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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.
Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.
Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
335 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2018
5,538 people are currently reading
87.9k people want to read
About the author
David Graeber
85 books4,723 followersDavid Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist.
On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he held the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.
Prior to that position, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.
Graeber had a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. He was an core participant in the Occupy Movement.
He passed away in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he held the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.
Prior to that position, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.
Graeber had a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. He was an core participant in the Occupy Movement.
He passed away in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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July 8, 2018
You need to get hold of this book. I’ve been recommending it to just about everyone I know.
The author was asked by a new journal / magazine if he would write an article that would be a bit controversial and so he wrote one about how so many people today work in bullshit jobs – and then the journal’s website crashed as a million people went about downloading the article.
I was a bit worried when I started this book because I really don’t like shaming people for the work they do. You know, it’s bad enough if you have to do a shit job that no one respects, but to then have to put up with being made to feel like scum because of it too, that just seems pointlessly cruel. Anyway, I’ve worked in lots of crap jobs in my life, and so I never really think that one’s worth is summed up by one’s occupation.
But that is certainly not what this book is about. The author of this isn’t really someone who has gone through a list of all possible occupations and then put a brown pencil mark beside the ones he has decided are bullshit. In fact, he hasn’t really decided so much which jobs are bullshit and which are not – although he does give a definition early on in this of what he means by bullshit jobs. Rather, he asks the people doing jobs if they think their jobs are bullshit. Basically, if your job disappeared tomorrow would the world be a better or a worse place? Or, in fact, would anyone even notice it was gone? When people are asked more or less this question the terrifying answer is that about 40% of them say that if their job disappeared tomorrow, no one in the world would notice it had gone. Worse, some people even felt that the world would actually be a better place if their job disappeared.
The author points out that one of the worst of all possible tortures you can inflict on a person is to get them to do something they know to be utterly pointless. We are meaning making creatures, we can make meaning out of abstract paintings, tealeaves, the bumps on people’s heads, reality TV shows, for god’s sake, it is actually hard to find things that we can’t put meanings onto. And these are the jobs that we earn our livings from. If we can’t spin a story to make it sound like we are doing something a bit worthwhile in those – especially when our livelihoods depend on it, that’s pretty bloody hopeless. In fact, this is the inverse situation of that Upton Sinclair quote: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ Surely, if your salary depends on you believing your job is worthwhile, the planets have aligned and the truth is self-evident. Except, something like 40% of people are happy to say that their job is entirely crap, worthless, and even contributes nothing meaningful to the sum of human happiness.
I’ve no idea how long you need to think about that before the full horror of the situation becomes apparent – but if you are not immediately horrified by that 40% figure you should probably stop reading now for a while until it does sink in.
Even if, for some reason, this almost half of the working population was wrong, and their jobs somehow did have a meaning, and that meaning was for some reason completely obscure to the person doing it, that would still be dystopian. As the author says, such a situation wold privide a horribly disfiguring scar across the psyche of society.
I’ve worked in many, many jobs – and some of those jobs have involved me in work that has been pretty close to being entirely meaningless. In one job, and this was one I quite liked, I was an archivist where a very large part of my life involved serialising records (mostly administrative dross from decades before) that had been boxed and stuck in various large storerooms and basically forgotten about. Sometimes this was quite fun – trying to work out what possible purpose these documents might have had in the 1950s or whenever. Mostly, however, it was shite – my manager did no serialisation of records at all for most of the time I worked for him, and then one day he decided to give it a go. I remember him saying to me that he couldn’t believe I could put up with the sheer boredom of the task. But my job immediately prior to this had been working in a post office on a counter selling stamps and getting yelled at by customers when the posties didn’t deliver their parcels on time. It also involved me getting paid about half what I was earning as an archivist while also not being abused by customers all day long. I found I could cope with the boredom and meaninglessness of the job very well indeed while I finished my undergrad degree and started a family. I knew there were much worse ways to make a living, because I’d tried a couple of them already.
A large part of the point of this book is to explain that this is not the way the world is supposed to work. Capitalism is meant to produce hyper-efficiency. Capitalism is meant to work by reducing labour to the lowest possible cost and then to remove workers entirely from the production process. It is certainly not meant to work by having nearly half of all job roles involved in work that doesn’t need to be done and wouldn’t be missed if it wasn’t.
What is interesting is that he refers back to Keynes who, in the 1930s predicted that in a generation or two people would need to get used to the idea of technological unemployment – that is, that technology was progressing so fast that soon a large proportion of the population would simply not be needed to do work, and so society would need to find ways to meaningfully occupy these people’s time out side of employment. Now, society has a history of dealing with such solutions – school, for instance, was largely created because there was no longer an economic need for children to work on farms and having lots of young people unsupervised and wandering around the streets was decided to be a rather bad idea. Much better to have them in a single room supervised by someone ‘in loco parentis’ – we could even call a ‘teacher’ if need be. Today universities have an increasing role pretty similar to that of these early primary school teachers as the age when an economic need for young people to work has risen from about 14 to 24 (and beyond).
The point being that Keynes is generally presented as having been completely wrong about the why capitalism was about to turn out – shorter working weeks, fewer people working – whereas, given the large proportion of people working in bullshit jobs, he may in fact have been completely right, except rather than people being given a life of leisure, they have been given a kind of living hell, totally meaningless work and more of it than you can even do – or so little that your main job is pretending to be busy when, in fact, you have stuff all to do.
This is a deeply disturbing book – but no less worth reading for that. The writer is painfully clear, logical and depressingly to the point. We have created so many empty, meaningless, soul destroying jobs, not because we need them to be done, but because our moral compass says that if you do not work you should not eat. And so this twisted morality in an age of abundance means almost everyone now has to play the game of appearing to work, even if this work is increasingly meaningless. The problem is that it serves the system if people work, and people benefit from it since they are paid for this work, often in inverse proportion to the usefulness of the work they perform, and also we punish those who don’t work with humiliation and poverty. So, work continues to be seen as a good, even while it becomes increasingly a horrible, meaningless drudge.
Oh, I don’t want to leave you feeling this is an awful read, it is anything but – although, clearly on many levels it pretty well has to be pretty awful too. This is beautifully written and often quite funny. But ultimately, we really do need to do something about this whole job thing. We are working more and more for less and less reason – we have the technology to give virtually everyone on the planet a meaningful and worthwhile life, and one where they could afford to explore the human condition in ways that world be the definition of ‘meaningful’. And yet we seem to be focused on achieving the exact opposite. I don’t know how this can change, but it definitely needs to.
He ends by discussing a universal basic income. I can’t get over how frequently I’m hearing about this lately.
The author was asked by a new journal / magazine if he would write an article that would be a bit controversial and so he wrote one about how so many people today work in bullshit jobs – and then the journal’s website crashed as a million people went about downloading the article.
I was a bit worried when I started this book because I really don’t like shaming people for the work they do. You know, it’s bad enough if you have to do a shit job that no one respects, but to then have to put up with being made to feel like scum because of it too, that just seems pointlessly cruel. Anyway, I’ve worked in lots of crap jobs in my life, and so I never really think that one’s worth is summed up by one’s occupation.
But that is certainly not what this book is about. The author of this isn’t really someone who has gone through a list of all possible occupations and then put a brown pencil mark beside the ones he has decided are bullshit. In fact, he hasn’t really decided so much which jobs are bullshit and which are not – although he does give a definition early on in this of what he means by bullshit jobs. Rather, he asks the people doing jobs if they think their jobs are bullshit. Basically, if your job disappeared tomorrow would the world be a better or a worse place? Or, in fact, would anyone even notice it was gone? When people are asked more or less this question the terrifying answer is that about 40% of them say that if their job disappeared tomorrow, no one in the world would notice it had gone. Worse, some people even felt that the world would actually be a better place if their job disappeared.
The author points out that one of the worst of all possible tortures you can inflict on a person is to get them to do something they know to be utterly pointless. We are meaning making creatures, we can make meaning out of abstract paintings, tealeaves, the bumps on people’s heads, reality TV shows, for god’s sake, it is actually hard to find things that we can’t put meanings onto. And these are the jobs that we earn our livings from. If we can’t spin a story to make it sound like we are doing something a bit worthwhile in those – especially when our livelihoods depend on it, that’s pretty bloody hopeless. In fact, this is the inverse situation of that Upton Sinclair quote: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ Surely, if your salary depends on you believing your job is worthwhile, the planets have aligned and the truth is self-evident. Except, something like 40% of people are happy to say that their job is entirely crap, worthless, and even contributes nothing meaningful to the sum of human happiness.
I’ve no idea how long you need to think about that before the full horror of the situation becomes apparent – but if you are not immediately horrified by that 40% figure you should probably stop reading now for a while until it does sink in.
Even if, for some reason, this almost half of the working population was wrong, and their jobs somehow did have a meaning, and that meaning was for some reason completely obscure to the person doing it, that would still be dystopian. As the author says, such a situation wold privide a horribly disfiguring scar across the psyche of society.
I’ve worked in many, many jobs – and some of those jobs have involved me in work that has been pretty close to being entirely meaningless. In one job, and this was one I quite liked, I was an archivist where a very large part of my life involved serialising records (mostly administrative dross from decades before) that had been boxed and stuck in various large storerooms and basically forgotten about. Sometimes this was quite fun – trying to work out what possible purpose these documents might have had in the 1950s or whenever. Mostly, however, it was shite – my manager did no serialisation of records at all for most of the time I worked for him, and then one day he decided to give it a go. I remember him saying to me that he couldn’t believe I could put up with the sheer boredom of the task. But my job immediately prior to this had been working in a post office on a counter selling stamps and getting yelled at by customers when the posties didn’t deliver their parcels on time. It also involved me getting paid about half what I was earning as an archivist while also not being abused by customers all day long. I found I could cope with the boredom and meaninglessness of the job very well indeed while I finished my undergrad degree and started a family. I knew there were much worse ways to make a living, because I’d tried a couple of them already.
A large part of the point of this book is to explain that this is not the way the world is supposed to work. Capitalism is meant to produce hyper-efficiency. Capitalism is meant to work by reducing labour to the lowest possible cost and then to remove workers entirely from the production process. It is certainly not meant to work by having nearly half of all job roles involved in work that doesn’t need to be done and wouldn’t be missed if it wasn’t.
What is interesting is that he refers back to Keynes who, in the 1930s predicted that in a generation or two people would need to get used to the idea of technological unemployment – that is, that technology was progressing so fast that soon a large proportion of the population would simply not be needed to do work, and so society would need to find ways to meaningfully occupy these people’s time out side of employment. Now, society has a history of dealing with such solutions – school, for instance, was largely created because there was no longer an economic need for children to work on farms and having lots of young people unsupervised and wandering around the streets was decided to be a rather bad idea. Much better to have them in a single room supervised by someone ‘in loco parentis’ – we could even call a ‘teacher’ if need be. Today universities have an increasing role pretty similar to that of these early primary school teachers as the age when an economic need for young people to work has risen from about 14 to 24 (and beyond).
The point being that Keynes is generally presented as having been completely wrong about the why capitalism was about to turn out – shorter working weeks, fewer people working – whereas, given the large proportion of people working in bullshit jobs, he may in fact have been completely right, except rather than people being given a life of leisure, they have been given a kind of living hell, totally meaningless work and more of it than you can even do – or so little that your main job is pretending to be busy when, in fact, you have stuff all to do.
This is a deeply disturbing book – but no less worth reading for that. The writer is painfully clear, logical and depressingly to the point. We have created so many empty, meaningless, soul destroying jobs, not because we need them to be done, but because our moral compass says that if you do not work you should not eat. And so this twisted morality in an age of abundance means almost everyone now has to play the game of appearing to work, even if this work is increasingly meaningless. The problem is that it serves the system if people work, and people benefit from it since they are paid for this work, often in inverse proportion to the usefulness of the work they perform, and also we punish those who don’t work with humiliation and poverty. So, work continues to be seen as a good, even while it becomes increasingly a horrible, meaningless drudge.
Oh, I don’t want to leave you feeling this is an awful read, it is anything but – although, clearly on many levels it pretty well has to be pretty awful too. This is beautifully written and often quite funny. But ultimately, we really do need to do something about this whole job thing. We are working more and more for less and less reason – we have the technology to give virtually everyone on the planet a meaningful and worthwhile life, and one where they could afford to explore the human condition in ways that world be the definition of ‘meaningful’. And yet we seem to be focused on achieving the exact opposite. I don’t know how this can change, but it definitely needs to.
He ends by discussing a universal basic income. I can’t get over how frequently I’m hearing about this lately.
October 13, 2023
I was expecting something along the pop-sociology lines of Malcolm Gladwell, and what I got was something far more profound. I wandered my way through affirmation, skepticism, analysis, comprehension, understanding and depression, so take that as a recommendation if you like. I don’t think I have the tools to critique it appropriately, but much of what Graber writes resonates.
The book originates from an essay Graber wrote in 2013, “based on a hunch” about the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, or, more specifically, the type of jobs where people don’t do much of anything. He approaches the topic with the mentality of a cultural anthropologist, which is to say, someone who deconstructs a group’s beliefs, social systems, and values in order to understand their meaning. The starting point for a cultural anthropologist, as learned from Professor Littleton, is the ethnography, where you basically ask people about whatever it is you want to know, and then fit it in a larger framework where you compare it with people in different demographics or societies, thus hopefully shedding some sort of light upon the system (finally coming to the conclusion that this is all constructed bullshit, but I may be mixing my French existentialism in there).
Once his essay hit the web, it became a sensation, and per his report, he had hundreds of people contacting him with their own ‘bullshit job’ experience. He then extracted these stories to create this book. Realize, then, that this is what the more physical sciences would consider a self-selecting, biased analysis. As Graber himself points out, he has a suspicion that corporate lawyers and VPs are also bullshit jobs, but they weren’t the ones writing in to tell him so. But at least it’s a starting point, right?
A key point is the definition of such jobs: “A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as a part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obligated to pretend that this is not the case.” (This is, of course, to be differentiated from shit jobs, which are horrible and/or low-paid but necessary). Such jobs can be further defined: “I found most useful to break down the types of bullshit jobs into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box checkers, and taskmaskers.” Flunkies are human decorations, existing to reflect the significance of their bosses/organizations, and have clear parallels to feudal societies. Goons enforce or aggressively manage company image (think soldiers, lobbists, PR specialists, corporate lawyers); duct tapers fix what’s broken, mostly because the system doesn’t want to fix or rebuild more efficiently; box checkers ensure companies are meeting a requirement that someone decided should exist (but the companies will then ignore); and taskmasters, who either make up bullshit for others to do, or assign tasks to others. (Apparently there was a suggestion for ‘imaginary friends,’ which are the jobs that are supposed to make employees into a ‘friend/family’ group, but it didn’t make the cut. Personally, I’d totally target that category if I was in an anthropology class these days).
Then he starts to connect it to social media, which Graber thinks is perfect for pretending one is ‘working’ but isn’t, as a diversion that’s highly interruptible should one need to spring into action for a minute or two. It's an interesting link, and helps explain the meteoric risk in sound-bite communication. He doesn’t linger there long, though, because his real points are two-fold: what does it say about a capitalist society that these jobs are allowed to exist (because in the perfect capitalism model, all inefficiencies would be stripped away), and what does it do to the person working that job?
"According to classical economic theory…The model human being that lives behind every prediction made by the discipline—is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits… Everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort.
“Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists’ model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.”
What’s even more interesting is that a lot of these 'bullshit' jobs belong to the ‘service sector,’ the field of employment that supposedly is showing growth–although he points out, if you analyze the ‘service’ job by subcategory (or remove a fourth category proposed in 1992, the FIRE-finance, insurance, real estate), the ‘service’ part is rather flat (how many laundrymats and lattes do we need?), with growth mostly in information/tech and FIRE jobs. He builds on this idea of what economy, and wonders why it is that we persist in the belief that such jobs are necessary and why we must work 40 hours a week at them, and contrasts it with historical assumptions about work as well as human biology (I'd probably challenge his idea that humans tend to sprint-rest with work and push more towards the 'endurance' category). Unfortunately, he veers away from the economics discussion for a bit to delve further into the damage it does to the human psyche.
“Most people in the world today… are now taught to see their work as their principle way of having an impact on the world, and the fact that they are paid to do it is proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect. Ask someone ‘what do you do,’ and they will assume you mean ‘for a living.’” ‘Work’ is about the impact one makes on the world and identity, so work that lacks meaning creates a kind of ‘social suffering.’ He also points out the mental trauma of having a job that appears like it should be purposeful, but could actually be perceived as harmful (here he cites stories from a therapist in a jobs program and a ‘box-checker’ in a homeless shelter program).
He’s not wrong about asking about jobs: in my efforts to start a non-illness, non-child related conversations with my patients, I often would ask, ‘what kind of work do you do?’ I had thought about that carefully, knowing that there’s often a class issue, but that it played to having a life outside of hospitalization without being privacy-invasive. That’s what I mean by bias: Graber can make a generalization about what people value when asked what they do, but has he accounted for what is considered appropriate conversations in the public and personal discourse? I mean, of course you ask about work. What else are you going to ask that doesn’t sound invasive. (I asked a couple people if they lived/grew up around the hospital, and I felt like they thought I was casing their home for burglary). At any rate, what he’s saying makes sense, but that’s hardly the ruler we want to use, is it?
I really slowed down in the section on “Why are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating,” because it was depressing. At the end of the day, many of our institutions are money-extractors/concentrators, designed not to be efficient, but to squeeze money out of a system. “The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible. Of course, this is basically what the entire FIRE sector does: it creates money (by making loans) and then moves it around in often extremely complicated ways, extracting another small cut with every transaction.” I was so out of my wheelhouse, I felt like I couldn’t argue with his conclusions, and at every point, they become more devastating: At p.157, Graber quotes Obama: “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs, people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places.” That, my friends, killed me, because it shows how truly revolutionary we would need to become as a society to change things, and how very little chance there is of that actually happening.
As a final, parting gift to my idealism, Graber looks at how culturally speaking, the intellectual elite are an isolated in-group as well. Try this: “Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which their children might become rich, but not possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite.” Unfortunately, Graber, like some of the best deconstructionists, doesn’t have a lot of hope to offer, but I do appreciate his unflinching look at where we stand. I think mentioning Universal Basic Income is about as close as he gets.
After reading so many fuzzy science pop-psych books, I appreciate his willingness to walk the reader through the steps of his logic. Sure, there’s a lot of anecdotal stories, but that’s the essence of what anthropologists do, is collate the stories and then pick out the common threads of meaning, and he does bolster them with other studies when he can. There’s a long bibliography as well as an extensive collection of notes. I found myself with a bookmark in the note section so that it was easier to flip back and forth as the ‘Notes’ were further explanations or asides, not merely references.
There’s more, of course; there’s always more. Try Wick and Trevor's excellent reviews for more–and better–insights.
Also, October 2023 update from Psyche Magazine discussing the 'bullshit jobs' theory along with newer studies: https://psyche.co/ideas/why-do-so-man...
The book originates from an essay Graber wrote in 2013, “based on a hunch” about the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, or, more specifically, the type of jobs where people don’t do much of anything. He approaches the topic with the mentality of a cultural anthropologist, which is to say, someone who deconstructs a group’s beliefs, social systems, and values in order to understand their meaning. The starting point for a cultural anthropologist, as learned from Professor Littleton, is the ethnography, where you basically ask people about whatever it is you want to know, and then fit it in a larger framework where you compare it with people in different demographics or societies, thus hopefully shedding some sort of light upon the system (finally coming to the conclusion that this is all constructed bullshit, but I may be mixing my French existentialism in there).
Once his essay hit the web, it became a sensation, and per his report, he had hundreds of people contacting him with their own ‘bullshit job’ experience. He then extracted these stories to create this book. Realize, then, that this is what the more physical sciences would consider a self-selecting, biased analysis. As Graber himself points out, he has a suspicion that corporate lawyers and VPs are also bullshit jobs, but they weren’t the ones writing in to tell him so. But at least it’s a starting point, right?
A key point is the definition of such jobs: “A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as a part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obligated to pretend that this is not the case.” (This is, of course, to be differentiated from shit jobs, which are horrible and/or low-paid but necessary). Such jobs can be further defined: “I found most useful to break down the types of bullshit jobs into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box checkers, and taskmaskers.” Flunkies are human decorations, existing to reflect the significance of their bosses/organizations, and have clear parallels to feudal societies. Goons enforce or aggressively manage company image (think soldiers, lobbists, PR specialists, corporate lawyers); duct tapers fix what’s broken, mostly because the system doesn’t want to fix or rebuild more efficiently; box checkers ensure companies are meeting a requirement that someone decided should exist (but the companies will then ignore); and taskmasters, who either make up bullshit for others to do, or assign tasks to others. (Apparently there was a suggestion for ‘imaginary friends,’ which are the jobs that are supposed to make employees into a ‘friend/family’ group, but it didn’t make the cut. Personally, I’d totally target that category if I was in an anthropology class these days).
Then he starts to connect it to social media, which Graber thinks is perfect for pretending one is ‘working’ but isn’t, as a diversion that’s highly interruptible should one need to spring into action for a minute or two. It's an interesting link, and helps explain the meteoric risk in sound-bite communication. He doesn’t linger there long, though, because his real points are two-fold: what does it say about a capitalist society that these jobs are allowed to exist (because in the perfect capitalism model, all inefficiencies would be stripped away), and what does it do to the person working that job?
"According to classical economic theory…The model human being that lives behind every prediction made by the discipline—is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits… Everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort.
“Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists’ model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.”
What’s even more interesting is that a lot of these 'bullshit' jobs belong to the ‘service sector,’ the field of employment that supposedly is showing growth–although he points out, if you analyze the ‘service’ job by subcategory (or remove a fourth category proposed in 1992, the FIRE-finance, insurance, real estate), the ‘service’ part is rather flat (how many laundrymats and lattes do we need?), with growth mostly in information/tech and FIRE jobs. He builds on this idea of what economy, and wonders why it is that we persist in the belief that such jobs are necessary and why we must work 40 hours a week at them, and contrasts it with historical assumptions about work as well as human biology (I'd probably challenge his idea that humans tend to sprint-rest with work and push more towards the 'endurance' category). Unfortunately, he veers away from the economics discussion for a bit to delve further into the damage it does to the human psyche.
“Most people in the world today… are now taught to see their work as their principle way of having an impact on the world, and the fact that they are paid to do it is proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect. Ask someone ‘what do you do,’ and they will assume you mean ‘for a living.’” ‘Work’ is about the impact one makes on the world and identity, so work that lacks meaning creates a kind of ‘social suffering.’ He also points out the mental trauma of having a job that appears like it should be purposeful, but could actually be perceived as harmful (here he cites stories from a therapist in a jobs program and a ‘box-checker’ in a homeless shelter program).
He’s not wrong about asking about jobs: in my efforts to start a non-illness, non-child related conversations with my patients, I often would ask, ‘what kind of work do you do?’ I had thought about that carefully, knowing that there’s often a class issue, but that it played to having a life outside of hospitalization without being privacy-invasive. That’s what I mean by bias: Graber can make a generalization about what people value when asked what they do, but has he accounted for what is considered appropriate conversations in the public and personal discourse? I mean, of course you ask about work. What else are you going to ask that doesn’t sound invasive. (I asked a couple people if they lived/grew up around the hospital, and I felt like they thought I was casing their home for burglary). At any rate, what he’s saying makes sense, but that’s hardly the ruler we want to use, is it?
I really slowed down in the section on “Why are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating,” because it was depressing. At the end of the day, many of our institutions are money-extractors/concentrators, designed not to be efficient, but to squeeze money out of a system. “The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible. Of course, this is basically what the entire FIRE sector does: it creates money (by making loans) and then moves it around in often extremely complicated ways, extracting another small cut with every transaction.” I was so out of my wheelhouse, I felt like I couldn’t argue with his conclusions, and at every point, they become more devastating: At p.157, Graber quotes Obama: “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs, people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places.” That, my friends, killed me, because it shows how truly revolutionary we would need to become as a society to change things, and how very little chance there is of that actually happening.
As a final, parting gift to my idealism, Graber looks at how culturally speaking, the intellectual elite are an isolated in-group as well. Try this: “Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which their children might become rich, but not possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite.” Unfortunately, Graber, like some of the best deconstructionists, doesn’t have a lot of hope to offer, but I do appreciate his unflinching look at where we stand. I think mentioning Universal Basic Income is about as close as he gets.
After reading so many fuzzy science pop-psych books, I appreciate his willingness to walk the reader through the steps of his logic. Sure, there’s a lot of anecdotal stories, but that’s the essence of what anthropologists do, is collate the stories and then pick out the common threads of meaning, and he does bolster them with other studies when he can. There’s a long bibliography as well as an extensive collection of notes. I found myself with a bookmark in the note section so that it was easier to flip back and forth as the ‘Notes’ were further explanations or asides, not merely references.
