Bullshit Jobs (2018)
theanarchistlibrary.org
theanarchistlibrary.org
> He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.
> A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us.
> At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
I feel that “our industry” is also rife with bullshit jobs, I think we aren’t exempt, but I wonder how others feel about this.
I had a bullshit job once: a project of 30M euro was clearly failing hard. 60 people were working every day and we didn’t deliver anything suitable for production. I kept my corner neat, but the writing was on the wall.
It felt so surreal, trying to care and do work, but on the other hand knowing the project was doomed.
After a year or so I couldn’t stand it anymore, I felt physically ill and I quit.
My manager was fired a month after I left. The project got canceled 6-8 months later.
They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got sorted out, we had it done.
Apparently, a memo went around that this was required everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made between public-facing websites (where this is true) and this one.
I feel you about the bullshit project you were on. I've been on similar projects and its such a grind. Helps to have a healthy work-life balance.
But: Big corps need to learn and experiment. Sometimes it's ridiculously expensive. But it needs to be done.
I quit a project (stayed in the company) that is currently running something like 10M euro. I quit when it was 1M. Because I felt my small role was tedious and stupid and not a big learning opportunity. But the job needs to be done. So now less capable people are doing it. And we (they organisation) will kind of maybe succeed. But the fact is: the project is mission critical for the company. So no choice but to do the job. But i can assure you most people working that project hates it. Think their job is bullshit etc. But really. It's just a really really important threadmill.
What i am trying to say: sometimes it's not the job. Sometimes it's you.
Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?
An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist."
The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?
go remove some guys that do legal compliance stuff and when the random inspection happen years later, you'll find out that maybe it would've cost you less to keep that employee.
Planes can keep flying without a pilot for quite awhile, until they run out of fuel or crash into a mountain.
Bad news: you have been rejected from consideration for any work related to realtime/life critical systems.
Good news: you may have a future in politics, at least in the county I live in.
"What will happen if this person stopped doing their job?"
"Oh the important monthly reports will stop going out."
"Oh, okay, we better not have them stop doing that then."
I submit that not only can we, but we must, admit that in some individual cases the person in the position knows best, and in others, they don't.
Or maybe, absent other evidence, it might make more sense to tentatively take people's self reports at face value. Or at least hold off backing some particular elaborate alternative which involves people being wrong about the things they have most information on.
Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.
Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You...
> Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything...
> This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible.
> Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention.
There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"
It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
The qualification is that even the person doing the job thinks it's bullshit. That doesn't mean the definition relies solely on them thinking it's bullshit.
Frankly, reading through the article, it feels like the definition keeps shifting and much of it is his struggle to even define what it means. He then goes on to start giving his definitions of the what he thinks are types of bullshit jobs.
The article I don't think is all that consistent and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Exactly. Like many of us, Graeber writes to understand.
His stated purpose is abundantly clear. Many, many people were sharing with Graeber complaints of a similar theme. So he tried to name and describe it.
Rightly, wrongly, or otherwise, it's all in the book. For other people to pick apart and response to.
How else is scholarship supposed to function?
Would Graeber have been more effective as an op ed columnist, churning out saccharine blather which confirms everyone's priors? eg The World is Flat and Bobos in Paradise?
I think there are definitely jobs that a computer or robot should be doing, but a human is there instead because of what our economy and society currently values. However, until the computer or robot is actually doing the job, I don't think I'd call it a bullshit job. That's not to say society shouldn't consider the impacts of grinding people's lives away with rote repetitive tasks.
Certain critics have adopted a labored, willful misunderstanding. eg Brad DeLong.
Graeber became public enemy #1 with Debt: The first 5000 Years. Some economists just couldn't wrap their heads around the anthropological viewpoint. Graeber is talking about people and societies evolving relationship(s) to debt, not economies and finance.
Economists and anthropologists like to dunk on each other. It's now something like a blood feud.
A more informative title would really be "boring jobs whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"
How is this job that different from being on an assembly line and all you do is tighten the screws on something that passes by?
To me it seems clear that that is not what this book is about. It's about the purpose, not the contents.
Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
I WAS REPLACED
BY A CRON JOBAnd still handling exceptions manually.
Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...
If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which is bad.
> Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work. But that's not really the topic of the book: There's entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of energy in their position.
I am almost positive Adam Smith pointed to this problem before with the pin factory example
Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science.
This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds?
You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping to make sure that people in your community can get the goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people know that they're not really contributing to the betterment of society in a lot of jobs.
And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been a PM on some products that could disappear off the face of the earth without making anybody especially worse off (except the guy managing the part of the operation that used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor and all would be fine).
I think that it's often better to forget the idea that work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with the respect of recognizing that they're there for a paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant.
Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people were compensated better they would find it to be more meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation to simply do well because they feel fairly valued.
It’s not all heart and soul stuff
If you talk to these workers, you can tell those who have a careful manager from those who don’t.
Mere tediousness would consign all warehouse jobs and janitorial positions to "bullshit" - which they are not, as specifically called out in the book. They might be unpleasant, but are definitely necessary.
Parent commenter is stating that, with a good manager, they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work. At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"
Those are not “bullshit jobs” by any definition. An Amazon warehouse worker knows that someone has to do that job. The same is true for your other examples.
Because of course, the executive are always driving things in the optimal way, but only them can see it…
In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational warts of the company, which more often than not, is governed not according to some clever plan from the executives, but instead is the results of political struggles between entities whose leader often hate each other.
There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.
Using BCG consultants for example.
-advice (and an old joke) from a former colleague
Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to understand how people feel about their lives and why. They don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that, objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing something subjectively worthwhile.
Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?
i think it’s likely a problem with both. no matter how many repeatedly delude themselves otherwise, both society and the individual are inextricable.
Been a while since I read Graeber's book but I recall one self reported "bullshit job" being to lift rocks scattered across a field and put them in a pile. The people doing the task thought it was a time wasting activity as they were unaware that winter frost pushes up new rocks every year.
It's possible that a lot of these so called bullshit jobs are just jobs where the purpose hasn't been explained to the employee.
Common theme in most of the executive decisions that I've seen. Lets shutdown product X, it costs us Y to run. We could use ~X from a different company that costs Y-2.5% to run. Then only months to an year later- We shouldn't have shut down X, as ~X is not what we actually want and our initial budgeting didn't cover it but we need 2Y to pay for and rebuilding X could cost us up to 10Y-20Y.
