The bullshit-jobs thesis may be bullshit
economist.com
economist.com
> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.
(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)
>They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" is vague aspirational follow your dreams guff. Who actually makes a world scale impact? You don't have to be Greta Thurnberg to be doing useful work that's valuable to those around you. The implication is if you're not changing the world, you're wasting your life. It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
> In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" [...] It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
You're right that Graeber's question is vague (it could do with improvement/narrowing) but the first question quoted above isn't so much worse but just completely irrelevant. They've asked an entirely different question unrelated to what Graeber was trying to get at.
If I don't "have the feeling of doing useful work", does that mean my job is not useful, or my job is potentially useful but carried out inefficiently. Am I attempting useful work but blocked from doing so by some administrative or practical barrier? Do I consider myself insufficiently talented or qualified at my job to carry it out in a useful manner.
Graeber's question, while in need of improvement, is at least asking about the right things: the jobs themselves. This new question is asking about the people's individual relationships to their jobs, not the actual purpose of the role.
Graeber defined "bullshit jobs" as jobs which hold no value to society at large. This includes zero sum jobs.
It's an argument over definition followed by an ad hominem - "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance".
It reminds me of this quote:
"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
That is not the case. They don't talk about who the jobs do or don't have value to at all anywhere in the article, they only address the evidence Graeber used as the basis of his book - how employees think and feel about their own employment.
I don't know about the research they are citing, perhaps that does what you say.
The interviewed person is probably the best to know if the job is valuable. Even if they falsely assume that their job makes no difference, the sentiment is a problem in itself.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving my interpretation of the intent.
That's fair but even still, Graeber's question should at least be probing whether people might think their jobs are useful; this new question only probes whether people think their contribution is useful individually.
In my case, it would be no different (beyond a handful of job losses which are insignificant in the grand scheme). That, to me, is a bullshit job. Meaningless time consumption.
If someone else would step in and do it, it’s not unique but isn’t necessarily bullshit.
Right, and apparently:
> those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning.
Which leads me to believe that people are not a good judge of the usefulness of their work. I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs. Perhaps the people doing them don't find the jobs meaningful, but refuse collection is certainly useful; without it, everyone would have to cart their trash to the dump, or, worse, we'd just have trash everywhere.
So it strikes me that all of this is just kinda pointless. I think we can reasonably make the argument that bullshit jobs do exist, but the number of these jobs is a very subjective take, and people seem to often incorrectly value their own jobs.
I think they did by and large (as did Graeber). The exceptions I remember listed were 1) "second order bullshit" - necessary jobs for "unnecessary companies".
E.g. cleaners for a debt collections call center - I don't think all reasonable people would believe this is socially useful. If the company doesnt need to exist the cleaners shouldn't either.
2) for example, cleaners who said that they were routinely ordered to clean things that already were clean or to do a small amount of cleaning and look busy the rest of the time. Performative cleaning, in other words.
The economist was specifically trying to misrepresent these examples to undermine the broader point, I think.
Clarity of intent. (Quality of training)
Adequate load sharing.
Interest of the approach (some petty tasks can made fun and challenging).
Then there's the systemic / social side of it. If your work flows with others. There a parallel with kinetic energy and inertia. A job where things flow is probably gonna be appreciated even if it has low value.
You can have a job where you feel useful and valuable without changing the world.
There are also jobs where you are being very useful, but it's arguably not good for society at large. You've got companies like FB that exist to just sell user data and serve ads and in HFT that milk ever penny out of the stock market where the speed of light isn't competitive enough for them, so they have to be as close to the exchanges as possible. Valuable to the company, but not through a bigger picture lens. Even worse, those companies have absorbed some of our best and brightest STEM graduates for years and prevented them from solving more noble pursuits.
There's a large amount of the economy that I'd consider a net negative for society - advertising and the industries created to convey it (radio, TV, most websites), credit cards, junk food, sales, etc. There are also a lot of cases where increased input doesn't seem to make people happier off. For instance, a lot of work goes into making special effects better than they were decades ago, but doesn't necessarily mean an audience in 2021 is going to enjoy movies more than an audience in 2000 did.
As a society we should probably spend a lot more time talking about where our economic output is going, and if it's going towards the things we actually want it to.
The value Facebook gets out of Facebook may well be obtained in questionable ways, but the fact is the service itself creates tons of value and utility for hundreds of millions of people. And yes I’m sure it causes some harm as well, definitely, but it’s not as simple as you make it out.
Perhaps the utility of Facebook isn't zero, but I certainly think the harm (has led to genocide in some countries like Myanmar) far out weighs the benefits.
• When asked "whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world", 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. (And this is what Graeber [not Gerber] wrote about.)
• When counting those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”, this was only 4.8%. (The newer research.)
It is hardly surprising that fewer people thought their job failed to clear the lower bar represented by the latter question (this is precisely what one would expect); so it's not clear what is being contradicted or refuted.
Even the data that the latter number is decreasing over time, or has a different distribution across kinds of work (than predicted by Graeber for the former question) is not necessarily a contradiction: those working in several "bullshit" jobs (under Graeber's definition) may well more frequently have a feeling of doing useful work, while also being less confident that their job itself serves a purpose and ought to exist. I can imagine this especially for the "goons" and "duct tapers" kinds of jobs (in his classification).
(In fact, if you look up and examine the full results of the YouGov poll at https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... you'll find that even among the 37% who said their job "is not making a meaningful contribution to the world", only 21% of them said they found it "Not at all fulfilling"!)
The Economist article dismisses the former question with "This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify", and you dismiss it by calling it "vague aspirational follow your dreams guff" and a "very heavily loaded" question that "hopelessly biased his conclusions", but this is all value judgement. It is not at all clear to me whether the "correct" question to ask is the latter one rather than the former one; surely it depends on what one is trying to conclude.
Humans have an innate desire to be useful.
If a human is 1% likely to think a not-bullshit-job is bullshit, and 10% likely to think a bullshit-job is bullshit, but 99% of jobs are not-bullshit, then for every bullshit job that the worker thinks is bullshit, there are 9.9 not-bullshit jobs that the worker thinks are bullshit.
Edit: Repaired math (2 minutes after posting)
The actual numbers are more like 60% non bullshit / 40% bullshit, though.
Most probably have also seen the type of manager that is less concerned with the work people underneath them do (because they don't understand or care) and more with the prestige, making sure people stay there, even if they contribute nothing - either because they can't or wouldn't. Worse, eventually the former turn into the later with enough time to resign to the situation.
It's challenging in such organizations to have meaningful cross-functional communication between the people who do the actual work and who need to understand each other. Why? Because these management layers also [try to] mediate all cross-functional interaction in formalized meetings which they run like court proceedings-- they're called by various names: "hand-offs", "gates", etc. The point is they're one-direction process-flow "ceremonies" that don't have real discussion between the parties involved.
What has to happen to workaround this is that the individuals who need to really communicate must seek each other out informally (or "offline" as the PM-derps would say), sometimes this works, sometimes it's a setup for one party getting snubbed by the other because they're beset with too many meetings.
So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.
I think everyone agrees.
