I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated betweenreal work“(farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit Jobs” written by David Graeber is a more intellectual framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are completely useless, and we can rid of (Almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN for actual working people, and society would be much better off.
Like many populist intuitions, this intuition is completely backwards. Intermediaries are extremely important!
I think the last 200 years have been a resounding victory for the superiority of the middleman model. Better models of coordination are extremely important, more so than direct improvements in “object-level”/”direct”/”real”/”authentic” work.
The world, by default, is not organized in ways that are particularly conducive to human flourishing, happiness, or productive capacity. Sometimes, the person Try to rearrange the atoms of the world To be better for humanitarian goals. Whenever you have an endeavor that requires more than two to three such people, or if those two to three people do not live near each other, you may need a middleman.
So this is an ideal middleman job Business,
You have extra wheat. I have extra beans. But we’re 100 miles apart and don’t know each other exists.
A trader a) physically moves the wheat to where it is in shortage (and is more valuable), b) physically moves the beans to where it is in shortage (and is more valuable), c) figures out an exchange rate, and d) bears the risk of spoilage and robbery. For his efforts, the trader takes a partial cut.
Another ideal middleman job is Leadership Or management,
Ten people want to build a bridge. But they face problems: who works on the foundation versus the supports? How can we prevent the team on the left from creating something incompatible with the team on the right? When is the foundation strong enough to start building on top? How do we know if we are on track or behind schedule?
A manager: a) figures out what needs to be done and who should do it, b) makes sure the parts fit together, c) adjusts when reality deviates from the plan, and d) makes calls when the right answer is not obvious.
Agriculture allowed specialization of labor and thus the introduction of middlemen.
Early middlemen had relatively simple jobs, such as trading goods and supervising labor. As our society grows larger, richer, and more complex, more and more intermediaries are tasked with managing the flow of increasingly abstract concepts: information, risk, relationships, and ideas.
Many societies throughout history were suspicious of middlemen. In classical Confucianism, merchants were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, with scholar-bureaucrats (middlemen presumably getting a pass because they studied Confucianism), farmers, artisans, and soldiers close behind. Similarly, in the West, Christians were often barred from money-lending and some other types of trade, leaving the less risky work of middlemen to Jewish and Muslim merchants and bankers.
However, over the past 200 years, it has become increasingly untenable to see middlemen performing largely unnecessary work. As societies become more and more complex, the jobs of intermediaries become more complex and more numerous, and societies that reject them become increasingly competitive and irrelevant.
By the 20th century, all powers essentially agreed that we needed intermediaries to organize our society. But there is still controversy over the details: should we have multiple bottom-up models of coordination, or is it better to have a centrally planned economy with a few leaders and mathematical models at the top?
The latter half of the 20th century can be seen as a dialectic between the US and Europe against Russia, China, and other adversaries over whether society should be frugal or centrally planned.
With a few exceptions, the West won a landslide victory. Capitalist austerity, explicitly communist or otherwise, leads to significantly higher returns and productive efficiency than centralized command-and-control.
Now consider the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Compared with 30 years ago, I think many people, especially among the intellectual elite, have largely lost their appreciation of the value of solving coordination problems and the associated respect for intermediaries.
In particular, I think a lot of people in my circle are missing the “great arbiter” intuition because they work in tech and/are addicted to tech. Information technology (“software is eating the world”) is an alternative way of organizing society.
However, while software engineers Look They are doing the “real work” themselves, the real work they are doing is in coordination technology, not in object-level work like robots or anything else.
Of the big companies, only Netflix is close to replacing “real work” (well, storytellers). Most other “tech” companies (like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) are about reorganizing society through information technology. (Companies like NVIDIA are an intermediate step that feeds in software that is primarily coordination technology).
Sometimes information age solutions are a complement and sometimes a substitute for traditional intermediaries.
Some of my followers are variously in the “progress studies” and “abundance” crowd. For you, I offer a challenge: Many people in related fields talk about the world in terms of physical capital and “manufacturing.” But most of the modern economy is in coordination. This means that the rate-limiting step forward for future economic growth will likely come from coordination reforms, not “real action” reforms. How can you align your efforts to improve coordination in the future?
What do substackers do? Well, many of us are useless, but I like to imagine that some of us, in our best moments, try to help facilitate the discovery and spread ideasWhat are good coordination-first structures for spreading ideas? How can intermediaries of information dissemination improve our efforts and help the universe find itself more quickly and efficiently?
A lot of people talk abouteconomy“of society. But, concretely and quantitatively, what does this actually mean? I’m excited to see more descriptive and neutral descriptions of the extent to which societies are economical today, and especially attempts to create graphs for the fraction of different societies and regions that have become economical over time.