People at the top generally don't have what is 'precisely' needed. And the kind of resources it could to go about achieving it.
No biggie.
And executives do not understand the details of what is actually happening on the production floor. They might be fed inaccurate information or outright fantasies by middle management. This is how Russian leadership believed they had winter uniforms, but in reality those uniforms did not exist. The same power dynamics, hiding of errors, exaduration of what convenient, happens in companies.
>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
So you could use the same logic to say that electorate has no business complaining about decisions taken by politicians, after all they have no big picture view and don’t have access to the report that politicians do.
Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way.
This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.
Some people might complain about all the data they need to analyze and forms to fill out and say "my job is bullshit", but it's all needed for compliance with some industry regulations (that HN seems to love so much).
Is that a bullshit job? I'd say no, even if the person doing the work thinks so.
Moreover, I think most people have a better idea of how bullshit their job is than an outside observer. Theyre doing it.
The job can be still bullshit, even though it serves a purpose for a specific company in a specific environment.
Corporate lawyer is the archetypal graeberian bullshit job.
His definition of bullshit seems to have no resemblance to what people would think of bullshit jobs.
Any such profession is a category of bullshit job in the book, whether or not you personally think corporate lawyers produce value to the world.
That would apply to any profession which involves competing in a zero sum game.
Zero-sum games exist, therefore these professions exist to enable players to win them
I could never work in a zero-sum environment.
So the job isn't bullshit as long as those laws exist.
The whole idea of "bullshit jobs" seems to focus on the job, not the environment that produces them.
Who is it then?
So I'd say if there is company X will to spend $Y on a job, then by definition it's not a bullshit job.
Tbf this isn't that great of a metric and the book itself relies on it a lot. I've personally seen a few of doctors and surgeons describe their job as mostly bullshit because they're not satisfied with it.
I don't think many computer programmers think programming computers in itself is bullshit, but everything around that core task can feel like bullshit very easily, and a lot of programming jobs feel like nothing but bullshit.
Do you feel they're describing "healing people" as bullshit, or that they're describing existing in the framework we've built up around healing people as bullshit?
Not everyone likes being a doctor. This isn't a US exclusive thing.
The author uses a very broad definition of bullshit, then pivots to their own personal view. You'll see this tactic in a lot of manipulative/dishonest content.
“a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”
Are the Internet, phones, cars, planes, processed food, restaurants, sporting areas, payroll, loans necessary? Many would argue that some of these are downright pernicious. It comes down to the evaluation and perspective of the employee, and thus is very much a feeling of bullshit, rather than a fact of bullshit - contrary to what the author argues. This is mostly a misinterpreted job satisfaction survey.
This person has no actual domain expertise, but instead they set out to confirm their mostly naive belief.
How horrifying, did he specify which terrible industries they were stuck in, and whether they were still hiring??
Anyone, feel free to comment if you do literally nothing at work :)
In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms: wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labor). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of private property in the hands of wealth owners, combined with government enforced taxes compel workers to labor. In a capitalist world, our means of survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the capitalist.
The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor is external to the worker,"[12]: 74 it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being.[12]: 74 A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another."[12]: 74 This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labor's form and direction belong to someone else.
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There it is, "bullshit jobs". And it was written by Karl Marx over 150 years ago, regarding the 4 types of capitalist alienation.
Simple yet very effective way to put it.
But the thing is, that won't happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not in 10 years. There will still be HR and PR departments to deal with humans and the stupid ways things need to work.
That's like a teacher saying that fundamentally if the kids just opened their book, read the lesson and did their exercise they wouldn't be needed in the first place. But we all know why that's only one ideal scenario and in practice you still need a teacher.
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh...
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
and :
"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. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."
In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."
Link to the paper discussed by the article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
The thing is, Graeber is wrong about the entire rest of the economy, where 99% of people live and work.
Who is more likely to know whether a job is valuable: you, or the person actually working it?
For those who haven't read the book the answer is largely what he terms "managerial feudalism". The economic motives of any individual manager, up to and including the CEO, often don't align with the abstract ideal of a brutally efficient capitalist firm. They get money and status by having a large "court" of underlings. If you've worked at a growth stage company it seems impossible to deny that this doesn't happen in the tech industry.
But the rank-and-file employee who's trying to assess whether their job generates value will have a very hard time doing this at all accurately. You need a lot of business strategy context to understand why the company is actually employing you (as opposed to what they tell you, which is always going to be "because you're amazing and talented and a valued team member")
seems like a pretty questionable starting point tbh, especially when he starts conflating the idea of actual bullshit with would prefer to be doing something else, like his example of his corporate lawyer friend who thinks his job is bullshit mainly because he'd rather concentrate on being a 'poet-musician'. It's not 'managerial feudalism' causing people to get paid more to solve large organizations' legal problems than scratch their own musical itches. And at the other end of the scale, some of the most parasitical workers really love what they do, whether that's because they love the thrill of browbeating people into giving them money or because they have a genuinely bullshit "strategy" job for internal politics reasons which has been designed to make them feel much more important than they actually are.
(and there's lots of pre-existing material on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of fields like law and adverse selection problems within firms, most of which works from better assumptions. Plus of course Marx's theory of alienation - one of his better theories - offering a theory for why people become more dissatisfied with the work they do as industrial processes become more efficient)
Private sector layoffs are harder in Europe and academia is less well funded, so it might be true-ish in Europe.
I think it is pretty safe to assume that at the very least in this case Graeber was correct.
For what it’s worth, Cowan is quite prolific, so not a bullshit job holder if that’s what you’re implying.
If Graeber had wanted to make contributions to management theory, he presumably would've written a different sort of book.
But is a diagnosis not a declaration of: "there should be less of this in the world"?
I think you already answered that question for me. I’ll also add that I don’t think this book was meant to be a contribution to management theory at all, I think the broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of thousands of people performing meaningless work just for the sake of having a job. This isn’t an issue of management, it’s an issue of values.
Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other people's jobs to be worthless...
Under the previous 'bloated' administration there were 40 consecutive quarters of economic growth at one point.
Read up on the history of Greater London Council/Greater London Authority, its one attempt deal with the 32 boroughs and City of London Corporation. Compare it with say NYC, or similarly large city’s around the world and it’s clear London/UK could benefit from streamlining things.
