Download or read book Bullshit Jobs written by David Graeber and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).

Download or read book No More Work written by James Livingston and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

Download or read book Calling Bullshit written by Carl T. Bergstrom and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bullshit isn’t what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data. “A modern classic . . . a straight-talking survival guide to the mean streets of a dying democracy and a global pandemic.”—Wired Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don’t feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data. You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit. We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.

Download or read book On Bullshit written by Harry G. Frankfurt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller that explains why bullshit is far more dangerous than lying One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Download or read book Empty Labor written by Roland Paulsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical study of 'empty labor', the time during which employees engage in non-work activities during the working day.

Download or read book Business Bullshit written by André Spicer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our organizations are flooded with empty talk. We are constantly "going forward" to lands of "deliverables", stopping off on the "journey" to "drill down" into "best practice". Being an expert at using management speak has become more important in corporate life than delivering long lasting results. The upshot is that meaningless corporate jargon is killing our organizations. In this book, management scholar the author argues we need to call this empty talk what it is: bullshit. The book looks at how organizations have become vast machines for manufacturing, distributing and consuming bullshit. It follows how the meaningless language of management has spread through schools, NGOs, politics and the media. Business Bullshit shows you how to spot business bullshit, considers why it is so popular, and outlines the impact it has on organizations and the people who work there. It also outlines what we can do to minimise bullshit at work. The author makes a case for why organizations need to avoid empty talk and reconnect with core activities.

Download or read book Financialization written by T. Palley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term financialization is a term that has become popular to describe developments within the global economy, and particularly within developed industrialized economies, over the past thirty years. The book is divided into four sections, which together give a comprehensive treatment of the economics and political economy of financialization.

Download or read book Bad Advice written by Venus Nicolino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles Times #1 Bestseller USA Today Bestselling Book Over motivational messages? Sick AF of inspirational quotes? Done with the shiny happy bad advice that gets you nowhere? Well, heads up: you’re about to get a shitload of Good Advice. In Bad Advice, relationship expert Dr. Venus Nicolino—a.k.a. Dr. V—takes a blowtorch to the shrink-wrapped, “feel good” BS that passes for self-help these days. When you’re heartbroken, what do you hear? You can’t love anyone until you love yourself. When someone’s hurt you? Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission. When you’re just a little too positive? Expectations lead to disappointment. Pop culture noise gives Bad Advice the varnish of truthiness and inspiration. But it’s not truth; it’s not inspiration. It’s bullshit. And at its root, all Bad Advice operates off the same lie: Emotions are optional. In Bad Advice, Dr. V delivers a bracing truth serum, in the form of Good Advice—an antidote to the bullshit, from “Just Be Yourself” to “Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last,” that teaches you to live your life in a way that honors who you are, what you need, and how you feel. Smart and irreverent, Dr. V fuses the brains and insight of a nerdy Ph.D. with the heart of a doting Italian Mother and the artful profanity of a Philly trucker. Dr. V’s signature combination of humor, hard science, and heartmake Bad Advice an iconoclastic course-correction like no other. A fiercely sharp wake-up call that tackles some of self-help’s most damaging truisms, Bad Advice is a never shy guide to tapping into your full potential.

Download or read book Ask a Manager written by Alison Green and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

Download or read book Existence written by Peter van Inwagen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of the nature of being was central to ancient and medieval philosophy, and continues to be relevant today. In this collection of thirteen recent essays, Peter van Inwagen applies the techniques of analytical philosophy to a wide variety of problems in ontology and meta-ontology. Topics discussed include the nature of being, the meaning of the existential quantifier, ontological commitment, recent attacks on metaphysics and ontology, the concept of ontological structure, fictional entities, mereological sums, and the ontology of mental states. Van Inwagen adopts a generally 'Quinean' position in meta-ontology, yet reaches ontological conclusions very different from Quine's. The volume includes two previously unpublished essays, one of which is an introductory essay where van Inwagen explains his conception of the relation between the language of 'the ordinary business of life' and that of 'the ontology room'. The volume will be an important collection for students and scholars of metaphysics.

Download or read book Overcharged written by Charles Silver and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is America's health care system so expensive? Why do hospitalized patients receive bills laden with inflated charges that com out of the blue from out-of-network providers or demands for services that weren't delivered? Why do we pay $600 for EpiPens that contain a dollar's worth of medicine? Why is more than $1 trillion - one out of every three dollars that passes through the system - lost to fraud, wasted on services that don't help patients, or otherwise misspent? Overcharged answers these questions. It shows that America's health care system, which replaces consumer choice with government control and third-party payment, is effectively designed to make health care as expensive as possible. Prices will fall, quality will improve, and medicine will become more patient-friendly only when consumers take charge and exert pressure from below. For this to happen, consumers must control the money. As Overcharged explains, when health care providers are subjected to the same competitive forces that shape other industries, they will either deliver better services more cheaply or risk being replaced by someone who will.

Download or read book Good People Bad Managers written by Samuel A. Culbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cuthbert examines "what bad habits are routinely followed by well-intended managers. Managers need to understand the causes for their constant distraction, become more aware of the negatives they inadvertently inflict, and the hollowness of the rationales they use to justify what they do. Company leaders, CEOs, and top tier managers need to become more aware of the ever-present concerns of their own workforce, implementing the management mentality they want in their company and then teaching their managerial employees how to absorb it"--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Direct Action written by David Graeber and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical anthropologist studies the global justice movement.

Download or read book Bad Jobs Bullshit written by Brad King and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have no clout whatsoever. We donÕt work for a publishing house, weÕre not hiding a printing press in a basement, and we arenÕt part of whatever mythical body of old white men drinking scotch in a shadowed library determines the literary canon. WeÕre just people who have worked a lot of bad jobs, and put up with a lot of bullshit, and decided we wanted to hear about how that same phenomenon happened to others. If youÕre reading this, itÕs because you want to hear about that too. We think youÕll find the mix of essays, short stories, and poems in this collection speak to common experiences and make you feel less alone in your struggle against the grinding machine of entropy.

Download or read book There s No Such Thing as an Easy Job written by Kikuko Tsumura and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'" -NPR “A thought-provoking, drily funny critique of capitalism and the systems of self-worth that are built around it.” -TIME, “Must-Read Books of the Year” A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park--it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful. And when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price. This is the first time Kikuko Tsumura--winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award--has been translated into English. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is as witty as it is unsettling--a jolting look at the maladies of late capitalist life through the unique and fascinating lens of modern Japanese culture.

Download or read book The Secret written by Rhonda Byrne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that changed lives in profound ways, now with a new foreword and afterword. In 2006, a groundbreaking feature-length film revealed the great mystery of the universe—The Secret—and, later that year, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller. Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers—men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.