> So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
Here we disagree. You are positing that it's possible for there to be a large org without this fat layer, and I think this is unlikely. It's like complaining about entropy or the n^2 communication cost. Something may be terrible yet impossible to avoid. Making big bureaucracies as efficient as small bureaucracies is a really, really, hard problem. It may well be an unsolvable problem that comes with scale, sort of the flipside of how many things are more efficiently produced in large quantities, and it could be that the "optimal" size of a business is where these two trade-offs balance out -- e.g. where the scaling costs of the bureaucracy meets the efficiency gains of scale production.
Companies should use "not having a manager", as a perk? As long as the team produces.
I don't think I have ever met a manager whom deserved the title.
I have met talented employees whom are unofficially recognized as the leaders though.
Of course we are all too ignorant to say anything, however I have done some poor quality research/thinking, *INSERT OPINIONS**
Then you can criticize various aspects of the way it was done of course, but that’s standard scientific method, and doesn’t necessarily reduce it to just rhetorics.
It's essentially the same type of technique socrates used: "of course, well all know nothing, but let me tell you what we all don't know..."
I can't see much that is wrong with this. You might disagree with his conclusions, in which case you can critique them or offer alternatives. This is very different from disagreeing with the claim that there are people who think that their jobs are meaningless. I can't tell which you are disagreeing with.
So, he basically admitted that he had no objective and reproducible definition of what a „bullshit job“ actually is.
For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones.
A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense.
Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.
Weird, I’d have thought brightness would map to volume and colour to pitch somehow.
Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't. 2) are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible. 3) are socially, politically, and/or environmentally toxic.
These are all different kinds of bullshit. They are bullshit jobs for reasons that should be obvious. The bullshit is about far more than alienation. It happens when the jobs lower net social stability, longevity, and prosperity, and promote short-term inequality over long-term opportunity.
Since that's the opposite of The Economist's ethical system - the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea.
Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically.
Fortunately this created a memorable meme which helped people question what they were doing.
If The Economist has started printing rebuttals, that suggests the meme was effective.
Damming the concept of “markets” as “self-harming” and “unstable” is an asinine statement. Of course not every instantiation of a market is flawless and without trade offs. Any sufficiently large-scale social system is rife with weird second order effects.
We can only analyze the efficacy of markets by comparing them against their alternative. Ironically – given one of your complaints about markets is monopolism – the most common alternative to markets is monopolism by the government. Yet, governments suffer from the same bureaucratically-induced problems that you are attributing to organizations operating in markets. Indeed, they have it worse because they don’t have the external pressure of competition to keep their bad behavior in check. Accountability in the public sector is significantly worse than in the private sector. History is filled with state-owned monopolies that failed to adapt to changing situations and degrade into obsolescence while still bleeding the public of money.
Every social system over-produces some things and under-produces other things, in constantly shifting proportions as time goes on. Of all systems, sufficiently competitive markets are the best at dynamically adjusting to minimize both surpluses and shortages. State-owned monopolies are truly abysmal at matching supply and demand. There’s textbooks worth of material as to why this is the case.
And perhaps, you may be referring to some notion of “totally free markets”. But there are no totally free markets. All markets are subject to the formal laws of their various operating jurisdictions and the norms that come from operating in society. The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior. There are notable counter examples where there isn’t consumer choice, but those organizations get dragged in the media and are forced to change in the court of public opinion.
So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?
It's interesting how folks on one extreme will point out every fault of the other, with their own reasons explaining away critiques of their favorite side.
> The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior.
This puts a lot of trust in people being well informed and having enough energy to react. We live in a complex world, and it's nearly impossible for consumers to each vote with their wallets on every aspect of life. In theory I could vet every food, drug, and hardware supplier personally before buying anything. But I'd rather have the most safety critical stuff regulated before it can be offered for sale.
Err yeah, like Amazon and Google and Disney and Comcast and $INSERT_MEGACORP_HERE totally don't buy out competitors, or use dominance in one field to buy dominance in another field.
I think you are the one espousing fairyland. Without the private gain public loss “market” we have now, half the market would have died in 2008 and the other half would have died last year…
It’s so weird how a story of greedy investors turned out to be the fault of the government in the end. “You set it in place, we simply had to bite!”
By contrast, the Great Recession of 2008 saw a GDP drop of 4.3%.
So, yes, without government bailouts, markets can fail _catastrophically_
With that said, we have different tools for different scenarios. In 2020, we used the "national funding, mobilization, and redistribution" tool to combat COVID and I think that was probably smart. Doing so necessarily wasted a lot of money (through graft, incompetent capital allocation, ec.). But optimal capital allocation was not the most important thing last year. We wanted safety! State intervention wins here!
With respect to other market instabilities, well, it gets complex. 2008 was a mess of government, quasi-government, and private market behaviors all in a toxic dance.
In any case, most markets most of the time absolutely do not require the government to step in. The economy is breathtakingly large. I mean, just really, truly stupendously massive. I hear "capitalism is bad" and "markets are toxic" claims a lot, but I've never heard a viable proposal that could realistically function as effectively as a predominantly market system.
Also, I'm not claiming that our current markets are perfect. Certainly they are not. It's clear that there are huge issues in a significant number of industries (hospitals, housing, and education are all suffering from cost disease).
We can (should!) take a crack at fixing the issues we have. Most of those fixes will come bottoms-up through creative-disruption, and some will come tops-down through policy and regulation.
It's important to look at these things as tools in a toolbox, not totalitarian dogma in an ideology.
Which is not to say a market is a good thing in any specific implementation. What it is, in this degree of generality, is inevitable. That a (more or less) free exchange of tokens of value is a good way to achieve the optimum is an additional assumption that needs separate justification, but seems to be plausible so far, or at least lacking in shattering disproof. Still, there is a hell of a lot of distance between these and any particular Western country in the year of our Lord 2021. Going from being dissatisfied with the latter to rejecting the former is like immediately blaming the compiler when your home-grown TLS implementation gets hacked. I mean, compilers bugs do exist, but that giant ASN.1 serializer looks mighty suspicious. (Tax code, antitrust enforcement, employees’ rights, need I continue?)
I think that the market can indeed be a very valuable system to reduce all kinds of inefficiencies. But at the same time, changes in tax code or antitrust enforcement will not alter capitalism's natural tendency toward monopolization, which ultimately turns everything into a planned economy anyhow. So in my opinion, the question is about how to effectively use the positive effects of the market, while also avoiding the less-positive effects that private enterprise has on society at large. And it seems to me like Kantorovich may have been closer to finding an answer than HFT yuppies at wall street will ever be.
idk, whatever we have right now?
No, it can also be done theoretically, by actually computing the costs of production (required to sustain certain level of consumption) from something like Leontief matrix. And then comparing with reality. It hasn't been done, mostly because the required data are private, but it is possible to do in principle, and I would argue that it would be very instructional for any society to do such a calculation (and make the result publicly available).
> What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?
There are many alternatives, but you have to understand that almost nobody wants to replace markets as a whole. So the replacement is always partial.
Socialism supporters oppose capitalism, which is defined by two characteristics - (1) labour markets and (2) capital mostly privately owned. (Let's now put aside that free market and property ownership are actually completely orthogonal concepts.)