By the way, I live in London and am reasonably familiar with its history. Asking people to 'read up' on things that haven't previously been a topic of the discussion is a bit presumptuous. I might know more about it than you!
Reducing support for local councils has been deeply unpopular, but pointing out 32 + 1 local councils for London is overly bureaucratic and long agreed to be inefficient doesn’t connect to that in any way? The actual solution is to get rid of most of them, but a stopgap is to reduce their funding and thus waste.
I don't really understand what this means. Any country that's existed for hundreds of years has bureaucracy that's built up over hundreds of years. Britain isn't an unusually bureaucratic country – quite the opposite in many respects.
>Reducing support for local councils has been deeply unpopular
And yet you seem to think that it's had various unspecified benefits. If so, why is it so unpopular with the general public? And what are these benefits? It's easy to cut 'waste' by cutting funding. Cut funding to zero and you'll have zero waste! Magic!
Most countries disrupt the existing bureaucracy over time, the UK is somewhat unique in how old many of it’s structures are. Tokyo and Paris are equally old cities, but their structure didn’t ossify hundreds of years ago they fundamentally changed over time.
Also, there is nothing unspecified about cutting waste being beneficial. The difficult bit about cutting spending in a democracy is the unpopular nature of doing so. So, again you personally don’t like what’s going on, and at the exact same time it’s good for the long term health of the UK. Not because their doing a particularly good job, but because their doing something necessary.
You haven't specified who's benefitted and how. Nor have you shown that 'waste' spending has indeed gone down, either in absolute terms or as a fraction of total spending.
>So, again you personally don’t like what’s going on, and at the exact same time it’s a very good thing for the long term health of the UK.
How long is 'long' here? The country was in a better economic state when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. How long will we have to wait to see these long term benefits?
> How long is ‘long’ here?
Everyone’s kids is who benefits.
I am talking 30-40 years, countries don’t turn around on a dime. That said from 2000 to 2010 the UK was ‘flat’ and it just dealt with COVID, but I am not blaming the people in power for either the event just how well they set the country up to improve in the future.
https://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/our-news/more-children-ris...
In any case, you are implicitly conceding that you cannot point to any tangible benefits of this government's policies in the present day. They are merely policies that you think are ideologically correct, and thus expect to have good outcomes within some very long timeframe.
No idea why you are brining Tokyo into this – sorry.
> cannot point to any tangible benefits
How about debt/ GDP ratio that fell down to 82.8% in 2019 right before the pandemic. This trend was really easy to find 84.5, 84.3, 83.5, 82.8 (pandemic)
Making longer term predictions is much harder than retroactively looking on a few backward looking and easily gamed indicators. Rather than directly looking at GDP you need to compare things like GDP per capita PPP with other countries adjusting for demographics, economic development, etc but it’s really not worth getting into with someone that’s thinking in terms of political ideology.
That said, debt as a percentage of GDP is actually higher now than it was in 2010 when the Conservatives came to power! (This was also true before the pandemic.) See the chart here under the heading “Government debt”: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...
>I am bringing every single other country into this because it makes it obvious why the UK is failing.
Wikipedia article on Tokyo; therefore the UK is failing. Ok. London is a prosperous and successful city. It's really not the part of the UK you'd point to if you wanted to show that the country as a whole is failing.
> Future economic prosperity requires the current generation of children to be healthy, well educated and well adjusted members of society.
If that’s your personal ideology then fuck old people benefits… Except no, that’s not what either of us believe. You need to balance what you want to do with what you can sustain doing, there’s all sorts of lovely benefits the government of the UK could provide in theory but you need to weight nice to haves vs the ability for the system to sustain itself.
The UK has been in a downward spiral for longer than either of us have been alive, fixing that is necessary or you’re not actually benefiting young people. Saying think of the children is all well and good, but debt isn’t a viable solution you need to cut somewhere if you want to prioritize children’s benefits more.
PS: UK’s debt to GDP ratio was under 30 in 2000, and hit ~70 in 2010. The growth slowed and stopped after conservatives took over. Let’s not pretend the previous 10 years before the conservatives was good governance, it created a huge long term burden for the country which is going to stick around long after those leaders are all dead. The conservatives haven’t done a good job, but debt fueled spending is only useful in an absolute emergency not the solution to any and all problems.
No idea what you are getting at here.
>Saying think of the children
The health and wellbeing of children is important. It is not wrong or irrational to think about it. On the contrary, it is irrational to make supposed 'savings' by neglecting the very people who will be the engine of the future economy.
>UK’s debt to GDP ratio was under 30 in 2000, and hit ~70 in 2010. The growth slowed and stopped after conservatives took over.
We're both looking at the same graph. The debt to GDP ratio has been consistently higher under the Conservatives than it ever was under the preceding Labour government. You are picking an economic statistic at random, misrepresenting it, and still failing to point to any tangible benefits of the Conservatives' cuts in public spending. We are supposed to just accept that cuts are good because 'spending less is good'.
More on the Conservatives vs. Labour and debt here: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-ha...
This is entirely fictitious.
Have they reformed feudal system of leasehold that makes me the equivalent of a medieval peasant? Have they reformed the absurd planning system which takes years to approve a barn, stops British farmers from building wing turbines, stops my friend from raising a roof by 10 cm and blocks every renewable -project in the land? Have they repealed FPTP voting to have a more modern system, replaced combined sewers that dump poop on the beach?
Have they reduced the number of local authorities in London, or combined parish and country councils in the countryside?
No, they have not reformed any of the old systems that plague UK. Your entire argument is fanciful fantasy.
But credit where credit is due, they were making real progress on the UK’s debt before the pandemic. That’s exactly the kind of thing where the benefits don’t show up in the short term but is still vital for a country to prosper long term.
The bullshitters tend to be better at keeping their jobs than the people actually doing the work. They've had the practice - years of justifying their existence to the people controlling headcount numbers.
I got to uk 12 years ago and it’s been cool at the time, but a steady decline the whole way. The place I left was developing and has now evened or surpassed UK by many quality of life metrics. The trend will probably continue.
Now I am wondering why I moved, at great cost to myself. When I tell locals about this, I’d hope they would be as annoyed about decline in living standards as I am, but they sometimes get offended. Apparently comparing Britain to ‘inferior’ countries is offensive.
Hard disagree.
