Latest news with #DavidGraeber
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Civil servants admit they have nothing to do – it's time for cuts
There are far too many bulls--- office jobs around. More than a decade ago, the late, self-styled 'radical anthropologist' David Graeber wrote an essay in which he argued that 'through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand'. Graeber believed there were many professionals who, if you met at a party after a few drinks, would soon launch into a tirade 'about how pointless and stupid their job really is'. As a result, we are miles away from the 15-hour week that the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted back in 1930 would be delivered by technological advances. Little has changed since Graeber wrote that essay in 2013. Productivity remains stubbornly low. Since the start of 2023, public sector output has barely grown 4pc despite a surge in hiring, while the private sector has not expanded at all. Andrew Bailey last week warned that Britain's bloated public sector is dragging down the economy after the Bank of England slashed its 2025 growth forecasts in half. 'We have got more population, we have got more labour force, we have got the same output, so you can only conclude then that you have got lower productivity,' he said. In a nutshell, taxpayers are paying more for less. Although the number of civil servants has soared, public service productivity remains 8.5pc below pre-lockdown levels amid a collapse in output. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government's tax and spending watchdog, believes public sector employment will continue to grow to 6.3m by the end of the decade. The message from Bailey was that Britain's growing public workforce is draining productivity – something radical needs to be done. It's now clear that tinkering around the edges won't tackle the bloated state. Examples of unnecessary jobs are everywhere and nobody is being incentivised to cut the waste. Some civil servants admit online that they don't really understand what the point of their job is. 'I barely have any work to do, and I don't feel challenged at all,' one anonymous civil servant complained on Reddit earlier this year. Another wrote: 'Since I've started, I've had very little work thrown my way, and I'm struggling to understand what my role actually is. A lot of my responsibilities overlap with others who have been doing it for a long time'. A third said: 'This is the worst thing about the civil service. Being stuck in a boring job with nothing to do.' There are plenty of jobs that could be cut or at least changed. Pamela Dow, a former civil servant, wrote in the New Statesman last year that there was a 1,000-strong 'Government People Group' with a £65m wage bill when she worked in the Cabinet Office. Ed Miliband's Energy Department this month scrapped a £70,000 job post for an 'office attendance' monitor amid mockery online. The advert, which stated that the role itself could include remote working, was said to have been published by mistake, with a spokesman stating 'the job does not exist'. It was quickly removed after being posted, but the fact it was drawn up at all is ludicrous. Ministers know they must cut down on this bloat. Departments have been told by the Chancellor they will not get cash for 'new priorities' unless they identify 'efficiency savings' of 5pc in their budgets as part of the spending review that concludes in June. Last week top civil servants were told that they could face the sack if they don't save taxpayers money, part of a series of reforms to how the civil service manages performance. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has been tasked with creating a more 'agile and modern' state. We have heard it all before. Last May John Glen, then-Conservative paymaster general, said that high performance in Whitehall was not being 'incentivised properly', and that pay should be tied to performance. Under the 2010 to 2015 coalition government, Lord Maude, the minister for the Cabinet Office, made cumulative savings worth £52bn, with new rules including limits on how much people could spend on either advertising or marketing without his sign off. Yet the change didn't stick – the state has bounced back and continues to grow. There have been calls for the UK to set up its own version of Elon Musk's department of government efficiency – or 'Doge' – which has vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget (a target experts are sceptical of and Musk himself is starting to downplay). That may be more trouble that it's work – Musk's approach had already sparked legal, security and ethical concerns. Still, governments around the world are watching to see what lessons can be learnt. In the UK, polls suggest voters want cuts in Whitehall but the savings can't come from slashing the civil service alone. Britain is becoming a sicker nation, with the number of people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness soaring in recent years. Tens of billions of pounds of taxpayer money will be needed to cover the UK's ballooning benefits bill between now and the next general election. Investment in public services is desperately needed to tackle some of these issues, but it needs to be spent much more wisely than in previous years. The simple fact is that employment has been expanding in education, health and public administration, but productivity has plummeted. Now is the time for a rethink, and a zero tolerance approach to bull s--- jobs is a good place to start. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Stop asking Californians when they will leave the state
Why don't you just leave? It's always an incendiary question. When you ask it of people in bad romances or miserable careers, they can be forgiven for ghosting. The word 'just' is the poison. As if leaving were simple. It is never simple. The reasons to stay in a job or a relationship – children, money, comfort, love – can be every bit as compelling as the reasons to hit the road. The same is true in California. The annual wildfires moved fast this year, and they were relentless. In less than a week, the fires razed more than 12,300 buildings in and around Los Angeles. Twenty-five people were killed. Smoke and toxins choke the air. More than 80,000 evacuees are still shut out of their neighborhoods. The fires have only just stopped raging. If you're an out-of-towner, studying the cyclical droughts and fires and surveying images of charred neighborhoods, it's tempting to urge Californians to get the hell out. Hold off. Hold the hell off. This is an extremely fragile time in California. When people lose their homes, whether in fire or evacuation, they also lose clothes, family photos, a world of creature comforts and often, most heartbreakingly, pets. In demanding that people leave their homes, we may be asking them to leave the most important thing of all: their communities and their loved ones. Is an actuary-calculated measure of safety from wildfires worth giving up intimacy and proximity to the people who make life worth living? David Graeber and David Wengrow put this calculus succinctly in The Dawn of Everything. 'There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow,' they wrote. 'And then there's the security of knowing that there are people who will care deeply if one is.' Practically speaking, people who experience disruptions after a disaster deteriorate the fastest, says Karestan Koenen, an expert in trauma at Harvard, who investigated the psychological effects of the 2018 Paradise fire in California. 'To prevent long-term mental health consequences is to address people's basic needs for a safe place to live, for food, for work,' says Koenen. And yet, the response to the California fires from some quarters has come dangerously close to impatience, even to I-told-you-so. 'The biggest thing to note about these fires in LA' said one Oregon climate expert, 'is that none of this is surprising.' No doubt this kind of observation is well-intended. But it's not the time, and it never will be. Unsurprising tragedies – an addict's overdose, a cancer patient's death – are still tragedies. I lived in New York City on 9/11. As the two enormous holes were smoking, the air suffused with asbestos and death, people from out of town kept telling me the attacks were predictable to anyone who had followed developments in the Middle East. They said I should leave. These people too were well-intentioned. And maybe they were right. But the bodies hadn't even been counted. We New Yorkers hadn't yet been able to confer with each other about the city's present dangers and possible futures. We hadn't grieved, we hadn't taken inventories of our needs and our values, we hadn't even started to plan. Eventually, in public and private discussions among ourselves, New Yorkers, together, found clarity and confidence in our personal decision-making about whether to stay or leave. Some picked up stakes. Some stayed and took heavy precautions. Some kept calm and carried on. Some played it by ear. I'd like to say, as I empty my pockets and submit my bag to security goons outside every comedy show and piano recital, that I never regretted my decision. But I rethought it constantly. Now, 24 years later, I still do. Angelenos must be afforded the same agency, autonomy and space to make – and rethink – and qualify – and act on their own choices. All of us, no matter where we live during the climate crisis, deserve that. 'Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality,' wrote the climate futurist Alex Steffen recently. Steffen, who teaches a course on climate and personal ruggedization, emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all response to that reality. Instead he urges participants to 'become native to now', 'develop a healthy relationship to discontinuity' and 'move from climate isolation to community'. Isolation – now that's something we should all leave, along with know-it-all-ism and solitary bunker-building. As fires and floods increasingly define our world, we don't need advice or loaded questions. We need solidarity, imagination and mutual respect. Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic
