Thursday's Top 10: The pointlessness of modern work; Lower for longer promises work better than QE; The Limits to Growth redux; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at midday today.

As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read today is #1 on the nature of modern work from David Graeber. 

1. 'A scar across our collective soul' - I'm a lucky man in many, many ways.

I have a (self-made) job I enjoy and that is rewarding in many ways.

But a lot of highly educated and intelligent and talented people now work in jobs that are no fun at all and increasingly don't seem to pay much.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

The advent of new technologies was supposed to make us all richer and give us more time for leisure.

Instead, a diminishing number of people work insane hours, while many others have not work at all, or not enough to earn a decent living.

Here's David Graeber with a juicy rant on the issue of work, pay, leisure and technology that uses a rude word for bovine excrement:

Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.

And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

2. The ghosts of the 1990s - FT's Josh Noble reports on how the ghosts of the 1990s Asian crisis may have returned.

When China unleashed the largest stimulus package in its history in response to the 2008 crisis and slowing export markets in the west, it came at a price. Today China is grappling with a bill that some economists say has driven total debt to gross domestic product past 200 per cent.

While China offers the most extreme example of using debt to fund growth, it is a pattern that has been repeated across Asia. Without exports, central banks turned on the taps, leading to a jump in household and corporate borrowing.

Now, as the US Federal Reserve considers a reversal of its ultra-loose monetary policy, the region faces a new challenge: coping with life after debt. And as investors gauge the impact of that transition, the ghosts of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis have been reawakened.

“All this QE [quantitative easing] money has lead to a massive credit inflation bubble in Asia,” said Kevin Lai, chief regional economist at Daiwa Securities. “The crime has been committed, we just have to deal with the aftermath. During that process there will be a lot of damage . . . It’s like a margin call. Households will need to sell their assets. There will be a lot of wealth destruction.”

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.

I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long. Now all of us—including the IMF—have a better understanding that a more equal distribution of income allows for more economic stability, more sustained economic growth, and healthier societies with stronger bonds of cohesion and trust. The research reaffirms this finding.

What is less clear is how we achieve more inclusive growth in practice. Certainly, universal access to decent education is the non-negotiable starting point. Beyond that, I believe policies such as robust social safety nets, extending the reach of credit, and—in some cases—minimum wages can help.

Above all, inclusive growth must also be job-rich growth. This is really a symbiotic relationship—we need growth for jobs and jobs for growth. Right now, 202 million people are looking for work, and two in five of the jobless are under 24. Relieving this sense of desperation must be the over-riding goal of everything we do.