A Review of Graeber's Essay on “Bullshit Jobs” (2013)
economist.com
economist.com
My conclusion is that it is the complexity. It is that people don't understand why they do something - this makes their work meaningless for them. And accidentally there is a big chance that their job is useless in an objective way - it is just that the people that direct them also don't understand the system fully.
And the complexity grows in many ways. One is that our lives are much more regulated than they used to be - we have more laws about everything. In one way it makes lives more fair - but the complexity from the entangling of different laws grows quickly. Another is that we actually have less cultural regulations. For example - take noise from parties, in the past it was that there were just some dates when everyone was partying - because everyone had the same religion etc.
By they way - in 'User Innovation' there is this notion of 'advanced analog field' https://books.google.pl/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&pg=PA134&lpg=P... - an area where there is a much stronger need for something then anywhere else. It is often that the innovation happens in that 'advanced analog field' and later it is adopted in all other areas. Like abs was invented first for airplane breaks - but later it was adopted by the car industry. I think that maybe we should treat software development as a kind of 'advanced analogue field' for law.
What's so laughably silly about it?
""" "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s)."
I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy? How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring, and if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions? """
What do you think the American Enterprise Institute is for? Cato? Chambers of Commerce? The multitude of other business umbrella lobby groups? What did you think they did other than come together to form a united front to represent their interests (conspire)?
>I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy?
I don't see why one would conclude that at all.
>How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring
Via a labor market which they try to mold using government policy to fit their interests.
>if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions
Periodic cullings help keep the rest of the employees suitably terrorized.
We're talking about a conspiracy to hire people for no other reason than to keep them busy so they don't revolt. This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a company owner, gain by adhering to this conspiracy? What I lose is obvious: huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish nothing. This conspiracy does not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge artificial externality with no apparent free-riding.
No, we're talking about hiring people for this reason, among others.
>This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a company owner, gain by adhering to this conspiracy?
You mean a share holder? Nothing. You seem to be laughably under the impression that the company is run for your personal benefit. It isn't.
>What I lose is obvious: huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish nothing.
You explain why companies hire based upon headcount instead of pure cost. It doesn't make intrinsic sense, but that's how it happens.
>This conspiracy does not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge artificial externality with no apparent free-riding.
Congratulations, you just assumed away the principal-agent dilemma.
Now it's the opposite. Anyone in the west can easily be idle and afford an OK standard of living. It's having a "professional" job that marks you as elite, because there aren't nearly enough such jobs for those who are capable.
So you get large numbers of people hustling to land and hold various sorts of dumb office jobs. Mostly because the job is a coveted status marker.
How?
Sorry for the off-topic, but is it normal to work from 9am to 5pm? Does this mean people have no lunch time, or they work "only" 7 hours?
it's shorthand for a tedious job.
I bit the bullet and googled it, and found out that people were just paid for lunch, or they weren't paid (37.5 hours a week, half hour lunch).
Consider the following thought experiment: two workers in skilled jobs, let's say they're dentists. Dentist A works 5 days a week and the occasional weekend, like most people do now. Dentist B figures she can get by working 1 or 2 days a week and spend the rest of her time playing roller hockey and fishing, and on a dentist's pay, she can.
Now fast forward a year, dentist A has done 5x the dentistry of B, has encountered 5x as many tricky situations and dealt with them, has kept her equipment in tip-top shape because it's being used every day, has had the time to bounce ideas off other dentists in the practice and so on. A is just after 1 year, a much more experienced and better dentist than B. So who do you go to, when you need some work done? The one who has devoted her life to dentistry and does it every day, or the one who sort of does it on the side when she can be bothered? Pretty soon B won't have any work at all - even from people who like the idea of working a 2 day week!
So these ideas about falling work weeks are nice in theory, but they don't take into account human nature and how real people think.
I don't necessarily want a cashier or a postman who has devoted his entire life to their career. Just 1-2 days a week is more than enough to be a very proficient cashier or postman.
One can even go the other way and say that I don't want a prostitute or truck loader that has devoted their entire life to their profession, for the obvious reason of physical degredation.
I'm a programmer, which I consider a pretty high skilled job, and I'm losing my fucking time in my day job. Granted, I need to practice the craft to keep up. But there is a point where I should stop and just learn. I would learn much faster if I could just use 20% of my work time learning. And no, I can't do it on the weekends. This would be overwork, and I have a life.