You can have a system which mostly gets rid of either one or both of these. For example, you replace (1) with worker cooperatives based on democratic control and replace (2) with a national investment fund that is again under shared ownership of the citizens. Both of these have been tried and work..
Does such a system replace all markets? No, but it replaces the chunk (labour market) that is considered the most contentious.
No it can't. Value (in the sense generally used in economics) can only be known through people's revealed preferences, and it's not possible to reveal people's preferences without giving them the chance to express them in a market. Markets require people to sacrifice money/labor/time to purchase things, which gives a much more meaningful measure of those things being valued than if people were just asked, surveyed or whatever and didn't have to put their money where their mouths were.
Speaking of preferences, I think you're buying too much into Hayek's free market ideology here. I don't think was proven in any way, in fact as you state, if the definition of preference is that cannot be revealed in other way, then you're starting with that as an axiom.
I would also say that I was born in a socialist system (with almost completely regulated market and planned economy), and it seems the last problem this system had was that the people's preferences weren't clear. In fact, if they weren't clear (for example, as queues for basic necessities) then you wouldn't be able to say that system was inefficient! Also, there was some internal competition, new products were created, and so on. The thing really was that the prices didn't reflect the preferences, which created lots of inefficiency (waste).
This of course ignores the incredible reduction in worldwide poverty over the past 50 years due to capitalism.
It's true that I can play games and do banking on my phone now though.
Capitalism systematically creates poverty both between countries (by extracting wealth from poorer countries) and within countries (by systematically depriving low income earners of adequate resources).
This is the first time I have heard this. Usually the argument is that globalization creates a world middle class and drags each countries' middle class toward that world middle class. The world middle class is wealthier than the Chinese middle class so they get pulled up. The world middle class is less wealthy than the American middle class so they get pulled down.
Really? I thought he actually did divide "bullshit jobs" into different categories (5 of them total) in his book.
But I am not even sure that your 1,2,3 is so separate. Isn't creating jobs that nobody needs and nobody would notice if they went away also alienating and, consequently, toxic? Isn't that just a matter of extent?
Anyway, I agree that free markets cannot be a solution to any moral problem, because participation in markets is by definition symmetric and voluntary, and so they cannot consistently impose any values. (But the people who push the markets do want them to, for ideological reasons, appear as if they are inevitable, and this requires the capability to resolve moral ambiguity.)
Graeber's definition of a "bullshit" job as one the worker didn't feel was meaningful - the canonical example being his lawyer friend who would rather people paid him for his hobby of making music - and his claim that the private sector was creating them as some sort of workfare program feels comparatively naive.
Yes, economists (especially the non-neoclassical ones) came up with all sorts of market failures. But they can seem to be a bit theoretical, as in, well, maybe these things happen in the wild, but maybe mostly not. In other words, they treat it as interesting, but disconnected, phenomena.
Graeber, as an anthropologist, just noticed lots of people being unhappy even in the situation of material abundance. And he looked for an unifying explanation. I think there definitely is a connection, but it will have to wait for somebody to analyze it in more detail.
For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it.
This isn't what an academic should be doing.
And don't get me started on his debt book
That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't.
But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms.
That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.
Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.
Does this mean we should move into decision making based on a kooks worship of a sun god? Absolutely not.
But it’s incredibly uncharitable to imply that one of the most influential anthropologists of recent history is somehow unreasonable.
We should absolutely rely on quantification where we are able, but members of this community of all people should be able to recognize that we’re still early in the iterations and in our abilities to measure all of life’s chaos and complexities accurately.
Again, i’m very much so not advocating that the itch you just had in your nose means someone is talking about you and i’m definitely not advocating that the tingle you felt run up your spine was a ghost. But we would be absolutely crazy to believe that we can accurately measure most of the complexities that are humanity’s issues.
I’m not a luddite. I firmly believe that technology and science are the best way to make decisions and carry us forward. But let’s not delude ourselves to the current limits of our abilities.
Some of our smartest people understand humans the least–and we’d be fools to forget this basic fact.
That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking.
Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work:
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"
"When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror."
c.f. https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists...
You can find other examples here:
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t...
Now if Graeber had written a book on the joys of fishing, we wouldn't expect a large amount of numerical fact checks. But for a book on debt -- which is really a book on financial systems across history, we do expect that the conclusions be consistent with the data as we know it. Graeber never made those consistency checks, so much of his observations can be ruled out and they really reveal an incredible state of being out-of-touch.
That said, he does provide rich examples and historical footnotes so I would recommend that people read his book. I just wouldn't recommend that people believe him when he draws certain conclusions and that people understand they are reading a polemical rather than an academic work.
I must admit I'm tempted to get you started :). Can you recommend a review of it that shares your criticism?
Same for me. I'm not well read in that topic so I can't compare Debt book with anything else as such. The sheer expanse of time period it covers and various topics it touches is very impressive indeed.
FWIW I'm half way through reading "The Nature of Money"[1] which was published well before The Debt and I'm tempted to think that the Debt book is significantly influenced by the former.
[1] https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Nature+of+Money-p-9780745609...
In what sense has it helped you read people?
> instead of analysing them more clinically
Can you point to a clinical analysis supporting your claims? You may be falling prey to what you accuse the Economist of: ideology over evidence.
Additionally,your viewpoint seems internally inconsistent. On the one hand, bigcorps are profit obsessed and will stop at nothing to juice margins. But also, they somehow allow jobs (ie labor cost) which produce nothing to proliferate.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
Political kingdom building, hire to fire, and over fitting to poorly chosen metics are just a few ways I can see margin obsessed companies also maintaining BS jobs.
Graeber discusses and speculates about different flavours of bullshit, that explicitly are not intended to represent different versions of the same thing. For definition/measurement, he takes an anthropologist's approach: let people define it themselves. Both you and this article are imposing another definition of bullshit. That's fine, but it just isn't the subject of the book.
He purposely chose a playful dissenting term like bullshit. He didn't say "productivity," because he wasn't writing a book on economics. He didn't say "alienation" because it wasn't a book about psychology. He does talk about those things, but they don't define it.
The reason the book is compelling is precisely because it isn't an economics or psychology book. Economics is pretty bad at measuring economic output of accounting, advertising, HR and most of the jobs that have a high rate of "my job is bullshit" takes associated with them. That means that we don't have empirical knowledge to discuss and the "argument" keeps devolving into the same theoretical (now ideological) one that Marx and Ricardo had 200 years ago... just like this article does.
No one would be making these comments if the subject was "am I a good person?"
This is purely subjective. I've worked at a tech company where they paid me 1.5x what they could have and I STFU so the checks would keep coming (they thought they were getting a bargain), but generally the firms will try to negotiate with you for the lowest price they can get you at.
That said, the aformention job where i was overpaid was a bullshit job because the product (was there even a product? I can't tell) would not have noticed if I wasn't there (maybe the morale would have gone down? I certainly wasn't worth that much).
The Economist regularly argues against giving markets free rein, they will talk about the negative impacts of monopolies and call for policies aimed at stopping climate change.
