A coincidental convergence of recent tweets: we are wasting the surplus from technical and economic innovation on mandatory, soul-killing busywork. 1/https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/981730992330174464 …
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David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
2/ It’s tax season in the US, so everyone in the country is forced to spend a couple days doing administrative work we hate and consider idiotic. IRS official estimate is that for individuals this takes 13 hours on average. Including biz, ~$500 bn/year.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/981732729388544000 …
David Chapman added,
David Chapman @MeaningnessReplying to @literalbananaSeems to me that all the time saved by mechanization has been taken up with administrative negative externalities. Everyone spends 20 hours/week dealing with dysfunctional institutions that demand form-filling and phone calls with low-level bureaucratic staff3 replies 4 retweets 29 likesShow this thread -
David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
3/ What makes dealing with health insurance, credit card company errors, retirement plan allocation, and taxes so awful?https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/981734411304497153 …
David Chapman added,
David Chapman @MeaningnessReplying to @literalbananaI think it’s: (1) they are mostly obviously pointless, (2) they take much longer than they need to, (3) outcomes are unpredictable and out of your control, and (4) they can impose vast arbitrary costs. Everyone is doing taxes now, which is an obvious case.2 replies 3 retweets 22 likesShow this thread -
David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
4/ Mandatory unpaid administrative busywork is mostly new, enabled by innovations in IT. We could use IT to free ourselves from nonsense; instead, collectively, we’ve used it to enslave ourselves.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/981733918918389760 …
David Chapman added,
David Chapman @MeaningnessReplying to @Meaningness @literalbananaI don’t think my parents spent much time on this stuff, and I don’t remember having to do much before ~ the mid-90s either. Cheap mainframe computers have made it possible for govs & cos to impose huge amounts of pointless work on other people4 replies 9 retweets 41 likesShow this thread -
David Chapman Retweeted David Colborne
5/ We’ve replaced the drudgery of actual work with the drudgery of talking about work (mostly done by machines). Actual work may be rougher on the body, but at least you feel like you’ve done something.https://twitter.com/ElectDavidC/status/981745576365535232 …
David Chapman added,
David Colborne @DavidColborneReplying to @Meaningness @literalbananaTrouble is, mechanization made it possible to work at scale, and humans really don't do that very well. The way we work around that is by communicating, which technology has also enabled at scale, so now our work is sorting through our communications to find the effects of work.2 replies 3 retweets 33 likesShow this thread -
David Chapman Retweeted Vicki Boykis
6/ “Talking about work” is now most of the economy.https://twitter.com/vboykis/status/981939305483563008 …
David Chapman added,
2 replies 5 retweets 42 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Meaningness
It's the cousin of Baumol's Cost Disease. As the efficiency of most kinds of work has vastly improved, what remains (figuring out what to do & communications overhead) takes up an ever increasing portion of the whole.
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David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
Yes! “Leibenstein’s Inefficiency Disease” per @patrickchttps://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/940232270790758401 …
David Chapman added,
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