As an Anarchist, it's my job to support the dissolution of any hierarchy that is not democratically operated in a way that supports people attempting to live while also creating communities founded on democratic incentives.
You can't be a passive anarchist and yes improvements need to be made. Who else would be doing the evolving here?
You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest capitalist leaders?
Can you elaborate on this point?
>You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest capitalist leaders?
I'm inclined to agree with you that that is a bad idea.
we should be striving to, when building these systems (building a business/organization/etc…) to try our best to put a bit more emphasis on not discarding the concerns of the people doing the work. an example would be, management often gets disconnected, siloed, or tunnel visioned in their thinking.
for example, an executive might not understand why an engineer sitting in meetings 90% of the time might be frustrated and why this might be hampering forward momentum. and then, executives when looking at another metric might question “our code is not up to par, why are engineers not producing?” they may never connect the dots that the executives caused the whole thing from the start.
if the business/org had built into its design where engineers/developers doing the work had more of a voice and felt more comfortable using it so their concerns can actually be heard, those kinds of tensions could be more easily addressed and solve entire classes of issues.
while i can see both sides here, i tend to agree with the Anarchist position more, both for productivity and for the overall mental health of those doing the more grunt style work.
i’ve worked in both large projects and mid/small projects and one of things that i can point to as a constant—if you give people more freedom/ownership of a project: they’re going to feel much better about it, they’re going to work harder to complete it, and they’re going to communicate and figure out clever ways to address underlying issues that may stand in the way. they’re going to feel actual pride in what they helped build.
and an opposite constant is: the more alienated someone is, the less ownership they feel over something—the less they give a shit. at this point their work devolves closer to “just a paycheck.” not only is this incredibly unhealthy for the project, but it makes the people doing the actual work feel worse/unfulfilled. i would argue (and Anarchists seem to as well) this alienation manifests in all kinds unhealthy ripple effects in society.
tldr, we should be putting more emphasis on the actual engineers/workers overall happiness levels and give them more ownership of their work. also, when i say “ownership” don’t limit your thinking to “capital ownership.”
Anarchists, if im misinterpreting, feel free to chime in and correct me.
I'm just saying that when switch to this mode, we've put our anarchist hat away and are practicing something else. Whatever we are at those times, we're no longer the audience that Graeber is writing for.
Of course reality doesn't work like that. You don't have the "burn it down" phase, followed by the "build it better" phase. It's all jumbled up together. But I still think it's helpful to view these two perspectives as different personae.
I've observed peers who were historically dismissive of "special treatment" (aka antidiscrimination measures) for women and members of underrepresented racial groups develop an case of late-onset empathy once they find themselves on the other side of that "not a good culture-fit" line.
Here's a thought... after growing up in a culture that tells them that no one is special and that everyone's just out on their own to fend for themselves, they're bombarded with this firm an unrelenting message that some do deserve special treatment and that it's only fair. But they're not included.
And then, when something unfair happens to them, and they hint that maybe they deserve this special treatment too, they're told to "fuck off, go eat shit and die patriarchy!".
I wonder why they're so keen to watch Fox News in retirement. Some mysteries we'll never figure out, I suppose.
Another way to experience discrimination is to cycle on the roads for a few months, especially anywhere motorists aren’t used to it.
I am not talking about people who endanger your life accidentally, You get heckled, mocked, threatened, etc.
Ironically, at least in the UK, the majority of those who work in DEI are middle and upper class university graduates.
(i'm not too familiar with dei stuff, so 'im having hard time to understand how the D diversity part ends up with the bullies?)
At a high level, DEI functions as a trojan horse. Under the unobjectionable guise of universal values : "diversity, equal-ness, inclusivity', it peddles specific political values.
It replaces the 'dont-ask-dont-tell' corporate era with a politicized atmosphere where silence is considered opposition. Diversity in color, but not in opinions. Diversity for census tracked metrics, and none for the rest. Marketed as equality of opportunity, but enforced as equity in outcomes. Inclusivity of every archetype found on a private-American-university-campus and judgement towards everything else.
Just as Tobacco companies have the highest ranked sustainability scores, the DEI-iest companies are often the most oppressive in demanding a certain kind of conformity. The most insidious part of DEI initiatives, is that their concerns are forever biased towards optics rather than real world impact.
I don't blame their inability to create both diverse and inclusive spaces. D & I cannot co-exist. Just as a dish with every ingredient is an allergy death device; A workplace where diverse opinions on personal matters are entertained will feel potently offensive. Such a space cannot feel inclusive. Similarly, E & E cannot co-exist. Equality and equity are diametrically opposed to each other.
America is a divided country and global MNC employees are folks from an even more divided world. People in such a workplace will inevitably disagree on fundamental aspects of society.
In the midst of this confusion the university hires self-proclaimed DEI experts with political aspirations, who ask you to read XKendi and Robin DiAngelo. If you want to properly understand the specific political school of thought DEI advocates for, you should read their books. I have read both and have strong opinions of a flavor that I bet you can guess. But, I'll let you make the judgement for yourself.
I always find it weird when the argument for more regulations is that the current regulations are ineffective.
So who do we listen to? Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?) or an anthropologist who creates well researched and thoughtful works?
Cowen completely missed Graeber's point in his criticism.
There are other forms of economic thought, but, IMO, they all start from different fundamentals. If the goal is profit and productivity, there's various ways to organize an economy to pursue that goal. If the goal is human flourishing, then alternative economic models are needed.
neoliberal economics tends to disregards any other basics of economics as an afterthought, and the philosophical debate about how a country's goals (and thus economy) should be build hasn't been held since.
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy from the 70s akin to Thatcher or Reagan. A lot of neoclassical economics is intended to make neoliberalism look good but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
But it is hysterical to see people try to separate economics from humanities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-anthropology-...
Anthropology: True Science
Graeber:
"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"
That's a scientist?
If that's a scientist then I am done trusting scientists.
> There was a garbled sentence in the first edition that I didn't catch in proofreading but was instantly removed as soon as anyone noticed it. DeLong has seized on this and endlessly reproduced it, quite possible hundreds of times, pretending it's still in the text.
> Why does he do this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea. I've never seen anyone else behave remotely like it.
Graeber starts with a conclusion, and cherry picks evidence that supports his conclusion. This is the opposite of science.
> Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?)
Yet somehow, countries that do a better job at following the recommendations of economists before more prosperous that don't.
I literally laughed out loud.
