Bullshit jobs^ref

the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job.