There’s more, of course; there’s always more. Try Wick and Trevor's excellent reviews for more–and better–insights.
Also, October 2023 update from Psyche Magazine discussing the 'bullshit jobs' theory along with newer studies: https://psyche.co/ideas/why-do-so-man...
May 10, 2020
There are 2 huge categories of bullshit jobs, the once we already know about, representative jobs, bureaucrats, people working not even part of the time they are at the workplace, all those professions people tend to see as great if one is lazy, or as depressing if one wants to do something productive, and as a good reason for envy if someone has a real, hard, full-time job with stress and not knowing how to do this all in just 40 hours a week.
The other, hidden, part of bullshit jobs is strongly related to this quote:
„In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour workweek. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, 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, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.“
I especially love the final sentence that nobody talks about it. The utopists and futurists of the past knew how quick a technological transformation can go, but they wouldn´t have ever thought that a system so stupid and destructive for everyone would ever be integrated and seen as ultimate dogma, as continuing of faith. They had open discourses and contentions in the late 19th and beginning 20th century and possibly everyone nowadays doing her/his brainless economic praising should think that neoliberalism and the actual economic system didn´t exist until the second half of the 20th century and that many said and still say that Milton Friedman was just babbling stupid theories that will hopefully never be implemented in a real system.
With those revolutions, world wars, and civil wars, the people of the past had come to the conclusion that it´s not such a good idea to suppress the population and let them be poor at the same time, because that´s a pretty explosive combination. They knew that there has to be a certain level of distributive justice to avoid pitchforks and torches.
That's the reason why the best time to be an average educated person or a craftsman was between 1945 and 1970, when a fair, Keynesian economics model enabled everyone to have a bit of social security, a good pension, and good education for their kids. It´s not as if the ruling class wanted their people to be happy and have a good life, lol, no, they were, especially in Europe, extremely afraid that the idea of communism and marxism could spread if people lived in poverty, so they reluctantly gave them social security and a Nordic model. Always remember that those were no friendly, good politicians, who believed in making a better society for all would be fine, they were just afraid of a revolution, a Soviet invasion, and a third world war.
But not learning from history has been trendy since the first advanced civilizations and empires destroyed themselves thousands of years ago, because they were ruled by lunatics with stupid ideologies. I see absolutely no difference between any kind of god emperor building pyramids or a roman emperor drinking his leaded wine while degenerating in decadence and the current elite of politicians and the wealthy who think neofeudalism at home, neocolonialism abroad, and destroying the only earth we have is worthwhile.
One of the most tragic aspects is the unnecessary loss of potential for development and unfolding of human potential, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, something humankind is epic at too, so that billions of people can´t do something useful with their lives and possibly invent the next big thing, do research, or enrich the lives of others with the products of their creativity.
The huge empires that could have grown and prospered, focussing on science and a fair society, able to conquer the world, could have lead to a higher technological development hundred or even thousands of years before now, we could have already colonized the solar system or gone even far beyond, numbering hundreds of billions. After that and centuries of barbarism, in the middle ages, at least hundreds of years could have been saved without kings and faith, but again humanity failed in developing something useful. Now we repeat the same circle of senseless destructivity, this time not just harming our development as a species, but irreversibly exterminating most of the species on the planet and forgetting classic educational examples such as Sisyphus with its deeper meaning.
It´s disgusting, 40 percent of all people are unhappy and think their job is useless and the ones who can´t get one, because there will be fewer jobs, are not protected by the state and forced to a life in poverty, discrimination, stigmatization, and crime.
Some points:
I like the idea that TV, computer games, and especially all social networks, youtube, and the internet are the perfect vehicles to make it bearable for workers who have no real purpose at their work and in life.
It´s against the interest of capitalism and especially neoliberalism to have so many useless or fictional work that could be automated, but without it, the state would have to bring the 15 to 20 hour work week, UBI, etc., or transform into a dictatorship to keep the unemployed masses calm, so they have to continue the path. I just don´t get the difference between direct communism and a state secretly subsidizing senseless jobs for each second worker…
The witty definitions of the tragic job categories are some of the best metaphors I´ve ever read: Goons, taskmasters, duct tapers, flak catchers, box tickers, and flunkies, it´s ingenious.
Many BS jobs are a result of public-private partnerships, semi privatization, and any kind of arrangement where the state pays for everything and the companies try to make it as costly as possible.
Prestige for managers and government officials is an important factor too, because what is as cool as an entourage of dozens of people with hundreds of vices and thousands of assistants. That rocks the house.
Bureaucracy
The irony: Useless collections of data, evaluations, overcomplicating everything and doing many things double or many more times was long idiotic, but it will be essential for big data and AI, so it turns out to have been unwittingly intelligent, although the main motivation had been to control and exploit everyone even more. And, of course, all those jobs including doing it can be fully automated.
As an anthropologist Graeber doesn´t use the mantra „because this old man said so, because everyone does it, don´t ask!“ that shouldn´t be criticized, but instead mixes up an amazing picture of big history, including the whole spectrum of many different sciences such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies,… and not just the ones the elite is interested in getting viral, and draws a bit different picture than the ones in school books and newspapers.
The government has to help keep producing more and more bullshit jobs and incentives and subsidies for companies to keep the idiotic system running.
Managerial feudalism: Mammon creates a caste system of people.
The social value of jobs, doing real work as a craftsman, nurses, care,.. has been made completely worthless, underpaid, and left alone close to poverty, burn-out, extreme stress, and horrible working conditions. What does it tell you about a system if it tells the personal how many seconds they have to invest in caring for a patient and if they care 1 minute too long, they are punished?
The conditioning of people to fight for a system that does nothing for them, attacking anything progressive, new, any possibility of change with the subconscious knowledge that they would have to ultimately admit that it´s not useful at all. It will get interesting to see in a faraway future how the system explains to those people that they wasted their lives and that the next generation will live in an utopia. The same as with prolonged life thanks to better medicine and technology and ultimately immortality, the once who are born earlier are unlucky. Damn.
Utopia would be already technologically possible and is maliciously and wantonly deferred.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_i...
The other, hidden, part of bullshit jobs is strongly related to this quote:
„In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour workweek. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, 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, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.“
I especially love the final sentence that nobody talks about it. The utopists and futurists of the past knew how quick a technological transformation can go, but they wouldn´t have ever thought that a system so stupid and destructive for everyone would ever be integrated and seen as ultimate dogma, as continuing of faith. They had open discourses and contentions in the late 19th and beginning 20th century and possibly everyone nowadays doing her/his brainless economic praising should think that neoliberalism and the actual economic system didn´t exist until the second half of the 20th century and that many said and still say that Milton Friedman was just babbling stupid theories that will hopefully never be implemented in a real system.
With those revolutions, world wars, and civil wars, the people of the past had come to the conclusion that it´s not such a good idea to suppress the population and let them be poor at the same time, because that´s a pretty explosive combination. They knew that there has to be a certain level of distributive justice to avoid pitchforks and torches.
That's the reason why the best time to be an average educated person or a craftsman was between 1945 and 1970, when a fair, Keynesian economics model enabled everyone to have a bit of social security, a good pension, and good education for their kids. It´s not as if the ruling class wanted their people to be happy and have a good life, lol, no, they were, especially in Europe, extremely afraid that the idea of communism and marxism could spread if people lived in poverty, so they reluctantly gave them social security and a Nordic model. Always remember that those were no friendly, good politicians, who believed in making a better society for all would be fine, they were just afraid of a revolution, a Soviet invasion, and a third world war.
But not learning from history has been trendy since the first advanced civilizations and empires destroyed themselves thousands of years ago, because they were ruled by lunatics with stupid ideologies. I see absolutely no difference between any kind of god emperor building pyramids or a roman emperor drinking his leaded wine while degenerating in decadence and the current elite of politicians and the wealthy who think neofeudalism at home, neocolonialism abroad, and destroying the only earth we have is worthwhile.
One of the most tragic aspects is the unnecessary loss of potential for development and unfolding of human potential, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, something humankind is epic at too, so that billions of people can´t do something useful with their lives and possibly invent the next big thing, do research, or enrich the lives of others with the products of their creativity.
The huge empires that could have grown and prospered, focussing on science and a fair society, able to conquer the world, could have lead to a higher technological development hundred or even thousands of years before now, we could have already colonized the solar system or gone even far beyond, numbering hundreds of billions. After that and centuries of barbarism, in the middle ages, at least hundreds of years could have been saved without kings and faith, but again humanity failed in developing something useful. Now we repeat the same circle of senseless destructivity, this time not just harming our development as a species, but irreversibly exterminating most of the species on the planet and forgetting classic educational examples such as Sisyphus with its deeper meaning.
It´s disgusting, 40 percent of all people are unhappy and think their job is useless and the ones who can´t get one, because there will be fewer jobs, are not protected by the state and forced to a life in poverty, discrimination, stigmatization, and crime.
Some points:
I like the idea that TV, computer games, and especially all social networks, youtube, and the internet are the perfect vehicles to make it bearable for workers who have no real purpose at their work and in life.
It´s against the interest of capitalism and especially neoliberalism to have so many useless or fictional work that could be automated, but without it, the state would have to bring the 15 to 20 hour work week, UBI, etc., or transform into a dictatorship to keep the unemployed masses calm, so they have to continue the path. I just don´t get the difference between direct communism and a state secretly subsidizing senseless jobs for each second worker…
The witty definitions of the tragic job categories are some of the best metaphors I´ve ever read: Goons, taskmasters, duct tapers, flak catchers, box tickers, and flunkies, it´s ingenious.
Many BS jobs are a result of public-private partnerships, semi privatization, and any kind of arrangement where the state pays for everything and the companies try to make it as costly as possible.
Prestige for managers and government officials is an important factor too, because what is as cool as an entourage of dozens of people with hundreds of vices and thousands of assistants. That rocks the house.
Bureaucracy
The irony: Useless collections of data, evaluations, overcomplicating everything and doing many things double or many more times was long idiotic, but it will be essential for big data and AI, so it turns out to have been unwittingly intelligent, although the main motivation had been to control and exploit everyone even more. And, of course, all those jobs including doing it can be fully automated.
As an anthropologist Graeber doesn´t use the mantra „because this old man said so, because everyone does it, don´t ask!“ that shouldn´t be criticized, but instead mixes up an amazing picture of big history, including the whole spectrum of many different sciences such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies,… and not just the ones the elite is interested in getting viral, and draws a bit different picture than the ones in school books and newspapers.
The government has to help keep producing more and more bullshit jobs and incentives and subsidies for companies to keep the idiotic system running.
Managerial feudalism: Mammon creates a caste system of people.
The social value of jobs, doing real work as a craftsman, nurses, care,.. has been made completely worthless, underpaid, and left alone close to poverty, burn-out, extreme stress, and horrible working conditions. What does it tell you about a system if it tells the personal how many seconds they have to invest in caring for a patient and if they care 1 minute too long, they are punished?
The conditioning of people to fight for a system that does nothing for them, attacking anything progressive, new, any possibility of change with the subconscious knowledge that they would have to ultimately admit that it´s not useful at all. It will get interesting to see in a faraway future how the system explains to those people that they wasted their lives and that the next generation will live in an utopia. The same as with prolonged life thanks to better medicine and technology and ultimately immortality, the once who are born earlier are unlucky. Damn.
Utopia would be already technologically possible and is maliciously and wantonly deferred.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_i...
July 7, 2018
This book is about how some jobs are worthless and don't need to exist. Perhaps this book itself is a good example of a worthless job that didn't need to be done and doesn't need to exist?
I like David Graeber. His book "Debt" was phenomenal. The book, however, is far from his best. It expands on the short 2013 essay, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which is still a provocation worth reading. But it didn't need to be expanded into a book. So the worst part of the book is that it is completely superfluous and stillborn. My recommendation is to read the essay instead.
On top of it all, it feels aimless and anecdotal - and simply dead WRONG about everything.
It would take a whole book to refute the book's central arguments, but here are a few of them:
1) There is such a thing as the "social value" of work (as opposed to its "market value"). (In reality, the notion of social value is a completely impossible concept to measure and quantify, and the best approximation - however flawed - is market value and similar indices of subjective preference.)
2) Workers are themselves the best judges of whether their work has any "social value." (In reality, the subjective feeling of "adding value to society" needs to be met with a social need, which is proved by someonen else saying "yes, you DO add value to society, please take this gift.")
3) The labour theory of value is essentially right. (In fact, it is an outdated theory of value that has been resoundingly refuted for over a hundred years now. It is about as relevant as the theory of the phlogiston - which, too, was once commonly taken for granted by the scientific community.)
I will not attempt to refute them here any further, except to point the reader to any Economics 101 textbook where the marginalist theory of value is explained, which totally refutes Graeber's defunct theories.
The only theory in the book that I like is the idea that we should institute a Universal Basic Income. But there are better expositions of that idea out there.
And don't get me started on the endless anecdotes and "letters to the author" - which prove nothing and serve little purpose beyond validating a socialist circle jerk. An endless barrage of one-sided anecdotes and disgruntled gossip do not "A Theory" make, Mr. Graeber.
So, overall, this is quite a pointless, aimless, badly written, painfully anecdotal and weak book. It has its merits as a pamphlet, but it has almost no value as a sociological or economic document. Almost every "scientific" claim in the book is either airheaded anarchistic utopianism or defunct 19th century Marxism. Rarely is a book so pointless, badly written AND factually dead wrong.
But Graeber has some attitude, I'll give him that... But attitude will only get you so far.
I like David Graeber. His book "Debt" was phenomenal. The book, however, is far from his best. It expands on the short 2013 essay, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which is still a provocation worth reading. But it didn't need to be expanded into a book. So the worst part of the book is that it is completely superfluous and stillborn. My recommendation is to read the essay instead.
On top of it all, it feels aimless and anecdotal - and simply dead WRONG about everything.
It would take a whole book to refute the book's central arguments, but here are a few of them:
1) There is such a thing as the "social value" of work (as opposed to its "market value"). (In reality, the notion of social value is a completely impossible concept to measure and quantify, and the best approximation - however flawed - is market value and similar indices of subjective preference.)
2) Workers are themselves the best judges of whether their work has any "social value." (In reality, the subjective feeling of "adding value to society" needs to be met with a social need, which is proved by someonen else saying "yes, you DO add value to society, please take this gift.")
3) The labour theory of value is essentially right. (In fact, it is an outdated theory of value that has been resoundingly refuted for over a hundred years now. It is about as relevant as the theory of the phlogiston - which, too, was once commonly taken for granted by the scientific community.)
I will not attempt to refute them here any further, except to point the reader to any Economics 101 textbook where the marginalist theory of value is explained, which totally refutes Graeber's defunct theories.
The only theory in the book that I like is the idea that we should institute a Universal Basic Income. But there are better expositions of that idea out there.
And don't get me started on the endless anecdotes and "letters to the author" - which prove nothing and serve little purpose beyond validating a socialist circle jerk. An endless barrage of one-sided anecdotes and disgruntled gossip do not "A Theory" make, Mr. Graeber.
So, overall, this is quite a pointless, aimless, badly written, painfully anecdotal and weak book. It has its merits as a pamphlet, but it has almost no value as a sociological or economic document. Almost every "scientific" claim in the book is either airheaded anarchistic utopianism or defunct 19th century Marxism. Rarely is a book so pointless, badly written AND factually dead wrong.
But Graeber has some attitude, I'll give him that... But attitude will only get you so far.
February 5, 2022
“We could easily all be putting in a twenty – or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.”
The covid-19 pandemic brought into very sharp relief that our definition of “essential workers” often directly contradicted the prestige we associate with that type of employment, and it reminded me that I had a copy of “Bullshit Jobs” on my shelf: it felt very topical… Also you have to admit that quote is thought-provoking.
I have been working in the insurance industry for more than a decade now – and according to this book’s taxonomy, I don’t have a bullshit job, but I have a job with lots of bullshitized elements that bog it down. I ended up there accidentally, as most people working in insurance do. It’s definitely not the sort of job you dream of having as a kid, most people don’t study to do it, but somehow, here we all are. I generally like what I do, but the way big corporations work (or don’t), the amount of convoluted procedures and structures, the duplicating of various tasks and the strangely pompous job titles often make me laugh. My views have definitely earned me a reputation as a cynic, especially when I express bafflement when people completely lose perspective on what exactly it is that we do and drink the company Kool-Aid (nothing annoys me more than referring to someone as a “rock star” of claim management). Maybe it’s the European family background, but I work to live, I don’t live to work – and in North America, that is often interpreted as meaning that I don’t care about my job and that I have no ambition. That’s obviously not true, but that’s just the cultural standard. A former boss of mine, who was a high-rolling CEO, one day decided to leave the company and take a sabbatical to be with his family and most people seemed to think he was crazy. I think it was the sanest decision he has taken in years.
Gaeber’s essay about bullshit jobs made me smile because I’ve had those jobs in the past. My way of dealing with them has always been to keep in mind that my job is not where I’d get most of my satisfaction: that’s what the rest of my life is for. But we, as a society, have often been indoctrinated that our job should be our calling, that we should be driven to excel, climb and succeed at all costs – so when you wake up and realize your job is essentially meaningless, it can be quite a shock…
Graeber roughly defines a bullshit job as one that would make no difference in the world, were it eliminated. But most importantly, a bullshit job feels pointless to the person doing it; they can’t think of a valid reason for their job to exists, but they will never say so publicly (probably because they fear losing their employment). He defines different sub-types of bullshit jobs and explores their mechanisms in detail, supported by testimonials of people who have had those types of jobs, and the effect its had on them. He also tries to figure out who we got to this point based on the history of labor, specifically how current definition of work evolved from the feudal system.
He also tackles a very interesting angle: to some people, the idea of a job where you basically do nothing with little to no supervision and get paid (with benefits) for the trouble sounds great – but it can actually be completely soul-destroying, and Graeber wanted to find out why. That part especially fascinated me, because a lot of the job that are very fulfilling (to borrow his term) spiritually often don’t pay a decent wage. One of my favorite gigs was (shocking no one ever) working in a bookstore, but the paycheck for a full week’s work was not enough to live decently (and by decently, I really mean paying rent and groceries, never mind any luxuries like clothes and Dove soap). Yet I can’t deny that talking about books to people all day long left me with a much bigger sense of satisfaction than coordinating meetings. My best friend worked as a barista when she was working on her M.A., and she felt a bigger sense of purpose doing that than any office job she’s ever had since graduating. It is very interesting to take a closer look as to why that is. “This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves.” How horribly familiar that sentence must feel to anyone who worked retail to pay tuition when they were students! In a bullshitized workplace, there isn’t much room for independent thinking, after all (I actually found myself thinking of Vonnegut’s “Player Piano”, where the Shah refers to all workers as slaves, regardless of what the translator explains to him – and then the novel is referred to in the final section about automation!)…
He also explores the very perverse notion that work is not something we feel we should be enjoying, that “fun” doesn’t belong in our workplace and the strange Puritan ethos behind that way of thinking. My French and Italian relatives are often puzzled by the North American self-punishing work ethics, and I really appreciate the Graeber spent some time explaining how the evolution of labor in different regions of Europe led to very different outlooks on the matter. For the record, I agree with my European relatives: when I see that some people have been sending work emails passed 9 pm – or when they are supposed to be on vacation, I think there is something wrong with them. Clinically. Graeber pushes this further by looking into how these dynamics bleed into politics and shape our way of thinking way beyond the cubicle – and it can be a bit scary, but enlightening.
I feel like Graeber put a lot of things on paper that often go unsaid – mostly because people don’t want to jeopardize their employment by saying that it doesn’t make any sense. But I feel like the purposelessness of many jobs is a badly kept secret, a sort of “emperor’s new clothes” thing, where everyone (consciously or not) understands this as reality but refuses to acknowledge it. In some way, reading about it feels like a relief: we are often gaslit by corporate messages about how crucial everything we do is, and when that feel disingenuous, it’s easy to start wondering if there isn’t something wrong with you because you feel like the box-checking aspect of your work are completely absurd. The honesty was truly refreshing.
You have to hand it to Graeber: he wrote a very readable non-fiction book, which is not always obvious. He explains his methods and research well, so the reader knows how he got to the conclusions he describes. He also has that wonderful deadpan British humour that I cherish, and that makes a book about a rather depressive subject fairly entertaining. The examples of people literally dying at their desks and staying there for days, unnoticed, and people skipping work for years without anyone realizing it – in order to do something meaningful with their time – are absurdly hilarious. Yes, it can be repetitive, and could have been trimmed a little without any of the book’s meat being lost. Yes, he offers no solution to this neoliberal capitalist vicious cycle we seem to be stuck in (besides an interesting reflexion on basic universal income). But that’s not what he wants: he just wants us to be more aware of it, to give readers the necessary perspective to re-evaluate the meaning of their jobs, to get them to think about it, and maybe do something about it if they can. Despite this flaw, this is a fascinating, entertaining and thought-provoking book that everyone could benefit to read, especially those of us who have had Kafkaesque office jobs or retail positions.
To circle back to the current situation with the pandemic, the people who’s job are currently deemed essential are made up primarily of what Graeber refers to as people with “caring labor” (first responders) and maintenance and service industry. Most of what Graeber would define as a bullshit job is currently on hold, and I find this phenomenon fascinating (if horrifying) – I hope it makes us deeply question how we take care of those essential workers, as a society.
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Article from 2021: https://warzel.substack.com/p/what-if...
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Article from early 2022: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/...
The covid-19 pandemic brought into very sharp relief that our definition of “essential workers” often directly contradicted the prestige we associate with that type of employment, and it reminded me that I had a copy of “Bullshit Jobs” on my shelf: it felt very topical… Also you have to admit that quote is thought-provoking.
I have been working in the insurance industry for more than a decade now – and according to this book’s taxonomy, I don’t have a bullshit job, but I have a job with lots of bullshitized elements that bog it down. I ended up there accidentally, as most people working in insurance do. It’s definitely not the sort of job you dream of having as a kid, most people don’t study to do it, but somehow, here we all are. I generally like what I do, but the way big corporations work (or don’t), the amount of convoluted procedures and structures, the duplicating of various tasks and the strangely pompous job titles often make me laugh. My views have definitely earned me a reputation as a cynic, especially when I express bafflement when people completely lose perspective on what exactly it is that we do and drink the company Kool-Aid (nothing annoys me more than referring to someone as a “rock star” of claim management). Maybe it’s the European family background, but I work to live, I don’t live to work – and in North America, that is often interpreted as meaning that I don’t care about my job and that I have no ambition. That’s obviously not true, but that’s just the cultural standard. A former boss of mine, who was a high-rolling CEO, one day decided to leave the company and take a sabbatical to be with his family and most people seemed to think he was crazy. I think it was the sanest decision he has taken in years.
Gaeber’s essay about bullshit jobs made me smile because I’ve had those jobs in the past. My way of dealing with them has always been to keep in mind that my job is not where I’d get most of my satisfaction: that’s what the rest of my life is for. But we, as a society, have often been indoctrinated that our job should be our calling, that we should be driven to excel, climb and succeed at all costs – so when you wake up and realize your job is essentially meaningless, it can be quite a shock…
Graeber roughly defines a bullshit job as one that would make no difference in the world, were it eliminated. But most importantly, a bullshit job feels pointless to the person doing it; they can’t think of a valid reason for their job to exists, but they will never say so publicly (probably because they fear losing their employment). He defines different sub-types of bullshit jobs and explores their mechanisms in detail, supported by testimonials of people who have had those types of jobs, and the effect its had on them. He also tries to figure out who we got to this point based on the history of labor, specifically how current definition of work evolved from the feudal system.
He also tackles a very interesting angle: to some people, the idea of a job where you basically do nothing with little to no supervision and get paid (with benefits) for the trouble sounds great – but it can actually be completely soul-destroying, and Graeber wanted to find out why. That part especially fascinated me, because a lot of the job that are very fulfilling (to borrow his term) spiritually often don’t pay a decent wage. One of my favorite gigs was (shocking no one ever) working in a bookstore, but the paycheck for a full week’s work was not enough to live decently (and by decently, I really mean paying rent and groceries, never mind any luxuries like clothes and Dove soap). Yet I can’t deny that talking about books to people all day long left me with a much bigger sense of satisfaction than coordinating meetings. My best friend worked as a barista when she was working on her M.A., and she felt a bigger sense of purpose doing that than any office job she’s ever had since graduating. It is very interesting to take a closer look as to why that is. “This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves.” How horribly familiar that sentence must feel to anyone who worked retail to pay tuition when they were students! In a bullshitized workplace, there isn’t much room for independent thinking, after all (I actually found myself thinking of Vonnegut’s “Player Piano”, where the Shah refers to all workers as slaves, regardless of what the translator explains to him – and then the novel is referred to in the final section about automation!)…
He also explores the very perverse notion that work is not something we feel we should be enjoying, that “fun” doesn’t belong in our workplace and the strange Puritan ethos behind that way of thinking. My French and Italian relatives are often puzzled by the North American self-punishing work ethics, and I really appreciate the Graeber spent some time explaining how the evolution of labor in different regions of Europe led to very different outlooks on the matter. For the record, I agree with my European relatives: when I see that some people have been sending work emails passed 9 pm – or when they are supposed to be on vacation, I think there is something wrong with them. Clinically. Graeber pushes this further by looking into how these dynamics bleed into politics and shape our way of thinking way beyond the cubicle – and it can be a bit scary, but enlightening.