To each it’s own. The lack of government regulations also creates job with discutable outcome in the US.
Adminstrative medical staff to deal with the insurance quagmire and wallmart greeters comes to mind. I would also evaluate the number of waiter to be 1.5 times higher for the same quality of service ( and more icy glass refill )
I’m shoving my agenda that those jobs are useless overall. But maybe people doing them would beg to differ.
That just my perspective having lived elsewhere most of my life : those jobs don’t exists, and society goes on. But that’s a shitty metric.
— What’s the purpose of wallmart greeters? I know they reduce the rate of theft but is it why Walmart is doing it ?
— On health and insurance: I’m convince that a larger or even single entity is more efficient at negotiating drugs price down and avoid having 42 systems talking to each other and moving claims around
On negotiating drug prices: That market is pre-broken due to us handing out patents in an attempt to spur innovation (It's not a bad attempt, it's probably the best tradeoff one could come up with to push advancement, it just totally breaks the market for the drug while the patent is in force). You are certainly right that size will give negotiating ability. I am not convinced the organization needs to be extremely large but it probably requires at least a few million patients. That being said I don't know what the optimal system is other than we are probably far from it because it's kind of complex. If your pricing power is large enough to move the expected value of a drug down, you are diminishing the value of the patent and decreasing the effect on new research, for example. The large system's negotiating power is also only as valuable as the skill and motivation of that system's negotiators and that skill and motivation is far from guaranteed. There are also tertiary regulatory effects limiting the competition in the generics production sector. I am not sure the relative importance of any of the points I raised or or the relative importance of the numerous other factors I didn't list and/or didn't think of so it's really hard to say for sure what the optimal solution is and in that situation I am totally fine with a public provider but I want my ability to use a private provider to be maintained and ideally the public provider should be charged for as a user fee I can opt out of so if it's garbage none of us have to use it.
Unless you are elderly or impaired I don’t see the point :)
We were growing fast and our recruitment process was feeling the strain, so we got some in-house recruiters.
A few years later, a full-function HR team got created, but waiting that long and starting with goal-oriented recruiters (not compliance-cowboys) was totally the right thing to do: a culture of manager and employee self-service, good tooling and as little bullshit as possible is a beautiful and smooth thing.
We're heading in that direction - just because everybody rode a horse doesn't mean a car won't find market.
(Cowen's review, characterizing the book as "entertaining," isn't bad)
Graeber's work might be opinionated but his evidence is stronger than Cowen's flippant comeback.
>> At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job.
This almost reads as Cowen is claiming that Graeber's job is bullshit.
Graeber is a prize winning and successful writer and academic.
I've been in a couple organizations of around 100 people with no HR at all. They did just fine. One of them got one HR person when it got to 120 employees, mainly because it wanted to sell and potential buyers would see them as "more serious" that way - not because it was needed for daily functioning (and growing just fine).
HR mostly became necessary in the litigious happy countries as a means of ass covering. Even in the US such sized companies used to work just fine without HR or with just a person or so back in the day.
HR is definitely not a "bullshit job". Who do you think deals with payroll and pensions and hiring and firing and contracts and complaints and m/paternity leave and ....
Still refutes kristianc's/Cowen's case, about a company absolutely needing HR so much that "one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all" is in serious trouble.
Apparently the company can servive not just with an understaffed HR deparment, but even with no HR department at all. Even with just a person (as in your example) unofficially doing some related tasks part time, alongside their real main role (which is not the same case as "having HR but just calling it something else - for starters it's just an ocassional task, and second it's not formal nor seen in some aggrandizing view).
And not only survive, but, if I get you story right expand to 80 people, and from there to 400 people, before even setting up an actual HR department.
The parent quotes Tyler writing: "let him [the person considering much of HR redundant] spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us."
Well, I've discussed various stages of the companies growth with the people managing such companies, and the lack of HR was never considered a problem. And if they lied to me, considered the objective proof of that: if it was they'd have prioritized creating one, like they had estalibshed other departments, but they never cared of it. One only did it in the end, after getting close to 120 people, to appease potential buyers.
So this "let him manage one (...) and report back to us", as if this will make him see the error of his idea, is already shot down by that. People have managed more than one, and never saw the issue even with not having a HR at all, much less with having an adequately stuffed one.
The core duty of the actual HR team is looking after executives. Providing advice and managing the relationship between directors and employees. And acting as a lever for instilling "behaviours" in the workforce. It creates distance.
In the several mid-sized companies I know of, the accounting department deals with the payroll. Nobody deals with pensions, that's not a company concern in those countries.
>and hiring and firing and contracts and complaints and m/paternity leave and ....
Nobody special. Each team gets to ask for hiring positions, some C-level gives them a number of alloted slots, they do the interviews and decide on some people, and get a final approval for the hire. The contracts are standard issue, done once with the help of the company's lawyers and re-used as templates. Firing is done in a similar fashion. Same for m/paternity leaves. Regular leave days are just claimed through the intranet system, and approved by the immediate team leader, out of a total of X vacation days (which can vary with the seniority). Team leaders are trusted to just approve their own vacations, they don't need to bother anyone.
As for complaints, people take them to their team leader, and if that's not resolved (or the issue is the team leader themselves), they can check with a higher exec. The role of HR in big companies is for ass saving: to avoid those executives having to deal with this directly. If your company is not yet a big faceless blob, this is not needed.
And that's it. For a company of around 100, that's like a few days of checking these, alongside other things, from team leaders every hiring-spurt period.
Here are the numbers (1982 - 2005) :
Administrative personnel : +240%
Management : +85%
Students : +56%
Teachers : +50%
Diplomas delivered : +47%
> Perhaps most controversial is an increasing raft of federal and state regulations that universities must abide by: the Clery Act, which requires campuses to report their crime activity; new Title IX regulations that govern the handling of sexual assault; and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requirements for providing educational records.
> In 2013 and 2014 alone, the Department of Education released rules and directives on 10 new sets of issues, ranging from proposed rules on teacher preparation programs to Net Price Calculator requirements to specific regulations for FAFSA verification. Complying with all these rules requires additional staff and additional money. The resources required are not insignificant: a Vanderbilt study of 13 colleges and universities found that regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time.
