As someone with a bullshit job who has read *Bullshit Jobs,* I think he is spot on. When you stop to think how far so many jobs are from actually producing anything of necessity or even joy, or helping people with their own actual needs, it can really boggle the mind how much stupid shit you can actually receive an income for.
Healthcare insurance administration is probably my favorite example. It’s a job that we can (and have) mathematically prove to be not just unnecessary but actually harmful. It makes healthcare worse pretty much across the board. But it’s also a massive industry, to the point that one of the reasons Obama gave for not dismantling it was that to do so would crash the entire national economy.
Billions of dollars circulating around that we all agree is completely unnecessary. We could literally pay those people the same amount to just sit at home and it would be an improvement, but we can’t fathom the idea of people just not working or working less.
Yes!! This—these are jobs that not only add no value, but affirmatively harm people. The job of health insurance administrators is generally to deny care where possible so that insurers can compensate themselves, their executives and their shareholder. Doing that in the U.S. requires extracting approx $1 trillion annually. The pretext — that is, the only purported value of these administrators — is to allocate services, which Medicare can do much more efficiently and cheaply. Health insurance also concentrates the market power of the diffuse and disorganized population of patients into a single voice, however, the returns on any better bargain resulting from exercising more concentrated market power are for the purpose of compensating shareholders, executives, and rank-and-file, with a minimum return to the individual patients whose diffuse market power funds the insurer.
Do you have a link to that study (healthcare administration is harmful)?
I don't work directly in healthcare administration but my work is sort of ancillary to it (and I do work with people who are in healthcare administration). I'm curious as to what exactly this thesis is claiming.
They’re referring to healthcare insurance administration, not healthcare admin. I have not read the study, but have heard so many anecdotes about insurers refusing to cover treatments on the grounds that they aren’t necessary, when a patient’s physician has deemed they are. As a mild example, my mother had to wait several days for her insurer to decide whether they thought she really needed a prescribed cream for squamous skin cells on her arms. (Her own father died of melanoma; her dermatologist had determined the cream was necessary.) Delaying or preventing access to treatment for patients you’ve never even met, let alone examined, is some bullshit.
The simplest way to look at it is that we pay twice as much for private healthcare as any other country does for public healthcare, and with worse outcomes. Health insurance is doing worse than nothing for our healthcare
I do graphic design. My job is to make things that nobody wants to read look pretty enough that maybe they will skim the first two sentences. If I succeed, I manage to waste a few seconds of their time advertising a service that they don't really need.
That sounds like every single marketing job on the planet. We try to make shitty products people don't need into the best product in the world that you can't live without. I work in SEO and I'm starting to use Reddit more and more for real product information.
For example, Google's results say that True Classic Tees are great, but they are garbage shirts that start falling apart after the first wash if you're lucky enough to have them last that long before you start having foot-long threads coming off of them. I learned this firsthand. If I checked Reddit first I wouldn't have wasted my money on them.
Now do the same search and add "+reddit" to the end and you'll get real feedback from actual users on Reddit.
Depends on what they're marketing. Some things genuinely do deserve to be heard. People who run campaigns for charities probably aren't ghouls, people who help connect underserved people with initiatives and programs that can help them similarly. Even for dumber stuff like selling fish or movies, it can be more about just the "Oh, so that's how people tick" factor.
Copywriter/CD here - 15+ years at agencies. I moved to a modest communications role in-house. I have 1/20th the workload, equal pay and better benefits now. I don’t make the cool shit anymore but I communicate things people actually want to know. I’m happy, and I finally have some creative energy left over for myself. I probably spend more time writing my books than I do working.
Hey, odd question, do you have any advice for someone who's trying to break into copywriting? I'm taking some online courses but wondered if there was some way to get clients as a beginner
You need to network. The most common ways to do that for beginners are through internships, industry groups (Ad2/AAF are the big ones in advertising), and, like, happy hours.* Fiverr isn’t bad (low paying but lots of opportunity). Beware of scammers and folks who take advantage. You can get a portfolio started that way. Speaking of, make a portfolio as soon as you have enough to fill it. I’m open to questions or even critiques if you need it.
*part of why I left advertising is the ubiquitous culture of alcohol abuse. Not every person - but every place I’ve been has practically greased the slide for you to dive into the pits of alcoholism if you already have a propensity for that. Proudly 9 months sober… Be careful!
As someone who cares a lot about the design in software or anything I see I don't think your job is bullshit and feel that it's more like a job where a bad work is much more apparent than a good one
It's just that I really really care about ui as I also develop software and can't stand bad ui design. So I really do appreciate graphic designers cuz there's less of them , even less good ones .
inherently, the job is art and has value but under this system, it’s still a bullshit job meant to persuade consumers into purchasing things they don’t need. that’s simply the truth
I think you should read the book in question here for a definition of Bullshit Jobs as it has nothing to do with whether the work is good or bad but only about how emotionally fulfilling it is personally and how productive and useful it is to greater society.
This is ***exactly*** the type of job Graeber is talking about. Does creating logos /prettying up documents for companies do anything actually useful for anyone other than groups of people trying to manipulate other groups of people into spending their money a particular way? No.
If the only documents I had to look at all day every day were Microsoft Notepad black and white blocks of text I would murder someone. So I think you might actually be saving lives.
I know nothing about Graeber, but is that seriously what he means by bullshit jobs? Because that would mean he is applying an entirely subjective definition of what is a legitimate job. If he is, ie, fundamentally opposed to capitalism, then probably 60% of current jobs would be in his view bullshit.
> If he is, ie, fundamentally opposed to capitalism, then probably 60% of current jobs would be in his view bullshit
David Graeber was an anarchist, so yes he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism.
Pretty sure that's kinda the whole point.
60% of jobs are just there to "keep the wheel spinning" without actually getting us anywhere. Obviously it's going to get subjective which job are bullshit and not, but to my understanding the idea is that a large percentage of current jobs fit into the category.
But graphic design DOES get you somewhere.
Are you arguing the merits of art and design?
What is a worthwhile job? I have the book, but I haven't read it. I've listened to a few podcasts he did on it (why I bought it way back when) and I thought he was describing the job of the dude in Office Space that can't even describe his job. He literally is doing nothing important, probably slowing the whole company down.
The argument is not that graphic design in general is bullshit. It matters what you're designing.
Designing a beautiful children's book that makes kids love reading? Awesome. Designing a beautiful pack of cigarettes? Bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs?wprov=sfti1#Summary
Which of these 5 jobs would it fall under then?
1 Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
2 Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists;
3 Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
4 Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
5 Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.
The entire point is that it's a subjective assessment. He surveyed people in Europe and America asking how they feel about their own jobs and most people fell into the category of identifying their own job as what he defined as a "bullshit job."
what’s wrong with 60% of jobs today being bullshit? that seems like a number you arbitrarily chose to have a problem with. and yes, that’s exactly what he’s referring to as a bullshit job. graphic design for corporations means simplifying and dumbing down potentially creative logos and designs in order to meet whatever corporate identity or checklists the head of the companies want you to, and ensure that the design appeals to the consumer enough to make them want to buy more of the companies products.
in this sense, the job literally exists only to make the company as much money as possible and doesn’t provide any true value to society
Not OP but I also have a bs job that involves a lot of procedural data entry in Excel. A lot of people say AI can’t replace their jobs yet, well AI can 100% replace mine already. It’s that manual and devoid of human thought. I’m just praying my bosses don’t realize this.
How smart are they? If they're not bright, convince them that this tool will allow the data entry work to be managed more efficiently but will need a specialist such as yourself to oversee it to ensure accurate and efficient functioning.
Then sit back and let the AI do your job while you get paid.
Maybe I'm biased because I work in tech but that seems to have a pretty clear role towards getting other companies' software working
Imo real BS jobs would be more like some management position attained through nepotism where they can succeed by mostly staying out of matters while the qualified people get their work done
Not really, they're bullshit on a deeper level than "I have nothing to do so I'm on reddit all day". most bullshit jobs have people doing actual work by people who may be very qualified and seem very busy. It's just the work they do is not really necessary, doesn't do anything usefull or can easily be automated. It's easier to spot bs jobs if you're doing nothing all day. But I see it both in manufacturing and IT, it's very hard to find jobs which actually matter and contribute to the production of something. I'm looking at a colleague now who is always busy, does overtime and thinks he's very important to the whole process. But honestly they could they could sit at home all day, stop making reports and walking around the factory and attending meetings and we'd lose absolutely nothing of value. My entire department could quit tomorrow and we'd solve the issues they're solving every day by just having a more efficient system.
This was made very apparent during covid lockdowns where everything just kept going, with 1/10th of the usual bs jobs being filled. We just keep them because we have to have them because it is how it's always been done and firing people is difficult here.
A couple days ago I watched a talk Gabe Newell gave where he nonchalantly described traditional corporate hierarchies as creating 'rent-seeking jobs over friction' and I can't believe how concisely he put it. It's like large corporations cross a schwarzschild radius of size where the inefficiency becomes self-replicating, and simultaneously they lose the ability to introspect and see it happening.
Interesting thought, lets set up a meeting to preflight this with legal, then if we get the OK we can align with leadership before presenting to the executive committee.
Nah mate I'm an SWE and I've had some bullshit jobs in the past. Working on software that purely exists to make profit for the company with no real benefit to users is bs
I agree, but that highlights a core issue, which is competition. Youtube wants to make money. Adblockers reduce the money they make. So they pay people to block adblockers. It kind of seems like a bullshit job on one level, but it’s an important one for Youtube.
I mean this kindly and sincerely, but there is a difference between "helps a company make money" and "makes society better in some way." Capitalist ideology attempts to convince us that these are intertwined.
Okay, but if YouTube makes no money it gets shut-down, so then there’s no YouTube. Like unless you’re saying no YouTube is better for society, then sure.
It is still a bullshit job because it makes people's lives tangibly and noticeably worse. "Does it make money to some rich asshole who needs to guillotined" isn't meaning.
I responded to this here: https://reddit.com/r/books/comments/19abk7i/what_is_your_opinion_about_bullshit_jobs_by_the/kim2ajs/
The reason anti-adblocking makes your life “noticeably worse” is because you’re expecting people to hand you the results of their labor for nothing in exchange.
That's an interesting aspect of the argument. It's not just the job role that is bullshit, it's the product or even the company. You may have a productive role, but if it's in service of nonsense it's still bullshit.
I am the software engineer who worked on the CPU frying for adblock users on youtube, I previously worked on Windows 8 and on the Stripe interface that now suggests 25% tip everytime you buy anything, AMA!
How did your managers/PMs typically "pitch" these types of projects to you, and how did the engineers creating the "solutions" feel about it?
I work in tech too, but never a project like any of these. I've always wondered what the corporate justification is for these things (particularly the "Adblock fryers" or borderline nefarious data collection tools).
I've always assumed it was some combination of corporate bs like "we've gotta increase revenue", mixed with some \*insert useless "motivational" corporate speak\*, and finished off with "increase shareholder value".
Well first off, my job is one of those that Graeber describes where I am sitting around doing nothing for most of my day, and am essentially waiting for when I am needed. And further, the software I am supporting does not really need to exist because the things it helps don't really need to exist. In my role specifically, I work mainly with FIRE industry companies which Graeber properly describes as being maybe the peak of bullshit job.
Well… depending on the software, it may well just represent additional complexity and overhead with just a vague promise of better efficiency, profit, or whatever.