I feel like Graeber put a lot of things on paper that often go unsaid – mostly because people don’t want to jeopardize their employment by saying that it doesn’t make any sense. But I feel like the purposelessness of many jobs is a badly kept secret, a sort of “emperor’s new clothes” thing, where everyone (consciously or not) understands this as reality but refuses to acknowledge it. In some way, reading about it feels like a relief: we are often gaslit by corporate messages about how crucial everything we do is, and when that feel disingenuous, it’s easy to start wondering if there isn’t something wrong with you because you feel like the box-checking aspect of your work are completely absurd. The honesty was truly refreshing.
You have to hand it to Graeber: he wrote a very readable non-fiction book, which is not always obvious. He explains his methods and research well, so the reader knows how he got to the conclusions he describes. He also has that wonderful deadpan British humour that I cherish, and that makes a book about a rather depressive subject fairly entertaining. The examples of people literally dying at their desks and staying there for days, unnoticed, and people skipping work for years without anyone realizing it – in order to do something meaningful with their time – are absurdly hilarious. Yes, it can be repetitive, and could have been trimmed a little without any of the book’s meat being lost. Yes, he offers no solution to this neoliberal capitalist vicious cycle we seem to be stuck in (besides an interesting reflexion on basic universal income). But that’s not what he wants: he just wants us to be more aware of it, to give readers the necessary perspective to re-evaluate the meaning of their jobs, to get them to think about it, and maybe do something about it if they can. Despite this flaw, this is a fascinating, entertaining and thought-provoking book that everyone could benefit to read, especially those of us who have had Kafkaesque office jobs or retail positions.
To circle back to the current situation with the pandemic, the people who’s job are currently deemed essential are made up primarily of what Graeber refers to as people with “caring labor” (first responders) and maintenance and service industry. Most of what Graeber would define as a bullshit job is currently on hold, and I find this phenomenon fascinating (if horrifying) – I hope it makes us deeply question how we take care of those essential workers, as a society.
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Article from 2021: https://warzel.substack.com/p/what-if...
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Article from early 2022: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/...
September 14, 2020
Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.
Reading this was cathartic. Like so many people, I, too, have experienced the suffering that is a useless job—a job that not only lacks any real benefit to society, but which also does not even benefit the company. (Lucky for me, I am now a teacher, which, for all its unpleasant aspects, almost never feels useless.) Even though I got a lot of reading and writing done on the job, the feeling of total futility eventually drove me half-crazy. So it felt liberating to read an entire book about this phenomenon.
But let me take a step back and explain the book. In 2013 Graeber published an article in STRIKE! magazine (a fairly obscure publication) about bullshit jobs, and it immediately went viral. This book is basically an articulation, elaboration, and defense of the points in that short article. Graeber notes that Keynes predicted the rise of automation to cause a startling reduction in the work-week. Yet this has not occurred. Many economists explain this by pointing to the rise of the so-called “service” industry. But this would seem to imply that we have switched from factory-work to making lattes for one another, or giving each other massages. As Graeber shows, this is hardly the case: the number of people in such jobs has remained fairly constant. What has grown, rather, is a vast edifice of managerial and administrative work.
Anyone familiar with the academic world will instantly recognize this. Universities have come to be dominated by a top-heavy administrative structure, and faculty have been forced to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on bureaucratic nonsense. The same is true in the medical field, or so I hear. Really, the story is the same everywhere: an increasingly arcane hierarchy of administrators, leading to byzantine networks of paperwork—all of it ostensibly for improving quality, and yet manifestly distracting from the real work. This kind of ritualistic box-ticking is only one of the types of bullshit jobs that Graeber investigates. Also included are flunkies (subordinates whose only role is to make superiors feel important), goons (jobs which arise from a kind of arms race, such as marketing agents or corporate lawyers), and duct tapers (who are hired to patch over an easily-fixed problem).
Obviously, one could argue all day about the typology of useless jobs. One could also argue about which jobs, if any, are useless. It must be said that Graeber’s reliance on the subjective experience of his informants does introduce a worrisome element of capricious judgment. Besides this, some might say that the free market can never give rise to useless jobs, since such things would be obviously detrimental to a company’s profits. But one need only read through the many testimonies collected by Graeber to be convinced that, yes, some jobs really ought not to exist. According to surveys, around 40% of workers report that they believe their own jobs to be useless—so useless that they could vanish tomorrow without anyone minding. To pick just one of Graeber’s examples: a man works for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor for the German military, whose job is to fill out the paperwork necessary to allow somebody to move their desk from one room to another room. I do not think this is necessary.
But this raises the obvious question: If so many jobs are really useless, why do they exist? One might understand this happening in the government, but this is precisely the sort of thing that the private sector should be immune from. Well, Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and so his explanations are social and cultural. He cites several factors. There is a huge amount of political pressure, from the left and the right, to create more jobs. This is natural, since being out of work means being poor, or worse. More than that, we have culturally internalized the institution of “work” to the extent that our jobs are the primary source of meaning in many people’s lives, even if they ultimately are disagreeable. Indeed, Graeber believes it is just the unpleasantness of work that makes it a source of value in our culture, as it becomes a type of ennobling suffering.
Graeber also notes the usefulness of useless jobs to the upper classes. For one, they keep people endlessly busy; and, what is more, well-paying, white-collar jobs—even useless ones—make their holders identify with the interests of the upper class. The economy then becomes a kind of engine for distributing favors and resources down an elaborate chain of command. Graeber coins the term “managerial feudalism” for this arrangement: the return of the medieval obsession with ranks mirrored by the modern penchant for inflated job titles. Now, my brief summary does not do justice to Graeber’s writing. Nevertheless, it is here where one wishes most for an economist to contribute to the argument. For even if there are forces countervailing the pressures of profit, the economy is still running on manifestly capitalist lines. So how could a sort of inefficient feudalism exist in this context?
Another point that Graeber examines is the relative pay of people with useful and useless employment. The obvious trend is that jobs which have undeniable social value—like nurses and teachers—are paid less, while jobs that have questionable or even negative social value—such as “creative vice presidents” and corporate lobbyists—are richly rewarded. I do not think you need to be an idealist to see this situation as undesirable. Graeber explains this tendency by analyzing the culture of work (specifically, that useful employment is supposed to be its own reward, while useless employment requires incentives), but again one craves an economic explanation. (This, by the way, is one of the frustrations of social science: that the different disciplines operate with incompatibly different premises and methodologies.)
For my part, my own experience, combined with the many testimonies and statistics in this book, is enough to convince me that some jobs are really bullshit—even from the limited standpoint of a company’s profit. And I think that Graeber may be correct in searching for a cultural and political, rather than a strictly “economic,” explanation. After all, we humans are not exactly renowned for our rational economies. But I do think he may have underestimated the role that corporate mergers have played in vastly reducing competition—and, thus, the pressure to eliminate useless jobs.
While all of this deserves analysis and debate, I think that this book is valuable if only for raising serious questions about the institution of work itself. The more that I read about history, the more I have come to see our modern ritual of work as strange and aberrant. The idea that we would all go to work five days a week, eight hours a day, year after year—regardless of whether we are making cars or filling out forms, and regardless of how much work there is on any given day—would have struck people in nearly any other place and time as bizarre.
To me, it just seems backwards to use a cookie-cutter schedule for every task (from lawyer to salesman), and then expect every member of society to adopt this basic template or risk abject poverty. Considering that the economy requires a certainly level of employment to function, and that the current social safety net could not support a large number of unemployed people anyway, perhaps it should come as no surprise that we are plagued by dummy jobs. And if you think about it, it would be an amazing coincidence if the economy—through all the structural and technological changes of the previous century—always needed between 90 to 95 percent of the working population at any given time.
Graeber’s proposed solution to this problem is Universal Basic Income—providing every person with a regular paycheck, sufficient to cover the necessities of life. Personally I think that this is a wonderful idea, and one which could greatly alleviate many of our social ills. Unfortunately, in the United States, at least, UBI seems just as likely as paid maternity leave. But whatever the means, I think it is high time to change our attitude towards work. We spend enormous amounts of time doing things we do not want to do, and, what is worse, things which often do not need to be done. What fuels this is a kind of masochistic work ethic, defining our worth by our ability to do things that we do not want to do. This ethic has so pervaded our culture that, in America at least, we take it for granted that everything form health care to our self-respect should depend on our jobs.
One of Graeber’s most interesting points is that the phenomenon of useless jobs may reveal that we are using a flawed conception of human nature. One would think that being paid to do little or nothing would be the height of happiness. But most people in useless jobs report profound feelings of unease and distress. Again, my own experience testifies to this. Though I had little work, and was paid decently, I often found myself miserable, even beside myself with a strange mixture of boredom and anxiety. Graeber has a long section on this, but basically it comes down to the way that useless work undermines our sense of agency in the world. There is a reason the gods punished Sisyphus that way. As Dostoyevsky said, having humans perform an unpleasant, uninteresting, and totally worthless task might be the most profound form of torture. In my own case, it gave me a very unsettling feeling of dissociation, as if I really could not control my own actions.
So if we build our economy on the assumption that humans, left to themselves, will choose to get the maximum reward for the least benefit, we may be building on false premises. I think that Graeber is right, and that people generally prefer feeling like they are doing something useful. This is why I think we ought not to fear that Universal Basic Income, or a drastic reduction in working hours, would lead to a society of lazy idlers. In any case, people bored at home may do something more worthwhile than people bored at work, who mostly seem to go on social media. (Graeber notes that the rise in social media use coincides with the rise of useless employment. Certainly it was true in my case, that useless employment led naturally to spending huge amounts of time on Facebook.)
This summary does not do justice to the full contents of the book. Graeber is a sharp writer and an agile thinker. Not only is he the first to really hone in on this strange aspect of the modern world, but he does so within a wide perspective. To give just a few more examples, he connects the rise of bullshit jobs with the slowdown in scientific progress and the decline in quality of Hollywood movies. Perhaps Graeber’s political identity as an anarchist helps him to avoid the basic narratives of both the left and the right, and to develop strikingly original opinions about social problems. While I am not anarchist myself, I think the institution of work deserves far more questioning and criticism. We have accepted work as the bedrock of society and the foundations of our lives’ meanings, and yet most of us do not particularly like it. If I could wax utopian for a moment, I would imagine a movement devoted to the creation of a society of leisure. I would even work for it.
August 8, 2022
I've been carrying this book around my workplace for the past three weeks. I read it during lunch, coffee breaks, while walking (which seems to be a new, eccentric habit I've picked up, because 1. I do not want to engage in conversation and 2. It's safe within the campus, since vehicles (the very, very few existing ones) are only allowed to move at the speed of 20 m/s and people mostly use cycles here anyway) and each time I've had someone rudely interrupt me (academia is severely lacking in social etiquette apparently) and go 'what are you reading?' Now, I couldn't be bothered to explain so I just showed them the cover, and I've had at least five people condescendingly snicker at it because they think it's some sort of self-help book that I shouldn't be wasting my time on. This baffled me, because they clearly have no understanding of what a bullshit job means. I would have taken an issue with the length of the book (which I initially did) because I was under the impression that a lot of it was self-explanatory just from the title, but apparently not. Nevermind the fact that these people who were puzzled by why I was reading the book are the same mfs who complain about how they have to fill 42069 forms, go through an endless list of 'official' procedures, talk to 1000 different people and wait for 2 years to even obtain the permission to move their desks. Oh gee, I wonder why. It's amusing to me that they understand bureaucracy but not the fact that there is so much bureaucracy because of bullshit jobs.
I've also had several NPCs argue with me about how capitalism is inevitable and necessary, and heirarchy is just the 'order of nature'. Argue isn't the right term here, since they barely let me talk. 'Explain', yeah, let's use that. I've been told to 'not deny biology' in the most creepy way possible. This should explain why I have been avoiding conversations altogether. After a particularly disturbing conversation with a coworker, I even had to hibernate in my room for a week, to make sure I don't lose my sanity. It's beyond my comprehension that these people just use all sorts of logical fallacies that one could possibly think of while 'explaining' things to me, but not understand that their beloved capitalism is now producing things that it is precisely not supposed to, like bullshit jobs.
While reading this book, I also became more mindful of the sort of things people do at their jobs. I evaluated job titles at my workplace and the working conditions they entail. Of course, there are several people working admin jobs who get air-conditioned cabins all for themselves, and I frankly have no idea what they do. And then there are the essential workers, like the ones at the mess, who work long-ass shifts and then sleep on the tables in the mess at night. Inevitable, apparently. And I work in one of the top research institutes in my country.
Popularize the concept of bullshit jobs. Spread the word.
I've also had several NPCs argue with me about how capitalism is inevitable and necessary, and heirarchy is just the 'order of nature'. Argue isn't the right term here, since they barely let me talk. 'Explain', yeah, let's use that. I've been told to 'not deny biology' in the most creepy way possible. This should explain why I have been avoiding conversations altogether. After a particularly disturbing conversation with a coworker, I even had to hibernate in my room for a week, to make sure I don't lose my sanity. It's beyond my comprehension that these people just use all sorts of logical fallacies that one could possibly think of while 'explaining' things to me, but not understand that their beloved capitalism is now producing things that it is precisely not supposed to, like bullshit jobs.
While reading this book, I also became more mindful of the sort of things people do at their jobs. I evaluated job titles at my workplace and the working conditions they entail. Of course, there are several people working admin jobs who get air-conditioned cabins all for themselves, and I frankly have no idea what they do. And then there are the essential workers, like the ones at the mess, who work long-ass shifts and then sleep on the tables in the mess at night. Inevitable, apparently. And I work in one of the top research institutes in my country.
Popularize the concept of bullshit jobs. Spread the word.
September 1, 2018
Concise summary: the book is a 280-page too long rambling mess consisting of half-baked ideas & inconsequential anecdotes. The author is political where there is no call for politics, and philosophically & mathematically inept.
I was planning to write a long critique, but I realised that to write an exhaustive review of everything that is wrong with the book I would need to write one of longer length. Instead, I will point out that the book goes off the mark starting with the very definition of a BS job it provides, and then give a couple of examples of how poor the author's reasoning is throughout the book - these will be unstructured, and this review will be a bit jumbled up itself, but it should give a flavour.
The book defines BS jobs as "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case".
Do you see why this is a terrible definition? There are two things wrong with it:
a) it relies on an employee's subjective judgement - the author acknowledges this, but thinks it's no big deal. I beg to differ - though I have conducted no systemic analysis here (n my defence, the author has not conducted robust analysis either: 99% of his assertions rely on anecdotal evidence submitted to him by readers), I suggest that the vast majority of people do not really grasp how modern economies work, and as a result, fail to understand how their own jobs fit in them. And this assuming people can even agree on the definition of value - a person may think their job working for Lady magazine is pointless; Lady magazine's readers may well disagree. Who's to say who is right?
b) it says that if someone thinks their job is valuable, then it is. Do I really need to explain why this is not the case?
Besides this, the book is unreadable due to:
- The author's pseudo-philosophising and bringing theology into the fold to explain the emergence of BS jobs.
- His supporting cast of characters in the form of readers who have submitted their experiences to him, characters invariably cast in the positive light of rebels fighting against an unjust, soul-crushing system. Well, I am sorry, but I cannot genuinely feel sorry for someone who is depressed because they did not manage to quit their BS job because every time they tried doing so they were offered more money; or someone whose work (according to them) literally directly leads to the deaths of many civilians, but who won't change jobs; etc. These people are not rebels, they are not noble; they are pathetic people who, by their own admission, are wasting their lives, but are too scared to do anything about it.
- The mathematical ineptitude: this manifests itself in various passages. Most importantly, as I mentioned earlier, a great deal of the author's calculations, inferences, and assertions are based on the stories readers have submitted. Yet to my recollection, the term "selection bias" is mentioned only once, and then waved off. So, the author finds that an overwhelming majority of corporate lawyers think their jobs is BS. Hypothesis 1: this is because the profession is indeed useless. Hypothesis 2: this is because the kind of person who would write to the person who coined the term "BS job" is the kind of person who is dissatisfied with their job. Call me cynical, but I think hypothesis 2 is more likely.
- The general ineptitude when it comes to thinking about complex matters. I agree that some jobs add no value to society. But, sadly, some jobs are a necessary evil. Take political consultants and lobbyists: if there were no one engaged in either profession, the world would probably be a better place. But, the world would certainly be a much worse place if people were allowed to be consultants and lobbyists for one cause only, no matter how noble the cause. Imagine all lobbyists except those working to increase funding for healthcare disappeared. What would happen then? We'd probably end up with an over-funded healthcare system, and underfunded education, police and fire departments. And since in a liberal society you cannot stop people from campaigning or advising politicians who stand for one cause, sadly you will have to live with lobbyists.
- The misunderstanding of economics. At various points, the author seems to suggest that BS jobs are out of sync with modern economic theory. This isn't so - game theory, as well as management theory (with regards, e.g., to agency problems) - are perfectly adequate to explain BS jobs.
- The politics: the author disparages those who argue that BS jobs are the result of market intervention. His one (and only one!) rebuttal here: that private universities in the US have increased admin staff more than public ones. Call me old fashioned, but I require something more than a single anecdote to discredit an entire political philosophy (especially a very poor anecdote - no mention on the relative increase of students for each type of university, the regulatory burden on each type etc). An example of another nonsensical politically-motivated assertion is that 99% of finance adds no value to society (I wonder whether the author understands how innovators raise capital to build their inventions?).
These and plenty more render the book an infuriating read. The core idea is worth exploring, but that doesn't make up for the book's countless shortcomings, not to mention its derivative writing style (which feels like a poor imitation of Nassim Taleb's).
I was planning to write a long critique, but I realised that to write an exhaustive review of everything that is wrong with the book I would need to write one of longer length. Instead, I will point out that the book goes off the mark starting with the very definition of a BS job it provides, and then give a couple of examples of how poor the author's reasoning is throughout the book - these will be unstructured, and this review will be a bit jumbled up itself, but it should give a flavour.
The book defines BS jobs as "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case".
Do you see why this is a terrible definition? There are two things wrong with it:
a) it relies on an employee's subjective judgement - the author acknowledges this, but thinks it's no big deal. I beg to differ - though I have conducted no systemic analysis here (n my defence, the author has not conducted robust analysis either: 99% of his assertions rely on anecdotal evidence submitted to him by readers), I suggest that the vast majority of people do not really grasp how modern economies work, and as a result, fail to understand how their own jobs fit in them. And this assuming people can even agree on the definition of value - a person may think their job working for Lady magazine is pointless; Lady magazine's readers may well disagree. Who's to say who is right?
b) it says that if someone thinks their job is valuable, then it is. Do I really need to explain why this is not the case?
Besides this, the book is unreadable due to:
- The author's pseudo-philosophising and bringing theology into the fold to explain the emergence of BS jobs.
- His supporting cast of characters in the form of readers who have submitted their experiences to him, characters invariably cast in the positive light of rebels fighting against an unjust, soul-crushing system. Well, I am sorry, but I cannot genuinely feel sorry for someone who is depressed because they did not manage to quit their BS job because every time they tried doing so they were offered more money; or someone whose work (according to them) literally directly leads to the deaths of many civilians, but who won't change jobs; etc. These people are not rebels, they are not noble; they are pathetic people who, by their own admission, are wasting their lives, but are too scared to do anything about it.
- The mathematical ineptitude: this manifests itself in various passages. Most importantly, as I mentioned earlier, a great deal of the author's calculations, inferences, and assertions are based on the stories readers have submitted. Yet to my recollection, the term "selection bias" is mentioned only once, and then waved off. So, the author finds that an overwhelming majority of corporate lawyers think their jobs is BS. Hypothesis 1: this is because the profession is indeed useless. Hypothesis 2: this is because the kind of person who would write to the person who coined the term "BS job" is the kind of person who is dissatisfied with their job. Call me cynical, but I think hypothesis 2 is more likely.
- The general ineptitude when it comes to thinking about complex matters. I agree that some jobs add no value to society. But, sadly, some jobs are a necessary evil. Take political consultants and lobbyists: if there were no one engaged in either profession, the world would probably be a better place. But, the world would certainly be a much worse place if people were allowed to be consultants and lobbyists for one cause only, no matter how noble the cause. Imagine all lobbyists except those working to increase funding for healthcare disappeared. What would happen then? We'd probably end up with an over-funded healthcare system, and underfunded education, police and fire departments. And since in a liberal society you cannot stop people from campaigning or advising politicians who stand for one cause, sadly you will have to live with lobbyists.
- The misunderstanding of economics. At various points, the author seems to suggest that BS jobs are out of sync with modern economic theory. This isn't so - game theory, as well as management theory (with regards, e.g., to agency problems) - are perfectly adequate to explain BS jobs.
- The politics: the author disparages those who argue that BS jobs are the result of market intervention. His one (and only one!) rebuttal here: that private universities in the US have increased admin staff more than public ones. Call me old fashioned, but I require something more than a single anecdote to discredit an entire political philosophy (especially a very poor anecdote - no mention on the relative increase of students for each type of university, the regulatory burden on each type etc). An example of another nonsensical politically-motivated assertion is that 99% of finance adds no value to society (I wonder whether the author understands how innovators raise capital to build their inventions?).
These and plenty more render the book an infuriating read. The core idea is worth exploring, but that doesn't make up for the book's countless shortcomings, not to mention its derivative writing style (which feels like a poor imitation of Nassim Taleb's).
July 30, 2020
I so appreciated this book for making me think hard about jobs and why they exist. David Graeber focuses Bullshit Jobs: A Theory on the origins and implications of bullshit jobs, or jobs that do not serve any real purpose in society. He does an excellent job describing how these jobs perpetuate capitalism by keeping people employed for the sake of keeping people employed, as well as how these jobs negatively affect people’s psychological well-being. Graeber draws thoughtful and relevant connections between bullshit jobs and related topics such as the vilification of poor people, how women often are delegated to low-paying and unfulfilling jobs compared to men, and the necessity of a universal basic income.
Though I feel that this book names an important trend in society (i.e., the existence of bullshit jobs) that we often skirt around, the points in the book got a bit repetitive. I wonder if tying everything back to the core point of bullshit jobs limited the book in some ways. I would’ve loved for Graeber to explore with more depth some of the topics he raised such as the misplaced ire of the white working class and how the structures that maintain bullshit jobs affect Black, Indigenous, and people of color. At the same time, I recognize that exploring those topics may have stretched the book a bit thin. Overall, I would recommend this book for those who want to think critically about the work we do and how and why we do it – I appreciate delving into the social construction of work as opposed to assuming that work is meaningful and/or life-fulfilling just because it is work.
Though I feel that this book names an important trend in society (i.e., the existence of bullshit jobs) that we often skirt around, the points in the book got a bit repetitive. I wonder if tying everything back to the core point of bullshit jobs limited the book in some ways. I would’ve loved for Graeber to explore with more depth some of the topics he raised such as the misplaced ire of the white working class and how the structures that maintain bullshit jobs affect Black, Indigenous, and people of color. At the same time, I recognize that exploring those topics may have stretched the book a bit thin. Overall, I would recommend this book for those who want to think critically about the work we do and how and why we do it – I appreciate delving into the social construction of work as opposed to assuming that work is meaningful and/or life-fulfilling just because it is work.
April 19, 2020
This made my day :) It's definitely a fav forever. Quirky and cool.
We start rating calc at 5 star max.
> Some of the things innovative. Seriously, have my star drives never been built because people around the world have been too busy creating BS PPTs and simply had no time to spend building devices for my space travel? F***!!!!!!! (+1 star)
> Other points felt like BS themselves and made me feel that the author misses the point a bit:
1. If people are ok being with themselves, on their own, without some supervisor snapping at them, if have individual projects to pursue, if they are mindful of their own interests and have personal intellectual pursuits and endeavors, they just might feel at such jobs as partially employed academics. (-1 star)
2. Another thing is that people could just craft new job responsibilities for themselves on the sly, while building networks inside the organization. This idea was superficially mentioned at one point in the book but wasn't developed at full, I think. (-1 star)
Q:
This is how the USSR ended up with shops where customers had to go through three different clerks to buy a loaf of bread, or road crews where, at any given moment, two-thirds of the workers were drinking, playing cards, or dozing off. This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. (с) I'm quite sure this is not true: I can't find sources on this. This some fantasy on what the USSR was like or something? Actually, in post-war USSR one could go to jail for 3 years for being late to work by 20 min. And the work was extremely substantial: just imagine rebuilding a country gutted in the WW2.
