This seems to me like an employee's opinion, rather than that of a founder. I mean that the worker's view of a company is as a job-creator, whereas a company founder sees a company as a tool to fill a market niche (and usually generate profit).
The argument against the article's proposal is quite simple - if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?
It's not that either's wrong and I don't know anything about the author's backgound. Just interesting to think from the other person's POV.
David Graeber is an athropology professor, mostly known for a quite good text "Debt: the first 5000 years" - actually I am probably on the opposite side of the political ideology from Graeber and disagree quite a bit with some of his conclusions[0] but he does bring up a lot of good points and the book is a very swift read (in fact it happens to be sitting on my desk at this very moment).
[0] particularly funny was when he suggests that the erroneous historical model of the genesis of money was created to justify the academic economist's profession, while offering an anthropological counter-narrative. This could just be a major exercise in projection.
I happen to agree with a lot of what he writes in this short essay, too - especially about how Keynes' prediction has come true (although I would disagree as to what is causal).
"There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)"
Isn't it interesting that the one example Graeber comes up with is possibly the profession writ large whose demand is largely influenced by a social structure outside of the free-market? Likewise, a over promulgation of workers in finance is suggestive that maybe there is some non-free-market force is incentivising individuals to go into that field...
"A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates, over 75% of all human interactions.
Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because they're not priced, but they're by no means insignificant. They range from developing-world peasants farming land to which they simply have no title deeds, through to the form of communist praxis which is the dominant social structure of the supposedly free-market west -- the nuclear family. (Or do you present your kids with a bill for their personal care and feeding? Non-dysfunctional families run along lines Marx described as, "to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities": sharing without reference to individual wealth is explicit in state-recognized marriage vows. That the power/money relationship often reverses a generation later, as adult children support or nurse their aged parents through their last year, just underlines the pattern.)
Graeber, as an anthropologist, is interested in all human interactions, not just marketized ones. And his particular field has been the intersection of the market sector with the non-marketized greater cloud of human relationships.
Yes, he makes that point in "Debt" - but most free-market people would consider volunteerism, as a 'free-market' activity, because internally an individual makes a choice (based on personal utility) to do activity X versus 'something else' which is a micro-market.
I thought it was a stretch for Graeber to basically call everything socialism in the (roughly speaking) second section of Debt - especially since there is a categorical distinction between Marx's tagline ("to each... from each...") to what actually happens (in families etc), which is, "to you according to what I perceive to be your need, from me, according to what I can afford to give".
Volunteerism too, providing services or simply comfort to others free of charge, whether they be family, friends, neighbors, the elderly, the sick, the poor, is a non-free-market activity. The less free time a person has though, time away from market-driven, payment-required jobs, the less freedom they have to: work on tasks pro bono, pursue hobbies, interests, contribute to a vibrant caring community, participate in government or petition it, learn new things, experiment, think, write, get creative, explore, and simply pursue their own happiness in life.
> if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?
That's not necessarily true. There are a lot of reasons why people or companies pay for things, and those reasons aren't necessarily related to the value of the things themselves. Consider:
- Corporate environments where bribery -- or its fancy equivalent, paying for nice dinners and ski trips for customers -- determines sales.
- Conflict-of-interest: guy responsible for purchasing works out a big contract between his firm and the vendor his wife owns.
- Vendor lock-in.
- Fear. This explains pretty well the bidding wars between Google and Facebook -- each of which fears losing an advantage over the other -- over startups whose value can very rarely reasonably amount to N times the value of companies who actually Build Things.
Money is at most a loose approximation for value. It can represent other things as well.
The argument against the article's proposal is quite simple - if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?
It's not that either's wrong and I don't know anything about the author's backgound. Just interesting to think from the other person's POV.