World of middle management

Or maybe management is even more bullshit than economics, I'm not sure, I've never studied anything related to it. It probably is. Perhaps the field stinks so hard that I've never bothered approaching it, thereby creating a survivor bias in my sample of what fields I think are utter bullshit.
Anyway, the world we live in is one of increasing middle management. In my essay on bullshit jobs I argued that they arise because of 2 simultaneous effects: 1) the technological system needs to keep growing, because it is what it does, and why it's so powerful that it has covered the entire globe, and 2) there are a lot incompetent people who need to take part in the system through 'working' and consuming.
That's essentially why there is so much middle management in my opinion. If you can't do something, at least you can supervise others doing it, because even if you do literally nothing, then the critical operations do not break. Unfortunately, 'doing nothing' is far better than what a lot of middle management accomplish, because their meetings take precious time away from otherwise productive employees.
But far worse than those bullshit managers who at least have some good intentions are the people who straight up play the game of being a parasite. The opacity that a highly complicated society creates, i.e. the opposite of transparency, leads to corruption and leeching:

• Financial operations to avoid taxes (tax avoidance is the set of legal operations to pay less tax, tax evasion is illegal)
• Making the world even more opaque and in general suited to benefit them. Unsurprisingly, if you make a good chunk of money not doing a whole lot, you'd want to keep your position and the society that allows it. So of course you would want more bureaucracy, i.e. more middle management
• Maintaining the world where incentive structures are misaligned, the main one being that industries maximize for profits, not for the quality of products or quality of life of their consumers.
But to come back to management specifically, is it surprising that the managing mindset - top-down orders as to what needs to be done - also trickles down into people’s lives? Numbing our body when it screams at us through the form of stress or a headache or digestion issues or trouble sleeping. Repressing our emotions which desperately want to be expressed. Micromanaging children instead of listening to them.
As it turns out, this might be the real trickle-down aspect of the system.

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2024-03-30