Graeber does excellent “work” dissecting the bullshitification of – mostly the white-collar – economy. Other authors focus on the moralizing premise of “work” as a value in itself, or the rise in general productivity and how this results in working just as hard for a pile of toys twice as high instead of simply meeting human needs in half the time. Others address automization, from various angles.
The point I want to see fleshed out is how the message of “produce and consume or die” directly results in actual inefficiencies when it comes to meeting concrete human needs. I'll give two examples.
One: the debates during quarantine about paying people to just stay home, and how much of this strangely seemed to revolve opening restaurants back up. Of course in an ideal world you would have gourmet chefs who'd want to show off their skills, places where people would gather for live entertainment, and things like this. But a large portion of restaurant-going happens simply because people don't have the time or effort left after work to find interesting meals and learn to cook for themselves – so in a world where people had that time and effort again, “the economy” would likely shrink as far as restaurant-going is concerned. After the adjustment period, and barring concerns about the future that had more to do with policy than anything, most people generally found they were happier during quarantine. Exactly why do we need restaurants, as long as everyone is being fed, again? It's because cooking a meal for a stranger raises GDP, and finding a meal that your family loves that you can cook them every week has zero effect whatsoever. Isn't that inherently absurd – especially if, overall, one is making people demonstrably happier? How is paying a few people to cook nonstop strangers really that different from paying everyone to stay home and cook for themselves? Apart from considerations around bulk pricing on ingredients, everything about the former arrangement is immediately more inefficient in terms of raw resources: a separate building has to be maintained, while all those people likely have the lights left on in their own homes; more transportation is required from all involved; not to mention the alternative uses to which the time and energy involved in the labor is involved could be put, and the satisfaction said uses could bring to people in general, including the server themselves (of course this definitely doesn't register in any measure of GDP, although it's certainly as important in any moral sense as the satisfaction of the people sitting at the dining table).
What I would like to see in an example like this: empirical evidence on the trends in happiness over time for people during quarantine; on how much more inclined people are to learn to, and actually cook, their own meals when given the time and freedom to do so; on the full extent of costs involved in keeping an industry running that technically isn't “producing” anything on the other end.
Two: the dominance of disposable plastic razors over the shaving industry. A reliable safety razor can be found as cheap as $15; another $20 buys 100 blades that can last a very long time, not to mention easily be recycled (while plastic razors can't, and so end up leeching BPA everywhere, which results in a whole mountain of consequent invisible costs – which extends as far as researchers having to delve into just how much this is affecting human health and hormones, when said research could be directed to solving other important problems if we weren't so busy creating this problem).
If everyone switched tomorrow, we'd all be saving money; raw resources; time and energy (picking up blades from the store, etc.); not to mention getting immediately better shaves because one of the few differences with a disposable is that the blades can't be removed and rinsed out – so the blades clog with hair long before they've actually become too dull to function.
And yet if we switched tomorrow, it's not an exaggeration to say that people would die. Because safety razors are so much more efficient at meeting the need a razor is supposed to meet, the industry would employ fewer people. Fewer manufacturing jobs would exist. There would be less reason to advertise. And so on down the whole trail. So fewer people would be able to find employment once we had switched. All these people would eventually be left to starve to death if they couldn't find some other shit to sell you. (And what if we don't need any other shit?) As it stands, the biggest reason disposable razors predominate is because they're a bigger industry – exactly because people have to throw them away, and this means they have to buy them more often. This results in the industry having more money to spend, and they spend (waste) a great deal of it on advertising to make sure that everyone knows the name Gilette, and very few people even know one company that designs safety razors.
This is so inefficient that we would probably still be working more efficiently if we switched, and we took a portion of the people that couldn't switch over to working in the safety razor industry, and simply paid them a portion of their previous salary to just do nothing.
Well, even if some details are missing or warped in this account, the principle it demosntrates is obviously true: the demand that people “produce or die” leads to people producing things in incredibly efficient ways, just because it gives them a way to meet the demand that they continually produce things – and we rarely devote effort to finding more efficient ways to solve these kinds of problems (such as the need to shave), because doing so would “hurt the economy.”
Again, this is the type of argument that I'd like to see addressed at more length, in more detail, with more citations – if anyone knows of any! I'm not looking for arguments about how much real work has been fluffed up with bullshit “administrative duties,” or psychoanalysis of work as “self-abnegation,” as Graeber puts it when he writes:
In some sense we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day. But one possibility the sociologists generally overlook is that, if work is a form of self-sacrifice or self-abnegation, then the very awfulness of modern work is what makes it possible to see it as an end in itself. We have returned to Carlyle: work should be painful, the misery of the job is itself what “forms character.” Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth ~because~ they hate their jobs. This is the attitude that, as Clement observed, seems to remain in the air all around us, implicit in office small-talk. “The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we'd rather not be doing”
Rather, I'm interested in analysis of the ways that basic human needs like shaving and eating are met inefficiently (in both pure material terms, and in terms of what has been demonstrably found to actually make people happier) because they're skewed by the economic demand to produce or die. I'd also love to see analysis that makes a point to delve very deep into the chain of cause and effect – like with my point that the dominance of disposable razors fuels a kind of “bullshitification” of scientific research, since we have to spend resources and limited valuable brain-power investigating all the harms this causes instead of investigating other serious problems – you know, every dollar and minute spent investigating the endocrine effects of BPA isn't being spent on investigating and researching potential cures for cancer. Quite literally, the chain of causation really does extend so far that the use of disposables means we're farther behind on curing cancer than we could be.
Thanks!