I know in America there's a species of free market puritan that believes regulation is always bad, and truly free markets are some sort of anarchist paradise of unfettered freedom. I blame Ayn Rand*. There are a lot of such people, I have worked for several American companies so I've met some of them. That's not the Economist though, look up one of it's withering critiques of the American health care system for example.
* Social welfare recipient Ayn Rand, to give her full title.
I think maybe you are looking at the situation and thinking that both the Economist and Graeber are "on the left", which from a US political standpoint would be somewhat accurate. Looked at in other context though, compared to Graeber, and Sahlins, who he studied under, the Economist would be better viewed as free market apologists offering helpful criticism whereas Graeber and Sahlins' work often questioned economic activity from a different perspective and has been used by people who question the very basis of modern economics and markets.
For example, Sahlins' work was referenced extensively in Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work. And Graeber published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. From that perspective, the idea that the Economist is on the left is a bit simplistic and not very relevant.
Not that I have any particular hostility to socialism either. I think it's generally wrong and misguided, but mostly in a well meaning, bumbling Sir Kier Starmer sort of way. Occasionally in a pernicious, righteous, nasty minded Jeremy Corbyn sort of way. I can often work with socialists though, but I'm European so you get used to it.
I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. Spoiler - not much.
Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarchist[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110629033208/http:/www.village...
I think that is the misinterpretation. Graeber and Sahlins' work seems to me to be interpreting things from outside a left/right capitalist/communist framework entirely, at least as much as possible, considering how much we have been trained to think within those frameworks.
> “I have the feeling of doing useful work”
Doing useful work is not a feeling, so people probably choose the middle-of-the-road answer (sometimes), or the socially desirable answer (often/always).
It's better to ask how useful they think their work is overall. Even better to ask them about their job 5 years previous. Think about all the people who joined the US military in the early 2000's. If you asked them about their work at the time they would say it was extremely meaningful. With hindsight the number would go down drastically. Same thing with all the people who see their work tossed asunder when a new CEO takes the company in a new direction.
Or even better^2, analyze how much bullshit work is actually being done regardless of whether people feel they're useful. People rarely glimpse the big picture so they are unlikely to see if their job is a strategic blunder, even years later.
Perhaps a better notion of bullshit jobs is in terms of what happens when people stop doing them. We had some nice recent examples of that in the past year when people stopped going to work because they couldn't. This happened on an extremely large scale and it was mostly fine. Record economic growth in some countries even.
I'm sure the paper-pushers, the process guardians, the SAFe certified ninjas, the box tickers are convinced their job is of utmost importance.
Not that it always isn't. Sometimes you need people like that. But only sometimes.
The most valuable thing humans do are nothing like that. They involve coming up with new ideas, resolving conflict, persuading people to do things, and fixing problems. No one knows how to measure this kind of work in terms of inputs and outputs and it is clear when it is happening successfully it involves a lot of downtime and extraneous communication. Also, it's often times really unclear who the key or effective people are in this kind of work even in success. So you may need ten people developing scripts -- nine of whose work is going to be cast aside-- to get the one really valuable film script. And yes, as the author points out a lot of people exploit that pretend to be doing something useful when they aren't.
The growth of this kind of work isn't a new sickness in society, it is that we need less people working like horses and we need more people doing work we can't measure the input of effort or the output of work.
Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens. I worked at a firm that fired its entire marketing team. There was no effect on sales that anyone could notice. They just made bad ads that had no effect on anything.
Yes, people have jobs that they know are useless. They know they are just going through the motions. They are in complicated organizations that can't measure their value and they know they are free riding. However, there are also people in the same type of organizations who think they are really valuable, who may actually have a negative value. My point is that in certain types of work it is hard to measure and this results in poor attribution or exploitation (pretending you are doing something).
>> Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens.
No, that's exactly what I disagree with. You are also thinking about work the way a horse does it and not considering real world situations. Let's say I have three development execs at a movie studio and I fire one. Does something bad happen? I am still going to pick a script from one of the other two and it will be a hit or a flop. That tells me nothing about what the work out put of the third fired executive, which I might not be able to judge the impact of until I look back a few years. I know-- from experience-- that is the same with the creative director of a video game. You may not know for sure if their ideas are good or if they are did a good job unless you see through what they are doing. Or artists who are most time the useless, or mediocre, but every now and then produce an essential piece of key art.
In case it isn't obvious I work in entertainment. But I believe their are similar cases in software engineering, recruiting, strategy planning, human resources, general leadership, etc. Where firing a person tells you nothing about what they would have done had they worked for a year.
(edited for spelling)
I was asked (more like forced to) have someone in my team copying zips of our releases and converting all code documentation into google doc files (with company logo, proper format,…). All of this code and documentation is for internal use only.
No one has ever read any of those documents, since the only people that would use it are in my team, who obviously prefer not having to fill a whole page of useless fluff just to save a useful command or a quick note about the method they just wrote.
There’s a LOT of BS in jobs, even in tech.
PS: You need to learn about doing the non horse work of inventing ways to get people to listen to you when you say your time is being wasted. That's work that is hard to measure, unlike copying files, but that we would both agree is valuable.
Not everybody is so lucky.
i worked for a couple of months as a data entry and my job was to convert a bunch (thousands) of pdf files into excel spreadsheets. Since the format of the files was the same (because they were generated by a program) it wasn't hard to automate this job...
Also i disliked the company so i didn't tell it to anybody
If you were to mediate conflicts all day between super talented, but very quarrelsome, experts: that's useful work. If you spend your entire day mediating conflicts between mediocre developers bikeshedding over logging frameworks, a topic that only came up because of nihysim: that's a bullshit job. Those developers are not useful, and neither are you.
What counts as real work? How many levels of indirection is allowed?
What would be the impact if that job and/or person disappeared right now (aside from personal relations; on the job, business, organization)?
Would they be missed for more than the candy jar they stocked on their desk? Would something critical go undone? Why? Was their job as a pass through (notify Alice that Bob is done)? Was the job a meaningful check (verify Alice's work then notify Bob)? Is that verification mechanical (a sanity check that can be automated) or does it require expertise (huh, that widget won't work in that gizmo, there's an issue documented at...)?
Obviously, low/negative performers disappearing can always improve things, but usually by the work itself being dispersed to competent people. Assume a competent person in the role, is it actually useful and providing value that would be missed if they left?
Also, you can add software development to the “meetings/email/reports” list, because that too is just another form of admin overhead from the perspective of most businesses that exist to do something other than sell software.
Those people could probably sleep in their office some weeks and not have anything very bad happen. Every now and then, not even once a year, those people find and close deals that generate millions of dollars. By your definition they are worthless but really they are a crucial ingredient in setting up projects that create work for dozens of programmers, artists, writers, etc.
If you don't understand why people exist in an organization, it may be because they are useless. But it may also be because you don't understand their purpose.
I know a fair number of people in consulting who have seen how the sausage is made, and they don't see how it's useful in any normal way. It's useful for certain parties in a firm, but it's not useful in a general sense of delivering what it says on the tin.