> “It is pages and pages and pages of regulations that require more sophisticated professionals,” says Penny Rue, vice president for Campus Life at Wake Forest University and board chair-elect of the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals. Rue adds that incidents on college campuses, such as the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, contributed to a need for administrative spending that often goes unnoticed, from case management services to threat assessment teams.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy.
> let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees,
Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.
I try to get to this point talking about insurance specialist working in the medical field in the US. Those jobs are vastly more present in the US than in other places that provide adéquat level of care and also have a concept of healtcare.
Going to the ER you sign a lot of paperwork thougt your admission.
I think of it as the eastern island moais.
Something society is choosing to do, and focus on. While effort could be directed elsewhere in order to enhance our futur.
Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.
in our current system, do these jobs serve a function? Yes, sure. The institutions have to be fed statitics about the corporation because that's how money is generated; the lawyers have to keep an eye on admissions and lawsuits because there are constant legal challenges, or the threat of them. The point is that modern capitalism is set up to require them. It's not necessary. The nurses reporting numbers to number-collector jobs is actively harmful to medical care. A system where students sue universities is very often actively harmful to education. Our system has been set up to support and require all these support desk jobs that add no value to the thing these institutions actually make.
All tasks that use repeatable actions and/or pattern matching, some analysis, will be done in parallel and more efficiently by ChatGPT like apps.
And therefore many jobs that required 9-5 corporate or knowledge work which required essentially simple but tedious tasks, like in excel will be obsolete. That involves a large chunk of the American middle class I think. Unfortunately, I think there are only a small percentage of corporate jobs that are safe from it. Even leadership, or decision making you can argue would be a place where GPT tools play a massive part.
I think his blind spot is that some people are doing exploratory work that has 10% chance to be impactful. With enough bad luck this person can work 10 years without meaningful results and even when the results come, you will be happy for 3-4 months before drowning again. Still if you skip it all together you will have a company that will fall out of relevance in 3-5 years due to lack of progress.
Basically he fails to see novel progress is really rare and assumes the optic of worker, but manager's optics is: 10% is fine, I am just gonna hire 10 people, pay them well and have meaningful progress every year.
> In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. There is a continuum from explicit feudal leftovers of this type to receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them.
This example speaks to me because I recall many years ago using an elevator in Rio de Janeiro which had an operator, and although his job was ostensibly to push the buttons, he was in fact part of the security apparatus - the friendly outer layer of a defence-in-depth strategy.
Not bullshit at all.
Now that’s not to say that organizational dysfunction doesn’t exist. I’ve seen people get hired and then the project that motivated the hiring has lost funding and the person has been idle. I’ve seen managers go on long-term sick leave and their +1 being too busy to find a replacement or provide supervision themselves, leaving teams directionless. I’ve seen people work really hard on bad ideas that didn’t fail fast enough.
Those people absolutely described their jobs as bullshit, but it was circumstantial bullshit, not an intrinsic property of the job.
The other angle here is grand purpose. The author denigrates some jobs because they achieve some allegedly amoral outcome. You might think that cosmetics shouldn’t exist, or that if they exist they shouldn’t be advertized. But that’s a value judgment to say the least, and a wholly different argument to declaring the whole supply chain to be made of bullshit jobs.
A security guard who has to manually press elevator buttons is not solving the problem effectively. Are you more secure that the guard manually presses the elevator button? Hell there could be an assault in the elevator and he wouldn't know a damn thing because he spent time away from watching cameras to press the elevator button. Therefore, it is a bullshit job.
But again, this isn't about the security man!!
You don’t know anything about the threat, the environment, or the asset being protected. Maybe just don’t comment with baseless speculation?
I don't understand your defensiveness here. The entire point is to question the role as a solution to the problem. Literally what bullshit jobs is all about. This isn't specifically about the elevator man, so you don't need to get all weird about it.
I should step away from the elevator example because people are clinging to it a bit too firmly when the entire point is to question [job role], not the specific elevator operator.
Presence also can mean placing yourself closer to where incidents happen more frequently which allows for a quicker response time.
Source me a security officer at a hospital.
The mains issue with security guards is they're weird doing nothing. It can be an important aspect of the job to be there standing in the corner in uniform, but if as commercial place you want a more casual and peaceful atmosphere, having your security staff dress like employees and do something, anything will help a lot.
As another there's the cleaning staff in attraction parks, they walk around with a broom but are expected to do a lot more, inclusing spotting lost kids, problematic behavior etc.
> he spent time away from watching cameras to press the elevator button.
Aren't they _in_ the elevator ?
The book takes the approach of “these people say their job is bullshit” to be tactful, as dunking on people is seen as a generally bad thing to do.
In the grand scheme of things, keeping everyone busy is also a societal construct that many will argue is needed. You might disagree, but the discussion would be on the societal model you want to push, and not the type of jobs people do.
Then of course you'd need to control for which trees are planted in which ecosystem, in what ways and at what costs, under what conditions etc.
And in the end you'd of course also need PR and communication people to deal with all the public facing aspects of it ....
Like an Anarchist Anthropologist?
I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, because from the press tour around it it seemed to me Graeber's position was one I'd already considered and rejected. It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary. I could be wrong, however, either about Graeber's thesis or about his conclusion.
Either way, brilliant author and great man. Lost too soon in Summer 2020, likely due to rare covid complications. Debt will always have a place on my bookshelf.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-ja...
I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft".
The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures.
There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist.
He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability.
I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.
All his books are superb.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) analyzes our civilization from another angle - how we have apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development, and how violence and domination became normalised within this dominant system. Not finished yet, but it's also a candidate for aggressive recommendations :)
If you are somewhat anarchistic, these provide a framework to hold onto society which makes so much more sense than the one provided in most schooling systems.
It was popular and heavily recommended here on HN. But I wonder how many people actually read it. I stopped after a few chapters. Maybe I'm just too dumb or I should have bought it in my native language, but it was too dense and unstructured for my taste. I think there are some people on youtube who summarized the main points. Found it more interesting.
I'm not so sure that would actually count as a bullshit job in Graeber's eyes. He works towards a definition of a bullshit job over multiple pages. Here is a bit, I think, that would rule out the job above:
> This allows us to refine our definition. Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless or pernicious; typically, there has to be some degree of pretense and fraud involved as well. The jobholder must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason why her job exists, even if, privately, she finds such claims ridiculous. There has to be some kind of gap between pretense and reality. (This makes sense etymologically: “bullshitting” is, after all, a form of dishonesty.)