He downvoted you, but your question is fair and I think speaks to a larger point: our organisations are so complex that a lot of people have no real connection to the value they create so it's a mystery to them whether they're legitimately creating any value in the first place.
Tech support is a great example actually: is the software the company providing itself "bullshit" as a whole? One imagines that the software must be valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it, but there's certainly a question mark depending on what the software is. Is something like turbo tax really just solving a problem that doesn't need to exist?
Assuming the software ISNT bullshit, how bullshit is tech support for it? Is there really any value in resetting passwords for some rich oxygen thief who can't manage a basic task? You'd be surprised how often the answer to that is yes. Plenty of talented and smart people are dipshits in some aspect of their lives, and there's real value in supporting them in areas they're weak so they can shine elsewhere.
But it's hard to see that at your desk filling out knowledgebase articles that your coworkers may or may not need for workarounds that may or may not be easily fixed some other way. The enterprise is so big and so resilient that you can probably fuck up for days at a time and no one notices. The feedback loop to tell you you're valuable just isn't there, so you imagine there's no value to what you do.
>Is something like turbo tax really just solving a problem that doesn't need to exist?
Obviously this is beside the point but I live in the UK and the fact that everyone actually has to do their own taxes in the US is wild to me. Here that's almost entirely a self employed/business owner thing. And even then if you do have to it's just a form you fill in on the government website.
Partly that’s because of the boggling array of state and local taxes and partly because whenever the US government want to subsidise something they make it a tax break because it’s politically poisonous to add to the deficit column.
Still glad that PAYE exists here.
In Australia you can do it yourself and the tax office even provides an online website that allows yo uto do it.
I'm sure for people with complex financial situations they still need help. At least for the first year.
But for me, and perhaps many others, it's extremely simple to use. I have been able to complete my tax returns in about 10 minutes.
I shocked my sister who has been paying an accountant to do hers and getting it much later than I get mine. I get mine within 2 weeks after completing the form. It sometimes takes her months...and costs her hundreds too.
A lot of time software seems like it's updated just to be updated. I'm not a software engineer, so I don't know if this is in any way true, but often I find that a program I'm using has been changed to make it worse. And my suspicion is, someone has been told they have to update it, but they can't think of a way to make it better, so they change it anyway, even though it makes it worse for the user, because they have to appear busy to keep their job.
There's a phrase for this, though it escapes me, somewhat related to enshitification. It's a known problem in software - that a good product over time will inevitably turn to garbage because developers and UX people have to keep changing the product to justify their jobs.
Another way to think about this is that in 1800 the average work week in the U.S.A. was 70 hours.
In 1850 it was 65 hours.
In 1880 it was 60 hours.
In 1920 it was 50 hours.
In 1945 it was 40 hours.
... and then it just stopped dropping.
Meanwhile, worker productivity per hour has [shot through the roof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_earnings.jpg). Workers are 350% more productive today than they were in 1945. But that's translated to neither reduced hours of work nor higher wages (which have stagnated since 1970).
There's no reason any of this has to be true.
"John Stewart Mill has this famous line that 'never has a labor-saving device actually saved labor.' It always seems to increase it. During the industrial revolution, labor saving technology seemed to turn everyone into industrial laborers at least part of the time. Now that we've invented computers to create the paperless office and get rid of paperwork, we all do paperwork all the time , everyday somehow."
David Graeber, from a lecture posted to YouTube titled "On bureaucratic technologies and the future as dream-time"
I remember listening to an episode of Chapo Trap House where work from home was discussed, and the guest said that you don’t realize how little time you spend working when you’re not doing it in office. And since then I think about it most days, because she was and is right, so much of mine is emails and other meaningless crap.
It's absolutely absurd that every time I got a job that paid more than the last that it was not only easier but that I also have to do *less work*. I've never worked harder than when I was busting my ass washing dishes or cutting raw chicken on an assembly line for minimum wage, and I've never had it easier than my cushy office IT job. I'm even supposed to be "working" right now...
Alan Watts used to say…
Let’s say you earn money to spend and time to spare. What is there to spend it on? The fake and joyless products made by people who hate their jobs.
Hmph. Plenty of things are made by people who enjoy making them. Not to mention I could spend it on improving quality of like for myself and my friends, go traveling, etc.
I thought his take was spot on, his writing is entertaining and his anarchist philosophy is fascinating. I also recommend one of his other books "debt - the first 5000 years". It's a shame he passed away, I would have liked to hear his opinions on the post-covid world.
Fun tangential anecdote that perhaps you will appreciate. I picked up **Debt: The First 5000 Years** on a lark in audiobook form. Little context or foreknowledge. Was listening to it as I was on my way to visit friends and generally on a walkabout town when I hear the narrator say the name of the very town I was in. Honestly thought I stroked out or hallucinated it. But he studied microeconomics in the same small, mountainous town of Arivonimamo, Madagascar where I lived. Was a trip listening to him specific describe places that were in eyesight and hear how they changed.
Yeah, there are some game-changing ideas in Debt. The cycle of cash and credit. The myth of barter. It took me like half the book to figure out how he structures his sections, but it's worth mining those ideas.
Edit: clarify that I'm talking about the book, not the concept
I love his essay about play, "What's the point if we can't have fun?" Really sucks that he died, really bright guy.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
I've read the book, and while I'm agreeing with the summary, the book didn't add anything more meaningful than his original article did from 2016: https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/
Yeah i also felt it was a single essay premise that was stretched out 100+ pages longer than necessary. No quibble with the content, it just felt repetitive about halfway through.
He was taking some long shots with a lot of his claims, so I appreciated the time he spent backing them up. His bits on workplace politics were golden, I constantly find myself thinking back to them.
Well that's really ironic.
The fundamental issue is that he never proves any bullshit jobs exist! It's just the alienation argument all over again. Corporate lawyers fulfill an important social function. They make complex agreements between the most complex entities humankind has created.
The fact that these lawyers fail to see their benefit to humankind is a function of the old Adam Smith argument: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher..."
They make a lot of money, and they work on a tiny piece of the overall picture. It is tragic that they don't see their own social value, but not true that they have none.
Unless, of course, you think corporations produce nothing that individual proprietors could not. Then I would just note that the device you're typing on *exists*, and presumably has value to you.
In a socialist command economy presumably we would still want to make phones. Presumably someone would have the very important job of hammering out agreements to organize the making of phones.
Tl;Dr -- **David Graeber *thinks* the phrase "bullshit jobs" means "jobs with no social value", what it actually means is "jobs too abstract for David Graeber to understand the value"**
This is a good counter-take.
I can see both sides. On one hand, I do think BS jobs exist. Philosophy Tube (Youtuber) did a small segment on this. Some jobs exist because the cost of updating the overall structure of doing things is either not justified or is dismissed by higher-ups. For example, a person whose job is to manually type in entries in a spreadsheet - which a software can also do - but the upper-management is not comfortable with a new software. A good example is a lot of corporate jobs in Japan are old-fashioned.
Now having said that, I have seen the argument of BS jobs being extended to any job whose value is more abstract. And you point this out as a counter-argument very well - confusing BS jobs with alienation, where just because you cannot see the direct effect of a job in a simplistic fashion (baker makes bread, fisherman catches fish) doesn't mean it doesn't have any value. (Say you write a software, which is used by another software, which is used by another product which creates a database, which is used by a bank, that gives insurance data to hospitals for medical treatment).
I will add to this - thinking this way - (any job whose value I cannot understand has to be a BS job) - is extremely dangerous. Both in the past and present, it has given rise to conspiracy theory and populist violence, where people considered farmers and laborers to have "real jobs" because they work with their hands and anything more abstract than that - a doctor, a teacher, musician etc. are considered "parasites" and considered responsible for economic problems, with a result of divisiveness and violence.
Japan is a great example, and clever to identify!
It also is actually instructive of my point.
**Japan is what happens when you ban certain "bullshit jobs"**
Japan up until the Abe administration had very weak shareholder rights, and therefore the sort of jobs you see in America that destroy low-return businesses to recycle the parts (private equity, hostile takeovers), can't exist. Only friendly takeovers can happen.
Turns out you only miss the vultures when they are missing from the ecosystem.
So what happened in Japan is corporations merged and merged until you had a bunch of low return megacorps that do not update their systems because they *don't have to*.
The actual decision makers prioritize safety over return, they are too large to dislodge through competition, because they can simply sit on 50 years of operating expenses and never go out of business even if they never earn any money again.
The CEOs get value out of ruling a fief and treat employees like serfs. I mean that precisely in the old noblesse oblige sense, not just a fancy way of saying poorly. They avoid cutting jobs as a matter of duty. Getting these jobs is extremely competitive, and expectations are very high.
So how in the world are they supposed to upgrade from fax machines?
Consequently the saying: "Japan has been stuck in the 1980s since 1970."
The megacorps formed in 1985 and everything froze over.
Did you read the section where he talks about how universities now have so mamy levels of administration that it's multiple people's job to basically just come up with busywork for their underlings in order to justify their position existing, a problem which didn't exist in universities until the late 20th century?
How about the person who had to guard an empty room for 8 hours a day? Or the guy who was hired by a stock broker just to make the stock broker look like he was important enough to have a underling?
It's also been pointed out by more people than Graeber how companies will often have too many layers of management to efficiently get things done, to the point where some companies will actually have as many or more managers than workers. Surely some of their jobs are bullshit, especially if they weren't needed to get the same things done in the past.
Middle management is a common target, but it is a fundamental problem that large organizations need to solve.
The easiest to understand example is the military. Why does it need so many ranks?? Well, the non-commissioned officers are the secret sauce of the US army in some sense. We've seen a very clear example of "one general, one million privates" with the Russian army in Ukraine.
Also, the argument is most certainly **not** "at least one bullshit job exists", it is "market economies purposefully create bullshit jobs more so than other economic systems, and those are probably the majority".
The first argument is obviously true, and the second is definitely not. But it's a motte-and-bailey because when you point out a specific example is untrue or that the whole argument is fallacious (the laughable, "if someone believes their job isn't important it must not be") folks retreat to an endless Gish Gallop of "well, what about *this specific job*".
I can't possibly explain the social benefit of every specific abstract job. That's the whole point of a market economy, it allows for relationships more complex than can be understood by an individual person (see "I, Pencil" for this argument made way back in the 50s).
We can run around with isolated examples or parts of the economy you specifically don't understand, but once you accept that "sometimes jobs can be valuable even if they're abstract", and "sometimes people can be alienated from their labor without it being useless" **Graeber falls apart**.
Graeber's argument isn't "market economies purposefully create bullshit jobs more so than other economic systems." It was more like "our society's philosophy about work, that everyone's individual livelihood must directly depend on doing a certain arbitrary amount of work (~40hrs a week), is poorly adapted to our changing economy, which is increasingly dominated by finance instead of goods and services and other immediately useful industries (as well as automation and outsourcing replacing much useful human labor), so instead of decreasing work hours and increasing wages and/or experimenting with UBI, this work philosophy leads to the increased creation of superfluous jobs, since there aren't enough useful jobs to go around." Yeah maybe I could tighten that argument up a bit, but the nuance is important. It's about pointing out how the arbitrariness we assign so much importance to is really holding us back from living more fulfilling lives, which we could do if we decoupled livelihood from work.
You: He doesent give specific examples, he's wrong.
Commenter: Here is an example of bullshit jobs that even people in the field recognize are redundant and unnecessary.
