From my inbox, apparently a comment on a Comment Is Free article:
“Consider a hedge fund manager. Sounds very useful. What do they do? To someone who had no idea, you might guess that they looked after the money to fund the maintenance of the vital ecosystems in Britain’s hedgerows. But actually the nature of their non-job is that they bet vast amounts of other people’s money on numbers going up or down, ruining lives willy-nilly and making millions of pounds for themselves which they can then squirrel away off-shore so they don’t have to pay any tax. If that isn’t a non-job, I’m at a loss to think what is. Ah, but of course they aren’t employed by local government.”
No, but they are maintained entirely at public expense.
Any other suggestions as to "private" sector non-jobs?
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Private military contractors. Although I suppose they provide actual services, the question is why are they doing things that were done perfectly well in the past by regular military personnel, at much less cost and with better oversight?
ReplyDeleteI guess my example is not strictly a non-job, but to me it makes no sense to pay these contractors immense salaries to do what our own military personnel could do for less money and probably with a lot more competence.
Perhaps a more appropriate example of a non-job would be casino operators. The fact that so many governments use legalized gambling as a way to raise funds really bothers me. It is a de facto regressive tax. But I suppose casino operators are similar to hedge fund managers, so do they count?