Q:
The result was to reveal that men are far more likely to feel that their jobs are pointless (42 percent) than women do (32 percent). Again, it seems reasonable to assume that they are right. (c) Or, maybe they are just perceiving the world differently. For example, a female secretary could be thinking in terms of making life easier for her boss, organising his work, improving the way his letters are perceived by their adressees (by delivering them on time, without misprints, on nice paper, etc), taking care of the coffees and lunches and appointments… A male secretary might be thinking in terms of doing the work of a menial servant and a helper and not having any influence on the decisions being made and having no expectations to get promoted and… And I'm not being sexist here: the girls are often brought up with the expectation of them running their homes (at least at some point), organising things in the family, taking care of people, while boys are more often oriented at being active, creating stuff, being direct and physical. It's a good thing this trend has been changing a lot lately! I would think that women are just less whiny about their jobs and the proportion is about equal (as long as women and male have equal chances at landing certain jobs!).
Q:
Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? (c)
Q:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, 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. (c)
Q:
What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (c)
Q:
Finally, and with the concurrence of his therapist, he decided that rather than just continue to sit around all day pretending to look busy, he would convince the water board he was being supervised by the municipality, and the municipality that he was being supervised by the water board, check in if there was a problem, but otherwise just go home and do something useful with his life. (с)
Q:
In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation. (c)
Q:
… HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. (c)
Q:
What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist. (c)
Q:
The most compelling argument to this effect was from a former exotic dancer, now professor, who made a case that most sex work should be considered a bullshit job because, while she acknowledged that sex work clearly did answer a genuine consumer demand, something was terribly, terribly wrong with any society that effectively tells the vast majority of its female population they are worth more dancing on boxes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five than they will be at any subsequent point in their lives, whatever their talents or accomplishments. If the same woman can make five times as much money stripping as she could teaching as a world-recognized scholar, could not the stripping job be considered bullshit simply on that basis? (c)
Q:
She had always been shy, tongue-tied in front of strangers, a fish out of water at her raucous secondary school; but what she hadn’t realized was that during all those years spent coolly standing back and watching others, she had been honing her detachment and learning the skills that would someday become her trade. She had been watching the versions people gave of themselves, the tells that showed when they were nervous or hopeful or trying to evade the truth. She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching. (c)
Q:
In other cases, as with Ophelia, the flunkies end up effectively doing the bosses’ jobs for them. This, of course, was the traditional role of female secretaries (now relabeled “administrative assistants”) working for male executives during most of the twentieth century: while in theory secretaries were there just to answer the phone, take dictation, and do some light filing, in fact, they often ended up doing 80 percent to 90 percent of their bosses’ jobs, and sometimes, 100 percent of its nonbullshit aspects. It would be fascinating—though probably impossible—to write a history of books, designs, plans, and documents attributed to famous men that were actually written by their secretaries. (с)
Q:
As we’ll see, testimonies from consultants hired to introduce efficiencies in a large corporation (say, a bank, or a medical supply corporation) attest to the awkward silences and outright hostility that ensue when executives realize those efficiencies will have the effect of automating away a significant portion of their subordinates. (c)
Q:
The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable. (c)
Q:
Does Oxford really need to employ a dozen-plus PR specialists to convince the public it’s a top-notch university? I’d imagine it would take at least that many PR agents quite a number of years to convince the public Oxford was not a top-notch university, and even then, I suspect the task would prove impossible. (c)
Q:
“I am a corporate lawyer . . . I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all of the time.” (c)
Q:
Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured. (c)
Q:
The project involved playing lip service to customers, and having long discussions with managers at meetings, before finally writing up a report that got praised (mainly because it was presented and laid out attractively) by managers in the meeting. (c)
Q:
Note here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses’ armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so may present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. (c)
Q:
I have rewritten candidates’ resumes myself to ensure that they defeat the hiring software so I can be allowed to interview and select them. If they don’t make it past the computer, I can’t consider them. (c)
Q:
One compelling suggestion I heard was for a category of “imaginary friends”—that is, people hired ostensibly to humanize an inhuman corporate environment but who, in fact, mainly force people to go through elaborate games of make-believe. We will be hearing about forced “creativity” and “mindfulness” seminars and obligatory charity events later on; there are workers whose entire careers are based on dressing up in costumes or otherwise designing silly games to create rapport in office environments where everyone would probably be happier just being left alone. (c)
Q:
I started arriving late and leaving early. I extended the company policy of “a pint on Friday lunchtime” into “pints every lunchtime.” I read novels at my desk. I went out for lunchtime walks that lasted three hours. I almost perfected my French reading ability, sitting with my shoes off with a copy of Le Monde and a Petit Robert. I tried to quit, and my boss offered me a £2,600 raise, which I reluctantly accepted. They needed me precisely because I didn’t have the skills to implement something that they didn’t want to implement, and they were willing to pay to keep me. (с)
Q:
His presence in the company was very close to a practical joke some designers were playing on one another. (c)
Q:
How might anti-Eric have behaved differently? Well, likely as not, he would have played along with the charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms of self-annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate social capital, connections that would eventually allow him to move on to better things. He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. (c)
Q:
One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during. (c)
Q:
Any given week, there will be a few situations where [our partner company] is supposed to reach out to my team for advisory. So for up to twenty minutes a week, we have actual work to do. Ordinarily, though, I send five or eight fifteen-word emails a day, and every few days, there’s a ten-minute team meeting. The rest of the workweek is functionally mine, though not in any way I can flaunt. So I flit through social media, RSS aggregation, and coursework in a wide but short browser window I keep discreetly on the second of my two monitors. And every few hours, I’ll remember I’m at a workplace and respond to my one waiting email with something like: “We agree with the thing you said. Please proceed with the thing.” Then I only have to pretend to be visibly overworked for seven more hours each day. (c)
Q:
But I have no authority and no control over anything.
So I read a lot. I watch TV. I have no idea what my boss thinks I do all day. (c)
We start rating calc at 5 star max.
> Some of the things innovative. Seriously, have my star drives never been built because people around the world have been too busy creating BS PPTs and simply had no time to spend building devices for my space travel? F***!!!!!!! (+1 star)
> Other points felt like BS themselves and made me feel that the author misses the point a bit:
1. If people are ok being with themselves, on their own, without some supervisor snapping at them, if have individual projects to pursue, if they are mindful of their own interests and have personal intellectual pursuits and endeavors, they just might feel at such jobs as partially employed academics. (-1 star)
2. Another thing is that people could just craft new job responsibilities for themselves on the sly, while building networks inside the organization. This idea was superficially mentioned at one point in the book but wasn't developed at full, I think. (-1 star)
Q:
This is how the USSR ended up with shops where customers had to go through three different clerks to buy a loaf of bread, or road crews where, at any given moment, two-thirds of the workers were drinking, playing cards, or dozing off. This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. (с) I'm quite sure this is not true: I can't find sources on this. This some fantasy on what the USSR was like or something? Actually, in post-war USSR one could go to jail for 3 years for being late to work by 20 min. And the work was extremely substantial: just imagine rebuilding a country gutted in the WW2.
Q:
The result was to reveal that men are far more likely to feel that their jobs are pointless (42 percent) than women do (32 percent). Again, it seems reasonable to assume that they are right. (c) Or, maybe they are just perceiving the world differently. For example, a female secretary could be thinking in terms of making life easier for her boss, organising his work, improving the way his letters are perceived by their adressees (by delivering them on time, without misprints, on nice paper, etc), taking care of the coffees and lunches and appointments… A male secretary might be thinking in terms of doing the work of a menial servant and a helper and not having any influence on the decisions being made and having no expectations to get promoted and… And I'm not being sexist here: the girls are often brought up with the expectation of them running their homes (at least at some point), organising things in the family, taking care of people, while boys are more often oriented at being active, creating stuff, being direct and physical. It's a good thing this trend has been changing a lot lately! I would think that women are just less whiny about their jobs and the proportion is about equal (as long as women and male have equal chances at landing certain jobs!).
Q:
Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? (c)
Q:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, 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. (c)
Q:
What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (c)
Q:
Finally, and with the concurrence of his therapist, he decided that rather than just continue to sit around all day pretending to look busy, he would convince the water board he was being supervised by the municipality, and the municipality that he was being supervised by the water board, check in if there was a problem, but otherwise just go home and do something useful with his life. (с)
Q:
In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation. (c)
Q:
… HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. (c)
Q:
What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist. (c)
Q:
The most compelling argument to this effect was from a former exotic dancer, now professor, who made a case that most sex work should be considered a bullshit job because, while she acknowledged that sex work clearly did answer a genuine consumer demand, something was terribly, terribly wrong with any society that effectively tells the vast majority of its female population they are worth more dancing on boxes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five than they will be at any subsequent point in their lives, whatever their talents or accomplishments. If the same woman can make five times as much money stripping as she could teaching as a world-recognized scholar, could not the stripping job be considered bullshit simply on that basis? (c)
Q:
She had always been shy, tongue-tied in front of strangers, a fish out of water at her raucous secondary school; but what she hadn’t realized was that during all those years spent coolly standing back and watching others, she had been honing her detachment and learning the skills that would someday become her trade. She had been watching the versions people gave of themselves, the tells that showed when they were nervous or hopeful or trying to evade the truth. She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching. (c)
Q:
In other cases, as with Ophelia, the flunkies end up effectively doing the bosses’ jobs for them. This, of course, was the traditional role of female secretaries (now relabeled “administrative assistants”) working for male executives during most of the twentieth century: while in theory secretaries were there just to answer the phone, take dictation, and do some light filing, in fact, they often ended up doing 80 percent to 90 percent of their bosses’ jobs, and sometimes, 100 percent of its nonbullshit aspects. It would be fascinating—though probably impossible—to write a history of books, designs, plans, and documents attributed to famous men that were actually written by their secretaries. (с)
Q:
As we’ll see, testimonies from consultants hired to introduce efficiencies in a large corporation (say, a bank, or a medical supply corporation) attest to the awkward silences and outright hostility that ensue when executives realize those efficiencies will have the effect of automating away a significant portion of their subordinates. (c)
Q:
The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable. (c)
Q:
Does Oxford really need to employ a dozen-plus PR specialists to convince the public it’s a top-notch university? I’d imagine it would take at least that many PR agents quite a number of years to convince the public Oxford was not a top-notch university, and even then, I suspect the task would prove impossible. (c)
Q:
“I am a corporate lawyer . . . I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all of the time.” (c)
Q:
Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured. (c)
Q:
The project involved playing lip service to customers, and having long discussions with managers at meetings, before finally writing up a report that got praised (mainly because it was presented and laid out attractively) by managers in the meeting. (c)
Q:
Note here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses’ armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so may present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. (c)
Q:
I have rewritten candidates’ resumes myself to ensure that they defeat the hiring software so I can be allowed to interview and select them. If they don’t make it past the computer, I can’t consider them. (c)
Q:
One compelling suggestion I heard was for a category of “imaginary friends”—that is, people hired ostensibly to humanize an inhuman corporate environment but who, in fact, mainly force people to go through elaborate games of make-believe. We will be hearing about forced “creativity” and “mindfulness” seminars and obligatory charity events later on; there are workers whose entire careers are based on dressing up in costumes or otherwise designing silly games to create rapport in office environments where everyone would probably be happier just being left alone. (c)
Q:
I started arriving late and leaving early. I extended the company policy of “a pint on Friday lunchtime” into “pints every lunchtime.” I read novels at my desk. I went out for lunchtime walks that lasted three hours. I almost perfected my French reading ability, sitting with my shoes off with a copy of Le Monde and a Petit Robert. I tried to quit, and my boss offered me a £2,600 raise, which I reluctantly accepted. They needed me precisely because I didn’t have the skills to implement something that they didn’t want to implement, and they were willing to pay to keep me. (с)
Q:
His presence in the company was very close to a practical joke some designers were playing on one another. (c)
Q:
How might anti-Eric have behaved differently? Well, likely as not, he would have played along with the charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms of self-annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate social capital, connections that would eventually allow him to move on to better things. He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. (c)
Q:
One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during. (c)
Q:
Any given week, there will be a few situations where [our partner company] is supposed to reach out to my team for advisory. So for up to twenty minutes a week, we have actual work to do. Ordinarily, though, I send five or eight fifteen-word emails a day, and every few days, there’s a ten-minute team meeting. The rest of the workweek is functionally mine, though not in any way I can flaunt. So I flit through social media, RSS aggregation, and coursework in a wide but short browser window I keep discreetly on the second of my two monitors. And every few hours, I’ll remember I’m at a workplace and respond to my one waiting email with something like: “We agree with the thing you said. Please proceed with the thing.” Then I only have to pretend to be visibly overworked for seven more hours each day. (c)
Q:
But I have no authority and no control over anything.
So I read a lot. I watch TV. I have no idea what my boss thinks I do all day. (c)
January 5, 2025
Modern capitalism is rebranded feudalism.
There is so much to say about this book. Tl:dr: read this book. Read it soon because it will completely change your world view about employment, society and capitalism. Graeber takes his theory about bullshit jobs, which he lays out very well, and then expands it into a theory about the very fabric of our economy and how our corporate world has been fashioned into a modern-day feudal state where managerial lords preside over a vast and bloated private bureaucracy that has one aim: slow down efficiency, extract as much capital from the process as possible and then concentrate that wealth at the top.
First with the meat of this book: Bullshit Jobs. With both wit and eloquence, Graeber comes up with an entire taxonomy of bullshit jobs that literally anyone who has ever worked in the market economy will readily relate to. He has 5 designations of bullshit jobs: the flunkies who are paid to make their superiors look good, these take the otherwise rebellious and give them something to do to occupy their time. Flunkies are the doormen, the cold callers that are assistance to stock brokers (when they don’t need one). It’s all about making the boss look good and they likely do 90% of their boss’ job while their boss is on Facebook all day. There are the Goons: trying to get people to do things that they don’t want to do, eg, a telemarketer. The Duct Tapers: they are hired to fix what someone else in the company screwed up or doesn’t know how to do. The Box Tickers: this is self explanatory. And then there are the Task Masters: those mid-level managerial positions who do nothing but manage people who don’t need to be managed at all. All of these jobs are bullshit jobs: if they were to vanish right now no one, not even those employed in these jobs, would miss these jobs. This is to distinguish from Shit Jobs which are 100% essential they just aren’t very glamorous and are traditionally laborious like service jobs. Here’s the crazy thing: Bullshit jobs are everywhere, go unrecognized and represent a reverse in traditional thinking: the private sector and “free markets” are incredibly inefficient and are bloated bureaucracies.
Through dozens and dozens of first hand accounts, Graeber shares and analyzes first hand accounts of people being very honest about their bullshit jobs. He suggests that the domination over people is a form of spiritual violence. The current job structure we live in is not natural and is not necessary. Graeber argues that we could easily all have 15 hour work weeks and possibly be even more efficient and be able to pursue other things that, you know, make us feel like human beings?
One should never underestimate an institution's motivation to preserve itself. Through collusion with the government, Wall Street has become the de fact task masters, setting up the feared government bureaucracy that has been the boogieman since the 1980s. Not only are these masters in power, but they are also in domination over our market society. Ingrained in each of us since school is the need to be on time, obey and don’t talk back regardless of how absurd our own critical thinking has discovered. Some insist that the free market would never create jobs that aren’t necessary and that it’s just the lowly employees that don’t understand their tiny jobs in the enormous complex of a conglomeration. They say it is the breaking of many tasks that makes it all appear bullshit. The truth is market solutions not only create inefficiencies but they are rewarded by them. For example, when a company has to pay out a lawsuit, it is greatly in their interest to take their time. The longer a process takes, the more wealth can be extracted multiplied by a factor of how ever many subcontractors get involved. The result is soul-sucking tedium for the little person, hollowing infrastructure and wealth concentration at the top. The advent of broad financialization I’m sure is at play here. What we have is not really capitalism but an enormous rent-seeking institution that rewards the inefficiencies and delays which destroys the final product with total disregard for the employee and their adorable attempts for a living wage and healthcare.
There is a clear inverse relationship between job usefulness and pay. Most jobs that add value—teachers, artists, journalists—get shit pay. Those that work in the financial sector contribute the absolute least to society. And herein we get a fleshing out of an important dynamic: moral envy and resentment. Take the outcry for teachers demanding collective bargaining for benefits. The opposing view is that “hey they chose that job, they should deal with it.” It’s as if we’re saying: if you choose a job that actually adds value to society, that should be a reward in and of itself, how dare you demand a living wage and benefits. There is a sort of perverse indignation when those in virtuous sectors also want decent pay.
There was a time when labor was seen as the means of production and power. Now, capital has all the power and dictates the market and value. In the Labor Value Theory, one paid for something the amount of labor it would’ve taken the consumer to produce. This idea is completely forerign because capitalists have completely decoupled price from product. Capital dictates everything. There was a huge shift from turning labor from the producing power into the consumers. Labor was hollowed out of its power and given just enough money to consume, but nothing more. So now we live in this weird sadomasochistic dynamic where suffering at a job is supposed to be some sort of badge of honor. And if you don’t suffer like the rest of us, then you’re just the undeserving poor. “How dare you demand entitlement when you haven’t suffered like me for ten years in a bullshit job where I’m dehumanized daily by a bullshit mid-level manager.”
Graeber argues that this is why we have the political landscape that we have today. Here’s the ecosystem: those struggling without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed as freeloaders. Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent those that do productive or virtuous labor. Those that do productive labor resent those that have monopolized capital at the top who are often referred to as the liberal elite. All are united in their hatred of the political class. The political class finds the hatred convenient because it’s all a grand distraction from their corruption and inept policymaking.
The white working class hates the liberal intelligentsia. Why? Because the liberal elite are the gatekeepers to the professional class and higher paying jobs. The white poor can often imagine themselves being rich but not having access to the ivory tower jobs of the liberal elite. So the rich are revered and often encouraged to obtain their wealth by unscrupulous means as long as it sticks it to the liberal class who, quite accurately, has shut off a lot of people to the professional class. If you want to make money, there are ways to do this. If you want to pursue arts, charity, journalism etc and make actual money at it, it is extremely difficult to do without existing social capital, wealth or social networks. The liberal elites have placed a social lock on making money through valuable work. The white working class focuses on resentment toward intellectuals. Immigrant families can also have distrust of liberal policymaking but they see education, a liberal bastion, as the only way of social mobility. For this reason, the white working class sees the immigrant class as in collusion with the liberal elite. And this is one reason why the military is so sacrosanct to the white working class: the children of the white working class, who are shut off from the liberal professional class, can obtain a job that has social value with job benefits. The military is a haven for frustrated altruists without a college degree.
Graeber ends his discussion with a little bit about tech taking over jobs and he brings up a fair point: why doesn’t anyone talk about the very feasible phenomenon of tech taking over the financial sector? It could happen… if we allowed it. Graeber also argues the Universal Basic Income (UBI) would do the exact opposite of growing the government, it would actually streamline the government and eliminate bullshit positions that would no longer be needed. UBI would give workers the power to quit their bullshit jobs, if they wanted to. Graeber is a self-professed anarchist and there’s obviously a lot of marxist principles in this book. Even if you’re against these ideas (I’m no marxist) you will learn a TON from this book.
Highly recommend. This book will change the way you think.
There is so much to say about this book. Tl:dr: read this book. Read it soon because it will completely change your world view about employment, society and capitalism. Graeber takes his theory about bullshit jobs, which he lays out very well, and then expands it into a theory about the very fabric of our economy and how our corporate world has been fashioned into a modern-day feudal state where managerial lords preside over a vast and bloated private bureaucracy that has one aim: slow down efficiency, extract as much capital from the process as possible and then concentrate that wealth at the top.
First with the meat of this book: Bullshit Jobs. With both wit and eloquence, Graeber comes up with an entire taxonomy of bullshit jobs that literally anyone who has ever worked in the market economy will readily relate to. He has 5 designations of bullshit jobs: the flunkies who are paid to make their superiors look good, these take the otherwise rebellious and give them something to do to occupy their time. Flunkies are the doormen, the cold callers that are assistance to stock brokers (when they don’t need one). It’s all about making the boss look good and they likely do 90% of their boss’ job while their boss is on Facebook all day. There are the Goons: trying to get people to do things that they don’t want to do, eg, a telemarketer. The Duct Tapers: they are hired to fix what someone else in the company screwed up or doesn’t know how to do. The Box Tickers: this is self explanatory. And then there are the Task Masters: those mid-level managerial positions who do nothing but manage people who don’t need to be managed at all. All of these jobs are bullshit jobs: if they were to vanish right now no one, not even those employed in these jobs, would miss these jobs. This is to distinguish from Shit Jobs which are 100% essential they just aren’t very glamorous and are traditionally laborious like service jobs. Here’s the crazy thing: Bullshit jobs are everywhere, go unrecognized and represent a reverse in traditional thinking: the private sector and “free markets” are incredibly inefficient and are bloated bureaucracies.
Through dozens and dozens of first hand accounts, Graeber shares and analyzes first hand accounts of people being very honest about their bullshit jobs. He suggests that the domination over people is a form of spiritual violence. The current job structure we live in is not natural and is not necessary. Graeber argues that we could easily all have 15 hour work weeks and possibly be even more efficient and be able to pursue other things that, you know, make us feel like human beings?
One should never underestimate an institution's motivation to preserve itself. Through collusion with the government, Wall Street has become the de fact task masters, setting up the feared government bureaucracy that has been the boogieman since the 1980s. Not only are these masters in power, but they are also in domination over our market society. Ingrained in each of us since school is the need to be on time, obey and don’t talk back regardless of how absurd our own critical thinking has discovered. Some insist that the free market would never create jobs that aren’t necessary and that it’s just the lowly employees that don’t understand their tiny jobs in the enormous complex of a conglomeration. They say it is the breaking of many tasks that makes it all appear bullshit. The truth is market solutions not only create inefficiencies but they are rewarded by them. For example, when a company has to pay out a lawsuit, it is greatly in their interest to take their time. The longer a process takes, the more wealth can be extracted multiplied by a factor of how ever many subcontractors get involved. The result is soul-sucking tedium for the little person, hollowing infrastructure and wealth concentration at the top. The advent of broad financialization I’m sure is at play here. What we have is not really capitalism but an enormous rent-seeking institution that rewards the inefficiencies and delays which destroys the final product with total disregard for the employee and their adorable attempts for a living wage and healthcare.
There is a clear inverse relationship between job usefulness and pay. Most jobs that add value—teachers, artists, journalists—get shit pay. Those that work in the financial sector contribute the absolute least to society. And herein we get a fleshing out of an important dynamic: moral envy and resentment. Take the outcry for teachers demanding collective bargaining for benefits. The opposing view is that “hey they chose that job, they should deal with it.” It’s as if we’re saying: if you choose a job that actually adds value to society, that should be a reward in and of itself, how dare you demand a living wage and benefits. There is a sort of perverse indignation when those in virtuous sectors also want decent pay.
There was a time when labor was seen as the means of production and power. Now, capital has all the power and dictates the market and value. In the Labor Value Theory, one paid for something the amount of labor it would’ve taken the consumer to produce. This idea is completely forerign because capitalists have completely decoupled price from product. Capital dictates everything. There was a huge shift from turning labor from the producing power into the consumers. Labor was hollowed out of its power and given just enough money to consume, but nothing more. So now we live in this weird sadomasochistic dynamic where suffering at a job is supposed to be some sort of badge of honor. And if you don’t suffer like the rest of us, then you’re just the undeserving poor. “How dare you demand entitlement when you haven’t suffered like me for ten years in a bullshit job where I’m dehumanized daily by a bullshit mid-level manager.”
Graeber argues that this is why we have the political landscape that we have today. Here’s the ecosystem: those struggling without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed as freeloaders. Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent those that do productive or virtuous labor. Those that do productive labor resent those that have monopolized capital at the top who are often referred to as the liberal elite. All are united in their hatred of the political class. The political class finds the hatred convenient because it’s all a grand distraction from their corruption and inept policymaking.