Doctors are quite special: they deal with several cases a day. They encounter various situations, and their personal experience is by itself statistically significant. To them, more work will mean more data, and better trained instincts.
Programmers often work on less than 1 project a year. At that scale, personal experience is mere anecdotal evidence. More work will just mean some more anecdotal evidence. That's not nearly enough data to feed our instinct. Simply put, working full time is a suboptimal way to learn.
Now that I think of it, I bet even doctors would benefit from stepping back, and do some directed learning instead of just treating patients.
A professional programmer who programs every day is going to spend half an hour every morning getting back into the zone. The same guy working 1 or 2 days a week is going to spend half that time just getting back up to speed on what the other programmers have been doing the other 3 or 4 days he's been away. It just doesn't scale. The 5 day guy is not going to be 5x as productive, but 10-20x.
There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. 100 hours doesn't work; my conjecture is that neither does 10.
They say yes, you say no. I see no reason to believe your version over theirs. (no, "everyone does it" is neither a proof, nor a reason, it is "that's the way we did it yesterday, that's the way we will do it in the future, why should we change?", the motto of almost every doomed enterprise)
There's a problem with that reasoning, because that number exists only because of Judeo-Christian traditions about the days that begin and end a week, the fact that 8 is a third of 24, the fact that the US had an active labor movement in the early 20th century, and the fact that US-style capitalism has been very influential around the world (largely for military reasons.)
Basing a chain of reasoning on the premiss that the status quo is the result of careful calibration over time is abandoning reason at the outset.
100 hours worked just fine, for owners.
A few questions about your larger assertion:
1) Could a 2-day a week dentist have a longer career than a 4-day dentist, ultimately leading to a higher saturation of experienced dentists?
2) Do you think that between a 2-day and a 4-day dentist of equivalent experience that one would perform better on an average workday than the other, or would they be equally affected by fatigue?
3) Do you agree that time for reflection and study are a requirement for skill-building, and do you think that there's any evidence pointing to an ideal ratio of reflection to practice that wouldn't advantage the 2-day dentist over the 4-day one?
The naturalistic fallacy.
Only if you're cynic to the core. If you follow that argument through (many do), then you would be okay with engaging in highly unethical (yet legal) behaviour.
> the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance.
If the criterion for "balance" is actually squeezing the most of your employees. Which works wonderfully mid term (1-2 years), but I wouldn't be so sure about long term (10-20 years), where time devoted to directed learning could compound to a significant a difference.
More importantly, though, if maximising your employer's benefits is your goal in life, something must be deeply wrong with you.
Taken to its extreme form that implies that only the best dentist in the world has any work. But even finding a dentist that is accepting new customers, especially if one is seeking an NHS dentist, can be quite difficult. I don't see anyone turning their noses up at a dentist because that dentist happens to only work two days a week.
I am also unsure that extra experience would allow the dentist to differentiate themselves that far in quality. It is not uncommon, if you interview a lot of people in some capacity, to meet a large number of people who seem to have done, rather than the 5 or 10 years work on their CV, one year 5 or 10 times – in terms of the experience that they have garnered and the things they've achieved. Other people have done far less work in their lives, but have crammed far more into it, or have achieved far better results. Sometimes that's because of their personality – how readily they put themselves forwards for things, other times it's because of the nature of their employment. If dentist B is of the latter type, and dentist A is of the former type, then I would choose dentist B.
Quite aside from the question of why a dentist would publish how many days a week they worked. If my dentist worked 2 days a week, chances are I wouldn't know.
A lot of this boils down to a very old question: why do we operate this machine we call the economy? Do we do it for our own interest, or is it an end in itself that uses us? What are we working for here? It's a question that if followed goes beyond economics and gets quite metaphysical.
There are whole bullshit departments, bullshit companies, and yes, even bullshit industries.
So you only read the first half of the first quote? Reading the entire paragraph makes it clear that it's not referring to dentists:
> technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people [...] spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
Speaking of real people in the real world, Denmark reduced its workweek from 40 to 37 hours, and this did not produce any decline in medical outcomes. I suspect reducing to 35 or 33 or 30 would also have no such effect.
In the late Gilded Age, the prevailing attitude was that poverty was a sort of bitter "moral medicine" that punished laziness and sin. So no one stepped in. But poverty turned out to be a cancer that spreads until it takes down a whole society. When people are economically disenfranchised and there is no economic reward in helping them, businesses tied to their fortunes also fail. The disease spreads. Rural poverty in 1925 led to corporate and bank failures circa 1928 and a full-blown Great Depression by 1931.