I read Bullshit Jobs and enjoyed it, yet it kinda nagged at me that I was missing the subtleness of the argument. I'm glad to see here that it hasn't crystalized for many others, too.
Plus everyone is giving slightly different definitions of a bullshit job. It smells of a Motte and bailey fallacy.
Reading the synopsis, I get the impression he's basically defining different forms of IOUs as "debt" instead of "currency", and use it as lever to posit that "debt" came before money, to then go on to explain that people live in a society and depend on each other in many intricate ways...
Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that...but is it worth a long read or am I already getting the gist of it ?
Is it still worth reading? It depends on how much you are interested in the history behind all these.
I think the book is recommended so much because many people have very weird view towards the concept of "debt". Maybe their upbringing taught them debt is intrinsically bad or something.
I remember someone talking about the nth attepted rewrite of the company's main project. Where all the devs were certain it would fail like the last one but the new CTO had a new plan. Just like the last CTO.
So there are definitely lots of people working at jobs they beleive are pointless though somewhere up the hierarchy it's beleived to be important. Which fits grabers definition.
The crazy thing is these jobs can be hard. Deadlines to hit and the like, but also they are pointless. It's a path to burnout.
And anyway a bullshit job should be bullshit because of the fundamental work of the job, not because of a specific risky project it’s doing for a specific time period. Like all the devs laid off this year didn’t have bullshit jobs just because their companies are fine without them.
The lack of a clear definition for bullshit jobs is my biggest problem with these sorts of discussions. The term seems to generic that everyone can apply it to something in their lives. For some it's "the job I'm personally doing is unfulfilling", while for others it seems to be "I don't see societal value in my work", and for others it's more about whole classes of jobs or work that could be removed for a better society.
Although you are required to do your job, you secretly believe it is pointless and should not need to be performed.
It's basically just measuring job satisfaction.
Although you are required to do your job, you secretly believe it is pointless and should not need to be performed.
(The UK has a particularly extreme version of this: the benefits department is hellbent on rejecting as many applicants as possible, and they lose a huge amount of court cases because of it, at great cost to the taxpayer and the lives of those affected)
It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching people bringing things through at airports, but their mere presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people trying funky things.
To put things in perspective, the various federal and state welfare agencies in Australia employ something like 200K bureaucrats to allocate and monitor welfare handouts.
If they were all made redundant, the money saved would add a significant amount to the available welfare budget.
I worked as a consultant at several of these agencies and I can assure you that most of the jobs there were bullshit.
One coworker described these places as “daycare for adults”.
1. They have to spend a LOT of time raising money and they are tired a lot doing things around it. This means just convincing a lot of people what they stand for and what the other guy does not, organizing or going to fundraisers. And its a 2 year term which is so short that time gets eaten up. If senators had this crazyness the average senator could not be practically as old as they are.
2. They also have to tow party lines by letting bills they may not have read or don't know about and spend time getting lobbied about why they should or should not support a bill because some donor funded their campaign.
I was told by someone in govt that lot of what the govt does is subcontracted out and the government action is just a lot of Procurement[1].
But the US govt is of course very important and has done useful things like the Clean Air and Water act or Social Security or Maintaining Public infrastructure we take for granted.
>Tom: Yes, yes that's right.
>2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?
>Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers...
>1st Bob: So you physically take the specs from the customer?
>Tom: Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed.
>2nd Bob: So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
>Tom: Well... No. ah sometimes.
>1st Bob: What would you say you do here?
>Tom: Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product.
It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division.
Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.
The guy who rants maniacally about Graeber in every. single. thread. about Greaber's work hasn't commented yet. I hope he's okay.
Indeed no. The guy isn't here, although a quick scan reveals one or two pretenders to the throne.
But then again, it's probably important to truly know what bullshit is. Is it, as expressed in the book "On Bullshit" intentional deception or even lying to advance the bullshitter's own interest? Or is it an unfounded or unsubstantiated belief in a value or goal that has not been subjected to enough careful scrutiny or deliberation?
Basically, the ultimate description of a bullshit job. Keynes proposed this as a counter measure against a depression. I'm absolutely certain that he understood that it does not make society any richer.
So for an economist, bullshit jobs are especially bad because they think about what people could be doing instead.
Basically, bullshit jobs come at an opportunity cost. Governments should be fighting this phenomenon. Just thinking about creating jobs is a bit shortsighted.
If he were around today to see e-digging holes and filling them up - bitcoin - he'd be horrified.
There are alternatives that don’t require you to believe in silly things like the example above. Check out Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics.
You aren't supposed to take Keynesian gold digging as a serious economic policy. It is a commentary about how your actions can be constrained so much that doing anything logical or reasonable becomes impossible because it hurts some special interest group.
> Much of our “money isn’t real” monetary policy is thanks to this thinking.
No, that started after the death of Keynesian economics. You know, the era of "monetary policy can fix anything"-Friedman. Monetary policy is inefficient so you have to do a lot of it and you can never stop.
If you want to take Keynes seriously, you should read a liquidity theory oriented book.
https://www.dieter-suhr.info/files/luxe/Downloads/Suhr_THE%2...
https://www.dieter-suhr.info/files/luxe/Downloads/Suhr_Struc...
I want to introduce a self stabilising type of liquidity but I am not ready yet to start a company. I am planning on doing something in two years.
For example, the process of making retail purchases and delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other major retailer.
But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual, manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll eventually get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they'll manually match the payment up with the invoice.
A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong building.
Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job would seem pointless.
So the jobs become observing all of the laws that we passed in the name of safety and equity (look at workplace accident rates since early 1900s. Or child labor rates). When you look at it this way, there's no stopping, since there will always be more "dangerous" or "unfair" things to optimize away with added labor.
> Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on September 2, 2020 while on vacation with his wife and friends in Venice. ... His wife, Dubrovsky, attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, saying they both had strange symptoms for months beforehand, and she said there was a connection between COVID-19 and pancreatitis.
(From Wikipedia)
Now it didn't happen in the 20th century. Most jobs we did in 2000 simply didn't exist in 1900. That same principle is extended ad infinitum to argue there's no problem with the current economic order.
Bullshit jobs are really a response to that problem (IMHO).
Automation could be a paradise. A future where people don't have to worry about time off task in an Amazon warehouse or work extra jobs delivering food could be fantastic. Or this could be a dystopian hell as automation allows the capital-owning class to capture even more of the labor value so we can further concentrate into a class of hyper-wealthy.