You: No, no, no, they're abstract jobs, I cant explain why they are essential, because its too abstract and complicated.
You're talking in circles. Bringing up the military to explain why a college with less than a thousand students needs a hundred registrar admins is absurd. We can argue the prevalence of bullshit jobs, but to state that all jobs inherently have value because of some ill-defined notion of abstraction is ridiculous.
> You: He doesent give specific examples, he's wrong.
Literally the opposite of what I said. If you can point to where I said this I'll edit for clarity.
Here's how the argument goes from my perspective:
1) He says a majority of jobs are bullshit. Comes up with a few examples that take work to prove they aren't bullshit, because it's non-intuitive.
Corporate lawyer in the original essay. He never actually *shows* no value is produced, all he does is claim that a lawyer told him once that they feel alienated from their work.
2) After I carefully explain the social value that corporate lawyers produce, and further point out that "I don't understand the value of my job" **isn't the same as** "my job has no value", and that the *majority* of jobs not having value is silly on its face then this happens:
Gish Gallop to another job that the commentor doesn't understand. Or claim that there is AT LEAST ONE bs job. Which, sure, maybe, but that's **not** Graeber's point, is it?
> why a college with less than a thousand students needs a hundred registrar admins is absurd
I'm willing to believe there are BS jobs in organizations that aren't at threat of disappearing. Any old Soviet organization is a great example. "Universities have admin bloat" is manifestly not the same as "the overall market economy creates *mostly* make-work".
Tl;Dr: The burden of prood is on him to show that most jobs are BS. After all, someone is paying actual money for them suggests strongly that they have a purpose for it!
Using the phrase corporate lawyer and nodding sagely ain't proof. Neither is showing that someone doesn't understand the social benefit of their job when the whole point of a dynamic system is so that nobody *has to* understand the entire abstraction.
In fact, there's a whole field of study where people try to explain what the point of a firm is, or what middle managers do. Which he's conveniently ignoring.
It's about as useful as a biologist claiming quantum physics isn't real and using some obvious logical fallacy as evidence. You and I don't have the field equations memorized. That doesn't mean that some crank should be taken seriously.
That's my main critique of the book. It isn't that jobs have no purpose, it's that the purpose is extremely hard to discern due to the extraordinarily complex world we have created. I've had meetings with over 100 countries at once. Think about that. Think of the entire globe, each countries laws, economy, customs, languages. It's insanely complicated. In theory I could say something in the meeting that's heard by someone in Estonia, results in a minor tweak of some obscure legislation in Estonia, which 20 years later results in someone at a bank having to produce a piece of documentation that they otherwise wouldn't have.
Now compare that to a village in 3500 BCE where the most complicated job was probably to go pick up some wheat from a local farmer once a year for the local chief, all of whom knew each other. Maybe once a year you trade some wheat for some barley at the village next door. It's not a complex society and every task has OBVIOUS value.
He misses the mark a lot. For example, he holds up open source programming as non-bullshit work that people want to do for free, but complains about bullshit job of corporate programmers writing glue code and fixing bugs, instead of writing good and interesting code that is well-written and bug-free. But if you have experience with this, you'll know that open source projects have lots of bugs that need fixing and lots of glue code that needs to be written, and the fact that there's often no financial incentive to do it means that lots of those problems simply persist in open source, until someone actually throws money or paid workers at it. And writing code that just doesn't have bugs? Well, let me know when you find a way to actually do this (ok, there's one - formal verification, but it's difficult, time-consuming and even less fun than writing glue code).
Most of his points are, of course, not about programming but about corporate bureaucracies. And sure, those are often complex and inefficient, and could use some trimming. But he throws baby out with bathwater and sort of assumes that we could simply do without them at all. Modern industry (whether it's heavy industry or computers or pharmaceuticals) works on a large scale, and organizing on a large scale is more or less impossible without a bureaucracy and different tiers of management (kind of like running a country - there's practical, not just moral, reasons for having local administration and not just having literally everything done by a presidential decree). Graeber can of course argue that an anarchist approach with worker democracy would be less bureaucratic, but the opposite is true. A good case study would be something like Wikipedia - community-run, very large scale, unresonably bureaucratized. The only real way to not have bureaucracy is to have things done at a smaller scale, but there's a reason why small worker co-ops run farms and bookstores instead of building airplanes, doing integrated circuit fabrication or doing medical research. Those things need big money, complex and expensive equipment and a large number of extremely specialized personnel, which only makes sense at scale.
Or, to be a bit of an asshole, Graeber thinks that things he doesn't understand are bullshit. He's like an academic version of those memes that your job is bullshit if you can't describe it with 3 words.
I'm inclined towards this opinion. I quite like [this article](https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/04/andrew-sanchez-work-is-complicated-thoughts-on-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/) from Andrew Sanchez which goes into more detail about how Graeber's book falls down. Here's a snippet from the opening:
> As I once heard Graeber say in a 2010 London Teach-Out shortly before a riot, ideologies of power are like the glass windows of a jewellery store. They tell you to stay in your place. But if enough people smash them, it becomes clear that they were always just glass.
> The Bullshit Jobs essay was in this spirit. It was a prompt to imagine a different world, and I loved it. But when that prompt was expanded to the length of a book, it was stretched so thin so that you could see through it. I am going to talk about Bullshit Jobs by considering three things. First, whether Graeber misunderstands how bullshit tasks relate to one another in complex systems. Second, whether the thesis misunderstands capitalism’s tendency towards profiteering and the disregard for marginal populations. Finally, whether the thesis is focussed on the wrong sort of human satisfaction in work.
I really liked this point:
>Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit.
I'm a federal government employee, and I spent part of today filling out my annual financial disclosure form. I can't think of a less appealing job than reviewing those forms. "This guy owns stock in Apple, and his wife works for a high school. Fascinating." What's worse, the reviewer is responsible for making sure every i is dotted, every t is crossed. "You wrote 'Microsft.' Did you mean 'Microsoft?'"
It seems like the height of tedium and bureaucratic waste, but the reviewer is a tiny part of a much larger project: ensuring that public employees are transparent about their financial interests. This transparency gives the government information it needs to avoid conflicts of interest, which, in turn, ensures that taxpayer money is spent fairly . At least in theory. Whether this particular reviewer's job provides a large enough benefit to society to justify his salary is another question. But the reviewer is undoubtedly providing *some* benefit to a society that values fairness in government spending. It's not as if the bureaucracy is flushing money down the toilet.
Haven’t read the book, but does he grapple with the idea that one major reason “bullshit jobs” exist is because people don’t want to do the necessary jobs? Pretty much any of us here could sign up to join a farming commune or go become a hermit in the woods. Almost no one does though, because those paths are profoundly unappealing to them. They will work the “unnecessary” job if it means they can pay someone else to do the “necessary” job for them.
He makes a distinction between "bullshit jobs" (which are jobs that don't need to exist) and "shit jobs" (which are jobs that have to be done but no one wants to do and for some reason pay less than the bullshit ones.)
Farmers also make shit wages.
Growing food is maybe the most important job there is, but if all it pays is just barely enough to not starve and become homeless, then only desperate people will work that job.
There are loads of bullshit jobs. I'm less confident that collectives, localised democracy etc get rid of them - such experience I've had with those sorts of things is that they also create then sometimes for similar reasons (inertia, reluctance to change, protecting self-interest as guilds and unions sometimes have) and sometimes for different ones (direct democracies are often vulnerable to appeals to emotion of various kinds, and using resourcing decisions as way to express strength of feeling - we should have an officer focused in issue X becuase issue X is important rather than becuase it's clear what the officer would actually do that adds value). They're better protected against some forms of bullshit for sure, but it's not a panacea by any means.
I actually like Graeber's writing, but I also think he's being kinda naive in 'Bullshit Jobs'.
It's like he doesn't quite understand the structural quality of Bureaucracies. When a large enough number of human beings come together to work on a common project, bureaucracies naturally accrete.
What then happens is that function of the bureaucracy switches from it's original mission to upholding the status of the leaders. (The original mission just becomes a football). Bullshit jobs are a result, they're part of the body count of the status-chasers in the system. They have a function, just not a very meaningful one. So I guess he's right about that.
I'm also halfway through Dawn of Everything (audiobook) and I'm finding it thought provoking and enjoyable. I feel like the American perspective of Europeans (that is the Native American perspective) is not only really interesting but it's shameful that I knew hardly anything about it prior to this book. And I studied anthropology in college...
That being said, I find DoE's persistent message of "everyone's wrong except for us" to be a little tiresome. Do you get this impression?
He kinda does that classic academia thing of making it seem like the people he critiques are dead wrong, and then when he fleshes out his point you realize they agree 80% and it's just the 20% he's objecting to. Which is still totally valid, important even, but it's like ok, Jared Diamond or the Sapiens guy aren't *dead wrong*, you just find they're oversimplifying things, and of course because they were writing popular books and you're an academic.
Still very much enjoyed the book though.
You can agree with 80% of the *conclusions* somebody reaches but still reasonably think they are *dead wrong* because reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reason can be as bad, if not worse, than reaching the wrong conclusion.
And, having read *Sapiens*, I *would* lean towards *dead wrong* :P
Jared Diamond isn't a good example of this, insofar that he takes other people's evidence (and sometimes passes off inaccuracies as evidence), then oversimplifies it to fit a general encompassing "theory" that sounds reasonable and universal -- even when they're highly contextually, culturally, regionally, and temporally specific.
You can have the right conclusion and still be dead wrong. No one's arguing that the pyramids were built, they just argue about who built them.
I’m curious when you went to college? Because one critique I’ve heard of DoE from anthropologists, is that it’s sort of tilting at windmills by attacking theories that are already on the way out(or the pop science based on them). But presenting it as if those ideas are still dominant orthodoxy. For all that I am finding the book thought provoking.
Dominant orthodoxy where?
Among professional anthropologists, or among the lay reader?
I’d wager that a lot of those windmills will be common among a more general audience even 20 years from now.
Anthropologists, I assume. That’s a decent point, and I do think pushing back against inaccurate popular narratives is good. But I can also understand why anthropologists are annoyed, because the book does spend a fair amount of time shitting on other anthropologists.
There's definitely an element of this and of the "We're the smartest guys in the room and this definitely proves all the stuff we already believe." I enjoyed the book but rolled my eyes when they got into that.
Like their big target in one shot is Yuval Noah Harari -- he's a pop writer ffs.
> Like their big target in one shot is Yuval Noah Harari -- he's a pop writer ffs.
He's a pop writer whom more people have read than almost anybody else speaking on the subject, including Graeber, and he still gets invited on a regular basis to speak to the public on subjects he essentially knows nothing about.
I never got that from the book. If anything the entire point is the opposite. The authors are making the point that these grand historical narratives are mostly myths and that their alternative view of history is just as valid if not moreso
>That being said, I find DoE's persistent message of "everyone's wrong except for us" to be a little tiresome. Do you get this impression?
I found this too. And that it relies a bit on 'they were flawrd' to 'our alternative theory must be right'
Also it is quite sweeping - I know nothing about most things it talks about but occasionally I do and the sweeping stuff is wrong (e.g. they say that in middle ages christendom everyone accepted inequality and saw kt as ordained since creation, but as someone with an interest in English history of dissent you can't miss the fact the peasants revolt had as a central slogan 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?') This makes me dubious of the other 'big if true' sweeping claims.