We can look at farm subsidies in 2015 and say that they're unnecessary and antiquated and we're right. (Worse yet, they seem to benefit corporate food producers more than individual farmers or sustainable agricultural practices.) However, the reason why those controls exist is because we learned, very painfully, about what can happen when food prices collapse. That's why those protections exist, even if they're ridiculous (leading to the unhealthy overuse of high-fructose corn syrup, for example) in 2015.
Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia took an altogether different route: fascism, and a communism that was the same thing in left-wing clothing. Rather than face the chaotic economic meltdowns that were occurring in freer countries, they instituted authoritarian societies that managed to distract the populace from economic struggles and class conflict by replacing those with narratives of nationalistic and racial conflict. It was evil, and disgusting, and self-serving on the part of the elite (because it allowed them to rape the country while blaming external agents or disliked ethnic groups) but, at least subjectively, it took the edge off of the Great Depression for the common people. (One could alternatively argue that the starvation and misery were just externalized. The Ukrainian Holodomor was far worse than the North American Great Depression.) In the end, it led to things far worse, as we (quite sadly) know.
What happened to agricultural commodities in the 1920s is happening to almost all human labor in the 2010s. The good news is that we don't seem to be taking quite the same path as in the 1920s: there are more social and economic controls, and the specifically racial or nationalistic impulse of the fascist movement is unlikely to re-emerge in respected institutions. This is a crisis, but it's a different kind. It's more widespread, but less severe (unless we're only in the early stages). We're nowhere near the Great Depression or fascism, and as of 2015, society (at least, in the U.S.) seems to be on the mend. We are better off than we were 10 years ago-- in the nightmare of the peak Bush years of 2001-2006, when fascism really seemed around the corner-- although we haven't made as much ground as we might like.
"Bullshit jobs" exist because people are protecting themselves from creeping de-necessitation. In the fight to stay employable, the more politically savvy are playing games to create the appearance of high output and performance, and the less savvy are often caught up in those games without knowing it. This drives the efficiency of rendered work down-- a sort of organic self-limiting element on increasing efficiency and rapid change-- but makes it almost impossible to tell who can be unemployed harmlessly and who is actually essential. What Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" are the innately political jobs. We don't have many entrepreneurs or programmers anymore, but we have a lot of private sector politicians who call themselves such.
One thing that you see amid destabilization, as well, is the feudal impulse. The European nobles are the descendants of the warlike people who provided protection as the Roman Empire disintegrated in the 3rd-8th centuries. Similarly, people cling to those (either people or institutions) who can provide protection from market chaos. Universities earn $200,000 per head on the promise of a credential that is supposed to insulate a person from here-and-there wage fluctuations (because the liberal arts education makes you generally employable as a leader) even though they haven't really been delivering that protection. The job of corporate management, these days, has more to do with providing protection from vision-less, cost-cutting (read: cost-externalizing) executive assholes than building a team or supporting subordinates' careers. Even in the VC-funded world, we see a frank re-emergence of feudalism, with investors as manorial lords and founders as vassals, and the same mythology around these 25-year-old, white male "entrepreneurs" as existed around 21-year-old white men (i.e. knights) with armor and battle axes, 1000 years ago.
Bullshit jobs exist because staying employed, in complex organizations, often has more to do with extending and enjoying political protection than the work itself. This keeps people on a monthly salary and prevents things from going from "stupid, tedious and annoying" to "I'm completely fucked if I don't find work in 3 months".
I wish I had a solution, and I don't. The sad thing that one learns in studying the 1920s-50s is that humans tend only to cut away the bullshit in a perceived existential crisis, and (this is most important) one that threatens the elite as much as (or more than) the rest. In war, humans can advance and innovate. R&D spending goes up, full employment becomes the norm, and petty differences are put aside. Sadly, though, no one has found anything but violent conflict that has that effect. In peace, the elite (such as our corporate elite) wages a slow-burning and subtle class war to keep itself in place at any cost, and this keeps them comfortable until mounting civil dysfunction (usually in multiple nations at once, allowing violent conflict) reaches a flash point and sets something off that threatens to take down absolutely everyone. And then (and often only then) do the private-sector social climbers go into hibernation and does the demand for real (non-bullshit) work reach a level that can involve everyone.