The article mentions but doesn't link to Graeber's book on Bullshit Jobs. I've heard it referenced enough times now to put it on my to-read list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
"The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
[...]
*duct tapers*, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, *e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code*, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;"
Part of what makes it so terrible is that Bullshit Jobs is an interesting premise. The fact that some percentage of people think that their jobs don't need to exist is an interesting observation that merits deeper study. If anyone ever does that study and writes a book about it I would love to read it but Graeber's book is not that.
Rather his book discusses the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs and then diverges into an incoherent political rant.
I saw Sam Harris on the Lex Friedman podcast talking about debating 9/11 conspiracy theorists he said:
> I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play Whac-A-Mole sufficiently well, so as to convince anyone of anything...
> ...it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to because they don't connect in a coherent way...
> ...I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled for that day...
> ...how long would it take to track that down, right? Did it happen, was it supposed to run that day, was there a completely mundane reason it would happen? And unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed ... He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird?
That's what reading this book is like.
There is no central thesis just a list of incoherent complaints.
In his other works he proposes a Universal Basic Income, and some have read his book as an argument for that. But not only does he not directly argue for it in the book, even if he did his writings much like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are not set up in a way that could even lead to a logical point because they're just disjoint misrepresentations he deliberately misinterprets to make them seem like they don't make sense.
It is a mentally exhausting read.