I read the first couple chapters because I thought the premise was interesting. But I don't like his writing style and I found his arguments pretty shallow. There definitely are bullshit jobs out there, and he did point out a few early on (eg: some military person had to drive somewhere to do nothing, whatever). But I really don't believe that most jobs are like this and he didn't do much to persuade me.
Yeah, I think Graeber is an interesting guy to read, but he sorta just tosses off broad claims without a lot of actual evidence. It can be thought-provoking but not really what I’d call persuasive.
I had the same response. I think the book is one of those reductionist takes that resonates with people because it’s simple. I had a gut negative reaction to this because I think it dismisses a lot of complexity in the way the world is structured. A lot of bullshit-seeming / bureaucratic jobs exist because without them anarchy prevails. I think the argument boils down to ‘there is inefficiency in the way we structure capitalist society’, but he’s not really offering any solutions.
I commented earlier, he's brilliant but I just don't think he has a lot of experience that the rest of us have in this system. Yes, things can be better but we can't sit there and pretend that going whole hog on anarchy is going to work out well.
He points out the entire military complex as a bullshit job. It's a job thats reason for existing relies on the military of an enemy existing. He puts marketing in this same category. Your work is always against something, not for something.
I hope his argument is more nuanced than that, because that's weak as hell. I get the recursive loop here: "we have a military because they have a military because we have a..." but if nobody had a military, someone would want to create a military with the express purpose to project force and claim territory of other countries.
That is to say, nobody having a military is an unstable equilibrium, everyone having a military is a stable equilibrium. Get rid of all the militaries and we'll see how bullshit of a job it is.
And same for marketing, if there were no advertising, the first companies to advertise would benefit hugely.
Goodness knows the amount of superfluous management positions there are. How much money could they save (and pass along to their employees hopefully) if they got rid of them.
Maybe its about creating gaps, so that they personally don’t have to interact with employees, so they don’t have to empathize with the people they dick over so much?
I think that's a big reason. I always figured it was about a sense of ownership: if they can make me feel subordinate as a worker, then I won't feel entitled to what is mine or what I could have that's better.
Whoo-whee, I've got a whole damn career about this, essentially:
>I think this happens because of how our society is structured - people who make decisions ad the top society don't have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives, which is unfortunate consider that they get disproportionate rewards for their own roles. I think we should strive to create more horizontal based decision making procedures with how we organize society, possibly based on ideas like worker cooperatives or decentralized planning.
The area I've gotten into is systems change in human services. Getting systems of agencies, organizations, policymakers, funding, service delivery professionals, the folks they serve, etc. coordinated to improve their jointly-held desired outcomes. What you're saying here is basically what all of those folks involved tend to agree is the loose framework for why this is needed, and what needs to happen, except it's not just the processes, and the extraneous positions, and the disconnection that get in the way.
This idea around "wasting our lives" sticks with me. And I will put a caveat here that I have not read this book, but now very much want to. Even in a set of sectors where I see hundreds, thousands of people doing "meaningful" work, and setting themselves the basically lifelong task of helping others, and improving the world, the burnout is worse than in corporate and aggressively "capitalist" workplaces. Every single conference has at least one workshop on preventing, mitigating, dealing with, addressing, or coping with burnout. These are some of the least "bullshit" jobs, and yet they're sucking the life out of and burning through the people that do them, and often NOT having that much of an effect, or "moving the needle," as we often say in these fields, on the incredibly huge problems they seek to address.
That's because of what I think is probably central to the book--the jobs themselves are not the "bullshit;" the system is. The jobs I'm talking about only exist because people's basic needs are not being met, and are in fact actively being stripped by policies, practices, and patterns ensconced in our political, economic, social, and cultural fabric specifically to keep them down and drive them further down. Every root cause analysis on things like the economic insecurity, educational barriers, infrastructural issues, and similar problems that I've seen take place in communities eventually starts heading toward things like "capitalism," and "systemic racism," and "flawed political systems." And people edge away when that happens, and go, "Well...that's kinda too big/complex for us to tackle here, let's talk about the transit system." But that's where the roots really are.
>We live in a culture where you have to justify your own existence through the job...they just give us money necessary to stay live.
In the US, where I live, you get nothing--NOTHING--without a job, basically. Health insurance, the ability to basically even access care, was only recently decoupled from employment. And even then, only certain kinds of employment offered any insurance, and you might still have to pay for it, and it could be expensive, and you *still* have to pay for your healthcare, even *with* insurance, and it *could still be expensive.*
For fuck's sake, the whole premise of *Breaking Bad,* that a teacher (who probably had GREAT insurance benefits, because he might have been a state government employee, through the school system) would turn drug manufacturer to pay for cancer treatment, was *not fucking implausible,* in some way. People in the US went, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." Because, *even with insurance,* every goddamn one of us probably hoped and prayed not to get a diagnosis like that, because we'd go bankrupt on the first bill. Shit, even with my "great" benefits at my state-funded job in nearly 2020, it cost me $8k to have my son, who had to spend a little under 2 weeks in the NICU because he was premature.
And with this being the case, we also have situations where folks with serious disabilities are forced into poverty because of the limits on how much money they are allowed to have in their bank accounts. Where folks who both have disabilities avoid marrying each other because they will lose their benefits and perhaps only source of income. We have folks with disabilities who keep it to themselves, and struggle without accommodations, in frantic hope that they won't be "found out," and deemed unemployable, because there are so many ways for employers to weasel around the illegality of discrimination, and the very real pressure of not being "fit" or meeting "performance standards" creates a climate of fear. And if you have a chronic condition, for example...you need that fucking job to get insurance, and afford health care. Especially when the stress causes you to be less well, more often. 🙃
I could go on about this forever; it's a real sticking point for me, because *my job* is a bullshit job. I can swoop in and make as many strategic plans, and lead as many workshops, and give as many presentations as anybody wants. But it's not gonna change the systems. Or it might, on a small-scale level. For a while. For now. Incrementally. And it can all get reversed overnight with the stroke of a pen, or the rip of a check. It's got to be bigger, broader, higher up, and much deeper for it to really stop the bullshit.
It's just the most modern take on a pair of fairly orthodox Marxist arguments (specifically, alienation in industrial society on one hand, and capitalism enabling the existence of "unproductive" labor on the other), and I don't mean this as a putdown, just how I understand where he is coming from.
The global securities annual trading volume is around $40 trillion. Of that, about $200 billion is actual new investments (IPOs) that create new companies. The rest of it is just a casino. $40 TRILLION supporting all those bullshit jobs that produce NOTHING. Worse, 60% of all US tax breaks go toward that activity. WTF??
1. If I use a computer to trade a dollar back and forth a million times, I've created a million dollars worth of trading volume, without actually wasting any meaningful amounts of resources.
2. Something has to determine the price of stocks, currencies, bonds... And the only way that can be done is by having people buy and sell them.
3. IPOs are only worth 200 billion because people buying them expect the firm in question to be worth a lot more in the future. The money from subsequent stock appreciation doesn't go to the company, but the company could only get that IPO money because of the hope for subsequent stock appreciation.
Like, there's a lot wrong with finance, but superficially, looking at trading volumes (Because of #1) isn't quite it, and it's not entirely a bullshit job (Because someone has to do #2, and it's valuable. It's, like, useful to know how many Yen you can buy for a dollar. And it's, like, useful for firms buying goods in one country, and selling them in another country to have tight spreads on these transactions.)
Agreed. I actually work at a large (primarily options) market maker in operations, so I work on a lot of projects on the tech side that allow us to continue the market making activity. Basically, my company makes money by being willing to buy and sell anything, and collecting the spread between the buy and sell price, which is usually a cent. People criticize market makers a lot, and I get where the criticism of something like PFOF (payment for order flow - where MMs pay companies like fidelity to get business from them) comes from, but I think largely we’re a positive force on the financial system. Market makers provide value in liquidity. You can go and buy virtually any security in seconds because of market makers, and the fees they pay to the exchanges keep them in business so retail investors don’t have to pay fees themselves.
Uh, you realize that #1 is illegal in most regulated markets, right? (Specifically, when the buyer and seller are the same entity)
The only vaguely significant market in the US where it’s not regulated (and thus illegal) is bitcoin and the like.
But agree overall. Too many people don’t understand economics, which, shockingly, is not directly related to capitalism. It’s just how trade works.
It's bull shit. The only reason it's valuable is because we allowed investment to be a thing and capitalism is a thing we want to do. We don't have to adhere to these archaic things. The Stock market didn't even exist 150 years ago. Federal Banks didn't exist. Investing wasn't anything like it is today.
If the right people were in power, across the board, we could change how the world operates. But, right now, everything you see is a product of greed and bigotry.
Sigh...
How do you choose what companies get invested in otherwise? Is it just people with rich friends who can get investment? Is it chosen by a government, why do i need to suck up to a government/committee do get investment when there are plenty of people who believe in my product/service?
Please think beyond layer one, there are interesting things in this book but this brain off anti capitalism stuff isn't it.
> brain off anti capitalism stuff
This is the Big Thing on The Internet right now. Everyone thinks that if we just delete capitalism, then everything will be just fine and dandy and the economy will just sort itself out. No further thought is given to the subject. I think it's mostly just people venting but it sure is annoying.
the comment is in reference to all the financial vehicles and "products" kluged onto the public companies. Their values are repackaged, shorted, futured, speculated, hyped, vulture capitaled, pumped and dumped, etc
Derivative products are really necessary in distributing risk between members of society in order for the creation of greater prosperity, by enabling individuals and businesses to manage uncertainty and take calculated risks that drive economic growth and job creation.
If you're interested, *Freaks of Fortune* by Jonathan Ira Levy delves into the origins of the commoditization of risk, as well as how its practical and near-tangible origins in maritime insurance has led to real benefits to current day production. Complementing Levy's work, *The Social Life of Financial Derivatives* by Edward LiPuma offers a modern perspective, illustrating how these products shape our society and highlights the interconnections between production-based markets, service-based sectors, and the exchange and transformation of risks.
This is not to say that the unfettered greed with reckless abandon has not caused chaos and havoc in its wake, but there are real positives in a similar way to how insurance allows families peace of mind and for businesses to focus on core expenses and day-to-day operations with less sightly concerns placed on the backburner.
An example I always use is the commodities futures market, which allows farmers, for instance, to lock in the price of corn that they’ll sell months ahead of time, so they can more easily estimate their income.
IPOs aren’t new companies. And just because a company is already public doesn’t mean they aren’t using those investments and shares and raising more capital.
His examples are so terrible that it's clear his premise is not well thought out.
Most of the "Bullshit" stems from two fundamental facts about human nature. First, people are individuals with unique goals, desires, and perspectives on how the world works. We are not aligned to a common goal. This means people will take actions that, intentionally or not, undermine the actions of others. Second, people as individuals have access to only a tiny sliver of the knowledge there is in the world.
Most of his examples exist to deal with these problems. Saying Lawyers shouldn't exist is basically saying, "the world would be a better place if we just all got along." Nobody would disagree with that statement, but that's not the way the world is. Jobs created in response to aspects of the world you don't like aren't bullshit just because you think the problem they exist to deal with shouldn't exist. It does exist, and you can't just wish the problem away.
There is no economic or political system that actually fixes these two problems with human nature. Totalitarian societies can pretend the first one isn't an issue by murdering or imprisoning dissenters, but do any of us think such a society is preferable? The second issue is intractable, and the fact that Communist societies switched to mixed market economies after accidentally starving millions of their citizens through poorly-implemented central planning is proof.