The white working class hates the liberal intelligentsia. Why? Because the liberal elite are the gatekeepers to the professional class and higher paying jobs. The white poor can often imagine themselves being rich but not having access to the ivory tower jobs of the liberal elite. So the rich are revered and often encouraged to obtain their wealth by unscrupulous means as long as it sticks it to the liberal class who, quite accurately, has shut off a lot of people to the professional class. If you want to make money, there are ways to do this. If you want to pursue arts, charity, journalism etc and make actual money at it, it is extremely difficult to do without existing social capital, wealth or social networks. The liberal elites have placed a social lock on making money through valuable work. The white working class focuses on resentment toward intellectuals. Immigrant families can also have distrust of liberal policymaking but they see education, a liberal bastion, as the only way of social mobility. For this reason, the white working class sees the immigrant class as in collusion with the liberal elite. And this is one reason why the military is so sacrosanct to the white working class: the children of the white working class, who are shut off from the liberal professional class, can obtain a job that has social value with job benefits. The military is a haven for frustrated altruists without a college degree.
Graeber ends his discussion with a little bit about tech taking over jobs and he brings up a fair point: why doesn’t anyone talk about the very feasible phenomenon of tech taking over the financial sector? It could happen… if we allowed it. Graeber also argues the Universal Basic Income (UBI) would do the exact opposite of growing the government, it would actually streamline the government and eliminate bullshit positions that would no longer be needed. UBI would give workers the power to quit their bullshit jobs, if they wanted to. Graeber is a self-professed anarchist and there’s obviously a lot of marxist principles in this book. Even if you’re against these ideas (I’m no marxist) you will learn a TON from this book.
Highly recommend. This book will change the way you think.
March 3, 2025
Capitalist Alienation 2.0…
Preamble:
1) Creativity:
--On the one hand, Graeber is my favourite writer.
…I’ve yet to read someone who has synthesized so much critical research and presented it in such a playful, engaging manner. As Colleen P. Eren reviewed, “[This book] makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange.”
--Indeed, an essay in Graeber’s posthumous The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays defends the method of “theoretical reduction”/“structural analysis” as “simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected.”
2) Rigour…?:
--On the other hand, it’s essential we constantly test our theories with an array of robust tools/lenses, perhaps even more so for theories that appeal to us (confirmation bias).
--Social sciences (yes, including “economics”) are a wonderland of biases; I experienced this the hard way from being lured early on into “free market” economics and New Atheism, with the subsequent growing pains of mounting contradictions and re-evaluations.
--Yes, there are innate difficulties in testing social theories (ex. difficult to perform social experiments to control for confounding variables/reproduce findings) compared to physical sciences, but many in social sciences seem rather negligent towards still-applicable tools in scientific research to control for our many fascinating biases (from “correlation fallacy” to “prosecutor’s fallacy”): see public science writer/medical doctor Goldacre’s: Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
--James Suzman, an anthropologist like Graeber (although with differing views, i.e. prioritizing a materialist lens rather than idealist/cultural lens), cautions:
…If academia is messy, the reading public is even more vulnerable in our world full of Malcolm Gladwell salespeople disguised as social theorists. From an interview, Gladwell reveals:
…As I started to collect more challenges to Graeber’s cultural/idealist anthropology (esp. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) and political strategy in Occupy Wall Street (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement), it was time to re-evaluate this book…
Highlights:
1) Graeber’s Methodology:
--Graeber collected (from mostly English-speaking countries) 124 personal stories discussing his 2013 essay on bullshit jobs and 250+ more direct responses to his 2016 Twitter post:
i) Individual:
--i.e. “why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?”
--Graeber’s collection of anecdotes covers this.
ii) Societal/Economic:
--i.e. “what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?”
--This is the level I start with, i.e. (geo)political economy lens to analyze capitalism. Note Graeber’s response in an interview in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays:
--i.e. “why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?”
--As a (cultural) anthropologist, this is indeed the “other parts” that Graeber emphasizes:
…I find the above context on methodology useful to reassess, before we get swept away by the theories; see comments below (start at message #14) for rest of the review (theory!)…
Preamble:
1) Creativity:
--On the one hand, Graeber is my favourite writer.
…I’ve yet to read someone who has synthesized so much critical research and presented it in such a playful, engaging manner. As Colleen P. Eren reviewed, “[This book] makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange.”
--Indeed, an essay in Graeber’s posthumous The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays defends the method of “theoretical reduction”/“structural analysis” as “simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected.”
2) Rigour…?:
--On the other hand, it’s essential we constantly test our theories with an array of robust tools/lenses, perhaps even more so for theories that appeal to us (confirmation bias).
--Social sciences (yes, including “economics”) are a wonderland of biases; I experienced this the hard way from being lured early on into “free market” economics and New Atheism, with the subsequent growing pains of mounting contradictions and re-evaluations.
--Yes, there are innate difficulties in testing social theories (ex. difficult to perform social experiments to control for confounding variables/reproduce findings) compared to physical sciences, but many in social sciences seem rather negligent towards still-applicable tools in scientific research to control for our many fascinating biases (from “correlation fallacy” to “prosecutor’s fallacy”): see public science writer/medical doctor Goldacre’s: Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
--James Suzman, an anthropologist like Graeber (although with differing views, i.e. prioritizing a materialist lens rather than idealist/cultural lens), cautions:
Novelty oils the engines of academia, a place in which there is more credibility to be gained by tearing down established ideas than by reaffirming them.…This pairs with Goldacre’s critique of systematic bias for publishing positive (i.e. novel, thus prestige) over negative findings. However, I would stress power in politically-contentious fields (ex. economics); theories useful to status quo power are popularized in well-funded departments (ex. business schools) whereas critical theories get relegated to basements (ex. geography, English department).
…If academia is messy, the reading public is even more vulnerable in our world full of Malcolm Gladwell salespeople disguised as social theorists. From an interview, Gladwell reveals:
I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. […] And if you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual, so you're quickly weaned off the notion that you should be interested in the mundane.…Goldacre dismisses Gladwell’s books as “silly and overstated”. How would Goldacre judge Graeber’s methodological rigour?
…As I started to collect more challenges to Graeber’s cultural/idealist anthropology (esp. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) and political strategy in Occupy Wall Street (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement), it was time to re-evaluate this book…
Highlights:
1) Graeber’s Methodology:
--Graeber collected (from mostly English-speaking countries) 124 personal stories discussing his 2013 essay on bullshit jobs and 250+ more direct responses to his 2016 Twitter post:
The results might not be adequate for most forms of statistical analysis, but I have found them an extraordinarily rich source for qualitative analysis, especially since in many cases I’ve been able to ask follow-up questions and, in some, to engage in long conversations with informants.…This could be sufficient for the topic (esp. by social science standards) if paired with broader data (ex. census), but the presentation is haphazard. In fact, I could not find a citation for a useful source (“a recent report”; luckily, this was easy to search for online: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Occupational changes during the 20th century”) mentioned in the following core passage:
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia [prediction in 1930 that, by 2030, we would have a 15-hour work week]—still being eagerly awaited in the sixties—never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.--In terms of social science theory, Graeber writes:
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” [not even citing direct quotes, tsk-tsk…] In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. (Even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
We are faced here with a classic problem in social theory: the problem of levels of causality. In the case of any given real-world event, there are any number of different reasons why one can say it happened. […]…Graeber considers 3 levels of casuality:
Much of the confusion that surrounds debate about social issues in general can be traced back to the fact that people will regularly take these different explanations as alternatives rather than seeing them as factors that all operate at the same time.
i) Individual:
--i.e. “why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?”
--Graeber’s collection of anecdotes covers this.
ii) Societal/Economic:
--i.e. “what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?”
--This is the level I start with, i.e. (geo)political economy lens to analyze capitalism. Note Graeber’s response in an interview in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays:
Often Marxists take me to task for ignoring the basic tenets of Marxism. I don’t think I ignore them, but I actually take them rather for granted. I’m just emphasizing other parts of the equation.iii) Cultural/Political:
--i.e. “why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?”
--As a (cultural) anthropologist, this is indeed the “other parts” that Graeber emphasizes:
It’s also the easiest to overlook, since it often deals specifically with things people are not doing.
[…] basic assumptions about what people are, what can be expected of them, and what they can justifiably demand of one another. Those assumptions, in turn, have an enormous influence in determining what is considered to be a political issue and what is not.”
…I find the above context on methodology useful to reassess, before we get swept away by the theories; see comments below (start at message #14) for rest of the review (theory!)…
April 2, 2024
Brilliant. Spectacular writing, interesting research and incredible theories and analysis.
June 24, 2019
What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. (xxi)
You had me at "ska musicians." But our author pivots quickly:
Writing this book also serves a political purpose.
I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. (xxvi)
Sadly, this call to action never really lands. Bullshit Jobs might have peaked as an essay. The book as a whole is relentlessly padded and at times repetitive, and its clunky, awkward, twisty prose sometimes comes across as parody of research and academic texts. These bits of bloat combine to make the text present more of a goofy, "just for fun" sort of message than a serious consideration of social change.
2.5 stars out of 5. Enjoyable for stretches, but gets bogged down in too much fluff. More a pop culture phenomenon than a genuine changemaker.
January 28, 2022
I have one.
Now I have the book.
Wholly cow.
This thing could not have come at a better time.
I needed it like a drink of cool clear water in a SoCal wild fire in a drought and a heat wave.
How so you ask?
Well.
You see.
I, like so many others…hate my job.
That’s right.
You heard me.
I hate my job.
I feel ashamed even saying that.
Because America and Capitalism.
But I do.
Not everything about it.
I’m a therpaist by training.
And I still see a few clients here and there.
And I completely LOVE IT.
It’s a tough gig at times.
But it’s is truly an honor to be afforded the sacred privilege of serving people in this way.
I absolutely LOVE being a therpaist.
It’s the work that I was born to do.
But the thing is.
It’s hard to support a family as a therpaist.
These types of “meaningful” jobs are often poorly compensated, particularly if the job description includes caring, and is associated with women, think nurse, teacher etc.
Therapist in private practice make a lot of money.
But I’m not in private practice.
I work in residential treatment for substance and mental health disorders.
And therapists in these types of roles, including community mental health or agency based care don’t tend to make cake.
And so, I (over time) have followed the money into an administrative management career path.
And it SUX.
At first it was MARVELOUS.
Dream job.
I love training new therapists, leading teams, designing programs, creating just culture.
All that.
And I’m not going to lie to y’all.
The money is good.
For the first time in my later adult life, I’m making enough money to support my family and live a basically comfortable life in Los Angeles.
Not enough to buy a home mind you.
Because Los Angeles.
But enough to pay the bills, get out of debt, save a little something, and even subscribe to Netflix without feeling like I’m sacrificing my future ability to feed and clothe my self and my wife in retirement.
But then, COVID-19 happened.
And the profit margins narrowed.
And the top down hostility flared.
And everybody became afraid for their jobs.
And the tensions mounted.
And the internecine office politics went psycho.
And the work environment became toxic.
And a lot of the good people left.
And it became increasingly hard to attract good new people to commute to work, and put their health at risk working in a residential milieu when they could make WAY more working remotely in the safety and comfort of their own homes.
And here we are.
From waking dream to living nightmare in a little over 365 days, just add one global epidemic (COVID-19 🦠) to another global epidemic (addiction 💉 and mental health 😫) to another crisis (health care in America 🏥 🇺🇸) to another crisis (affordable housing 💵🏠) to another crisis (the great resignation 🏭👎) and KABOOM💥.
2019 😃
2020 😕
2021 ☹️
2022 😖
2023….
I worked in the film and television industry for 15 years before I decided to go back to school and become a therapist.
I worked (behind the camera where all the smart people are) as an art director, prop maker and set decorator.
It was fun, and quite lucrative, but over time it became a meaningless, self pimping perversion of my creative aspirations, and I eventually became burnt out beyond recognition. A very common occurrence in that field.
So yeah.
I became a therapist.
And…
I’m dangerously close to a repeat performance.
In the film industry, we had a painful little “joke.”
Ready for it?
A director (the creative) and a producer (the bean counter business guy) are walking in the desert.
They’re both dying of thirst.
Right in the nick of time, the director finds a pitcher of life saving ice water, and just as the director is about to serve up two delicious glasses, the producer says “wait, wait, I have an idea, give me the pitcher so I can take a piss in it”.
This is what it’s like to (a) become and therpaist, and then (b) become a clinical director, only you’re the one taking a piss in your own pitcher.
There’s a saying from Greenland that goes: ‘pissing your pants can only keep you warm for so long.’
Well!
I’m cold 🥶
But I’m not bitter.
No!
So anyway.
I have made a few healthy career moves (in no small part because of this book). I didn’t quit my job. But I’m stepping down from the administrative (shit job from hell) role, and back into the therapy role (that I love, love, LOVE).
And it’s already better.
So yes.
This book gives form, structure, and language to the experience of having a soul sucking gig.
It’s validating.
It’s clarifying.
And it’s laugh out loud funny.
It’s a soothing tincture for a bruised and battered soul.
If you feel guilty and weird because you hate your job, and you also feel ridiculously fortunate to have a job, and you don’t really have a good way of surviving without a job, and you don’t really have a good alternative for your current job.
Than think about picking this thing up.
Reading it.
And then hit me up in the comments section if you want to start a revolution.
This book is a god shot.
5/5 Stars ✨
Now I have the book.
Wholly cow.
This thing could not have come at a better time.
I needed it like a drink of cool clear water in a SoCal wild fire in a drought and a heat wave.
How so you ask?
Well.
You see.
I, like so many others…hate my job.
That’s right.
You heard me.
I hate my job.
I feel ashamed even saying that.
Because America and Capitalism.
But I do.
Not everything about it.
I’m a therpaist by training.
And I still see a few clients here and there.
And I completely LOVE IT.
It’s a tough gig at times.
But it’s is truly an honor to be afforded the sacred privilege of serving people in this way.
I absolutely LOVE being a therpaist.
It’s the work that I was born to do.
But the thing is.
It’s hard to support a family as a therpaist.
These types of “meaningful” jobs are often poorly compensated, particularly if the job description includes caring, and is associated with women, think nurse, teacher etc.
Therapist in private practice make a lot of money.
But I’m not in private practice.
I work in residential treatment for substance and mental health disorders.
And therapists in these types of roles, including community mental health or agency based care don’t tend to make cake.
And so, I (over time) have followed the money into an administrative management career path.
And it SUX.
At first it was MARVELOUS.
Dream job.
I love training new therapists, leading teams, designing programs, creating just culture.
All that.
And I’m not going to lie to y’all.
The money is good.
For the first time in my later adult life, I’m making enough money to support my family and live a basically comfortable life in Los Angeles.
Not enough to buy a home mind you.
Because Los Angeles.
But enough to pay the bills, get out of debt, save a little something, and even subscribe to Netflix without feeling like I’m sacrificing my future ability to feed and clothe my self and my wife in retirement.
But then, COVID-19 happened.
And the profit margins narrowed.
And the top down hostility flared.
And everybody became afraid for their jobs.
And the tensions mounted.
And the internecine office politics went psycho.
And the work environment became toxic.
And a lot of the good people left.
And it became increasingly hard to attract good new people to commute to work, and put their health at risk working in a residential milieu when they could make WAY more working remotely in the safety and comfort of their own homes.
And here we are.
From waking dream to living nightmare in a little over 365 days, just add one global epidemic (COVID-19 🦠) to another global epidemic (addiction 💉 and mental health 😫) to another crisis (health care in America 🏥 🇺🇸) to another crisis (affordable housing 💵🏠) to another crisis (the great resignation 🏭👎) and KABOOM💥.
2019 😃
2020 😕
2021 ☹️
2022 😖
2023….
I worked in the film and television industry for 15 years before I decided to go back to school and become a therapist.
I worked (behind the camera where all the smart people are) as an art director, prop maker and set decorator.
It was fun, and quite lucrative, but over time it became a meaningless, self pimping perversion of my creative aspirations, and I eventually became burnt out beyond recognition. A very common occurrence in that field.
So yeah.
I became a therapist.
And…
I’m dangerously close to a repeat performance.
In the film industry, we had a painful little “joke.”
Ready for it?
A director (the creative) and a producer (the bean counter business guy) are walking in the desert.
They’re both dying of thirst.
Right in the nick of time, the director finds a pitcher of life saving ice water, and just as the director is about to serve up two delicious glasses, the producer says “wait, wait, I have an idea, give me the pitcher so I can take a piss in it”.
This is what it’s like to (a) become and therpaist, and then (b) become a clinical director, only you’re the one taking a piss in your own pitcher.
There’s a saying from Greenland that goes: ‘pissing your pants can only keep you warm for so long.’
Well!
I’m cold 🥶
But I’m not bitter.
No!
So anyway.
I have made a few healthy career moves (in no small part because of this book). I didn’t quit my job. But I’m stepping down from the administrative (shit job from hell) role, and back into the therapy role (that I love, love, LOVE).
And it’s already better.
So yes.
This book gives form, structure, and language to the experience of having a soul sucking gig.
It’s validating.
It’s clarifying.
And it’s laugh out loud funny.
It’s a soothing tincture for a bruised and battered soul.
If you feel guilty and weird because you hate your job, and you also feel ridiculously fortunate to have a job, and you don’t really have a good way of surviving without a job, and you don’t really have a good alternative for your current job.
Than think about picking this thing up.
Reading it.
And then hit me up in the comments section if you want to start a revolution.
This book is a god shot.
5/5 Stars ✨
February 26, 2018
Facebook Salvation for BS Jobholders
The astounding number of hours spent weekly by social media users is a direct result of bullshit jobs, says David Graeber, in his book of the same name. In this context, the average smartphone being consulted 221 times a day is no longer unbelievable. Graeber has uncovered a whole new field for research: jobs where nothing real happens.
We often think of neoliberalism as the era when companies are lean and mean, all the fat is excised and operations optimized. That however, only applies to low-level labor, such as factory workers, teachers, nurses and cleaners. Meanwhile, managers are busy bulking up, overstaffing and underworking. The people who actually produce the goods or care for patients, customers and students are continually punished. Much of the rest is BS, he says.
David Graeber is an anthropologist, unwilling celebrity of Occupy Wall Street, and bestselling author of Debt. His approach is always clear, clean, organized and direct, and Bullshit Jobs is no exception. It began in 2013 when Strike! magazine published his essay on bullshit jobs. It immediately went viral. He asked why Oxford needs a dozen PR specialists to promote the university as a top notch school and why TV production companies need armies of development vice-presidents. (Consider too that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has a marketing department of 400.) His essay told BS jobholders they were not alone. They reposted it, blogged about it, and talked it up. It led Graeber to ask questions over Twitter, and he distilled the mountain of response into categories and examples. Polling firms started asking those questions too. It is becoming clear, in country after country, that 37-40% of jobs are either bullshit, or bullshitized by the corporation.
There are five main categories of bullshit jobs:
-Flunkies (eg. assistants, receptionists, or secretaries who make others look important)
-Duct tapers (who bridge gaps and errors instead of fixing obvious flaws in systems)
-Goons (such as telemarketers whose work function is to annoy)
-Box tickers (report generators, form fillers and surveillance agents)
-Taskmasters (who assign useless jobs, or worse, cause harm to others: eg unemployment or welfare agents)
-Flak catchers, on the other hand, provide a real service, allowing customers and co-workers to vent at someone totally powerless to resolve their issue. They may think they have BS jobs, but they have a genuine purpose. Sorry people.
Being ”the cause” of something is the most rewarding part of work. If workers can’t see any effect of anything they do, there’s steady decline, both mental and physical. “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist,” he says. They sit all day, surf the internet, become sullen and depressed, and long for human interaction and any sense of accomplishment.
Graeber says it all began in the Gilded Age, when labor lost its reputation as the means of production. Capital became the means, to the point where governments now fawn over capital to the detriment of everyone and everything else.
People can be resourceful, and seek fulfillment where they can. One hiring manager said she actually rewrote candidate résumés to show experience in an open BS position. Because her company’s HR software would not permit her to interview candidates without all the right boxes ticked, she had to give them the experience herself. But the receptionist whose only tasks are to answer the phone once a day and keep the mints bowl filled has no such opportunity.
There were those who wrote in saying they had written whole plays or learned a new language at work, but for the most part, neoliberalism has provided the BS jobholders with BS fillers like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube to wile away the years. BS jobs are responsible for their rise. For those who want more, there is risk. One wrote that “Doing something worthwhile is subversive.” The perversity is striking.
The main driver seems to be siege mentality and aggrandizement of executives: the need for underlings to prove how important they are. We used to call this empire-building. Graeber calls it managerial feudalism. So even though neoliberalism frowns on inefficiencies, there are many who are more about their own careers than the profits of the company.
Graeber’s first example is both the best and the worst. He quotes a man who works at a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor to the German army. When a soldier wanted to move to the empty office next door, the requisition filtered through all the companies to him. He arranged for security and movers to meet him at the office (several hours away), pack up the laptop and seal it securely, then unpack it again in the next office, while army security kept watch. Everybody signed off and filed their paperwork. This is a bullshit job. Or is it? What Graeber doesn’t see is the obvious reason for subcontractors to employ far too many people. They are not about efficiency, they are about billing the company above them. They mark up the employee’s salary 50-100%, so the more bureaucratic and process-oriented they are, the more profitable they will be. Those BS employees are pure profit. This is capitalism at its finest.
So the private sector is no different from the public sector. The market economy is not ruthlessly efficient, and far from rewarding to all but the top one percent. Graeber quotes President Obama, who created a healthcare plan that added to, rather than subtracted from the complex mess. He specifically cited the three million jobs that just process billing data, that might disappear had he proposed a single payer system. Instead, he institutionalized the BS jobs.
Graeber suggests we look at Universal Basic Income as an option, so that (among many other things) BS jobholders can quit and regain some purpose in life. In the meantime, there’s Facebook.
David Wineberg
The astounding number of hours spent weekly by social media users is a direct result of bullshit jobs, says David Graeber, in his book of the same name. In this context, the average smartphone being consulted 221 times a day is no longer unbelievable. Graeber has uncovered a whole new field for research: jobs where nothing real happens.
We often think of neoliberalism as the era when companies are lean and mean, all the fat is excised and operations optimized. That however, only applies to low-level labor, such as factory workers, teachers, nurses and cleaners. Meanwhile, managers are busy bulking up, overstaffing and underworking. The people who actually produce the goods or care for patients, customers and students are continually punished. Much of the rest is BS, he says.
David Graeber is an anthropologist, unwilling celebrity of Occupy Wall Street, and bestselling author of Debt. His approach is always clear, clean, organized and direct, and Bullshit Jobs is no exception. It began in 2013 when Strike! magazine published his essay on bullshit jobs. It immediately went viral. He asked why Oxford needs a dozen PR specialists to promote the university as a top notch school and why TV production companies need armies of development vice-presidents. (Consider too that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has a marketing department of 400.) His essay told BS jobholders they were not alone. They reposted it, blogged about it, and talked it up. It led Graeber to ask questions over Twitter, and he distilled the mountain of response into categories and examples. Polling firms started asking those questions too. It is becoming clear, in country after country, that 37-40% of jobs are either bullshit, or bullshitized by the corporation.
There are five main categories of bullshit jobs:
-Flunkies (eg. assistants, receptionists, or secretaries who make others look important)
-Duct tapers (who bridge gaps and errors instead of fixing obvious flaws in systems)
-Goons (such as telemarketers whose work function is to annoy)
-Box tickers (report generators, form fillers and surveillance agents)
-Taskmasters (who assign useless jobs, or worse, cause harm to others: eg unemployment or welfare agents)
-Flak catchers, on the other hand, provide a real service, allowing customers and co-workers to vent at someone totally powerless to resolve their issue. They may think they have BS jobs, but they have a genuine purpose. Sorry people.
Being ”the cause” of something is the most rewarding part of work. If workers can’t see any effect of anything they do, there’s steady decline, both mental and physical. “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist,” he says. They sit all day, surf the internet, become sullen and depressed, and long for human interaction and any sense of accomplishment.
Graeber says it all began in the Gilded Age, when labor lost its reputation as the means of production. Capital became the means, to the point where governments now fawn over capital to the detriment of everyone and everything else.
People can be resourceful, and seek fulfillment where they can. One hiring manager said she actually rewrote candidate résumés to show experience in an open BS position. Because her company’s HR software would not permit her to interview candidates without all the right boxes ticked, she had to give them the experience herself. But the receptionist whose only tasks are to answer the phone once a day and keep the mints bowl filled has no such opportunity.
There were those who wrote in saying they had written whole plays or learned a new language at work, but for the most part, neoliberalism has provided the BS jobholders with BS fillers like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube to wile away the years. BS jobs are responsible for their rise. For those who want more, there is risk. One wrote that “Doing something worthwhile is subversive.” The perversity is striking.
The main driver seems to be siege mentality and aggrandizement of executives: the need for underlings to prove how important they are. We used to call this empire-building. Graeber calls it managerial feudalism. So even though neoliberalism frowns on inefficiencies, there are many who are more about their own careers than the profits of the company.