I also do very little that is useful despite bringing a great deal of skill. If they cared to ask me what I think, I would be happy to explain why all the things they get me to do are a waste of time. I’d also be more than happy to suggest some simple things they could do that would actually be useful.
One may feel that their job is not making a meaningful contribution. That doesn't translate to the job being useless or BS.
Did you read Graeber's book? I have seen a lot of the mechanics described in every job I've ever done, including roles like the Box Ticker or the Flunkie - or whatever he calls the "entourage" people, it's been a minute. These types of functions exist and often don't contribute to the product, company growth or financial success. That's what bullshit means in context: busywork, economically non-functional. Now, not every compliance role (Box Ticker) is a bullshit job. Nor is every assistant (Flunkie). But enough are for the pattern to exist and Graeber to have a point.
Markets and companies, which are often assumed to be efficient, are remarkably tolerant to inefficiency in their internal politics and bureaucracies. There is also a degree to which large enough companies can just coast on prior success before they feel the impact of bad process or ill focus and start to feel they're bleeding money.
Looking at the broader economy, there are a lot of "lifestyle" products that squarely fall in the category of luxuries. There's "consultancy" that exists to play politics in companies and doesn't do anything, like SAfE/Agile/Scrum/transformation consultants (not all, but enough), management strategy consultants, etc. This is where the Economist's alienation comes in: there is no meaning to contribute to when working at one of these companies, as they offer and stimulate pure consumerism, or political faire semblant (=pretending) as a service.
My conclusion is both Graeber and the Economist are right: the left Venn diagram contains actual useless jobs (as in, don't contribute to the process). The right diagram contains a lot of meaningless jobs where the product/service is ephemeral or purely materialistic, leading to alienation. The two diagrams overlap.
As to whether 70% of jobs are contained in the union of the two? Perhaps not, but I think it's a big enough problem for it to lead to an increase in burnouts, boreouts, depression and suicide.
Perhaps you have a perception of a certain kind of individual tenure associated with government jobs ("it's so hard to fire them"). That perception might even be true, though it's a little debatable since there are some fairly legitimate reasons why these rules exist.
But even if it is true, that doesn't mean that government work over the long haul is secure.
Given the motivation, "waste" has a narrow definition in the private sector: anything that doesn't contribute to the baseline. Non-waste can take many forms, e.g. improving product quality, reducing costs, managing brand perception, market research or regulatory capture. There is wiggle room for subjective assessment, like when companies see IT not as a catalyst but a cost centre and therefore fundamentally waste.
The government has a different motivator entirely: the greater good. Waste and inefficiency take on another meaning in that context. Digging and filling ditches isn't wasteful if it ensures people have an income. In a government context, it's a useful job because it achieves stated goals, but still a meaningless one.
The wars on terror and drugs are examples where it becomes more murky. For some, they are both useful and meaningful. For others, they're just one or perhaps neither.
There are also government projects that seem like waste at the time but turn out to have tremendous value and even be private sector useful today. Examples are legion in military inventions that later became staples, such as microwave ovens, the Internet, cell phones. Regardless of how you feel about landing on the moon and NASA in general, we have now have non-stick pans, GPS and solar panels.
In summary: looking at government through the lens of the private sector is failing to understand a simple truth: corporations are individualistic, where governments are collectivist even in a capitalist system.
I don't want to advocate for this idea necessarily, just that I think the "bullshit jobs thesis" might mean something different to different people. The Economist article closes with an admission that "part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct," discussing the adage that "people leave bad managers, not bad jobs." Many variants of the bullshit jobs thesis I think propose an increase in bad managers, who are part of a larger unnecessary management structure.
I guess overall I felt as if the Economist piece was missing a few things.
Personally I'm fairly sure there's a large number of "bullshit jobs" and I have my own, unfounded, opinions regarding which jobs that might be. I'm just not convinced that we can identify these jobs by asking those who work in those position.
There's also the jobs that truly are essential, but only because something somewhere else is broken.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
When I finished, I went to see the person who used the product in person. Turns out, his job was to sit in front of the webpage and refresh it every minute or so, then report it if any of the pages in the iframes failed to load. After my update, he wouldn't have to refresh the page anymore. He would just sit and watch.
I thought that his job was bullshit, and that his manager was just keeping him busy. But it turns out, I was the one who was misemployed[1].
There's a network of hidden, potential rivers of value flowing through society.
Companies are established in hopes of tapping into those rivers.
Once in a while some company, often by sheer chance alone will place itself in such beneficial spot of this river network that it can draw absolutely insane amount of money from there.
Form then on usual concerns about making mistakes, efficiency and doing reasonable things that are essential for survival of smaller companies no longer matter to that lucky company.
It can grow to huge proportions and spread, it can make dazzling amount of mistakes, have huge inefficiencies hiring useless or harmful people, doing unnecessary things, especially in the new places that the company grew into, but are sufficiently far away to the core that is tapping to this ample stream of cash.
This situation can last for many decades, until tectonic shifts of society fabric eventually alter the river network and the source starts to dry out, and this formerly lucky company now sees its money being taken by other lucky ones somewhere else.
Your job might have been highly beneficial to the endeavor it was a part of and removing it might have decrease efficiency of this endeavor greatly, but I strongly suspect that the whole endeavor was one of those side ones, remote from the core of the profit source of the whole corporation.
It's not that your job was useless, but probably everything two management levels up from you and everything below them was useless in the grand scheme of things for that corporation and maybe even actively harmful to their bottom line.
Corporations have to dissipate cash this way. They have to keep trying doing stupid inefficient things because that's their only chance of long term survival. They are desperately trying to discover new ample source of wealth, before the one that fuels them dries out and they have to accept all of the inefficiencies that come from this random search.
The first definition is sort of ridiculous (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless), but when challenged it reverts to the second definition, which is trivially obvious (of course most companies are trying to hawk crap).
Read the comments on this post - most of the arguments are just people switching between the two definitions.
On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job is not "clearly useless" in the eyes of the management, even if it's obvious to other people.
More often, the usefulness of the job to the organization itself, or to people inside it, has become disconnected from its actual usefulness. For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.
What I think actually happens is that companies hire more people for a particular role than they need, because load balancing is difficult, or they have a structure that extracts productivity from the workforce in a way that's inefficient. But that's not the same as outright non-productivity. Those people are not useless - they're still productive, they just provide suboptimal (and maybe negative) return on investment.
> For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.
I don't think it works like that. They may invest the excess staffing budget in a productive worker they otherwise wouldn't have hired, but that's not the same as hiring someone who provides no benefit. The return that employee brings may even be negative but it's very, very unlikely to be -100%.
Some companies, maybe. I've known enough companies that tolerated and in some cases enjoyed fat, to understand as a rule what you're claiming doesn't hold. Including lots of fat shaped like management layers. Other forms of fat include "we don't want to fire these people, so let's give them symbolic work until they retire", "these are all friends of people in upper management, so don't fire them even though nobody knows what they actually do", "these people were hired as a PR stunt and now they really don't have much to do", "we have to go through the motions of doing this project, even though everyone knows it's doomed, it's just for show anyway", and many, many more.
Companies can be very, very inefficient and still work.