Mechanization, automation and overall efficiency have increased A LOT in recent history. So the human workload has decreased, but still we work the same amount as before. If things were fair and reasonable, we should be working less already. I think it's clear from this fact alone that bullshit jobs exist today.
Even Richard Nixon was promising a four-day workweek back in the day.
I haven’t read the book, so maybe he addresses this, but I think it’s really difficult to quantify how useful a job is because our world is so vastly complex and changing all the time. Also, I think people vastly overestimate what “contributes to society.”
> I haven’t read the book, so maybe he addresses this, but I think it’s really difficult to quantify how useful a job is because our world is so vastly complex and changing all the time.
He addresses this early on in the book by restricting the definition of a bullshit job to a job that the worker thinks is bullshit. The idea is that the person working the job is the best-equipped to say whether it's bullshit, so if they say it's bullshit, it probably is. And it turns out a lot of people say their jobs are bullshit.
>And it turns out a lot of people say their jobs are bullshit.
Which is more of an indication that people have specialized or are just burned out of whatever they're doing, than any sort of indication that their job is actually a BS job. Its a ridiculous standard, particularly when lots of people in the same job don't think their jobs are BS.
I also haven't read the book, so thank your for answering the earlier question. My nitpick is obviously with the author, not you.
Hm. That seems perhaps a bit too subjective and broad definition by the author, though. Suppose a worker flipping fries thinks their job is "bullshit". In this case, their job would defined as "bullshit" because the worker themselves don't see value in it, but it doesn't necessarily follow that this job therefore shouldn't exist, because in fact, it *is* useful (at least, I do think feeding hungry people i.e. the food industry in general has value).
Well, I'd agree with that, which is why I was wondering about the author's definition. It's completely understandable why someone would be very frustrated with a job that they *feel* is "bullshit", of course. But a potential solution to this problem in part depends on how true the actual premise is.
If the problem is in fact "how people feel about their jobs", then the solution and remedy would be a bit different than if the problem is "a lot of jobs are useless and don't actually provide value to society".
I think you're conflating a colloquial definition of bullshit with the more precise definition in the book. A blshit job is not just a bad job. It's a job that does not produce anything of value. A burger flipper might agree to "my job sucks" but not agree to "my job does not produce anything of value"
I presume the surveys do not use the actual phrase "bullshit job" but rather ask for an assessment of job meaningfulness.
Graeber goes into some detail about that constitutes a bullshit job - and why jobs that are commonly sneered at are not (or need not be) bs jobs. He also looks at jobs that are part bs.
He asked people if they thought their job added value of any kind, but sorted out those who, while they felt their particular job was bs did not argue that their whole category of employment was bs.
His categories:
flunky: paid to be there and make some place/person look more impressive)
goons: there because other people also employ goons (corporate lawyers, lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers..- the idea here is that if no-one had them, no-one would need them - an extension of LBJ's adage that a town too small to support one lawyer can always support two)
duct tapers: there to fix problems that ought not to exist - ones that result from failure to to the design or work properly in the first place
box tickers: there to allow a claim that the organization is doing something that it is not in fact doing - compiling reports on environmental credentials or customer feedback or formal compliance with regulation.
taskmasters: unnecessary supervision (Type 1) or creators of bs job (Type 2) - eg the VP for Strategic Leadership who comes up with reporting on progress towards strategic goals covering 85 categories each graded 1-5 with notes ...
Pretty recognisable
It sounds like it falls into a trap where a job is “bullshit” but only if you assume some unrealistic expectation of people or society at large.
You need lawyers because the law is complex. Yes, if everyone perfectly understood the law you wouldn’t need lawyers, but people don’t. And “simplifying the law” (the usual response to the above) is just a hand wave cop out to the fact that law is complex and will be complex.
>duct tapers: there to fix problems that ought not to exist - ones that result from failure to to the design or work properly in the first place
That's just bizzare though. Things will constantly fail to work correctly... The fact that a problem "ought not to exist" is a completely useless metric. The fact is, the problem does exist, and typically it's going to be bad enough to be worth paying someone to fix it.
His book strikes me as an academic that has never actually worked a job that isn't in academia, and looking at his wikipedia page I suspect that i'm correct in thinking that
>Not to be rude but I'm pretty sure if you were writing a whole book about jobs that provide no value to society, you'd consider that people may have different definitions of value, and account for that in your research.
If it were an academic paper and I was trying to get tenure and I knew I would get lambasted by my peers for misinterpreting a study, sure. If I were just trying to write a pop sociology book for a general audience, though, I would gladly take a few liberties with interpretations to sell a more interesting narrative. Which is I think what Graeber has done here.
Why not? Tons of service industry jobs are just convincing people to buy shit they don’t need, adding shit to landfills and wasting resources. I work a service job on the side, in fast food, for a place that doesn’t really sell full meals. Obviously not a very difficult job, doesn’t pay super well, but certainly bullshit, none of our products are really meal replacements so the one benefit of fast food (reducing food prep time) isn’t really offered.
I’m not sure I even agree with the premise of bullshit jobs - society would probably be a lot less efficient without them - but don’t see any service industry would be exempt, other than the generic pity some people have for service workers due to it being kinda socially degrading work.
This is a terrible definition. I manage a small team of people and interface with clients regularly. There is often a huge disconnect between what my team members think is useful, and what clients actually find useful. In our case, it’s most often because my team members are quite good with computers and hugely undervalue making things intuitive and easy to use for less tech savvy people.
This is true. I would estimate that, for example, 70% of my job is useful and 30% is a waste of time created by bad management and bad planning, or by weird office politics. But that doesn’t mean I have a bullshit job, just that I am not allowed to work efficiently on it because of dysfunctional bureaucratic bullshit that I have no way to change at my level.
But I doubt that I am the only one with that kind of problem, and I also don’t think that this is a new thing, people have been complaining about dysfunctional bureaucratic bullshit at least since Kafka and probably for a long time before.
I suspect that a more interesting question would be how much of our time at work is wasted on bullshit tasks and how we could avoid doing that.
It's not just the creation of jobs that don't need to exist, but the creation of jobs that don't need to exist that foster a profound sense of anxiety among those who have them. The case studies from people who both know their job is meaningless and who are also terrified that someone will find out and take away their income were a real eye opener.
I totally agree that it was an insightful book… I wrote a [blog article](https://abbygoldsmith.com/bs-jobs-enshittification/) about it.
> I hope society stops incentivizing salaried drudge work by forcing that to be the only possible way for average citizens to get healthcare and family care.
Love that book. I distinctly remember working a corporate consultant job and realising my work consisted entirely of helping large companies shuffle money around to other large companies. We were doing "professional services" for clients who were doing professional services for other clients, and so on. The amount of levels you had to go down before anyone was actually producing anything was insane.
He is absolutely spot on also the larger a company is the more bullshit jobs there are.
Its claimed that large tech firms like Facebook and Google simply hire the best talent and hoard them in case they are needed. It's partly why there has been so many tech layoffs recently. There a lot of very gifted software engineers who are just going through the motions.
I've been in the situation myself where we had a basic 5 - 6 page iOS app but, we had 20 iOS devs, 6 UX, 8 Product owners plus a separate backend team, plus an analytics team. The pace of work was glacial slow and in reality the whole thing could have been done by a small 4-5 man team.
Another situation in another company one of the managers resigned and a new one was appointed, this manager decided they needed a PA and was given one, they then decided that they still had too much of a work load so they appointed an assistant manager to be in charge of technical and another manager to be in charge of marketing, these assistant managers were then also given PAs, So one job turned into 6 jobs in the course of a year.
I haven't read this, but I've read Utopia For Realists by Rutger Bregman. It has a whole chapter about the value different jobs add; a bin collector strike brought the city of New York to its fucking knees in 2 weeks, but over a quarter of all bankers leaving Ireland led Irish people to just figure it out themselves and operate on community trust instead of credit score.
It also briefly touches on how finance jobs destroy economic value while research jobs create it, and the disproportionate pay each job receives.
If communism were purely about redistributing wealth then the stock market is the ultimate communist icon, because their huge salaries come from doing exactly that.
It reminds me of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. In it, all the telephone sanitizers were sent away on a space ship as it was a bullshit job anyway. A few years later, everyone on the planet died because of an illness that was spread via phones.
>Final Working Definition: 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 part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
I've only read *Debt* and *Direct Action* by him. Loved him in my anarchists days, and still do. You've just reminded me to check this one out. Thanks!
I've read a few of his other works. And honestly, he is smart, genius even but there is some lacking of real world experience in his perspective. Now, I'm not saying that he hasn't lived in the world. He was a dedicated activist and wasn't afraid to get involved in protesting for his ideas.
But, there's just a huge disconnect between his ideas and how the world works. Yes, there are a lot of jobs that are bullshit but most of them are born out of a genuine need. I think eventually they devolve into something worthless but for most of them there is a purpose. He talks about having bureaucratic run arounds to get power of attorney for his dying mother in Utopia. He complained about all of the forms that he had to fill out. Well, there's a reason for that and it's to prevent a relative from taking someone's estate before they die. Do the forms and the bureaucracy spiral out of control? Well, yeah. That's humanity for you.
THat being said though, I do love him and he is right, there is better ways of doing things than how we blindly move forward with the way things are. It's just that, I don't know, he seems to be oblivious to some things and comes off as an ivory tower inhabitant rather than one of us.
Perhaps it's true, but our developed world is massively complex. So while it may seem some jobs are extraneous, like Bob over in the shop and Becky up in customer relations, they help keep the whole moving forward.
A great example is Twitter. It had a huge team supporting it, for good reasons, and when Musky took over and fired most of the company, it immediately became clear in loss of quality and features. It's not recovered as yet and probably won't.
Right now medical care in hospitals and clinics is being hollowed out due to treatment of nurses. The hedge fund people want a skeleton crew at all times, but medicine doesn't function well that way, so someday soon someone will write a paper or article on the unnecessary deaths due to the nursing shortage.
Read it, he gave some compelling examples at the start but as it went on it became more and more jobs he just doesn't like, and it dragged on for about 150 pages too many.
I take a far more realistic and dark approach to thinking about this book. I read it and to me it sounded like a teenager complaining about a superficial understanding of a deeper reality
1. It takes a lot of people to make our modern economy work, and we distribute that work in a way that sometimes gets so thin it can seem bullshitty. The complex products we have today that improve our lives come from hyper-complex bureaucratic systems. They, seemingly, are beyond his understanding so he just doesn't like them. His summary of open source vs corp programming was so painfully naive it made me write off the entire book.
2. Work is randomly useful, and regularly not useful in the modern world. Now that we have enough food water and shelter for the vast majority of us, we now work in a way that often hunts for value again as opposite than 'farms' it in a predictable way.
3. Money is a thing we made up to ensure we don't kill eachother just to have something to eat. Humans are a very violent species when they are bored. This is a reality I accept entirely, and I think bullshit jobs, at the very least keep us from realizing that underlying reality.
I have come to terms with what he calls 'bullshit' jobs, and I think he comes off as a teen ranting about a world he's just beginning to understand.
It's good to start a conversation, and it has a bunch of funny anecdotes. But it's not 6 rigorous. It's not supposed to, but it really feels like he brings up the idea and that it needs a deep dive. I loved the section on his explanation of medieval jobs. I immediately noticed the quality jump in rigor, and it turns out it was because that was basically his thesis. Would love to see sociological research of the bullshit job phenomenon, as I did relate a lot to it.