Graeber’s first example is both the best and the worst. He quotes a man who works at a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor to the German army. When a soldier wanted to move to the empty office next door, the requisition filtered through all the companies to him. He arranged for security and movers to meet him at the office (several hours away), pack up the laptop and seal it securely, then unpack it again in the next office, while army security kept watch. Everybody signed off and filed their paperwork. This is a bullshit job. Or is it? What Graeber doesn’t see is the obvious reason for subcontractors to employ far too many people. They are not about efficiency, they are about billing the company above them. They mark up the employee’s salary 50-100%, so the more bureaucratic and process-oriented they are, the more profitable they will be. Those BS employees are pure profit. This is capitalism at its finest.
So the private sector is no different from the public sector. The market economy is not ruthlessly efficient, and far from rewarding to all but the top one percent. Graeber quotes President Obama, who created a healthcare plan that added to, rather than subtracted from the complex mess. He specifically cited the three million jobs that just process billing data, that might disappear had he proposed a single payer system. Instead, he institutionalized the BS jobs.
Graeber suggests we look at Universal Basic Income as an option, so that (among many other things) BS jobholders can quit and regain some purpose in life. In the meantime, there’s Facebook.
David Wineberg
Shelved as 'giveaway'
June 14, 2021This book rubs salt into old wounds; it chips away at all my illusions of self-importance, and increases my doubts about how I have chosen to spend my life. Though I am paid very well, I have always felt unessential in the grand scheme of things. There is good reason that spiritually, emotionally, personally unfulfilling and unrewarding work should command higher wages––in essence the worker barters his life away in what he does––but it has often bothered me (like a thorn in the side) that after I am gone, I shall not have left much of an impact on the world, that I shall have acquired no renown as a result of my carreer. Whereas at half my age, Alexander had conquered half of the known world, all of the aspirations to greatness and fame that I had held as an idealistic youth have shipwrecked on the sandbars of an Ocean of insignificance. I had once dreamed of making a difference in the world: I had hoped that on some distant day I might reflect today I have finished my novel, or today I have composed my great symphony, or even today I have saved a life. These had once been noble aspirations, but my energies have only been consumed to increase my company’s market share: today I have secured an account; today I have helped to defeat Zippo. This is no greatness that will ever be admired.
You may be wondering what I do. I am part of special operations for Bic, specifically, Customer Support & Field Repair Technician. You may not have noticed, but on the back of every Bic lighter there is a lot of small print, including a lifetime guarantee (3000 steady flames), and a 1-800 emergency support number to call if the device should fail before its guaranteed lifetime. I am part of the Flint & Steel Division of the company, which specializes in emergency lighter field repair; there are two other branches of the special ops customer support group, Razor (for the shaving products) and Quill (for the pens). These last two, as a result of pandemic induced economic collapse, have recently been defined as unessential by the company, and there have been layoffs. Those dedicated workers who would formerly respond to repair calls requiring the emergency replacement of a stuck ball-point on a Bic pen, may now be a thing of the past, if they do not re-assign Quill duties to the Flint & Steel group. Those of us in the Flint & Steel division of Bic continue to be counted as essential, because People need to keep smokin'. It may have helped that we are subsidized in part by an agreement with Big Tobacco.
My team and I are on call 24/7. When the emergency pager goes off, I suit up, grab my tools, jump in the truck, log in to obtain mission-specific details, plot the coördinates into the GPS, and head out into the field to repair someone's malfunctioning lighter. There are, rarely, moments of high adventure (involving off-road travel to remote locations). If the location is considered dangerous, or if it is extremely remote, the company will drop a team of us in by helicopter; our packs are always ready in advance, and they are kept in the personally issued company trucks, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Response time is a big deal for the company. These missions are exciting, and we are required to be in top physical condition. So, there is at least the prestige of being part of a well-trained and highly disciplined team. Every year the company takes us somewhere remote for a two-week training mission. Last year it was the Bavarian Alps; the year before that, the Seychelle islands off the coast of Africa. This is my third year with Bic, and later this summer, training will take us to the Antarctic. So, the job has its perks and bennies, but there is always that inner gnawing feeling, that this is all bullshit, and that we are inessential. Alas, it is a way to pay the bills, but the deep sense of meaninglessness is always exacerbated when I show up to help some crack-ho get her pipe lit. How could she see straight, I wonder, to dial the number on the lighter. Other than this, the biggest downside is the paperwork that must be completed as a follow-up to every simple repair case, and the more extensive debriefing process on the bigger missions.
There is also the occasional accidental false alarm, or the malicious false report of customers who have called us up only to ridicule and laugh at me when I arrive. Bic constantly reassures us that we are essential to backing up their competitive 100% guarantee of their product, and they pay us well for putting up with this sort of thing. It beats the old factory job I used to have with Titleist. Did you know that those dimples on the outer casing of the golf-balls are applied by hand with a special tool? Yeah, I used to do that. The working conditions were deplorable, but military search and rescue experience, combined with the small crafting tools experience with Titleist helped me to get in to my current position with Bic. I’m Glad to be out of the golfball factory and in the field full-time with Bic now. The intermittent nature of the work (there are 1.48 calls per month) affords me lots of time for family, reading, learning, writing book reviews, and doing my own thing during the downtime, when I am otherwise on call. Still, that gnawing inner emptiness that all of my time on this earth will have been traded merely to keep some lighters operational, increasing self-doubt, and worsening nervous conditions all conspire to prevent me from accomplishing anything personally meaningful. It would be fitting, I suppose, if I were to lie one day buried beneath the eternally burning flame at the Bic company headquarters, but I am under no illusions that anyone shall ever remember who I was, or what I did. I feel that this is why they pay us six figures, that this is why we deserve it, and I have been complicit in that agreement. One day I may find the strength to call it quits with Bic, and become a teacher.
Big thanks to David Graeber for showing me that I am not alone in my disillusion and despondency.
Encouragement is always appreciated. If you are also involved in some other kind of "bullshit job"; and you are seeking solidarity, add your story to the comments below.
You may be wondering what I do. I am part of special operations for Bic, specifically, Customer Support & Field Repair Technician. You may not have noticed, but on the back of every Bic lighter there is a lot of small print, including a lifetime guarantee (3000 steady flames), and a 1-800 emergency support number to call if the device should fail before its guaranteed lifetime. I am part of the Flint & Steel Division of the company, which specializes in emergency lighter field repair; there are two other branches of the special ops customer support group, Razor (for the shaving products) and Quill (for the pens). These last two, as a result of pandemic induced economic collapse, have recently been defined as unessential by the company, and there have been layoffs. Those dedicated workers who would formerly respond to repair calls requiring the emergency replacement of a stuck ball-point on a Bic pen, may now be a thing of the past, if they do not re-assign Quill duties to the Flint & Steel group. Those of us in the Flint & Steel division of Bic continue to be counted as essential, because People need to keep smokin'. It may have helped that we are subsidized in part by an agreement with Big Tobacco.
My team and I are on call 24/7. When the emergency pager goes off, I suit up, grab my tools, jump in the truck, log in to obtain mission-specific details, plot the coördinates into the GPS, and head out into the field to repair someone's malfunctioning lighter. There are, rarely, moments of high adventure (involving off-road travel to remote locations). If the location is considered dangerous, or if it is extremely remote, the company will drop a team of us in by helicopter; our packs are always ready in advance, and they are kept in the personally issued company trucks, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Response time is a big deal for the company. These missions are exciting, and we are required to be in top physical condition. So, there is at least the prestige of being part of a well-trained and highly disciplined team. Every year the company takes us somewhere remote for a two-week training mission. Last year it was the Bavarian Alps; the year before that, the Seychelle islands off the coast of Africa. This is my third year with Bic, and later this summer, training will take us to the Antarctic. So, the job has its perks and bennies, but there is always that inner gnawing feeling, that this is all bullshit, and that we are inessential. Alas, it is a way to pay the bills, but the deep sense of meaninglessness is always exacerbated when I show up to help some crack-ho get her pipe lit. How could she see straight, I wonder, to dial the number on the lighter. Other than this, the biggest downside is the paperwork that must be completed as a follow-up to every simple repair case, and the more extensive debriefing process on the bigger missions.
There is also the occasional accidental false alarm, or the malicious false report of customers who have called us up only to ridicule and laugh at me when I arrive. Bic constantly reassures us that we are essential to backing up their competitive 100% guarantee of their product, and they pay us well for putting up with this sort of thing. It beats the old factory job I used to have with Titleist. Did you know that those dimples on the outer casing of the golf-balls are applied by hand with a special tool? Yeah, I used to do that. The working conditions were deplorable, but military search and rescue experience, combined with the small crafting tools experience with Titleist helped me to get in to my current position with Bic. I’m Glad to be out of the golfball factory and in the field full-time with Bic now. The intermittent nature of the work (there are 1.48 calls per month) affords me lots of time for family, reading, learning, writing book reviews, and doing my own thing during the downtime, when I am otherwise on call. Still, that gnawing inner emptiness that all of my time on this earth will have been traded merely to keep some lighters operational, increasing self-doubt, and worsening nervous conditions all conspire to prevent me from accomplishing anything personally meaningful. It would be fitting, I suppose, if I were to lie one day buried beneath the eternally burning flame at the Bic company headquarters, but I am under no illusions that anyone shall ever remember who I was, or what I did. I feel that this is why they pay us six figures, that this is why we deserve it, and I have been complicit in that agreement. One day I may find the strength to call it quits with Bic, and become a teacher.
Big thanks to David Graeber for showing me that I am not alone in my disillusion and despondency.
Encouragement is always appreciated. If you are also involved in some other kind of "bullshit job"; and you are seeking solidarity, add your story to the comments below.
September 27, 2018
Uma leitura bem surpreendente e um daqueles livros que mudou a forma como vejo o mundo. Este livro é uma versão estendida e mais detalhada de um ensaio chamado "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant", do antropólogo David Graeber, que está disponível de graça na Strike Magazine e foi traduzido para várias línguas. O artigo em si já mata a ideia principal, mas recomendo o livro todo pelos exemplos e pela argumentação.
Segundo Graeber, com a modernização da indústria e do mercado, ao invés de nos aproximarmos da eficiência de uma jornada de trabalho mais curta ou de menos vagas de empregos (e mais eficientes), nós estamos cada vez mais fazendo trabalho à toa (Bullshit). Enquanto nos mantemos ocupados pelas mesmas 40 horas semanais. Ascensoristas são um alvo fácil, mas no livro ele dá uma classificação bem mais generosa, com trabalhos de gerência, consultoria, relações públicas, coordenadores, profissionais de liderança e afins... que, segundo Graeber, fazem trabalhos que eles mesmos não conseguem justificar para que servem.
Ele cita pesquisas motivadas pelo seu texto original de 2013, onde trabalhadores foram perguntados se achavam que o que a atividade que faziam contribui de alguma forma para o mundo. A porcentagem varia de acordo com o país, mas invariavelmente mais de um terço das pessoas acham que não, o que fazem não faz a menor diferença. E o ponto de Graeber aqui não é se isso de fato é o que acontece, se esses trabalhos não são de fato importantes, mas sim que quem realiza eles realmente se sente fazendo um trabalho inútil.
Segundo ele, isso resulta quase em uma relação inversa entre a realização ou a relevância do trabalho (genérica, para a humanidade) e o valor do salário. Como professores e garis que fazem uma diferença diária na vida das pessoas ganham bem menos do que um assistente administrativo com um trabalho dispensável. A discussão é bem mais longa, com toda a dinâmica de trabalho, cobranças e do exercício de poder que é alguém acumular funcionários sob sua responsabilidade sem necessariamente ter demanda para isso, a utilidade do que fazemos e por aí vai.
Acabou me tornando muito mais cínico e me fez começar a reparar no tanto de gente fazendo um trabalho desnecessário. O único ponto onde fiz cara de "quê?" foi quando ele discute o raciocínio pelo qual não deveria haver uma diferença no quanto as pessoas recebem com base no talento ou no esforço. Não bate com o resto do livro e a lógica apresentada não me faz sentido nenhum. Mas como não é de longe o ponto central do livro, só uma tangente, não desvaloriza o resto da obra.
Segundo Graeber, com a modernização da indústria e do mercado, ao invés de nos aproximarmos da eficiência de uma jornada de trabalho mais curta ou de menos vagas de empregos (e mais eficientes), nós estamos cada vez mais fazendo trabalho à toa (Bullshit). Enquanto nos mantemos ocupados pelas mesmas 40 horas semanais. Ascensoristas são um alvo fácil, mas no livro ele dá uma classificação bem mais generosa, com trabalhos de gerência, consultoria, relações públicas, coordenadores, profissionais de liderança e afins... que, segundo Graeber, fazem trabalhos que eles mesmos não conseguem justificar para que servem.
Ele cita pesquisas motivadas pelo seu texto original de 2013, onde trabalhadores foram perguntados se achavam que o que a atividade que faziam contribui de alguma forma para o mundo. A porcentagem varia de acordo com o país, mas invariavelmente mais de um terço das pessoas acham que não, o que fazem não faz a menor diferença. E o ponto de Graeber aqui não é se isso de fato é o que acontece, se esses trabalhos não são de fato importantes, mas sim que quem realiza eles realmente se sente fazendo um trabalho inútil.
Segundo ele, isso resulta quase em uma relação inversa entre a realização ou a relevância do trabalho (genérica, para a humanidade) e o valor do salário. Como professores e garis que fazem uma diferença diária na vida das pessoas ganham bem menos do que um assistente administrativo com um trabalho dispensável. A discussão é bem mais longa, com toda a dinâmica de trabalho, cobranças e do exercício de poder que é alguém acumular funcionários sob sua responsabilidade sem necessariamente ter demanda para isso, a utilidade do que fazemos e por aí vai.
Acabou me tornando muito mais cínico e me fez começar a reparar no tanto de gente fazendo um trabalho desnecessário. O único ponto onde fiz cara de "quê?" foi quando ele discute o raciocínio pelo qual não deveria haver uma diferença no quanto as pessoas recebem com base no talento ou no esforço. Não bate com o resto do livro e a lógica apresentada não me faz sentido nenhum. Mas como não é de longe o ponto central do livro, só uma tangente, não desvaloriza o resto da obra.
May 25, 2018
Having read and even cited [for a piece on the rise of extreme endurance sports over the past century] Graeber's original essay in Strike magazine, I eagerly preordered this book. I read it with a kind of surreptitious glee while attending college curriculum meetings and during my usual 4-hour commute, some days just go to said meetings, which consisted of adults with PhDs commenting on font size and whether to use the word "show" versus "demonstrate." But I digress.
It takes a lot for me at this point to feel like I've read something paradigm shifting. This book--its central idea--is paradigm shifting. I think most people have thought about work being "estranged" a la Marx, or "immaterial" or non-physical...but to bring to recognition fully that we have a workforce where almost 40% of the population feels its labor to be useless bullshit, and that this is actually a structural/political/economic logic inherent in our current system, a system purportedly organized for efficiency in supplying the market with what it wants...that, to me, was completely striking. And yet, once you read the descriptions he offers, it seems so completely obvious he is correct--and that is the beauty of the book. It makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange. It does seem, too, that there is a certain nascent awareness of the insights in the book if we are to judge by popular culture. Shows like "Corporate," "The Office," and a recent amazing short film "Nada, S.A." all feature central characters destroyed by bullshit jobs. So it is a timely contribution.
Written in an almost conversational tone, with many interesting meandering discussions, parentheticals and quotes from people who confessed to him about the nature of their bullshit jobs, Graeber's work thankfully avoids the type of arcane academese that will prevent it from being fully appreciated by those who should be reading this. He offers typologies of the types of bullshit work, theorizes its rise, and offers hints (he eschews state-imposed policies) at ways to chip away at the problem in the last chapter.
For me personally, and I'm sure many others, it felt like cathartic read. His humanistic discussion of the type of spiritual violence bullshitification of jobs inflicts on us--by depriving us of the ability to contribute work of *social value,* of feeling like our toiling has an effect on the world--and the consequences of spending vast amounts of time on nothing, validates all the anxiety and depression which often feel unjustified. It also presents the tantalizing possibility of resistance to and rejection of such work, perhaps through abandonment [a la Daniel Quinn in "Beyond Civilization" perhaps through organizing. But it certainly, as he states in the end, raises questions about the nature of freedom and challenges us to really question what we're doing with our lives, and the social value it carries. A must-read.
It takes a lot for me at this point to feel like I've read something paradigm shifting. This book--its central idea--is paradigm shifting. I think most people have thought about work being "estranged" a la Marx, or "immaterial" or non-physical...but to bring to recognition fully that we have a workforce where almost 40% of the population feels its labor to be useless bullshit, and that this is actually a structural/political/economic logic inherent in our current system, a system purportedly organized for efficiency in supplying the market with what it wants...that, to me, was completely striking. And yet, once you read the descriptions he offers, it seems so completely obvious he is correct--and that is the beauty of the book. It makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange. It does seem, too, that there is a certain nascent awareness of the insights in the book if we are to judge by popular culture. Shows like "Corporate," "The Office," and a recent amazing short film "Nada, S.A." all feature central characters destroyed by bullshit jobs. So it is a timely contribution.
Written in an almost conversational tone, with many interesting meandering discussions, parentheticals and quotes from people who confessed to him about the nature of their bullshit jobs, Graeber's work thankfully avoids the type of arcane academese that will prevent it from being fully appreciated by those who should be reading this. He offers typologies of the types of bullshit work, theorizes its rise, and offers hints (he eschews state-imposed policies) at ways to chip away at the problem in the last chapter.
For me personally, and I'm sure many others, it felt like cathartic read. His humanistic discussion of the type of spiritual violence bullshitification of jobs inflicts on us--by depriving us of the ability to contribute work of *social value,* of feeling like our toiling has an effect on the world--and the consequences of spending vast amounts of time on nothing, validates all the anxiety and depression which often feel unjustified. It also presents the tantalizing possibility of resistance to and rejection of such work, perhaps through abandonment [a la Daniel Quinn in "Beyond Civilization" perhaps through organizing. But it certainly, as he states in the end, raises questions about the nature of freedom and challenges us to really question what we're doing with our lives, and the social value it carries. A must-read.
February 9, 2022
"This book hits a little too close to home", said the guy posting this review from work.
May 23, 2018
So I wasn't sold on the first half of this book--the diagnosis of bullshit jobs. But the last half or third, I read like 5 times because it's Graeber at his best--diagnosing the bullshit in the ways we talk about the economy and money and debt. The reason I didn't love the diagnosis is because I think someone being miserable in their work is so human and so expansive that it's just the human condition--we are all unhappy. However, what does the proliferation of finance do to businesses and the building of class-based resentments? That is good stuff and as always with Graeber, it is fresh, creative, and essential reading for all.
The other interesting tidbit that I am not sure I agree with is his solution, which I know he comes at reluctantly. But UBI? I don't know. I know he gets there from a feminist perspective, which I think is insightful and convincing, but I think he doesn't fully consider how the federal jobs guarantee can also address the feminist concerns without proliferating bullshit jobs, but of course Graeber is an anarchist and I can imagine he wouldn't want to make the government in charge of any more stuff. But I am more bullish on the possibility of a government by the people and for the people than Graeber is.
The other interesting tidbit that I am not sure I agree with is his solution, which I know he comes at reluctantly. But UBI? I don't know. I know he gets there from a feminist perspective, which I think is insightful and convincing, but I think he doesn't fully consider how the federal jobs guarantee can also address the feminist concerns without proliferating bullshit jobs, but of course Graeber is an anarchist and I can imagine he wouldn't want to make the government in charge of any more stuff. But I am more bullish on the possibility of a government by the people and for the people than Graeber is.
Read
May 28, 2020I have worked many bullshit jobs. I will work them in the future. This is what you do if you're of a certain caste. Notice I said caste not class, for a reason.
Simply put, this is a rallying cry, and should be treated as such. I really wish there was some more substantive data here, but I prefer to think of Graeber's style as polemical rather than academic, and books like this are what change public opinion, at the end of the day, and I want him to receive an audience.
Not because it's groundbreaking, but because Graeber is the Bill Hicks of discourse – he is the hand on your shoulder that reassures you that yes, so much of life is all bullshit, and people spoon-feeding you bullshit. You are not crazy and you are not alone.
Simply put, this is a rallying cry, and should be treated as such. I really wish there was some more substantive data here, but I prefer to think of Graeber's style as polemical rather than academic, and books like this are what change public opinion, at the end of the day, and I want him to receive an audience.
Not because it's groundbreaking, but because Graeber is the Bill Hicks of discourse – he is the hand on your shoulder that reassures you that yes, so much of life is all bullshit, and people spoon-feeding you bullshit. You are not crazy and you are not alone.
April 1, 2022
I am sure you must have heard this management joke which originated some years ago, and is still popular on the net.
---
When I joined a major public sector manufacturing company as a management trainee after passing my engineering degree in 1985, I was under the impression that I was going to do engineering. But I was disabused of that notion on my first day of training itself. It was true that I was hired because of my engineering degree and my performance in the entrance test and interview, but the company's sole intention of taking me on was to make me into a manager. A manager, the powers that be told us trainees, was a superior being not easily defined or understood; management was not a science but an art. When after spending more than eighteen years in that company in various positions, I quit in 2004, I still had no idea what a manager was. And that too, after obtaining a post-graduate diploma in finance management through distance education.
Thanks to David Graeber, now I know.
A manager is someone who does a "Bullshit Job".
---
In the spring of 2013, David Graeber wrote an essay entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” in a new revolutionary magazine called Strike! and set off what he terms an "internet sensation." The premise of the essay was that in the current corporatised environment, there are a lot of jobs which seem to be of no use whatsoever (HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers etc.) to the outsider. Were these the same to the people who held the jobs? The overwhelming response to his essay confirmed that there were, indeed, a lot of people who thought the work they did did not make any meaningful contribution to the world. A YouGov poll based on it threw up an astonishing figure of 37%.
...And most of them hated the work they did.
Graeber communicated with many of them - and these discussions, which span across the book, make for hilarious (and somewhat disturbing) reading. While going through the experiences of various people, I could easily relate to their anguish: and just as easily, I could identify a dozen jobs of the top of my head which were as meaningless and soul-destroying as what these people were doing. And - surprise, surprise! - most of them are in the private sector, which is supposed to be "lean and mean".
Why?
To understand this, we have to go back to the industrial revolution. As feudal society became replaced by industrial society, the whole job structure changed. Feudal society comprised landlords who extracted rent from tenants for their landholdings, and used their ill-gotten gains to prop up a whole set of flunkies who apparently did nothing other than being yes-men. In industrial society, the business owner made money instead from something he produced, after paying his workers a fair (or unfair) wage. It was more egalitarian than the feudal society - the playing field was level, and anyone could expect to go up the ladder provided he had the capability, grit, and a fair amount of luck.
However, as technology advanced and production processes became more automated and efficient, the industrial workforce became more and more redundant. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week: that is, a situation where most of humankind could enjoy a sedate life whether they had a job or not. But it didn't happen. Graeber says
To cut to the chase...
Most of the free market is now controlled by corporates. These are feudal entities, who actually do not "produce" anything, but make their living by playing the financial markets. In fact, they live through rent extraction, albeit not on land. And like feudal lords, the corporate bosses need their yes-men and flunkies. Ergo: bullshit jobs.
This is a somewhat trite simplification of what Graeber says in this book, however. The point is, the concept of people existing comfortably without working and "earning a living" is anathema to us - even if the work is utterly pointless. Even if a country is rich enough to feed the majority of its population with very few of its people engaged in some sort of work, no government would consider such an option seriously. They would try to "generate employment" - most of it useless.
The author provides graphs to show how the percentage of people engaged in agriculture and manufacturing have steadily decreased, and those in services have gone up - and most of these services are in the area of information which, on close analysis, is not needed. We have really reached an Orwellian situation here.
The author talks about a Universal Basic Income as a possible way out of this morass, and I agree. I, for one, have never seen drudgery as something sacred. We have reached a situation where at least the industrialised countries can provide a living income to every citizen. Those who want to earn more, can always improve their situation by learning a profession. Who knows? With humankind free to employ time as they want, we may get a more peaceful, productive and happy society.
We can all learn from this fisherman:
A big corporation recently hired several cannibals in the interest of cultural diversity. "You are all part of our team now," said the HR rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any of the other employees."Well, it seems that the person who coined this joke had a point.
The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks later, their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with you. However, one of our shipping clerks has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?" The cannibals all shook their heads no.
After the boss left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the shipping clerk ?" A hand rose hesitantly, to which the leader of the cannibals continued, "You fool --- for 4 weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But NOOOO, you had to go and eat someone who actually does something!"