That depends on the company. How about the 'growth engines' whose primary goal is to be acquired? I don't think these claims work in a world where the axiom 'the goal of a company is to make more money than it spends' is broken.
> I don't think it works like that.
I'll split the middle. Sometimes it works like that, but not nearly as often as proponents of the narrative say it does.
No, it's very easy to demonstrate. The staff themselves will tell you. In fact, the article we are discussing begins by citing two surveys which show huge numbers of employees (tens of millions if the survey is accurate) believe they are not doing useful work or are not contributing meaningfully to the world.
A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?)
B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.)
Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.
Being the fall guy is a bullshit job but having fall guys to sacrifice is imensely useful.
Or do you have people who are still productive, but you keep around as insurance?
The only way somebody can say this is if they haven't actually worked for any real company.
A bit naive to think that companies are 100% efficient and don’t make mistakes. Companies aren’t robots, they’re a collection of people, people make mistakes.
I’ve seen executives in the past identify an issue and hire someone to solve that problem, executive didn’t understand the problem, person left the company position wasn’t filled again.
That would be true only if leadership was 100% omniscient and knowledgeable in all topics. The problem is that ultimately only leadership and shareholders are incentivized by company profits.
People on a salary care more about their personal salary and benefits, and while those should theoretically correlate with company profits, the feedback loop is extremely long and can be affected by external factors, potentially concealing inefficiencies, ultimately allowing people on a flat salary to prioritize their personal gains at the detriment of the company's gains.
And the above still assumes good faith and mere lack of skill. When you include fraud or mis-selling into the mix (such as big consulting companies charging insane sums for unkept promises then outsourcing the actual work to incompetent people) the problem becomes so much bigger.
People feel useful if their work contributes towards achieving objectives. If you're on a ship taking on water, bailing out that water is incredibly useful. On the other hand a security guard who hasn't had to deal with an incident in years probably feels quite useless.
Meaningfully contributing however requires that objective to be one that needs doing. If the ship is only taking on water because some basic maintenance has been neglected, that doesn't make it any less important to bail out the water, but it's BS that you have to in the first place. While the security guard may never do anything productive, simply being available on the off chance there is an incident is a major and indispensable reduction of risk for the organization which depending on circumstances, may very well not be able to operate without it; certainly not BS at all.
Most people do work hard to deal with the problems they face day in and day out. That doesn't mean the problem should have existed in the first place, and Graeber correctly defines a bullshit job in such a way that a very much not-bullshit employee can nevertheless find themself in the soul crushing position of working a bullshit job. Any alternative definition where that soul crushing situation isn't possible completely misses the point of his research.
Consider the quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
In spite of this, many people today will openly acknowledge that their jobs are useless; against their own interests. There are no incentives for people to think this way and yet they do.
Not only that, but the idea of jobs becoming increasingly useless aligns perfectly with what you would expect to happen as a consequence of reserve banks constantly printing new currency to 'prop up' the markets whenever they threaten to collapse. Of course that would make people more complacent, lazier, dumber, etc... Every time you give incompetent people an unfair advantage, you're making is harder for competent people to compete against them. Our system is constantly propping up incompetent people and hurting competent people. It's almost impossible to bootstrap a startup these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the few bootstrapping success stories were part of a gaslighting agenda.
There is no free market. I wouldn't be surprised if many successful people today were essentially hand-picked by the financial elite; possibly selected based on their psychopathic tendencies. A hierarchy of psychopaths destroying the economy and the planet while gaslighting the world into doubting their own eyes.
The whole scheme is so obvious at this stage. I wonder how much the author of this article got paid to write it.
> Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs. He may have been way off the mark with regards how common BS jobs are, but he was right to link people’s attitudes towards their jobs to their psychological wellbeing, and this is something that employers – and society as a whole – should take seriously.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/one-in-twenty-workers-ar...
In the many comments to this post (which in itself is a good thing - may it inspire some smart cookies to carry Graeber's torch) the discussion quickly degenerates in the "markets versus state" caricature in a manifestation of the same inadequate interpretation framework. "Markets" existed since the first three-way encounter and exchange of some goods and associated exchange rates. However corporates (expressing the enforceable interest of an industrious subset of humanity) and states (purportedly expressing the interest of "all", at least within a "nation") did not. Markets have no morality: its an information technology that can facilitate trade in slaves, human organs, human labor or human personalities (=adtech), or nuclear and chemical (=CO2) waste. Who is the gatekeeper of the morality of what and how is produced and traded? Oligopolistic corporate interests corrupting puppet state entities? Entrenched autocracies with the organized private sector simply a puppet satellite constellation? We need to get to a better level of discourse before we hit terminal planetary and societal boundaries and that, my friends, is no bullshit job.
Also there is e.g. a large amount of empiric data supporting minimum-wage laws are beneficial and also a large ammount of empiric data showing it's harmful!
Conslusion: there are no solutions only tradeoffs.
Btw I'm curious, do you have an example of economists being surprised by a recession? Because they usually don't claim to be able to predict one in the first place. There's a huge difference between pop econ columnists who write clickbait predictions and the actual academic consensus in the field.
2. Some of the harshest criticism of other social sciences comes from ... economists. (Notably of sociology, though also variously ecology, systems theory, and cybernetics.)
3. The 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis rocked mainstream economics to its core. a) Queen Elizabeth famously asked why nobody saw it coming (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/33863...), the failure is b) called the "Crisis of Economics" (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-did-economi... and c) Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman has asked "why economics failed" (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/opinion/krugman-why-econo...).
None of which is "pop economists".
Bullshit that doesn't benefit employers, bullshit that doesn't benefit customers, bullshit that doesn't benefit governments, bullshit that doesn't benefit citizens.
> Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning.
If your survey of 44,000 workers across 35 countries found that admins view their jobs as not useless, your survey is fucked.
Having worked at some large companies, organization is a massive challenge. It’s not hard to get 10,000 smart people working hard. Getting them all working towards the same goal is not easy at all.
So the perception forms that managers are bad and not that necessary.
From https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228268927_Managemen...
{{Citation needed}}
In my experience, any manager with even a shred of self awareness and emotional sensitivity figures out that the people who work for you care exactly as much for their work as they believe you care about them.
First manager who cared made that obvious, and was a mentor for many years. We had this talk and I also asked why:
Because maybe you will do the same, give as you got.
I have.
Those relationships go well past whatever company gig got them started.
Caring is not enough!
When people take time to consider one another and field of play they also tend to understand everyone, that playfield and potentially themselves better. Not understanding people in our lives is a waste of time, energy, resources, and all of that comes with greater cost and risk exposure not associated with meaningful returns.
Unnecessary costs and risks do add up.
Going back to the "mega-corp" scenario, if you are a lazy person, a good strategy would be to join an org in a defensible (ideally monopolized) industry and work just hard enough to not get fired. Find yourself a bullshit job!
Yesterday something else interesting happen, "Yana Sizikova: Russian tennis player arrested at French Open over match-fixing allegations", what is that to do with anything?
From one angle just imagine someone was arrested for playing game. Imagine child on playground being arrested for playing with marbles. But, things are not that simple this adult game was connected with money, and everything what has connection with money we give some kind of value, so much that we are keen to put someone in prison.