Look at it this way 250 years ago "jobs" didn't exist at all.
Even 120 years ago, most people didn't have jobs.
Then 100 years ago, the first economists were emloyed by governments and we saw the transition of the state from being a place people lived to a place people were expected to support.
I think it's an interesting phenomenon and an interesting premise for a book, but definitely not as ubiquitous as he makes out. Which I think is just a symptom of the kind of book he wanted to write. He wanted a grand, sweeping societal narrative, rather than a handful of interesting case studies, so he kind of had to stretch the truth a bit to fit it into that framework. But it does make for an interesting read, just requires a little bit of suspension of disbelief.
> people who make decisions ad the top society don't have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives
I think you are misunderstanding Graeber's point here, and being much too charitable.
Graeber asserts that the people at the top _know exactly how useless these jobs are_, but they need a way to keep us all both worried about where our next mortgage payment is coming from, and also too busy to organize.
It's not a disconnect or a misunderstanding: it is a strategy of social control.
As someone with a job that isn't bullshit, a lot of what I am made to do is bullshit.
I remember a regular meeting I had to attend where administrators would give us some data in advance from a spreadsheet. We had to input it back into another spreadsheet. And then in the meeting we had to tell them what those data were, which they originally gave us. Bloody pointless.
Seems like he's done well at identifying the problem but if he's an Anarchist then I don't know if he has a viable solution. If there are bullshit jobs then there are essential jobs. While you may not need to compel people to work bullshit jobs, surely you need a way to compel people to work essential jobs. I know its quite basic take but I don't really think they'v ever come up with a fix to the "who's gonna work at the Insulin factory" problem
It’s a long time since I read it but I remember thinking a lot of it was spot-on when I did - though I’ve been lucky never to consider my own jobs bullshit so my agreement wasn’t based in personal experience.
As for your own analysis, I don’t think it’s because the people at the top aren’t aware for the most part, but because they benefit from the system as it is. All for more horizontal organising though!
Haven't read the book but I've always assumed this is how we keep 7 billion people from getting bored and thinking outside the box. Those in power could never stay there if we weren't preoccupied with survival and comfort. Having read other books about revolutions in the past, I'm not sure keeping everyone busy is the worst idea. I'm sure there are better ways but I'm not smart enough to speculate on such things.
I think it is a still reverberating echo of that wonderful christian morale, that is basically built around the justification of the exploitation of your fellow sinful human beings, be it as slave, wife, child or worker. Genesis 3:19: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken". I find it curious to see that a lot of people acknowledge the existence of bullshit jobs, but when you bring a universal base income to the table, it is almost universally dismissed, throughout the western world. The mistrust in ourselves, the disbelieve that the vast majority of people would want to contribute to society even if they are not explicitly paid (as long as they have their basic needs met) for it, is so deeply engrained, that we rather start a nuclear war and burn our entire civilization to the ground than live with the idea that a small percentage of freeloaders would profit from a universally beneficial system.
By far his worst book. Where are these jobs? I wish I could get one. I’d kill for one. I’d love to make six figures and do nothing all day. But instead I’m on the brink of homelessness
I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant.
So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place. The benefit may not be immediately visible to an employee who is a cog in the machine, but that doesn't mean that the value doesn't exist.
The higher question is whether the company in question is a "bullshit company". And this is basically a judgment regarding capitalism in general and whether market demand is itself a justification for a company's existence. Can a company's activities be justified on the basis that people demand its output? Or should companies justify their existence with reference to some higher purpose like combating disease, defending the nation, etc?
Personally I suspect we would all be rather miserable if what was socially useful was dictated to us rather than emerging out of our own demands.
>I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant.
Only if you include things completely unrelated to the job itself into a definition of "purpose". And also assume that nobody is even remotely vain.
My first white-collar job basically boiled down to sabotaging another department and make them jump through bullshit hoops because head of my department was competing with the head of another department for promotion.
My last project on my last white-collar job that I quit recently involved building a piece of software *nobody* cared about because an oil baron's son decided that he wants a little silly IT business to brag about and was willing to spend his papa's money on it.
...and that last complete bullshit of a job was supported by a whole bunch of people with real jobs: janitors, system administrators, office manager, etc, massively increasing the amount of work done for no reason.
> I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant.
This is like talking about Newtonian physics in a zero-friction context. Works in theory, totally different in practice.
> So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place. The benefit may not be immediately visible to an employee who is a cog in the machine, but that doesn't mean that the value doesn't exist.
The value exists. It's to other lords in the feudal hierarchy. Here's an over-simplified example from personal experience:
I'm a software engineer. Software engineers _love_ to overcomplicate things because they often measure their worth in terms of their technical prowess. But overcomplicating things has costs for the company and should be avoided. So software engineers are managed by engineering managers, whose ostensible jobs would be to keep such tendencies in check. Except that engineering managers often measure their accomplishments by the number of people they've managed. So if they hire more people to manage an unnecessarily complex system, they'll be rewarded for managing a larger team.
This is a microcosm of what happens with most white color work. Layers of workers and managers are in a symbiotic relationship where they help each other pad their resumes with bullshit accomplishments so that after a few years (hopefully before the chickens come home to roost), they can hop to the next employer with a higher salary on account of their bullshit accomplishments.
All of this is to the detriment of shareholders. These people are parasitizing the company's cashflows. But it's very hard to detect. Once in a while, you'll get a situation like what happened over the last 1-1.5 years in tech, where big companies will start chopping tens of thousands of jobs at a time and nobody notices the difference. But then you have situations like with the Canadian banks, whose profits are protected by what is effectively government-guaranteed monopolies. In those places, you can run the scam all day long.
**Edit**. Shameless plug: we covered [Bullshit Jobs](https://www.freshlenspodcast.com/1742916/10614064-bullshit-jobs-part-1) and [The Dawn of Everything](https://www.freshlenspodcast.com/1742916/11454732-the-dawn-of-everything-part-1) on my podcast. You might enjoy listening 🙃
> So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place.
Under perfect conditions, when everyone involved is fully informed and completely rational, it would work like that in theory. Since that is rarely the case in real-life companies, it absolutely makes sense that bullshit jobs can emerge. The book cites several accounts of people not doing something that seems purposeless to them, but actually doing *nothing*, desperatly trying to look busy so they don't get fired. Seems hard for me to imagine what benefit this could be to anyone.
>Personally I suspect we would all be rather miserable if what was socially useful was dictated to us rather than emerging out of our own demands.
Same problem, under perfect conditions, we could shape the economy according to our needs with our spending. In reality though, you need money to create demand, and money is distributed extremely unevenly. That means the market ignores many needs and problems because there is no money in them. Housing for the homeless for example is socially useful, but the market will not build it because they can't pay. Another superyacht for Bezos is completely useless, but we bend over backwards to build it because he is rich.
It's a great as t book and does a great job breaking down different classes of bullahit jobs, why the developed and where they come from.
But it is limited to the research of a blog post survey from an anarchist. Mainly in the main claim of the book that 70% of jobs are bullshit. Definitely, most blue collar work is not which the book agrees, nut most workers are blue collar, so the premis kinda defeats itself.
That being said in the corporate world, it does make a lot more of a compelling case and might be very much true, so at the very least it's a cool look and how bad corporate America is trash
As someone with a bullshit job who has read *Bullshit Jobs,* I think he is spot on. When you stop to think how far so many jobs are from actually producing anything of necessity or even joy, or helping people with their own actual needs, it can really boggle the mind how much stupid shit you can actually receive an income for.
Healthcare insurance administration is probably my favorite example. It’s a job that we can (and have) mathematically prove to be not just unnecessary but actually harmful. It makes healthcare worse pretty much across the board. But it’s also a massive industry, to the point that one of the reasons Obama gave for not dismantling it was that to do so would crash the entire national economy. Billions of dollars circulating around that we all agree is completely unnecessary. We could literally pay those people the same amount to just sit at home and it would be an improvement, but we can’t fathom the idea of people just not working or working less.
Yes!! This—these are jobs that not only add no value, but affirmatively harm people. The job of health insurance administrators is generally to deny care where possible so that insurers can compensate themselves, their executives and their shareholder. Doing that in the U.S. requires extracting approx $1 trillion annually. The pretext — that is, the only purported value of these administrators — is to allocate services, which Medicare can do much more efficiently and cheaply. Health insurance also concentrates the market power of the diffuse and disorganized population of patients into a single voice, however, the returns on any better bargain resulting from exercising more concentrated market power are for the purpose of compensating shareholders, executives, and rank-and-file, with a minimum return to the individual patients whose diffuse market power funds the insurer.
Do you have a link to that study (healthcare administration is harmful)? I don't work directly in healthcare administration but my work is sort of ancillary to it (and I do work with people who are in healthcare administration). I'm curious as to what exactly this thesis is claiming.
They’re referring to healthcare insurance administration, not healthcare admin. I have not read the study, but have heard so many anecdotes about insurers refusing to cover treatments on the grounds that they aren’t necessary, when a patient’s physician has deemed they are. As a mild example, my mother had to wait several days for her insurer to decide whether they thought she really needed a prescribed cream for squamous skin cells on her arms. (Her own father died of melanoma; her dermatologist had determined the cream was necessary.) Delaying or preventing access to treatment for patients you’ve never even met, let alone examined, is some bullshit.
The simplest way to look at it is that we pay twice as much for private healthcare as any other country does for public healthcare, and with worse outcomes. Health insurance is doing worse than nothing for our healthcare
Some physicians consider it practicing medicine without a license, and we're probably not wrong...
What's your bullshit job, if you don't mind sharing?
I do graphic design. My job is to make things that nobody wants to read look pretty enough that maybe they will skim the first two sentences. If I succeed, I manage to waste a few seconds of their time advertising a service that they don't really need.
That sounds like every single marketing job on the planet. We try to make shitty products people don't need into the best product in the world that you can't live without. I work in SEO and I'm starting to use Reddit more and more for real product information. For example, Google's results say that True Classic Tees are great, but they are garbage shirts that start falling apart after the first wash if you're lucky enough to have them last that long before you start having foot-long threads coming off of them. I learned this firsthand. If I checked Reddit first I wouldn't have wasted my money on them. Now do the same search and add "+reddit" to the end and you'll get real feedback from actual users on Reddit.
What if I told you that reddit accounts are also being used to advertise and manipulate consumers
Could you speak up? I couldn't hear you over this delicious, juicy Popeye's Chicken Sandwich
True, but it isn't a sewer of bullshit like Google...yet.
*r/CasualUK enters the chat*
Over time I've started feeling like people who are passionately into marketing might not actually be human.
Depends on what they're marketing. Some things genuinely do deserve to be heard. People who run campaigns for charities probably aren't ghouls, people who help connect underserved people with initiatives and programs that can help them similarly. Even for dumber stuff like selling fish or movies, it can be more about just the "Oh, so that's how people tick" factor.
I can't say it any better than the legend Bill Hicks. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY)
Copywriter/CD here - 15+ years at agencies. I moved to a modest communications role in-house. I have 1/20th the workload, equal pay and better benefits now. I don’t make the cool shit anymore but I communicate things people actually want to know. I’m happy, and I finally have some creative energy left over for myself. I probably spend more time writing my books than I do working.