---
When I joined a major public sector manufacturing company as a management trainee after passing my engineering degree in 1985, I was under the impression that I was going to do engineering. But I was disabused of that notion on my first day of training itself. It was true that I was hired because of my engineering degree and my performance in the entrance test and interview, but the company's sole intention of taking me on was to make me into a manager. A manager, the powers that be told us trainees, was a superior being not easily defined or understood; management was not a science but an art. When after spending more than eighteen years in that company in various positions, I quit in 2004, I still had no idea what a manager was. And that too, after obtaining a post-graduate diploma in finance management through distance education.
Thanks to David Graeber, now I know.
A manager is someone who does a "Bullshit Job".
---
In the spring of 2013, David Graeber wrote an essay entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” in a new revolutionary magazine called Strike! and set off what he terms an "internet sensation." The premise of the essay was that in the current corporatised environment, there are a lot of jobs which seem to be of no use whatsoever (HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers etc.) to the outsider. Were these the same to the people who held the jobs? The overwhelming response to his essay confirmed that there were, indeed, a lot of people who thought the work they did did not make any meaningful contribution to the world. A YouGov poll based on it threw up an astonishing figure of 37%.
...And most of them hated the work they did.
Graeber communicated with many of them - and these discussions, which span across the book, make for hilarious (and somewhat disturbing) reading. While going through the experiences of various people, I could easily relate to their anguish: and just as easily, I could identify a dozen jobs of the top of my head which were as meaningless and soul-destroying as what these people were doing. And - surprise, surprise! - most of them are in the private sector, which is supposed to be "lean and mean".
Why?
To understand this, we have to go back to the industrial revolution. As feudal society became replaced by industrial society, the whole job structure changed. Feudal society comprised landlords who extracted rent from tenants for their landholdings, and used their ill-gotten gains to prop up a whole set of flunkies who apparently did nothing other than being yes-men. In industrial society, the business owner made money instead from something he produced, after paying his workers a fair (or unfair) wage. It was more egalitarian than the feudal society - the playing field was level, and anyone could expect to go up the ladder provided he had the capability, grit, and a fair amount of luck.
However, as technology advanced and production processes became more automated and efficient, the industrial workforce became more and more redundant. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week: that is, a situation where most of humankind could enjoy a sedate life whether they had a job or not. But it didn't happen. Graeber says
There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, 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, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound.Again, why?
To cut to the chase...
Most of the free market is now controlled by corporates. These are feudal entities, who actually do not "produce" anything, but make their living by playing the financial markets. In fact, they live through rent extraction, albeit not on land. And like feudal lords, the corporate bosses need their yes-men and flunkies. Ergo: bullshit jobs.
This is a somewhat trite simplification of what Graeber says in this book, however. The point is, the concept of people existing comfortably without working and "earning a living" is anathema to us - even if the work is utterly pointless. Even if a country is rich enough to feed the majority of its population with very few of its people engaged in some sort of work, no government would consider such an option seriously. They would try to "generate employment" - most of it useless.
The author provides graphs to show how the percentage of people engaged in agriculture and manufacturing have steadily decreased, and those in services have gone up - and most of these services are in the area of information which, on close analysis, is not needed. We have really reached an Orwellian situation here.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and LondonThink about it. It makes sense. Most of the youth in our modern world is fed with the concept of the sanctity of work ("work is worship") from their primary school onwards: and that too, working to earn a livelihood, not enjoy and fulfill yourself. (In fact, work which one does as a passion is often unpaid or low-paid, and people who follow their dreams without thinking of monetary benefits are often derided.) So work becomes this mind-numbing drudge, a cross which one has to bear to keep body and soul together, and all creativity is killed; thus producing the moronic mob that Orwell is talking about.
The author talks about a Universal Basic Income as a possible way out of this morass, and I agree. I, for one, have never seen drudgery as something sacred. We have reached a situation where at least the industrialised countries can provide a living income to every citizen. Those who want to earn more, can always improve their situation by learning a profession. Who knows? With humankind free to employ time as they want, we may get a more peaceful, productive and happy society.
We can all learn from this fisherman:
One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.
About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman. “You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”
The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”
“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer.
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling.
The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.
The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.
“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.
The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”
Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”
The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”
September 18, 2020
Before there was this book, the concept of “bullshit jobs” was examined extensively in a popular American film. I present to you “Office Space” (1999) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOE...
Watch the movie if you have a bullshit job!
I'll never forget this moment in 2006. I was working in Japan for a kid's English school. For that day, it was my job to pass out flyers for about two hours after I was done teaching. As I passed out flyers, I stood across from a woman who was wearing a sign made out of cardboard. She had put the sign over her shirt and was wearing it as she stood. I asked her how long she had been doing it. Since nine in the morning, she replied. I left at five and so did she. It was her eight-hour job to wear a sign. The store could have easily propped it up or made it into a poster or something, but instead they paid a person to just wear the sign. (Not even a proper sign-person who flips and twirls the sign). They also paid people at the time (and still do I think) to pass out tissues with advertisements. And one more thing. There are a lot of taxi drivers in Japan. Too many. What will happen when the automated taxis come?
So...bullshit jobs...that is the question this book takes up.
The author has identified a phenomenon, an elephant in the economic world, but does the author have a theory?
I think the frame of reference for this book is troubling. It's not that most jobs are bullshit -- the question that should be asked is how various people, societies, and nations have dealt with abundance, technological change and the growth of efficiency, and the role of "work" in social life. The shift from agriculture and industry to services has been well documented. Graeber does a nice job of showing how what is often defined as services really equates to useless administrative positions (not barbers and daycare workers).
Having lived in the US, Saudi Arabia, and Japan, I know that "work" is often looked at through a cultural lens.
In Saudi Arabia, citizens are readily able to admit that work is "bullshit" and that it should be avoided, foisted on foreigners, or minimized altogether. Everything meaningful in life is found in prayer, play, family, and friends. No one in Saudi is under the illusion that their talent produced the oil that has made them rich. So, why not just enjoy the benefits in the forms of subsidies, incentives, and handouts. Such is the mindset of a "rentier state".
In the US, work is both a duty and a right. Citizens ostracize those who don't work and organize to protect jobs and industries even when they are not productive. They are both angry at welfare recipients, but also angry at politicians who can't produce jobs. Socialism is something that leads to "soft" citizens. For an average US citizen, “work” is a good in-and-of itself, a sign of stoic virtue.
In Japan, work -- and especially unpleasant work -- is seen as a duty and way of showing submission to authority. The phenomenon of "no-pay overtime" demonstrates this principle. Workers stay overtime to do work for no pay even when there is very little work to do. This is a way of showing submission to your company. In return, companies perform social functions like retaining workers during economic slumps and even hiring unnecessary workers to maintain the country's official low unemployment numbers.
So, work is bullshit, but it's bullshit done in different ways for different societies. The people who most admit the "bullshitiness" of work altogether (and the bullshitiness of war) -- I think -- are European countries that have shorter work weeks and longer vacations. These same countries spend more liberally on social welfare and don't really like to spend money on their militaries either. They believe (at least more than others) in the good life here and now. Some have described this approach as enlightened; others as decadent.
These are concepts I understood prior to reading this book. My knowledge was informed by my own experiences, some scattered readings, and movies and TV like “Office Space”, “The Office”, “IT Crowd”, and others. It’s nice to see an academic book take up the subject matter.
The good of this book is very much intertwined with the bad. The book is called “Bullshit Job: A Theory.” There was no coherent theory in this book. Instead, there is a theoretical exploration that pulls from many sources. The best sources, of course, are the informants themselves. Graeber lets many of the informants speak for themselves about the soul-crushing nature of bullshit jobs. The book is better for it. Many of these anecdotes illuminate ideas found in popular culture, especially in shows like “The Office” or “The IT Crowd.” But the book itself does not lock into any one theory. It explores the phenomenon and tests our assumptions about ideas such as value, the nature of work, and the social and political realities that lead to meaningless work.
Many of these ideas are great. There are gems everywhere.
One of these gems comes from the German psychologist Karl Groos, who wrote in 1901 about the delight children took in being “the cause”. Humans seem to get pleasure from being able to act in ways that shape their environment. When you deprive humans of their ability “be the cause”, especially after having experienced the joy of being the cause, the result is often rage. This would seem to explain why globalization and technological change are so intertwined with radical political movements and even terrorism. It seems that terrorism and radical politics are alternative means for reclaiming the joy of “being the cause.”
You can find more gems like these scattered throughout the book. But you are also equally likely to find long passages worth skipping. I found myself skimming some of the book (about 10 percent) when I found the book wandering aimlessly.
The final chapter offers some very good analysis of right-wing populism in the United States. This analysis does not necessarily evolve organically from the concept of bullshit jobs, but there are connections.
One of the main problems I have with the book is that it doesn't resolve an ideological debate that has been going on for sometime: between socialism and libertarianism. Socialism advocates for a bigger role in redistribution of wealth and greater strengthening of worker's rights; libertarianism focuses on minimizing government, with a corresponding belief that big corporations will die out as well. Libertarians believe that everything captured under the label "bullshit jobs" is simply a product of government bureaucracy, corporate bureaucracy, the servicing of these bureaucracies. If you get rid of the opaqueness that comes with large organizations and complex rules, it becomes clear very easily who is creating value. If more companies become worker-owned and smaller in scale, then it becomes very clear indeed what value is being created and by whom.
As I was reading through the various informants (by far the best part of this book) it became clear to me that there were very few, if any, entrepreneurs and freelancers. The freelancer I did manage to find seemed depressed that they were servicing stupid bureaucracies. The libertarian argument does seem bullshitish to me. A society of entrepreneurs would seem dystopic (a combination of the very poor / very rich / and very get-rich-quickish type scams). A society with no basic safety net seems prone to me to fall into very slave-laborish type work situations and proliferate pernicious hustles. A society with a fat middle class -- even fattened with bullshit jobs and inflated salaries -- seems preferable as it suggests a population with extensive “skin in the game” with regards to stability, civility, gradualism, and shared communal prosperity. But to my mind, not enough has been done to refute libertarianism (in theory at least, in reality it mostly remains untried...unless pre-corporate capitalism is seen as a libertarian society...).
There is another elephant in the room, one that I have been exploring in my other readings. Soon, many white-collar jobs will be automated. It will be theoretically possible (if it isn't already) to eliminate large numbers of jobs. Should societies create large swathes of bullshit jobs, socialize the benefits from automation, or -- I'm not sure what the liberatarian response would be -- just let the market do its thing? The topic is touched on briefly in the excellent last chapter of the book.
The answer is, perhaps reluctantly, Universal Basic Income. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this seems to be a concept that even libertarians like Nassim N. Taleb at least don’t hate because it is widely distributive and bypasses bureaucrats. Thus, we find some commonality between Graeber (the anarchist) and Taleb (the libertarian) -- bypass the bureaucracy and give people an income directly. What Graeber calls the equivalent of economic “safe-word,” Taleb would call “fuck you money.”
In a world where much of the word is replaced by automation, why should the economic game be overly coercive? The answer seems to be, it shouldn’t be. The gains of capitalism should continue to be socialized...just not in a way that makes useless fake jobs that make people miserable.
But to return to my earlier point, the one based on my own experiences and travels -- work serves different functions to different cultures. And thus for some cultures, forcing people to wear signs for eight hours will be preferable to UBI as work is seen as a way of demonstrating obedience.
Watch the movie if you have a bullshit job!
I'll never forget this moment in 2006. I was working in Japan for a kid's English school. For that day, it was my job to pass out flyers for about two hours after I was done teaching. As I passed out flyers, I stood across from a woman who was wearing a sign made out of cardboard. She had put the sign over her shirt and was wearing it as she stood. I asked her how long she had been doing it. Since nine in the morning, she replied. I left at five and so did she. It was her eight-hour job to wear a sign. The store could have easily propped it up or made it into a poster or something, but instead they paid a person to just wear the sign. (Not even a proper sign-person who flips and twirls the sign). They also paid people at the time (and still do I think) to pass out tissues with advertisements. And one more thing. There are a lot of taxi drivers in Japan. Too many. What will happen when the automated taxis come?
So...bullshit jobs...that is the question this book takes up.
The author has identified a phenomenon, an elephant in the economic world, but does the author have a theory?
I think the frame of reference for this book is troubling. It's not that most jobs are bullshit -- the question that should be asked is how various people, societies, and nations have dealt with abundance, technological change and the growth of efficiency, and the role of "work" in social life. The shift from agriculture and industry to services has been well documented. Graeber does a nice job of showing how what is often defined as services really equates to useless administrative positions (not barbers and daycare workers).
Having lived in the US, Saudi Arabia, and Japan, I know that "work" is often looked at through a cultural lens.
In Saudi Arabia, citizens are readily able to admit that work is "bullshit" and that it should be avoided, foisted on foreigners, or minimized altogether. Everything meaningful in life is found in prayer, play, family, and friends. No one in Saudi is under the illusion that their talent produced the oil that has made them rich. So, why not just enjoy the benefits in the forms of subsidies, incentives, and handouts. Such is the mindset of a "rentier state".
In the US, work is both a duty and a right. Citizens ostracize those who don't work and organize to protect jobs and industries even when they are not productive. They are both angry at welfare recipients, but also angry at politicians who can't produce jobs. Socialism is something that leads to "soft" citizens. For an average US citizen, “work” is a good in-and-of itself, a sign of stoic virtue.
In Japan, work -- and especially unpleasant work -- is seen as a duty and way of showing submission to authority. The phenomenon of "no-pay overtime" demonstrates this principle. Workers stay overtime to do work for no pay even when there is very little work to do. This is a way of showing submission to your company. In return, companies perform social functions like retaining workers during economic slumps and even hiring unnecessary workers to maintain the country's official low unemployment numbers.
So, work is bullshit, but it's bullshit done in different ways for different societies. The people who most admit the "bullshitiness" of work altogether (and the bullshitiness of war) -- I think -- are European countries that have shorter work weeks and longer vacations. These same countries spend more liberally on social welfare and don't really like to spend money on their militaries either. They believe (at least more than others) in the good life here and now. Some have described this approach as enlightened; others as decadent.
These are concepts I understood prior to reading this book. My knowledge was informed by my own experiences, some scattered readings, and movies and TV like “Office Space”, “The Office”, “IT Crowd”, and others. It’s nice to see an academic book take up the subject matter.
The good of this book is very much intertwined with the bad. The book is called “Bullshit Job: A Theory.” There was no coherent theory in this book. Instead, there is a theoretical exploration that pulls from many sources. The best sources, of course, are the informants themselves. Graeber lets many of the informants speak for themselves about the soul-crushing nature of bullshit jobs. The book is better for it. Many of these anecdotes illuminate ideas found in popular culture, especially in shows like “The Office” or “The IT Crowd.” But the book itself does not lock into any one theory. It explores the phenomenon and tests our assumptions about ideas such as value, the nature of work, and the social and political realities that lead to meaningless work.
Many of these ideas are great. There are gems everywhere.
One of these gems comes from the German psychologist Karl Groos, who wrote in 1901 about the delight children took in being “the cause”. Humans seem to get pleasure from being able to act in ways that shape their environment. When you deprive humans of their ability “be the cause”, especially after having experienced the joy of being the cause, the result is often rage. This would seem to explain why globalization and technological change are so intertwined with radical political movements and even terrorism. It seems that terrorism and radical politics are alternative means for reclaiming the joy of “being the cause.”
You can find more gems like these scattered throughout the book. But you are also equally likely to find long passages worth skipping. I found myself skimming some of the book (about 10 percent) when I found the book wandering aimlessly.
The final chapter offers some very good analysis of right-wing populism in the United States. This analysis does not necessarily evolve organically from the concept of bullshit jobs, but there are connections.
One of the main problems I have with the book is that it doesn't resolve an ideological debate that has been going on for sometime: between socialism and libertarianism. Socialism advocates for a bigger role in redistribution of wealth and greater strengthening of worker's rights; libertarianism focuses on minimizing government, with a corresponding belief that big corporations will die out as well. Libertarians believe that everything captured under the label "bullshit jobs" is simply a product of government bureaucracy, corporate bureaucracy, the servicing of these bureaucracies. If you get rid of the opaqueness that comes with large organizations and complex rules, it becomes clear very easily who is creating value. If more companies become worker-owned and smaller in scale, then it becomes very clear indeed what value is being created and by whom.
As I was reading through the various informants (by far the best part of this book) it became clear to me that there were very few, if any, entrepreneurs and freelancers. The freelancer I did manage to find seemed depressed that they were servicing stupid bureaucracies. The libertarian argument does seem bullshitish to me. A society of entrepreneurs would seem dystopic (a combination of the very poor / very rich / and very get-rich-quickish type scams). A society with no basic safety net seems prone to me to fall into very slave-laborish type work situations and proliferate pernicious hustles. A society with a fat middle class -- even fattened with bullshit jobs and inflated salaries -- seems preferable as it suggests a population with extensive “skin in the game” with regards to stability, civility, gradualism, and shared communal prosperity. But to my mind, not enough has been done to refute libertarianism (in theory at least, in reality it mostly remains untried...unless pre-corporate capitalism is seen as a libertarian society...).
There is another elephant in the room, one that I have been exploring in my other readings. Soon, many white-collar jobs will be automated. It will be theoretically possible (if it isn't already) to eliminate large numbers of jobs. Should societies create large swathes of bullshit jobs, socialize the benefits from automation, or -- I'm not sure what the liberatarian response would be -- just let the market do its thing? The topic is touched on briefly in the excellent last chapter of the book.
The answer is, perhaps reluctantly, Universal Basic Income. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this seems to be a concept that even libertarians like Nassim N. Taleb at least don’t hate because it is widely distributive and bypasses bureaucrats. Thus, we find some commonality between Graeber (the anarchist) and Taleb (the libertarian) -- bypass the bureaucracy and give people an income directly. What Graeber calls the equivalent of economic “safe-word,” Taleb would call “fuck you money.”
In a world where much of the word is replaced by automation, why should the economic game be overly coercive? The answer seems to be, it shouldn’t be. The gains of capitalism should continue to be socialized...just not in a way that makes useless fake jobs that make people miserable.
But to return to my earlier point, the one based on my own experiences and travels -- work serves different functions to different cultures. And thus for some cultures, forcing people to wear signs for eight hours will be preferable to UBI as work is seen as a way of demonstrating obedience.
June 12, 2019
I wanted to like this book. I loved Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and hoped for something closer to that, where Respected Anthropologist David Graeber walks us through the evolution of labor, and explains how we arrived at our current model. Unfortunately, we got David Graeber, "Researcher"* who spends the first half of his book reading comments and emails from people who read his original article in Strike! magazine, and the second half of his article trying to taxonomize, opine, conject, and honestly - just rant at the sociopolitical factors that have led us to where we are today.
The premise of his article is actually very compelling. Something about the nature of work getting increasingly abstract, and removed from the actual production of tangible goods or services definitely makes the book's premise an easy emotional appeal to make.
However, Graeber started to lose me once he's done embellishing on his essay, and moved into his "research"*. Both quotes and an asterisk are necessary around this word, because as I alluded to earlier, you soon find out that his "research"* was just him downloading some choice comments to his article when it was first published, and setting up an email address where people could email with him about their bullshit jobs.
He then uses snippets from these accounts to form a picture of what type of work is 'bullshit' but maintains that he would *never* tell you that your job is bullshit - only you can decide that for yourself. He attempts to generalize bullshit jobs, even going so far as to categorize the different types of bullshit jobs, which he gives catchy names to: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. However, despite providing a rubric to assess whether a job is bullshit, he maintains that a job is bullshit only if the person holding the job believes it to be so. Why? To avoid hurting people's feelings?
I'd have liked him to embrace the classification exercise wholeheartedly. If you think HR consultants are bullshit, tell us why. If this phenomenon is as serious an offense (I think the term he used was spiritual violence) to our society as you claim, why pull punches? And if we wanted to move away from 'bullshit jobs', how would we do so? What would that transition look like?
There's an interesting idea he brings up at the end of the book, about how every morning, we all wake up and remake the world we live in anew. Through reaffirmation, we reinvent our institutions, societal norms, and our understanding of the world around us. If we've conditioned an entire population to expect a deep sense of fulfillment from their work, laboring away at a noble mission, isn't despair the only crop we can reasonably expect to harvest?
He started out strong, with a message that clearly resonated, but manages to somehow stop short, while simultaneously going too far. Respected Anthropologist Graeber refusing to call bullshit on other people's bullshit is, in many ways, the ultimate bullshit.
Bullshit.
The premise of his article is actually very compelling. Something about the nature of work getting increasingly abstract, and removed from the actual production of tangible goods or services definitely makes the book's premise an easy emotional appeal to make.
However, Graeber started to lose me once he's done embellishing on his essay, and moved into his "research"*. Both quotes and an asterisk are necessary around this word, because as I alluded to earlier, you soon find out that his "research"* was just him downloading some choice comments to his article when it was first published, and setting up an email address where people could email with him about their bullshit jobs.
He then uses snippets from these accounts to form a picture of what type of work is 'bullshit' but maintains that he would *never* tell you that your job is bullshit - only you can decide that for yourself. He attempts to generalize bullshit jobs, even going so far as to categorize the different types of bullshit jobs, which he gives catchy names to: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. However, despite providing a rubric to assess whether a job is bullshit, he maintains that a job is bullshit only if the person holding the job believes it to be so. Why? To avoid hurting people's feelings?
I'd have liked him to embrace the classification exercise wholeheartedly. If you think HR consultants are bullshit, tell us why. If this phenomenon is as serious an offense (I think the term he used was spiritual violence) to our society as you claim, why pull punches? And if we wanted to move away from 'bullshit jobs', how would we do so? What would that transition look like?
There's an interesting idea he brings up at the end of the book, about how every morning, we all wake up and remake the world we live in anew. Through reaffirmation, we reinvent our institutions, societal norms, and our understanding of the world around us. If we've conditioned an entire population to expect a deep sense of fulfillment from their work, laboring away at a noble mission, isn't despair the only crop we can reasonably expect to harvest?
He started out strong, with a message that clearly resonated, but manages to somehow stop short, while simultaneously going too far. Respected Anthropologist Graeber refusing to call bullshit on other people's bullshit is, in many ways, the ultimate bullshit.
Bullshit.
December 19, 2019
Bullshit book based largely on anecdotal "evidence" and a small sample size of lazy, uninspired people who whine about being unfulfilled, but are too comfortable to actually change jobs or voluntarily seek out new challenges in their present roles. The author appears to carry a deep animus towards lawyers, financial types and seemingly anyone who is more successful or makes more money than him. On the other hand, people who have "real" jobs (read: mostly blue collar type work) are the genuine gems who actually contribute anything to society. I would like to see him call his plumber to sort things out if his publisher decides to suddenly stop paying him his royalties or someone else plagiarises his work. Of course, there are good and bad apples in any profession, but the level of generalisation here is appalling.
April 26, 2019
"This is not a book about a particular solution. It's a book about a problem . . . I hesitate to make policy suggestions . . . " -- page 270 (now he tells us -- with only fifteen pages left in the book!)
Bullshit Jobs has a great attention-grabbing, provocative title and some occasionally good stories from the interviewees who are all too aware that their various jobs are, well . . . see the title. However, this probably worked much better in its original format as an online article. Author Graeber can drone on like the academia member he is (an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics) and maybe some editorial tightening would've done the trick. Also, though I try really hard to be open to / accepting of differing political opinions when Graeber admits (again, on the same page as the above quote) that "I'm personally an anarchist" and that he wants to see the dissolutions of "governments, corporations, and the rest" I started thinking that he needs to leave the campus or his faculty office and walk into the real world for a spell. That, and he made a couple of cheap shots about one line of work that sounded too much like virtue signaling.
Bullshit Jobs has a great attention-grabbing, provocative title and some occasionally good stories from the interviewees who are all too aware that their various jobs are, well . . . see the title. However, this probably worked much better in its original format as an online article. Author Graeber can drone on like the academia member he is (an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics) and maybe some editorial tightening would've done the trick. Also, though I try really hard to be open to / accepting of differing political opinions when Graeber admits (again, on the same page as the above quote) that "I'm personally an anarchist" and that he wants to see the dissolutions of "governments, corporations, and the rest" I started thinking that he needs to leave the campus or his faculty office and walk into the real world for a spell. That, and he made a couple of cheap shots about one line of work that sounded too much like virtue signaling.
July 9, 2021
For English version please scroll down
*******
Ein echter Augenöffner
David Graeber schreibt hier über den hohen Anteil an Jobs bzw. den hohen Anteil an Aufgaben in den bestehenden Jobs, die vollkommen ineffizient, nutzlos und möglicherweise sogar schädlich für die Gesellschaft sind. Der Witz bei der Sache ist, dass ein Job offenbar umso besser bezahlt wird, umsoweniger gesamtgesellschaftlichen Nutzen er bringt.
