How to Cure Fiat Financialization and Bullshit Jobs
Starting with the lowest hanging fruit created by NGOs and ESG.
This essay is the spiritual successor to Not Lindy! Motherf*cker! , and one which proposes very Yes-Lindy solutions.
I want to share some ideas around “Progress”, “doing good” and basic capital allocation - for the betterment of all humanity - in the context of unhinged fiat currency proliferation and the distortions it creates in society.
You might be familiar with David Graeber’s concept of Bullshit Jobs.
These are jobs that are administrative in nature, and that their proliferation is a result of what he calls “managerial feudalism”. As we shift away from manufacturing widgets that have clear demand and use in people’s lives, and instead towards services and knowledge work, we find that these services often require extra layers of branding and ever more derivative “bullshitting" in order to generate demand for them and justify their existence and the time and capital they burn through as a result.
He defines these jobs broadly accurately, but in more recent times it appears that we have to consider a new layer to the problem, and that is the propensity for bullshit jobs to make appearances even in non-market-based arenas such as the non-profit world - sometimes even dominating them completely. That is, there is still something natural about bullshitting a little in order to sell soemething to a willing buyer, in a free market - but something is amiss when the product or service the bullshit job is producing/doing is being imposed on others, in the technical sense. In this case, we need to be asking deeper questions about the allocation of such quantities of time and capital.
As the Gini curve hollowing out of the middle class accelerates, creating a vastly bigger struggling proletariat and even wealthier super-rich, we experience ever larger market distortions and begin to see excesses of capital that have to a find a home or a purpose. The world of “purpose” based activities, via non-profits and NGOs, provides a convenient escape valve, tax-free.
There are dangers inherent to this broader model, very often involving “Coercion as a Service” and other such unchecked mercenary activities and abominations of human time allocation - due to these plain excesses of capital and no willing market to speak of.
As one twitter user pointed out: “NGOs would be genuinely useful if market forces were allowed to determine their size and mandates.”
And this is a key insight - at some point we, the public, can’t always just sit back and watch multi billion dollar pet agendas be rolled out with aplomb just because liberal arts majors often don’t realise when they are working for the firm.
But they appear to be increasingly dominated by ever more ideological pet projects (think Bill Gates and his desire to own all the farms, wipe out cows, and inject what few animals remain with MRNA vaccines - against the public’s will, or even knowledge). I think we can all agree that a lot of what Bill does with his money are some of the most anti-human agendas we have ever seen at such scale.
With all this supply of individual well-meaners, do-gooders, and advocates of Progress, and very little in the way of market demand, we end up living in a world of billions, if not trillions at this point, largely allocated to projects that have little in the way of publicly understandable second-order benefits. - i.e we can all tell that is the best use of money.
“It would be better if more people understood what is wrong with the “progress” narrative, and understood what authentic progress actually entails, and understood the caution and restraint that it requires, and understood the emphasis on maintaining, and understood that very often the best way to solve a problem is to remove its causes, which actually involves reversing some stuff rather than always create new stuff. But obviously the market incentive is to create new stuff - the history books’ incentive is to create new stuff. But as we think about how do we actually solve problems in a way that isn’t a racket? That isn’t solving a problem that was caused by the result of our previous problem solving.”
“Helping people to help themselves” is always the best way of improving things in the long term. We know this instinctively, and in our personal lives, and needs to be applied at all level of NGO activity.
We know from the past few years how much the influence of private capital and billionaire donor money has shaped our lives - and in many ways that we wish it wouldn’t have - medical and ideological coercion being the number one culprits, by a country mile.
I am proposing that we look at “goals” and “Progress” with a categorization system. Much the way ESG attempts to do, but this time actually facing the right direction and applying to non-profits, rather than attempting to handicap for-profits while NGOs run amok.
I asked the AI to give me a breakdown of NGO World and, unsurprisingly, its idea of categorization resembles that of the UN Sustainable Development Goals - or One World Government.
Framing and Rating True Usefulness
Indeed, a ratings system would technically be a bullshit job itself, by all modern definitions, but bear with me and maybe this can help to add both structured thinking to the non-profit sector, as a starting point for people to become more attuned to what really has the most positive nth-order effects in reality, and helping capital flow to the places where the most true impact can be seen and felt in the long term.
In crypto we talk about Layers - Layer 1, Layer 2 and so on. Bitcoin is Layer 1 because it functions as the store of value, primary encryption: the digital gold - the most basic quality required for getting a new monetary system going. Layer 2 would be payments, smart contracts and so on. You can’t have payments if you don’t already have a store of value. Each layer builds upon the functionality and security provided by the layer beneath it.