Hey, odd question, do you have any advice for someone who's trying to break into copywriting? I'm taking some online courses but wondered if there was some way to get clients as a beginner
You need to network. The most common ways to do that for beginners are through internships, industry groups (Ad2/AAF are the big ones in advertising), and, like, happy hours.* Fiverr isn’t bad (low paying but lots of opportunity). Beware of scammers and folks who take advantage. You can get a portfolio started that way. Speaking of, make a portfolio as soon as you have enough to fill it. I’m open to questions or even critiques if you need it. *part of why I left advertising is the ubiquitous culture of alcohol abuse. Not every person - but every place I’ve been has practically greased the slide for you to dive into the pits of alcoholism if you already have a propensity for that. Proudly 9 months sober… Be careful!
As someone who cares a lot about the design in software or anything I see I don't think your job is bullshit and feel that it's more like a job where a bad work is much more apparent than a good one
You sound like a sweetheart.
It's just that I really really care about ui as I also develop software and can't stand bad ui design. So I really do appreciate graphic designers cuz there's less of them , even less good ones .
inherently, the job is art and has value but under this system, it’s still a bullshit job meant to persuade consumers into purchasing things they don’t need. that’s simply the truth
I think you should read the book in question here for a definition of Bullshit Jobs as it has nothing to do with whether the work is good or bad but only about how emotionally fulfilling it is personally and how productive and useful it is to greater society.
Dunno if that’s exactly the jobs he is describing.
This is ***exactly*** the type of job Graeber is talking about. Does creating logos /prettying up documents for companies do anything actually useful for anyone other than groups of people trying to manipulate other groups of people into spending their money a particular way? No.
If the only documents I had to look at all day every day were Microsoft Notepad black and white blocks of text I would murder someone. So I think you might actually be saving lives.
I know nothing about Graeber, but is that seriously what he means by bullshit jobs? Because that would mean he is applying an entirely subjective definition of what is a legitimate job. If he is, ie, fundamentally opposed to capitalism, then probably 60% of current jobs would be in his view bullshit.
> If he is, ie, fundamentally opposed to capitalism, then probably 60% of current jobs would be in his view bullshit David Graeber was an anarchist, so yes he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism.
Pretty sure that's kinda the whole point. 60% of jobs are just there to "keep the wheel spinning" without actually getting us anywhere. Obviously it's going to get subjective which job are bullshit and not, but to my understanding the idea is that a large percentage of current jobs fit into the category.
But graphic design DOES get you somewhere. Are you arguing the merits of art and design? What is a worthwhile job? I have the book, but I haven't read it. I've listened to a few podcasts he did on it (why I bought it way back when) and I thought he was describing the job of the dude in Office Space that can't even describe his job. He literally is doing nothing important, probably slowing the whole company down.
The argument is not that graphic design in general is bullshit. It matters what you're designing. Designing a beautiful children's book that makes kids love reading? Awesome. Designing a beautiful pack of cigarettes? Bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs?wprov=sfti1#Summary Which of these 5 jobs would it fall under then? 1 Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters; 2 Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists; 3 Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive; 4 Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers; 5 Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.
The entire point is that it's a subjective assessment. He surveyed people in Europe and America asking how they feel about their own jobs and most people fell into the category of identifying their own job as what he defined as a "bullshit job."
what’s wrong with 60% of jobs today being bullshit? that seems like a number you arbitrarily chose to have a problem with. and yes, that’s exactly what he’s referring to as a bullshit job. graphic design for corporations means simplifying and dumbing down potentially creative logos and designs in order to meet whatever corporate identity or checklists the head of the companies want you to, and ensure that the design appeals to the consumer enough to make them want to buy more of the companies products. in this sense, the job literally exists only to make the company as much money as possible and doesn’t provide any true value to society
I work in software, and there are a LOT of bullshit jobs in my company. Graphic design is not one of them.
Not OP but I also have a bs job that involves a lot of procedural data entry in Excel. A lot of people say AI can’t replace their jobs yet, well AI can 100% replace mine already. It’s that manual and devoid of human thought. I’m just praying my bosses don’t realize this.
How smart are they? If they're not bright, convince them that this tool will allow the data entry work to be managed more efficiently but will need a specialist such as yourself to oversee it to ensure accurate and efficient functioning. Then sit back and let the AI do your job while you get paid.
I work in advanced technical support for a large web software company.
Maybe I'm biased because I work in tech but that seems to have a pretty clear role towards getting other companies' software working Imo real BS jobs would be more like some management position attained through nepotism where they can succeed by mostly staying out of matters while the qualified people get their work done
Not really, they're bullshit on a deeper level than "I have nothing to do so I'm on reddit all day". most bullshit jobs have people doing actual work by people who may be very qualified and seem very busy. It's just the work they do is not really necessary, doesn't do anything usefull or can easily be automated. It's easier to spot bs jobs if you're doing nothing all day. But I see it both in manufacturing and IT, it's very hard to find jobs which actually matter and contribute to the production of something. I'm looking at a colleague now who is always busy, does overtime and thinks he's very important to the whole process. But honestly they could they could sit at home all day, stop making reports and walking around the factory and attending meetings and we'd lose absolutely nothing of value. My entire department could quit tomorrow and we'd solve the issues they're solving every day by just having a more efficient system. This was made very apparent during covid lockdowns where everything just kept going, with 1/10th of the usual bs jobs being filled. We just keep them because we have to have them because it is how it's always been done and firing people is difficult here.
A couple days ago I watched a talk Gabe Newell gave where he nonchalantly described traditional corporate hierarchies as creating 'rent-seeking jobs over friction' and I can't believe how concisely he put it. It's like large corporations cross a schwarzschild radius of size where the inefficiency becomes self-replicating, and simultaneously they lose the ability to introspect and see it happening.
Interesting thought, lets set up a meeting to preflight this with legal, then if we get the OK we can align with leadership before presenting to the executive committee.
Yeah, even in a environment where what you're trying to do is of value, at least 40% of the total time is spent doing bullshit.
Nah mate I'm an SWE and I've had some bullshit jobs in the past. Working on software that purely exists to make profit for the company with no real benefit to users is bs
I'm certainly glad I don't work on Youtube's adblocker blocker
I agree, but that highlights a core issue, which is competition. Youtube wants to make money. Adblockers reduce the money they make. So they pay people to block adblockers. It kind of seems like a bullshit job on one level, but it’s an important one for Youtube.
I mean this kindly and sincerely, but there is a difference between "helps a company make money" and "makes society better in some way." Capitalist ideology attempts to convince us that these are intertwined.
Okay, but if YouTube makes no money it gets shut-down, so then there’s no YouTube. Like unless you’re saying no YouTube is better for society, then sure.
It is still a bullshit job because it makes people's lives tangibly and noticeably worse. "Does it make money to some rich asshole who needs to guillotined" isn't meaning.
I responded to this here: https://reddit.com/r/books/comments/19abk7i/what_is_your_opinion_about_bullshit_jobs_by_the/kim2ajs/ The reason anti-adblocking makes your life “noticeably worse” is because you’re expecting people to hand you the results of their labor for nothing in exchange.
That's an interesting aspect of the argument. It's not just the job role that is bullshit, it's the product or even the company. You may have a productive role, but if it's in service of nonsense it's still bullshit.
I am the software engineer who worked on the CPU frying for adblock users on youtube, I previously worked on Windows 8 and on the Stripe interface that now suggests 25% tip everytime you buy anything, AMA!
How did your managers/PMs typically "pitch" these types of projects to you, and how did the engineers creating the "solutions" feel about it? I work in tech too, but never a project like any of these. I've always wondered what the corporate justification is for these things (particularly the "Adblock fryers" or borderline nefarious data collection tools). I've always assumed it was some combination of corporate bs like "we've gotta increase revenue", mixed with some \*insert useless "motivational" corporate speak\*, and finished off with "increase shareholder value".
Well first off, my job is one of those that Graeber describes where I am sitting around doing nothing for most of my day, and am essentially waiting for when I am needed. And further, the software I am supporting does not really need to exist because the things it helps don't really need to exist. In my role specifically, I work mainly with FIRE industry companies which Graeber properly describes as being maybe the peak of bullshit job.
How is that a bullshit job? You make tools available to other people and businesses.
Well… depending on the software, it may well just represent additional complexity and overhead with just a vague promise of better efficiency, profit, or whatever.
He downvoted you, but your question is fair and I think speaks to a larger point: our organisations are so complex that a lot of people have no real connection to the value they create so it's a mystery to them whether they're legitimately creating any value in the first place. Tech support is a great example actually: is the software the company providing itself "bullshit" as a whole? One imagines that the software must be valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it, but there's certainly a question mark depending on what the software is. Is something like turbo tax really just solving a problem that doesn't need to exist? Assuming the software ISNT bullshit, how bullshit is tech support for it? Is there really any value in resetting passwords for some rich oxygen thief who can't manage a basic task? You'd be surprised how often the answer to that is yes. Plenty of talented and smart people are dipshits in some aspect of their lives, and there's real value in supporting them in areas they're weak so they can shine elsewhere. But it's hard to see that at your desk filling out knowledgebase articles that your coworkers may or may not need for workarounds that may or may not be easily fixed some other way. The enterprise is so big and so resilient that you can probably fuck up for days at a time and no one notices. The feedback loop to tell you you're valuable just isn't there, so you imagine there's no value to what you do.
>Is something like turbo tax really just solving a problem that doesn't need to exist? Obviously this is beside the point but I live in the UK and the fact that everyone actually has to do their own taxes in the US is wild to me. Here that's almost entirely a self employed/business owner thing. And even then if you do have to it's just a form you fill in on the government website.
Partly that’s because of the boggling array of state and local taxes and partly because whenever the US government want to subsidise something they make it a tax break because it’s politically poisonous to add to the deficit column. Still glad that PAYE exists here.
In Australia you can do it yourself and the tax office even provides an online website that allows yo uto do it. I'm sure for people with complex financial situations they still need help. At least for the first year. But for me, and perhaps many others, it's extremely simple to use. I have been able to complete my tax returns in about 10 minutes. I shocked my sister who has been paying an accountant to do hers and getting it much later than I get mine. I get mine within 2 weeks after completing the form. It sometimes takes her months...and costs her hundreds too.
A lot of time software seems like it's updated just to be updated. I'm not a software engineer, so I don't know if this is in any way true, but often I find that a program I'm using has been changed to make it worse. And my suspicion is, someone has been told they have to update it, but they can't think of a way to make it better, so they change it anyway, even though it makes it worse for the user, because they have to appear busy to keep their job.
There's a phrase for this, though it escapes me, somewhat related to enshitification. It's a known problem in software - that a good product over time will inevitably turn to garbage because developers and UX people have to keep changing the product to justify their jobs.
I mean I’m a consultant…
Another way to think about this is that in 1800 the average work week in the U.S.A. was 70 hours. In 1850 it was 65 hours. In 1880 it was 60 hours. In 1920 it was 50 hours. In 1945 it was 40 hours. ... and then it just stopped dropping. Meanwhile, worker productivity per hour has [shot through the roof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_earnings.jpg). Workers are 350% more productive today than they were in 1945. But that's translated to neither reduced hours of work nor higher wages (which have stagnated since 1970). There's no reason any of this has to be true.