Graeber erläutert schlüssig wie und warum sich der Anteil dieser Bullshit-Jobs seit den 50ern so massiv erhöht hat.
Ich habe mich über viele Jahre meines Berufslebens darüber gewundert, geärgert und aufgeregt, wieso sich eine Firma weniger mit Herstellung und Verkauf eines Produkts oder Services beschäftigen kann, sondern zu einem Riesengroßen Anteil mit internen administrativen Prozessen, die ganz offensichtlich nichts anderes als Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen sein können, ohne pleite zu gehen.
Mir ist auch schmerzlich am eigenen Leib aufgefallen, welche schlimmen Auswirkungen ein Job mit hohem Bullshit-Anteil haben kann (nur war mir bis zur Lektüre dieses Buches gar nicht klar, wie sehr die seelische und geistige Gesundheit leidet, wenn man in dieser Art Job gefangen ist).
David Graeber konnte mir viele meiner Fragen belegbar beantworten und hat mir mit diesem Buch zu einem neuen Blickwinkel auf das Thema verholfen.
5 Sterne.
---------------------
A real eye opener
David Graeber writes about the high proportion of jobs or the high proportion of tasks in existing jobs, which are completely inefficient, useless and possibly even harmful to society. The weird thing about it is that a job is apparently paid the better, the less it brings societal benefits.
Graeber explains conclusively how and why the proportion of these bullshit jobs has increased so massively since the 1950s.
For many years of my professional life, I have wondered, was annoyed and upset about why a company can deal less with the manufacturing and sale of a product or service, but to a large extent with internal administrative processes, which obviously cannot be anything other than job creation measures without going broke.
I also noticed painfully on myself the bad effects of a job with a high bullshit portion (only until reading this book I didn't realize how much mental and spiritual health suffers if you are caught in this type of job).
David Graeber was able to provide verifiable answers to many of my questions, and with this book he has given me a new perspective on the subject.
5 Stars.
*******
Ein echter Augenöffner
David Graeber schreibt hier über den hohen Anteil an Jobs bzw. den hohen Anteil an Aufgaben in den bestehenden Jobs, die vollkommen ineffizient, nutzlos und möglicherweise sogar schädlich für die Gesellschaft sind. Der Witz bei der Sache ist, dass ein Job offenbar umso besser bezahlt wird, umsoweniger gesamtgesellschaftlichen Nutzen er bringt.
Graeber erläutert schlüssig wie und warum sich der Anteil dieser Bullshit-Jobs seit den 50ern so massiv erhöht hat.
Ich habe mich über viele Jahre meines Berufslebens darüber gewundert, geärgert und aufgeregt, wieso sich eine Firma weniger mit Herstellung und Verkauf eines Produkts oder Services beschäftigen kann, sondern zu einem Riesengroßen Anteil mit internen administrativen Prozessen, die ganz offensichtlich nichts anderes als Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen sein können, ohne pleite zu gehen.
Mir ist auch schmerzlich am eigenen Leib aufgefallen, welche schlimmen Auswirkungen ein Job mit hohem Bullshit-Anteil haben kann (nur war mir bis zur Lektüre dieses Buches gar nicht klar, wie sehr die seelische und geistige Gesundheit leidet, wenn man in dieser Art Job gefangen ist).
David Graeber konnte mir viele meiner Fragen belegbar beantworten und hat mir mit diesem Buch zu einem neuen Blickwinkel auf das Thema verholfen.
5 Sterne.
---------------------
A real eye opener
David Graeber writes about the high proportion of jobs or the high proportion of tasks in existing jobs, which are completely inefficient, useless and possibly even harmful to society. The weird thing about it is that a job is apparently paid the better, the less it brings societal benefits.
Graeber explains conclusively how and why the proportion of these bullshit jobs has increased so massively since the 1950s.
For many years of my professional life, I have wondered, was annoyed and upset about why a company can deal less with the manufacturing and sale of a product or service, but to a large extent with internal administrative processes, which obviously cannot be anything other than job creation measures without going broke.
I also noticed painfully on myself the bad effects of a job with a high bullshit portion (only until reading this book I didn't realize how much mental and spiritual health suffers if you are caught in this type of job).
David Graeber was able to provide verifiable answers to many of my questions, and with this book he has given me a new perspective on the subject.
5 Stars.
June 28, 2018
This is an eye-opening and subversive book, and changed the way I look at jobs. Politicians and economists are always touting how great jobs are- jobs can fix anything and make capitalism work like a charm. This book questions that assumption.
I'm giving this book five out of five stars because it opens up a new topic and asks strong questions that have not before been considered.
The definition of a bullshit job, in the author's opinion, is "a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence." He leaves the determination of what constitutes a bullshit job to the employee, as they best know whether their job has any meaning or social benefit. In a depressing survey he states that close to 40% of respondents admit that their jobs is bullshit- not that necessary and not that productive. They work maybe a few hours a week doing pointless tasks and spend the rest of the time on the internet or on personal projects while pretending to look busy.
The author distinguishes between shit jobs, which are low-paying and necessary, and bullshit jobs, which are high-paying and wasteful. He says that bullshit jobs, because of their lack of meaning, have to be paid more to keep people in them, while ordinary jobs like teaching, police work, cleaning, and cooking at least have some sort of intrinsic benefit to the worker.
Examples of bullshit jobs are detailed at length in this book, many in the UK, where the author is from, but also some from all areas of the globe, including the US. Besides the obvious targets like government bureaucrats he singles out most of the financial sector, the bloated medical sector, much of the corporate world, lawyers, and more. Many of the employees interviewed secretly hated their jobs and would quit if it weren't for the insanely generous salaries and benefits.
There are five main categories of bullshit jobs:
-Flunkies - assistants to important people who have little to do other than to make their boss look good.
-Duct tapers- armies of people who fix flaws in information systems that could have an easy fix, but politics and personalities keep the flaws permanent.
-Goons - telemarketers and advertisers whose only function is to annoy people to buy things they don't really need.
-Box tickers -report generators, form fillers, bureaucracy flunkies
-Taskmasters assigning jobs, or worse, causing harm to others by assigning more bullshit jobs:
The second half of this book goes into some deep economic and philosophical discussions about why these types of jobs exist and what would happen if they all would be eliminated. What would people do? It examines the history of work and how our Puritan work ethic began and looks at what has happened over the past fifty years as productivity gains have made manual labor less and less important.
Graeber poses some tough and important questions, that I doubt many are too eager to confront even as our economy continues to shed jobs that are being taken over by machines. Why can't everybody work 15-20 hour weeks? Why must we play this game of pretending to work when there's nothing to do? Do some jobs do more harm than good? The author brings up the idea of Universal Basic Income, which has been bandied about and will continue to come up in the future. People who don't work at all are shamed into feeling sub-human, while those who pretend to work can feel superior, but secretly feel guilty. It's a messed up system that I've personally witnessed in several bullshit jobs.
I'm giving this book five out of five stars because it opens up a new topic and asks strong questions that have not before been considered.
The definition of a bullshit job, in the author's opinion, is "a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence." He leaves the determination of what constitutes a bullshit job to the employee, as they best know whether their job has any meaning or social benefit. In a depressing survey he states that close to 40% of respondents admit that their jobs is bullshit- not that necessary and not that productive. They work maybe a few hours a week doing pointless tasks and spend the rest of the time on the internet or on personal projects while pretending to look busy.
The author distinguishes between shit jobs, which are low-paying and necessary, and bullshit jobs, which are high-paying and wasteful. He says that bullshit jobs, because of their lack of meaning, have to be paid more to keep people in them, while ordinary jobs like teaching, police work, cleaning, and cooking at least have some sort of intrinsic benefit to the worker.
Examples of bullshit jobs are detailed at length in this book, many in the UK, where the author is from, but also some from all areas of the globe, including the US. Besides the obvious targets like government bureaucrats he singles out most of the financial sector, the bloated medical sector, much of the corporate world, lawyers, and more. Many of the employees interviewed secretly hated their jobs and would quit if it weren't for the insanely generous salaries and benefits.
There are five main categories of bullshit jobs:
-Flunkies - assistants to important people who have little to do other than to make their boss look good.
-Duct tapers- armies of people who fix flaws in information systems that could have an easy fix, but politics and personalities keep the flaws permanent.
-Goons - telemarketers and advertisers whose only function is to annoy people to buy things they don't really need.
-Box tickers -report generators, form fillers, bureaucracy flunkies
-Taskmasters assigning jobs, or worse, causing harm to others by assigning more bullshit jobs:
The second half of this book goes into some deep economic and philosophical discussions about why these types of jobs exist and what would happen if they all would be eliminated. What would people do? It examines the history of work and how our Puritan work ethic began and looks at what has happened over the past fifty years as productivity gains have made manual labor less and less important.
Graeber poses some tough and important questions, that I doubt many are too eager to confront even as our economy continues to shed jobs that are being taken over by machines. Why can't everybody work 15-20 hour weeks? Why must we play this game of pretending to work when there's nothing to do? Do some jobs do more harm than good? The author brings up the idea of Universal Basic Income, which has been bandied about and will continue to come up in the future. People who don't work at all are shamed into feeling sub-human, while those who pretend to work can feel superior, but secretly feel guilty. It's a messed up system that I've personally witnessed in several bullshit jobs.
December 29, 2020
Azért mentem könyvesboltosnak, mert szeretem a könyveket. Szeretek könyvek között lenni, velük bíbelődni, no meg azokkal, akik hozzám hasonlóan szeretik a könyveket. A könyvesbolti munka olyan állásnak tűnt, ahol minderre módom lehet, és sokáig így is volt. Aztán boltvezetőként azon kaptam magam, hogy egyre kevesebb időm van a könyvekre. Excel-táblázatokat töltök ki, amelyeket valószínűleg a kutya nem fog elolvasni, elégedettségi kérdőívekre válaszolok, miközben nem látom értelmüket, és olyan teljesítményértékelésekben veszek részt, amelyeknek hasznáról nem vagyok meggyőződve. Ahogy Graeber mondaná: bullshit munkát végeztem. Persze ezzel együtt nyilván a könyvesbolti munka nem bullshit (pláne mert jó rebellisként minden erőmmel igyekeztem ezek helyett továbbra is a könyvekkel bíbelődni, csak azért is), inkább úgy mondanám, hogy kihat rá a bullshitgenerátorok tevékenysége, akik valahol a fejem felett (akár állami, akár céges szinten) egyre több adminisztratív borzalmat ötöltek ki konkrétan az én bosszantásomra. Meggyőződésem, elsősorban azért, mert ha nem találnának ki egy halom tök fölösleges marhaságot, akkor még feltűnne valakinek, hogy munkájuk valójában totálisan nélkülözhető.
No, az ő munkájuk az, amit Graeber bullshit munkának nevez.
A bullshit munka lényege a szerző definíciója szerint nagyjából az, hogy értéket nem termel, haszontalan, sőt, nagy százalékban még kártékony is. Olyasmi, aminek művelői sosem mennek el sztrájkolni, mert ha megtennék, akkor a világ egyszeriben rájönne, hogy egyáltalában nem hiányoznak. (Képzeljétek csak el, mi lenne, ha a PR szakemberek sztrájkolnának! Vagy a politikai tanácsadók!) Igen, egy rakás ilyen munka van, sokkal több, mint gondolnánk: Graeber 37-40%-ra teszi az arányukat. Szóval érdemes a kérdéssel foglalkozni. Csak miért így, kérdem én? Kezdjük ott, hogy a szerző állításait tulajdonképpen végig azokkal a levelekkel támasztja alá, amit olyan dolgozók írtak neki, akik munkájukat bullshitnek érzik. Értjük: az bizonyítja az igazamat, hogy akik egyetértenek velem, azok ugyanazt mondják, amit én. Graeber meg sem próbál valakit az ördög ügyvédjeként szerepeltetni, mondván, a másik oldal úgyis hazudik. Nem hinném, hogy ennek fényében ezt a szöveget tudományos igényűnek nevezhetnénk.
De hát hogy is nevezhetnénk annak, amikor a definíciója is olyan puha, mint a napon hagyott trappista? Mert ugye mi az, hogy „értéket nem termel”? Mi az, hogy „kártékony”? Graeber ugyan megpedzegeti, hogy a bullshit munkát végzők maguk is érzik, hogy semmi értelmeset nem csinálnak, ám amennyiben ez mégsem igaz rájuk, akkor elintézi annyival, hogy csak nem mernek szembenézni a ténnyel. Szóval végeredményben az van, hogy az „érték” meg a „kártékony” az, amit Graeber annak gondol. Minden kétség nélkül jelöl meg komplett szakmákat bullshit munkaként, és (tényleg szellemes) kategóriákba rendezi őket, néha az az érzésem, pusztán azért, mert szereti a dolgokat (tényleg szellemes) kategóriákba rendezni. A bankokra kifejezetten pikkel, őket tokkal-vonóval a „kártékony” kategóriába teszi, de hát álljunk már meg egy pillanatra! Én is felháborítónak tartom, hogy egy pénzügyi tanácsadó, akármilyen baklövéseket követ el, annyit keres, mint 50 ápolónő és 50 tanár EGYÜTT, de azért nem mennék el odáig, hogy válogatás nélkül az összes pénzügyest megbélyegezzem. Sokkal inkább úgy látom, hogy minden munkának van egy bizonyos bullshit-százaléka, egyes munkáknak kevesebb, másoknak több, de ez nagyban függ az adott cég üzletpolitikájától, a vezetői hozzáállástól, illetve a munkavállaló személyes viselkedésétől – és ez a bankszakmára éppúgy igaz, mint bármelyik másikra. Graeberről amúgy is lesír, hogy lövése sincs a közgazdaságtanról, a hitelek gazdaságban betöltött szerepe teljesen ismeretlen neki. Ahogy egyébként egy csomó más dolog is.
Pedig a kérdés, amit a szerző felvet, nagyon fontos. Hisz technikailag immár lehetséges lenne számos munkakörben akár a 15 órás munkahét is, mégis heti 40 órában aszaltatják benn a cégek a dolgozókat, ráadásul még egy csomó olyan pozíciót is kitalálnak, aminek igazából semmi értelme nincs. Miért tesznek ilyet a kapitalisták, amikor ez logikusan végiggondolva ellentmond a profit törvényének, ami állítólag a rendszert működteti? És egyáltalán: miért gond az, hogy bullshit munkák vannak*? Graeber meglebegtet egy tetszetős hipotézist a „menedzserfeudalizmusról”, amelynek lényege, hogy a vezető pozíciókban lévők egy rakás értelmetlen munkakör létrehozásával kötik magukhoz a középosztályt, hogy azok tőlük függjenek, és nehogy szövetségre lépjenek az éhbérért dolgozó, valódi produktív munkát végző munkásosztállyal**. Mondom, ez például érdekes gondolat, de a szerző rendre elkalandozik, jóval kétségesebb magyarázatokba bonyolódva. Például azt állítja, a gazdagok azért hoznak létre bullshit munkákat, hogy a jónépnek ne legyen ideje gondolkodni. Vagy hosszan elmélkedik arról, hogy már a Bibliában is Ádámot azzal fenyítette az Úr, hogy az orcája verejtékével keresse kenyerét, aminek következtében erősen beépült a kollektív társadalmi tudatba, hogy a munka csak rossz lehet, ha pedig valaki hasznosat vagy kellemeset szeretne csinálni, azt tegye ingyen vagy kevés pénzért. Ez persze megmagyarázhatja azt, miért kínozzák a munkáltatók a munkavállalóikat, és hogy miért keresnek bitang keveset az állatkerti gondozók, de ahhoz, hogy mi végre van ennyi bullshit munka a világon, jóval kevesebb köze van.
Kár ezért az egészért. Pedig ez a kötet lehetett volna az új progresszív elképzelések egyik zászlóshajója is, tekintve, hogy megoldási javaslatként végül az alapjövedelem (általam is megfontolandónak tartott) gondolata mellett köt ki. Merthogy ugye az adna mankót azoknak, akik jelenleg a kapitalizmus kiszolgáltatottjai. Több függetlenséget, több szabadidőt idézne elő, és ez jó. Szerintem is jó. És tök jó lett volna, ha Graeber meggyőzően tudott volna amellett érvelni, miért is jó. De az az érzésem, túlságosan belezúgott saját elméletébe, és talán abba az elmébe is, amiből ez az elmélet kipattant. Így aztán nem is tudott mást írni, csak egy provokatív, csapongó, sok szempontból logikátlan, helyenként pedig kifejezetten pökhendi könyvet. Egy olyan könyvet, ami felvet ugyan értékes kérdéseket, de gyenge válaszokat ad rá. Egy olyan könyvet, ami maga is bullshit, minimum 37-40% arányban. Mondom, minimum.
* Nekem például tetszene egy olyan bullshit munka, amelynek keretében havi 400.000 nettóért kell napi 8 órát üldögélnem egy irodai asztalnál, néha válaszolnék egy levélre annyit, hogy „nagyon jó, később beszéljük át”, hétfőnként meg elmennék egy értekezletre, ahol megbeszélnénk, milyen eredményesen csináltuk a múlt héten a semmit. Feltéve, hogy az időm többi részében hagynának olvasgatni, értékeléseket írni, közösségi oldalakon szörfölgetni, satöbbi. Mert a bullshit munka nem a priori rossz, hanem csak akkor, ha az ember felettese elvárja, hogy ottlétünk minden percében eljátsszuk, hogy megfeszítve dolgozunk valami fiktív feladaton. Mert ebben az esetben viszont pokoli, az igaz.
** Graeber itt a munkásosztályba beleszámolja az ún. „gondoskodó” szakmákat is, úgymint ápoló, tanár, óvónő, stb.
No, az ő munkájuk az, amit Graeber bullshit munkának nevez.
A bullshit munka lényege a szerző definíciója szerint nagyjából az, hogy értéket nem termel, haszontalan, sőt, nagy százalékban még kártékony is. Olyasmi, aminek művelői sosem mennek el sztrájkolni, mert ha megtennék, akkor a világ egyszeriben rájönne, hogy egyáltalában nem hiányoznak. (Képzeljétek csak el, mi lenne, ha a PR szakemberek sztrájkolnának! Vagy a politikai tanácsadók!) Igen, egy rakás ilyen munka van, sokkal több, mint gondolnánk: Graeber 37-40%-ra teszi az arányukat. Szóval érdemes a kérdéssel foglalkozni. Csak miért így, kérdem én? Kezdjük ott, hogy a szerző állításait tulajdonképpen végig azokkal a levelekkel támasztja alá, amit olyan dolgozók írtak neki, akik munkájukat bullshitnek érzik. Értjük: az bizonyítja az igazamat, hogy akik egyetértenek velem, azok ugyanazt mondják, amit én. Graeber meg sem próbál valakit az ördög ügyvédjeként szerepeltetni, mondván, a másik oldal úgyis hazudik. Nem hinném, hogy ennek fényében ezt a szöveget tudományos igényűnek nevezhetnénk.
De hát hogy is nevezhetnénk annak, amikor a definíciója is olyan puha, mint a napon hagyott trappista? Mert ugye mi az, hogy „értéket nem termel”? Mi az, hogy „kártékony”? Graeber ugyan megpedzegeti, hogy a bullshit munkát végzők maguk is érzik, hogy semmi értelmeset nem csinálnak, ám amennyiben ez mégsem igaz rájuk, akkor elintézi annyival, hogy csak nem mernek szembenézni a ténnyel. Szóval végeredményben az van, hogy az „érték” meg a „kártékony” az, amit Graeber annak gondol. Minden kétség nélkül jelöl meg komplett szakmákat bullshit munkaként, és (tényleg szellemes) kategóriákba rendezi őket, néha az az érzésem, pusztán azért, mert szereti a dolgokat (tényleg szellemes) kategóriákba rendezni. A bankokra kifejezetten pikkel, őket tokkal-vonóval a „kártékony” kategóriába teszi, de hát álljunk már meg egy pillanatra! Én is felháborítónak tartom, hogy egy pénzügyi tanácsadó, akármilyen baklövéseket követ el, annyit keres, mint 50 ápolónő és 50 tanár EGYÜTT, de azért nem mennék el odáig, hogy válogatás nélkül az összes pénzügyest megbélyegezzem. Sokkal inkább úgy látom, hogy minden munkának van egy bizonyos bullshit-százaléka, egyes munkáknak kevesebb, másoknak több, de ez nagyban függ az adott cég üzletpolitikájától, a vezetői hozzáállástól, illetve a munkavállaló személyes viselkedésétől – és ez a bankszakmára éppúgy igaz, mint bármelyik másikra. Graeberről amúgy is lesír, hogy lövése sincs a közgazdaságtanról, a hitelek gazdaságban betöltött szerepe teljesen ismeretlen neki. Ahogy egyébként egy csomó más dolog is.
Pedig a kérdés, amit a szerző felvet, nagyon fontos. Hisz technikailag immár lehetséges lenne számos munkakörben akár a 15 órás munkahét is, mégis heti 40 órában aszaltatják benn a cégek a dolgozókat, ráadásul még egy csomó olyan pozíciót is kitalálnak, aminek igazából semmi értelme nincs. Miért tesznek ilyet a kapitalisták, amikor ez logikusan végiggondolva ellentmond a profit törvényének, ami állítólag a rendszert működteti? És egyáltalán: miért gond az, hogy bullshit munkák vannak*? Graeber meglebegtet egy tetszetős hipotézist a „menedzserfeudalizmusról”, amelynek lényege, hogy a vezető pozíciókban lévők egy rakás értelmetlen munkakör létrehozásával kötik magukhoz a középosztályt, hogy azok tőlük függjenek, és nehogy szövetségre lépjenek az éhbérért dolgozó, valódi produktív munkát végző munkásosztállyal**. Mondom, ez például érdekes gondolat, de a szerző rendre elkalandozik, jóval kétségesebb magyarázatokba bonyolódva. Például azt állítja, a gazdagok azért hoznak létre bullshit munkákat, hogy a jónépnek ne legyen ideje gondolkodni. Vagy hosszan elmélkedik arról, hogy már a Bibliában is Ádámot azzal fenyítette az Úr, hogy az orcája verejtékével keresse kenyerét, aminek következtében erősen beépült a kollektív társadalmi tudatba, hogy a munka csak rossz lehet, ha pedig valaki hasznosat vagy kellemeset szeretne csinálni, azt tegye ingyen vagy kevés pénzért. Ez persze megmagyarázhatja azt, miért kínozzák a munkáltatók a munkavállalóikat, és hogy miért keresnek bitang keveset az állatkerti gondozók, de ahhoz, hogy mi végre van ennyi bullshit munka a világon, jóval kevesebb köze van.
Kár ezért az egészért. Pedig ez a kötet lehetett volna az új progresszív elképzelések egyik zászlóshajója is, tekintve, hogy megoldási javaslatként végül az alapjövedelem (általam is megfontolandónak tartott) gondolata mellett köt ki. Merthogy ugye az adna mankót azoknak, akik jelenleg a kapitalizmus kiszolgáltatottjai. Több függetlenséget, több szabadidőt idézne elő, és ez jó. Szerintem is jó. És tök jó lett volna, ha Graeber meggyőzően tudott volna amellett érvelni, miért is jó. De az az érzésem, túlságosan belezúgott saját elméletébe, és talán abba az elmébe is, amiből ez az elmélet kipattant. Így aztán nem is tudott mást írni, csak egy provokatív, csapongó, sok szempontból logikátlan, helyenként pedig kifejezetten pökhendi könyvet. Egy olyan könyvet, ami felvet ugyan értékes kérdéseket, de gyenge válaszokat ad rá. Egy olyan könyvet, ami maga is bullshit, minimum 37-40% arányban. Mondom, minimum.
* Nekem például tetszene egy olyan bullshit munka, amelynek keretében havi 400.000 nettóért kell napi 8 órát üldögélnem egy irodai asztalnál, néha válaszolnék egy levélre annyit, hogy „nagyon jó, később beszéljük át”, hétfőnként meg elmennék egy értekezletre, ahol megbeszélnénk, milyen eredményesen csináltuk a múlt héten a semmit. Feltéve, hogy az időm többi részében hagynának olvasgatni, értékeléseket írni, közösségi oldalakon szörfölgetni, satöbbi. Mert a bullshit munka nem a priori rossz, hanem csak akkor, ha az ember felettese elvárja, hogy ottlétünk minden percében eljátsszuk, hogy megfeszítve dolgozunk valami fiktív feladaton. Mert ebben az esetben viszont pokoli, az igaz.
** Graeber itt a munkásosztályba beleszámolja az ún. „gondoskodó” szakmákat is, úgymint ápoló, tanár, óvónő, stb.
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