Graeber's biggest point is that even when he talks to people and asks them if their job is valuable, and they should know better than anyone else, they often say 'no, not really.'

Yeah I know that's his point and that's why I describe his point of view as being naive.

It may be true that for some percentage of workers at any given time their role is experimental and may turn out to be unimportant or a failed attempt at change, and it may be the case that it take a while for these sorts of inefficiencies to be rooted out or resolved because the cost and time associated with doing so make it a low priority but that is something that people who are in those positions would not necessarily be aware of.

This is the same as when people say things like "I don't know why we are so precious with our kids these days. I never wore a bike helmet and I survived!".

Without the proper perspective people frequently form wildly inaccurate opinions.

I don't think he thinks "anyone not involved in hammering steel" is unnecessary, that's a bit of a strawman.

If all I have to do in order to make it a straw man is replace the word iPhone with horseshoe he's doing a pretty good job of constructing his own straw man.

The argument goes that big corporations have a tendency to hire more people than necessary because middle managers are rewarded based on how many people work under them. Or that people looking to keep their jobs, try to make themselves look more busy and valuable than they really are.

That story is completely ridiculous.

People waste a lot of time at offices doing things that aren't work. But our culture demands we be at work 8 hours a day, even if the work only requires 4 hours.

Then businesses have an opportunity to compete for talent by offering better working conditions. If they can do so profitably then they win.

Economists in the 1930's thought the world would be so rich by today, that people would only need to work a few hours a week. And the economy has grown vastly since then, and we are much richer. But I don't think most people have the option of working that little, even if they want to.

This is more a result of the spoils of productivity increases not being distributed evenly.

By having massive unemployment and under employment then expecting the remaining workers to work harder for less pay on average while more and more income is paid towards servicing private debt the finance, banking and real estate sectors have made out like bandits.

But that's a different subject entirely from automation.

I don't think so. It has a lot to do with automation because that is where the productivity increases have come from, but rather than the federal government guaranteeing full employment and setting a floor price for labour and a minimum set of conditions below which we consider employment to be exploitation, which would not only maintain demand in the economy but also reduce the inequality with which the spoils of those productivity increases are distributed, they have left people to fend for themselves and the economy has languished as a result.

Those jobs can really be valuable and still be vulnerable to automation. AI has improved a lot in the last 5 years. I don't think it's implausible at all to imagine most jobs done now being partially or totally automated.

Maybe in 1,000 years but I disagree that automation will have the type of impact people (particularly in the UBI advocacy camp) claim it will.