In our current political climate, the dystopian hellscape of subsistence living at one end and trillionaires at the other seems more likely.
The problem is capitalism.
I never experienced anything like what you're talking about. I was happy to have elective courses because that meant I was able to study things that interested me outside of my planned career path. It sounds like you view education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI, productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to my previous comment - that is sad to me.
If you went to a school where STEM students were forced to take a humanities course but humanities students did not have to take a calculus sequence, then you experienced the thing I described.
I can only repeat my point so many times, this is exactly the outlook on life I find to be sad and ignorant. Philosophy doesn't poof into non-existence when it isn't supported by taxes, it becomes a playground for the rich and the rich get to decide what schools of thought are worth pursuing.
>If you went to a school where STEM students were forced to take a humanities course but humanities students did not have to take a calculus sequence, then you experienced the thing I described.
I did not view it as forced to take humanities courses, but as an opportunity to take humanities courses. I will also say that, if my memory serves, those humanities students were forced to take certain math courses (Algebra & Statistics). I agree that those same students would benefit greatly from being "forced" to take calculus courses - there are number of interesting philosophical concepts covered in calculus.
There is virtually no connection between math and philosophy. If you decompose a “mathematical philosophy” textbook into its mathematical and philosophical components you will quickly see which part is wasting paper.
I have no doubt that hundreds of millions of BS jobs exist, but isn't that what management consultants are supposed to fix?
Whether or not management consultants actually do fix wasteful jobs is another issue. But my understanding of the sector was that it was aimed to fix these issues. Organisational refactoring, if you will.
Likewise, everyone complains about bad management, but good management is supposed to be able to fix the kind of issues Graeber describes. Steve Jobs' return to Apple in the late 90s is a famous example.
Years ago on this site someone who worked in senior management in a tech company told a story. It went something like this: there were two teams in the company, who were always complaining, not very productive, and seemed to waste enormous amounts of time and energy on pointless busywork or trying to coordinate tasks. Everyone on team A blamed team B, everyone on team B blamed team A, etc, etc. The manager realised this needed to be fixed, talked to the relevant people on both teams, figured out what the problem was, and ... fixed it. (I have no recollection of what the actual problem was -- let's suppose it was some kind of communication or process issue.) After that, things ran smoothly.
Is this story realistic? No doubt -- after all anyone who has worked in engineering is familiar with chronic technical problems that can be fixed with very small amounts of work -- if one has the requisite knowledge. And no doubt there are chronic human problems that are similarly solvable.
Anyway - after many rounds of such management fixes you would have an organisation that ran like a swiss watch. In such places, good managers, like good sysadmins, fade into the background and become invisible. Google in the 2000s may have been a good example. But eventually either the organisation grows, or the good managers leave, or -- most likely -- people decide they no longer need to worry about good management, the organisation begins to rot, and eventually they're forced to bring in bad management. Corporate entropy proceeds in the usual way, and you end up with waste, bad practices, poor communication, doomed projects, crappy output, politics, and -- BS jobs.
This is why I'm skeptical of political intellectuals like Graeber who note a problem but misidentify the solution. Some of the things he categorises as "BS jobs" are themselves intended to fix BS jobs.
But I do not have much experience working in large organisations, so perhaps someone else can chime in.
If you buy the Bullshit Jobs thesis (to be clear I'm somewhere in the middle here, I don't fully buy it), then mechanical turks would be the ideal way to create a backchannel full employment program. There will never be any shortage of data to label, and the same piece of data can be redundantly labeled two, three, four times, to improve accuracy. Then you can create positions for people to train those labelers, people to manage those people, et cetera. If your goal was to provide a job for literally every person, this wouldn't be a bad industry to start with.
I think there will also be quite a bit of demand for it; the world will change, the distributions models predict over will shift, and they'll need new data/feedback to maintain their performance (to say nothing of competitive pressures to train models with even better performance).
While Graeber much resended it and argued its not inevitable, humanity tends to get organized in hiearchical power pyramids.
Now guess what: Being part of the pyramid gives you identity, maybe even gives you some purpose. But you can't always fill the pyramid with "proper jobs". And it is not needed either.
Bullshit jobs are the fillers needed to create the intended structure.
(1) Which one was the very first bullshit job? Probably some acolyte of a Babylonian priest moving around made-up religious symbols sixty times per day to keep the Sun moving.
Then I interacted with him on Twitter where I saw him lying, brazenly.
They I reread his books and realized, sadly, they were bullshit.
So I guess he really did understand pointless jobs.
It sort makes sense in the context of tightly state-controlled capitalist economies like Japan, but in a US context it's just comical. The same evil corporate managers who get lambasted for laying people off to satisfy Wall Street's demand for quarterly profit growth are supposedly keeping loads of other people employed just for funsies.
"some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.
For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.
It seems plausible at least that you could evaluate a potential path forward, decide it is a dead end, let everyone know it is a dead end, have the report there just for backup in case anyone asks, and then not actually have anyone ask (maybe you have a really good reputation). I’d say the report there was still useful, even if only as an insurance policy.
agree 100%. The commonality there is that these are things where the profit motive can't discipline wasteful management.
I'd also throw in the non-profit sector in general, in addition to what you listed. Without ongoing hard work by donors to prevent waste, non-profits become very good at incinerating all their money on excessive overhead.
Pension fund manager wants bonus, not to ensure livable conditions for the next couple of generations whose funds he's managing.
The bullshit job concept is not "this is making the world worse off", it's "no one would notice if this job ceased to exist".
There is a real theory out there that index funds are making companies less cutthroat and competitive, but there's pretty limited evidence to support the theory. And if you can identify any companies with a notably high amount of fat to cut, there's a lot of money to be made working for an activist investor trying to get those companies to fire all their bullshit workers.
If you can't identify such companies, you may just be a bullshitter yourself though.
Plenty of white collar employers have had net reductions too. Most of the dotcom era companies net reduced all the way to zero.
There are tons of bullshit jobs... in the "essential and key sectors".
Asking people how they feel about their job on Jan 5th right after they come back from vacation in the darkest days of the winter is guaranteed to yield the worse possible response.
Also, the fact that he literally had to threaten people to force the publication of his "manifesto" says it all to me. [0]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-kaczyn...