In the same way, we grow economy, create roles, watch our security, value things, help others trying to go around fundamental question that needs answer - who owns and who has right to access resources in the society where everything is fully automated?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
Choice quote: "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."
And here is an article arguing that jobs are legitimate as long as people "feel useful". Well, this is precisely the problem. They fill offices with workers because it feels good to have subordinates. Responsibility is part of the career reward system, and people derive their identities from jobs and careers.
(I see Graeber used a different definition ...)
That does not mean they are bullshit jobs.
It is not at all, in fact it's pretty basic. Every nurse, farmer, firefighter, garbage man etc. can answer "yes" in good conscience.
Asking whether the job is "useful" is pretty meaningless though, even utterly meaningless jobs are useful to someone.
https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/071%20Business%...
archive.is is of course blocked in some countries
If just want plain old text
curl https://amp.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit \
|grep -o "<p.*</p>"|tr -cd '\12\40-\176' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm“Well gee I walked around the office asking people if their job was essential and everybody said it was.”
Graeber’s question was, paraphrased, “do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world”. This is an objectively loaded question. For example, I could rephrase that question as “do you think your job makes a contribution to the world” and lose absolutely nothing. The only purpose the “meaningful” adjective serves is to arbitrarily raise the bar for which people would answer yes to the question.
The only thing useful Graeber’s research possibly showed is that people with more education have a higher standard for what they consider a meaningful contribution to the world than people with less education.
However, if you don't buy the "capitalism is always right" Ansatz, then it's quite easy to see paid BS work as yet another market failure ... or worse, as a way to keep workers busy so they don't cause trouble for "the system". Which I believe was one of Mr. Graeber's main points.
Are you suggesting there's a global cabal of executives colluding to create bullshit jobs to keep the populace in check? Absent that, I doubt this is actually the reason, because it suffers from the free rider problem. If you spend money keeping workers occupied, you'll be reaping the benefits (them not revolting) but so will your competitors who aren't spending any money on such jobs. Prisoner's dilemma would suggest that companies that don't collude would defect, and none of them would be hiring for bullshit jobs.
* note how "free" the market was before the great depression and the subsequent regulations that followed to stabilize things, then repeal of said regulations that lead to one financial collapse after another (savings and loan crisis, early 2000s financial troubles, 2008 financial crisis etc etc)
The real problem was not a fixed currency supply, it was the sudden contraction in the currency supply which caused people to over-react and hold onto currency too tightly. It self-corrected eventually as the panic subsided and investments resumed.
If banks had enough deposits to pay all depositors, bank runs would not have mattered, there would not have been a panic and there would not have been a contraction in the currency supply and there would not have been an economic depression.
I don't know if pure capitalism can work without any regulation but manipulating the money supply is definitely not the solution.
Humans are a people of stories and a shared common narrative was probably critical to provide societal cohesion and build a sense of community and purpose.
Unemployment is high in many developed countries, and society is unable to occupy people with meaningful activities, to give sense to their existence, or even to give enough money to unproductive people so that they can be happy enough.
I have been depressed and unemployed for a long time, and the fact that you literally have to beg for a job just so you can get out of bed and see other people shows that work doesn't matter. Salary doesn't matter.
Work and labor has become a religion because people are afraid they might not have any purpose or to end up alone and excluded from society. You can even see unions doing politics and fighting capitalists, but completely disregard people who are unemployed.
Once you give enough money to everyone so that they have a right to exist, get shelter and food, maybe people won't be alienated by work.
Many countries don't have the student debts issue, but still have jobs some consider BS.
I mean, this is probably a big problem in the US, but the focus on this very local thing feels kinda obsessed to me. "We have it worse than our parents, because of student dept!", well we have it worse too, even without the dept...
For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people.
Just because something is bullshit doesn't mean it's useless. For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!
- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends.
- Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands.
And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.
wars are zero sum too (the land up for grabs is fixed). does that mean armies are bullshit?
It goes beyond making people "feel better". It's about variance and/or managing risk. eg. so if you die of cancer with a wife and 3 kids they won't end up in the poor house.
You may see it as a variant of Parkinson's law: Bullshit expands so as to use up all the resources available for its consumption.
Actual competitive markets are made of competing firms, and firms can't (in general) optimise.
1. Holmstrom's theorem tells us that no payment system for a team of agents can have a budget in balance, be in Nash equilibrium, and be Pareto efficient.
2. Since firms are definitionally teams of people, and since you don't get a choice whether the budget balancing or the workers optimise, this means that firms must sacrifice Pareto efficiency.
3. If firms can't always seek out the Pareto frontier, then a competitive market composed of firms will not satisfy the conditions for Walras' theorem to hold, and so competitive markets can't necessarily reach equilibrium.
There are always systemically fewer jobs than there are people that want them - deliberately so as a matter of policy.
For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market.
In the UK we currently have 3.5 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work, but only 0.6 million unfilled vacancies.
Why should both sides be equal? Easy counter-example: I'm sure everyone on earth would like an iphone (demand of 8 billion) but the supply is far less than that.
The purest markets we have are the financial markets and level 2 data tends to exhibit this quality.
Demand is desire plus ability to pay - which is why your iPhone example is deficient. That’s why billions go without and why people go for the alternatives.
However everybody needs a job to be able to live. There is no alternative to selling your labour hours in a modern world. Extracting from others is a fallacy of composition.
For instance: large companies and monopolies can stand to sustain a lot of "bullshit" as anticompetitive pressures and just economics of scale and generally just social inertia (e.g. "well competitor X might be cheaper but do they represent higher risk?") let them get away with inefficient practices. They have to do a lot of bullshit before this becomes a risk to them.
Most companies have some elasticity on this also when what they can spend is not directly tied to their revenue and their competitive position in the market. I.e. they can raise more money than their competitive position might suggest through either loans or investment. Loans and investments cannot be perfectly efficient because there is always incomplete information when awarding finance. This may occur in some types of startups but it's true for many established companies as well.
It's not necessarily the case either that bullshit jobs have to be stable in order to represent a large chunk of the labour market either. They may be wiped out by competitive pressures in one area only to open up in another.
Charities/non-profits may also provide another place for bullshit jobs to hide. Not all charities are perfectly efficient and they do not operate competitively.
In almost every corner of the economy there are inefficiencies where bullshit jobs can hide.
There must be very little overlap between my place in the world and the people whose reaction is, "nah, that can't possibly be true".
In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it.
If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing.
(Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.)
In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
From my experience and in my opinion, when an organization pushes past the point where everybody knows everybody else and where one person can understand the whole apparatus there's absolutely nothing that can you can do but accept the reality of losing complete control and oversight.
Another aspect: the increasing number and depth of rules and regulations imposed by laws on organizations creates the need of bureaucrats that simply sign checklists without actually checking anything. You can know the jobs are bullshit but can't simply choose not to comply.
Some whole departments are there just for show. In this age you have to look like you care about the environment, social issues, etc. And while really caring would be quite expensive and in some cases completely debilitating for the business a few people making powerpoints and social media posts do the trick.
