What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.

It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.

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groundzeros2015 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.

It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this.

> advertising

I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists.

I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function.

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tehjoker 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.

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dns_snek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life".

There's nothing inherent to socialism that would preclude advertising. It's an economic system where the means of production (capital) is owned by the workers or the state. In market socialism you still have worker cooperatives competing on the market.

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Wilder7977 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.

	▲	wolvesechoes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we are, with an impression that most people referencing the book apparently didn't read it.

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inglor_cz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"."

Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ...

... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crime of sabotage.

You have no idea.

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dns_snek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any economic system.

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inglor_cz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production.

And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were.

All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad management of the stolen assets is just a consequence, because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually bad at managing anything including themselves.

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dns_snek an hour ago | parent [-]

This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy where the state owns everything and people are forced to give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model, not some defining feature of socialism.

Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth that matched or exceeded most capitalist European economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as western societies are today but it definitely wasn't totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's a philosophical question in there about what freedom really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 70s.

I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now and what was better then as that's beside the point, which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to capitalism.

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inglor_cz an hour ago | parent [-]

"just one terrible (Soviet) model"

It is the model, introduced basically everywhere where socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that cars with four wheels are just one terrible model, because there were a few cars with three wheels.

Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.

You also shouldn't discount the effect of sending young Yugoslavs to work in West Germany on the total balance sheet. A massive influx of remittances in Deutsche Mark was an important factor in Yugoslavia getting richer, and there was nothing socialist about it, it was an overflow of quick economic growth in a capitalist country.

	▲	dns_snek an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism. > You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism" Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization. > Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands. You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely different from USSR yet still socialist. Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives. Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system, but people love nothing more than to draw conclusions from these obviously-invalid "experiments". "You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything that was bad about the USSR". The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that.

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thesmtsolver2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.

	▲	bubblewand 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The parts that are only done to maintain status quo with a competitor aren’t productive, and that’s quite a bit of it. Two (or more) sides spend money, nothing changes. No good is produced. The whole exercise is basically an accident. Like when a competing country builds their tenth battleship, so you commission another one to match them. The world would have been better if neither had been build. Money changed hands (one supposes) but the aim of the whole exercise had no effect. It was similar to paying people to dig holes a fill them back in again, to the tune of serious money. This was so utterly stupid and wasteful that there was a whole treaty about it, to try to prevent so many bullshit jobs from being created again. Or when Pepsi increases their ad spending in Brazil, so Coca Cola counters, and much of the money ends up accomplishing little except keeping things just how they were. That component or quality of the ad industry, the book claims, is bullshit, on account of not doing any good. The book treats of several ways in which a job might be bullshit, and just kinda mentions this one as an aside: the zero-sum activity. It mostly covers other sorts, but this is the closest I can recall it coming to declaring sales “bullshit” (the book rarely, bordering on never, paints even most of an entire industry or field as bullshit, and advertising isn’t sales, but it’s as close as it got, as I recall)
	▲	wiseowise 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Best product should be picked according to requirements by LLM without bullshit advertising.