Just so, with NGOs and non-market-based activities. If an NGO is addressing some issue regarding “lgbtq unvaxxed metal workers in Malawi” then it would be Layer 5. If, on the other hand, you are campaigning for obvious basics that benefit everyone (depleted basic infrastructure) then you are treated as a Layer 1 concern - and which ought to get better ‘benefits’. Second and third-order positive effects being the name of the game.
They can still do what they like with their money, but, like ESG disingenuously attempts to do, the public and/or investors should be provided with a short-hand heuristic for judging where it all fits in - and whether or not it’s just a pet project of yet another Dr Evil character.
These “basics”, or Layer 1 concerns, would include the kind of factors that individual people, and corporations, often or always consider when drawing up lists of say, which country to move to, or domicile a business in.
A simple rubric for stability and foresight that no person can avoid when making serious decisions:
Stable and cheap energy supply (most importantly, enough capacity for globally competitive industrial production)
Rule of law
Secure borders (big yikes)
General safety and security (no defunding of the police)
Fair elections with in-person voting, free of tampering (especially the digital or mail-in ballot kind)
Social contract intact (democracy unaffected by fascist WEF/WHO/UN SDG)
Parents raising their kids, not the government
Medical freedom
Anti-slavery (think lithium and cobalt mines for the Green Scam)
Real food (No MRNA’d cattle, no GMOs, full disclosure of ingredients)
Positive business environment, low red tape, extra support for small businesses
Low taxes, small government
Moratorium on the use of humiliating and manipulative Corporate Memphis art in any serious sector and/or public communications
Shift back to incandescent lights to aid with global mental health (nuclear energy used to power this just fine, but now everybody is mad)
These factors and goals are by definition what helps humanity the most, and very often we find NGOs dedicated to their exact opposite causes. Look at the list again and you can probably find multiple well-known NGOs that fight each of these.
A good example, of more extreme scale, would be open borders and all the NGO activity that is downstream of that. It’s of little or waning use for the UN to give pre-loaded credit cards to the illegals walking over the Mexican border because they too eventually suffer the effects of the inflation caused by the money printing, caused by giving away money for free. Their money is slowly worth less too, and they are also not incentivized to save.
This is a low-res explanation, but essentially this is how it works, and we can see how counter-productive these overly-narrow goals are - ultimately making *everything worse in the longer term.
The Best Way To “Do Good”
This is not to say we don’t still want to help niche problems in some or other way, or or that private actors can no longer choose what to get involved in - we still want to “plant trees” or “hand out meals” - but we absolutely need to know how much particular projects are helping the system in a multi-order way, as well as contextualizing capital allocation in a transparent and publicly visible way - as in, “what else could this money be spent on, if not on this project?”
Beyond NGOs, we can even extrapolate this framework to other types of compliance regimes that are non-essential to life on earth. The EU’s fixation on regulating itself into oblivion would be a good example - along with all the auxiliary industries, that such an environment creates, like a high prevalence of tax avoidance activities, which in turn creates more bullshit jobs.
My own pet annoyance, as many know, is ESG. The entire premise and concept is hopelessly vague, ineffective and open to corruption and distortion, many would argue by design. Is ESG helping any of the above factors to improve or become more reliable over the long term? No, of course not.
A couple of weeks ago, we saw two lithium battery or recycling plants explode, one in Korea and one in Glasgow. Lithium starts with ‘slave’ labour, and ends in a 5000 degree furnace of death, and a terrifying plume of smoke as high as the eye can see. It also has no hope whatsoever of storing all the energy that it’s supposed to, according to the (now massively discredited and illegitimate) Net Zero goals.
This is about helping the do-good class to start understanding opportunity cost and nth order effects. Most especially the bulge bracket of boomers who are lured by their financial advisors into buying Blackrock’s Climate Transition ETFs, as they find they are not helping anything other than creating more inflation, nor even making a return. (Bet you didn’t know that the climate was “transitioning” either - yep, they went there.)
Just as all of the “renewables” people *should have actually all been working on improving nuclear tech for the last 20 years, so the UN credit card people have should have been finding a better use for those hundreds of billions.
And it’s critical to know where the money comes from - let’s not forget that anything that creates more inflation is by definition anti-human and a bullshit job.
Investing The Right Way (more great ideas)
I have previously written about how the term ‘sustainability’ is hopelessly flawed (again, by design) but here Stuart Kirk actually makes the fantastic point that the word invest is arguably just as abused, misused, and misunderstood.
Do also see the other presentation at HSBC that he got fired for - well worth it.
(The video Blackrock doesn’t want you to see:)
Anyway. Remember the list!
That’s literally all it takes to reduce inflation, and reduce bullshit jobs with fiat titles, and impact the world more people positively.