And then there's government jobs, markets ruled by monopolies, corruption, nepotism, and a million other things.
I use to love the Economist but it is just a waste of time now as well.
> resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour
It's more than this; it's also how some people who work in finance actually feel about their own jobs.
This commentator is very skeptical of people that speak about themselves in the third person.
Only Julius Caesar is allowed to do that.
Right, and this is why surveying people on whether they think their jobs are meaningful is an inadequate means of determining if the jobs are actually meaningful to society. This should not be a subjective determination.
No doubt people in finance feel like they are the most necessary jobs on the planet because they touch so much of the world's money.
But it is not their money. Someone has to earn it first before the financial sector can touch it.
Also, the question is not whether it is "good work" but whether it is "necessary work".
Graeber floated an explanation (bullshit jobs) for the data gathered (grumpy workers). It was not a study, nor ever presented as such.
This is follow up research, a proper study. IIRC, as Graeber had encouraged.
The researchers propose the Marxist notion of alienation as an alternate theory for the phenomenon Graeber originally daylighted.
While the researchers reduce the likely scope of alienation, they emphasize that millions of people are impacted, which should not be ignored.
Graeber has no particular animus towards finance, as The Economist suggested. He's grumpy about corporatism and bureaucracy. If The Economist is offended by Graeber's work, that's on them.
--
Research cited by Economist:
"Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
Buried lede:
"But part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct. Employees who think their work is useless tend to feel anxious and depressed. The reason, the academics suggest, is linked to the Marxist idea of “alienation”, which described what artisans felt in the 19th century when they stopped working for themselves and were dragooned into factories."
Bonus link:
Say you're working in a call-center for an insurance company. You could look at it one way - you're a small part of a great thing, the idea of inn-sewer-ants, that means people in society have some level of safety when things go wrong.
But it becomes alienating when you see that it, along with pretty much all business, is a construct to funnel wealth to the people at the top, whilst extracting as much value as it can from the powerless people at the bottom.
Capitalism is innately more alienating the closer to the bottom you are, because due to the division of labour, people no longer have much of a connection to the results of the work they are doing, unless they are in an industry that is innately creative, such as coding, or vocational and involves seeing the direct results of helping people out.
A health insurance company might have employees with different understandings of how the world works. Some may feel they are helping people who are sick, and others may feel they are skimming money off the top of sick people.
The former employees might feel quite satisfied with their work and the later naturally feels depressed and anxious.
But ideal workers who are neither naive nor cynical - how do they see the situation?
That's a very Marxist view. And no, it's not. Capitalism is fundamentally exploiting the planets resources, mostly hydrocarbons.
You can easily pay people a fair market wage and still produce a profit by exploiting the planet or even just market inefficiencies.
The Marxist view assumes that if there is profit it should be shared between workers for their labour.
This view completely ignores the costs and risks involved with capital expenditures.
It also assumes that markets are efficient, they're not.
1. "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations, and a resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour."
I found the anthropological perspective fairly refreshing. Instead of starting from a definition, model or theory, it starts from people's opinions. It is certainly worth exploring that many people feel their job is bullshit. People know what bullshit means to them. Grafting that onto a tightly defined (in this case marxist) concept like "Alienation" is the opposite of that.
If companies didn't have as many lawyers, other companies wouldn't need as many. If accounting rules were simpler, we'd need fewer accountants. That's one type of bullshit. Another might be lawyers and accountants who just don't do much. Those don't reduce to the same thing, as this article attempts to.
I think if a writer chooses the term "bullshit" rather than a more precise term, and that frames things. If someone makes a scientific argument, you don't negate it with a legal one.
Anyway... I read Graeber's book simultaneously with "complacent class," By Tyler Cowen. I was amused by the serendipity. Cowen's is from the other end of the philosophical spectrum. His book had a Schumpeterian feel. Both were examining areas that are hard to measure, and thus aren't "where the light is" in terms of the old economist adage. It's easy to measure the productivity of steel workers, harder to define productivity of administrative work... the kind of work that has become very prevalent.
Both note (I think) some similar pseudo data points. One was that most (other people's) attempts to quantify office workers productivity did not find that PCs introduction in the 90s had any effect. Graeber thinks about it in decidedly non economist terms. Office workers produce "paperwork," letters, memos, reports, etc. We now have a lot more of these, thanks to Dell. The "data point" is academia. Both note a (this one is more legible) a steep rise in administration/academic ratios at universities.
To me, I found the argument convincing. I suspect FB may be the most inefficient organisation that has ever existed... or close. Twitter too, on a smaller scale. I strongly suspect that if FB's ad business happened to generate only $5bn, they would run FB on that budget instead. I don't think FB would be different, acquisitions aside. That's not a proveable suspicion though.
Meanwhile Wikipedia, for all the flak it receives for expansive expenses, is incredibly resource efficient. It's also a very big site, and it runs on a budget 1,000X smaller than FB's. It runs on a smaller budget than stackoverflow, a site modeled on wikipedia. I strongly suspect that if it had been founded as a startup, Wikipedia would spend many times more.
The reason both books were interesting to me is that they consciously try to sidestep the "are efficient market theories true?" question. Its tedious and we have hundreds of years of boring articles like this one on commenting on it.
If so I’d love to hear what you do.
It’s idealistic hokum.
If the banks were only loaning people money to collect sea shells, then the entire global economy would end up revolving around sea shell collection.
Then some rational people would eventually write books claiming that seashell collection is a bullshit job, we don't need so many seashells... Then people like you would post comments saying "That's not true, obviously we need seashells because capitalism would never allow for such inefficiency."
I don't know which it's more of; mysterious or annoying that people keep repeating this... simplistic fallacy. WTF does one have to do with the other?!? "Capitalism" or "a free market" is how the game is played or what it is about; "currency" or the monetary supply is just the markers used to count points in the game. They're not the same thing.
In the game of Monopoly new currency is injected constantly, when players get 200 $ (? IIRC) for completing each lap around the board. Does that make the goal of the game not about amassing all the money[1] and bankrupting the other players? No, of course not. The goal of the game and the markers used to count progress towards that goal are different things.
Conflating them is committing a stupid fallacy, even more so in real life than in the game.
____
[1]: All the money in circulation, regardless of how much that happens to be.
If two people own shares of a company which grows at 10% per year; one person owns $1 million worth of shares and another owns $1000 worth of shares. The first person gets $100K worth of additional wealth in the first year, the other person gets only $100... Then the following year, the compounding effect increases the gap between them even more.
Even if that growth was completely natural (no central bank intervention), it would still be unfair... But what makes the system so incredibly unjust is that all this growth is ARTIFICIAL. The central banks print money and push it into the economy; the institutions on the front line then basically use that new money to pay one another for services; thus wiping out each other's debts using the freshly printed money. It's a giant, multi-layer pyramid scheme.
I don’t deny that there is some wasted effort, what I argue against is that the amount of truly wasted effort is significant and that the measure for whether or not a job is bullshit should be that the person doing the job thinks it shouldn’t exist.
We are capitalist in as much as you and I are allowed to build a machine and pay people to run it. I agree there are no free markets, all markets are created by governments just as all currency is.