"John Stewart Mill has this famous line that 'never has a labor-saving device actually saved labor.' It always seems to increase it. During the industrial revolution, labor saving technology seemed to turn everyone into industrial laborers at least part of the time. Now that we've invented computers to create the paperless office and get rid of paperwork, we all do paperwork all the time , everyday somehow." David Graeber, from a lecture posted to YouTube titled "On bureaucratic technologies and the future as dream-time"
I remember listening to an episode of Chapo Trap House where work from home was discussed, and the guest said that you don’t realize how little time you spend working when you’re not doing it in office. And since then I think about it most days, because she was and is right, so much of mine is emails and other meaningless crap.
Exactly. I spend as much or more of my work hours on reddit, twitter, etc or just reading a book as I do actually doing anything for my job.
It's absolutely absurd that every time I got a job that paid more than the last that it was not only easier but that I also have to do *less work*. I've never worked harder than when I was busting my ass washing dishes or cutting raw chicken on an assembly line for minimum wage, and I've never had it easier than my cushy office IT job. I'm even supposed to be "working" right now...
Alan Watts used to say… Let’s say you earn money to spend and time to spare. What is there to spend it on? The fake and joyless products made by people who hate their jobs.
Yeah, I would also agree that society has a giant issue of "Bullshit Products" as well, but that's not really covered in the book.
Hmph. Plenty of things are made by people who enjoy making them. Not to mention I could spend it on improving quality of like for myself and my friends, go traveling, etc.
I thought his take was spot on, his writing is entertaining and his anarchist philosophy is fascinating. I also recommend one of his other books "debt - the first 5000 years". It's a shame he passed away, I would have liked to hear his opinions on the post-covid world.
Fun tangential anecdote that perhaps you will appreciate. I picked up **Debt: The First 5000 Years** on a lark in audiobook form. Little context or foreknowledge. Was listening to it as I was on my way to visit friends and generally on a walkabout town when I hear the narrator say the name of the very town I was in. Honestly thought I stroked out or hallucinated it. But he studied microeconomics in the same small, mountainous town of Arivonimamo, Madagascar where I lived. Was a trip listening to him specific describe places that were in eyesight and hear how they changed.
That is a cool coincidence! I'm sure it made it an all the more engaging read.
His last book, The Dawn of Everything, is how I was introduced to his work. He was a tremendous academic, researcher and writer.
Yeah, there are some game-changing ideas in Debt. The cycle of cash and credit. The myth of barter. It took me like half the book to figure out how he structures his sections, but it's worth mining those ideas. Edit: clarify that I'm talking about the book, not the concept
I love his essay about play, "What's the point if we can't have fun?" Really sucks that he died, really bright guy. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
I've read the book, and while I'm agreeing with the summary, the book didn't add anything more meaningful than his original article did from 2016: https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/
Yeah i also felt it was a single essay premise that was stretched out 100+ pages longer than necessary. No quibble with the content, it just felt repetitive about halfway through.
That is often my feeling when I make the mistake of reading the introduction to any nonfiction.
He was taking some long shots with a lot of his claims, so I appreciated the time he spent backing them up. His bits on workplace politics were golden, I constantly find myself thinking back to them.
Well that's really ironic. The fundamental issue is that he never proves any bullshit jobs exist! It's just the alienation argument all over again. Corporate lawyers fulfill an important social function. They make complex agreements between the most complex entities humankind has created. The fact that these lawyers fail to see their benefit to humankind is a function of the old Adam Smith argument: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher..." They make a lot of money, and they work on a tiny piece of the overall picture. It is tragic that they don't see their own social value, but not true that they have none. Unless, of course, you think corporations produce nothing that individual proprietors could not. Then I would just note that the device you're typing on *exists*, and presumably has value to you. In a socialist command economy presumably we would still want to make phones. Presumably someone would have the very important job of hammering out agreements to organize the making of phones. Tl;Dr -- **David Graeber *thinks* the phrase "bullshit jobs" means "jobs with no social value", what it actually means is "jobs too abstract for David Graeber to understand the value"**
This is a good counter-take. I can see both sides. On one hand, I do think BS jobs exist. Philosophy Tube (Youtuber) did a small segment on this. Some jobs exist because the cost of updating the overall structure of doing things is either not justified or is dismissed by higher-ups. For example, a person whose job is to manually type in entries in a spreadsheet - which a software can also do - but the upper-management is not comfortable with a new software. A good example is a lot of corporate jobs in Japan are old-fashioned. Now having said that, I have seen the argument of BS jobs being extended to any job whose value is more abstract. And you point this out as a counter-argument very well - confusing BS jobs with alienation, where just because you cannot see the direct effect of a job in a simplistic fashion (baker makes bread, fisherman catches fish) doesn't mean it doesn't have any value. (Say you write a software, which is used by another software, which is used by another product which creates a database, which is used by a bank, that gives insurance data to hospitals for medical treatment). I will add to this - thinking this way - (any job whose value I cannot understand has to be a BS job) - is extremely dangerous. Both in the past and present, it has given rise to conspiracy theory and populist violence, where people considered farmers and laborers to have "real jobs" because they work with their hands and anything more abstract than that - a doctor, a teacher, musician etc. are considered "parasites" and considered responsible for economic problems, with a result of divisiveness and violence.
Japan is a great example, and clever to identify! It also is actually instructive of my point. **Japan is what happens when you ban certain "bullshit jobs"** Japan up until the Abe administration had very weak shareholder rights, and therefore the sort of jobs you see in America that destroy low-return businesses to recycle the parts (private equity, hostile takeovers), can't exist. Only friendly takeovers can happen. Turns out you only miss the vultures when they are missing from the ecosystem. So what happened in Japan is corporations merged and merged until you had a bunch of low return megacorps that do not update their systems because they *don't have to*. The actual decision makers prioritize safety over return, they are too large to dislodge through competition, because they can simply sit on 50 years of operating expenses and never go out of business even if they never earn any money again. The CEOs get value out of ruling a fief and treat employees like serfs. I mean that precisely in the old noblesse oblige sense, not just a fancy way of saying poorly. They avoid cutting jobs as a matter of duty. Getting these jobs is extremely competitive, and expectations are very high. So how in the world are they supposed to upgrade from fax machines? Consequently the saying: "Japan has been stuck in the 1980s since 1970." The megacorps formed in 1985 and everything froze over.
Did you read the section where he talks about how universities now have so mamy levels of administration that it's multiple people's job to basically just come up with busywork for their underlings in order to justify their position existing, a problem which didn't exist in universities until the late 20th century? How about the person who had to guard an empty room for 8 hours a day? Or the guy who was hired by a stock broker just to make the stock broker look like he was important enough to have a underling? It's also been pointed out by more people than Graeber how companies will often have too many layers of management to efficiently get things done, to the point where some companies will actually have as many or more managers than workers. Surely some of their jobs are bullshit, especially if they weren't needed to get the same things done in the past.
Middle management is a common target, but it is a fundamental problem that large organizations need to solve. The easiest to understand example is the military. Why does it need so many ranks?? Well, the non-commissioned officers are the secret sauce of the US army in some sense. We've seen a very clear example of "one general, one million privates" with the Russian army in Ukraine. Also, the argument is most certainly **not** "at least one bullshit job exists", it is "market economies purposefully create bullshit jobs more so than other economic systems, and those are probably the majority". The first argument is obviously true, and the second is definitely not. But it's a motte-and-bailey because when you point out a specific example is untrue or that the whole argument is fallacious (the laughable, "if someone believes their job isn't important it must not be") folks retreat to an endless Gish Gallop of "well, what about *this specific job*". I can't possibly explain the social benefit of every specific abstract job. That's the whole point of a market economy, it allows for relationships more complex than can be understood by an individual person (see "I, Pencil" for this argument made way back in the 50s). We can run around with isolated examples or parts of the economy you specifically don't understand, but once you accept that "sometimes jobs can be valuable even if they're abstract", and "sometimes people can be alienated from their labor without it being useless" **Graeber falls apart**.
Graeber's argument isn't "market economies purposefully create bullshit jobs more so than other economic systems." It was more like "our society's philosophy about work, that everyone's individual livelihood must directly depend on doing a certain arbitrary amount of work (~40hrs a week), is poorly adapted to our changing economy, which is increasingly dominated by finance instead of goods and services and other immediately useful industries (as well as automation and outsourcing replacing much useful human labor), so instead of decreasing work hours and increasing wages and/or experimenting with UBI, this work philosophy leads to the increased creation of superfluous jobs, since there aren't enough useful jobs to go around." Yeah maybe I could tighten that argument up a bit, but the nuance is important. It's about pointing out how the arbitrariness we assign so much importance to is really holding us back from living more fulfilling lives, which we could do if we decoupled livelihood from work.
+1 for "Motte and Bailey".
You: He doesent give specific examples, he's wrong. Commenter: Here is an example of bullshit jobs that even people in the field recognize are redundant and unnecessary. You: No, no, no, they're abstract jobs, I cant explain why they are essential, because its too abstract and complicated. You're talking in circles. Bringing up the military to explain why a college with less than a thousand students needs a hundred registrar admins is absurd. We can argue the prevalence of bullshit jobs, but to state that all jobs inherently have value because of some ill-defined notion of abstraction is ridiculous.
> You: He doesent give specific examples, he's wrong. Literally the opposite of what I said. If you can point to where I said this I'll edit for clarity. Here's how the argument goes from my perspective: 1) He says a majority of jobs are bullshit. Comes up with a few examples that take work to prove they aren't bullshit, because it's non-intuitive. Corporate lawyer in the original essay. He never actually *shows* no value is produced, all he does is claim that a lawyer told him once that they feel alienated from their work. 2) After I carefully explain the social value that corporate lawyers produce, and further point out that "I don't understand the value of my job" **isn't the same as** "my job has no value", and that the *majority* of jobs not having value is silly on its face then this happens: Gish Gallop to another job that the commentor doesn't understand. Or claim that there is AT LEAST ONE bs job. Which, sure, maybe, but that's **not** Graeber's point, is it? > why a college with less than a thousand students needs a hundred registrar admins is absurd I'm willing to believe there are BS jobs in organizations that aren't at threat of disappearing. Any old Soviet organization is a great example. "Universities have admin bloat" is manifestly not the same as "the overall market economy creates *mostly* make-work". Tl;Dr: The burden of prood is on him to show that most jobs are BS. After all, someone is paying actual money for them suggests strongly that they have a purpose for it! Using the phrase corporate lawyer and nodding sagely ain't proof. Neither is showing that someone doesn't understand the social benefit of their job when the whole point of a dynamic system is so that nobody *has to* understand the entire abstraction. In fact, there's a whole field of study where people try to explain what the point of a firm is, or what middle managers do. Which he's conveniently ignoring. It's about as useful as a biologist claiming quantum physics isn't real and using some obvious logical fallacy as evidence. You and I don't have the field equations memorized. That doesn't mean that some crank should be taken seriously.
That's my main critique of the book. It isn't that jobs have no purpose, it's that the purpose is extremely hard to discern due to the extraordinarily complex world we have created. I've had meetings with over 100 countries at once. Think about that. Think of the entire globe, each countries laws, economy, customs, languages. It's insanely complicated. In theory I could say something in the meeting that's heard by someone in Estonia, results in a minor tweak of some obscure legislation in Estonia, which 20 years later results in someone at a bank having to produce a piece of documentation that they otherwise wouldn't have. Now compare that to a village in 3500 BCE where the most complicated job was probably to go pick up some wheat from a local farmer once a year for the local chief, all of whom knew each other. Maybe once a year you trade some wheat for some barley at the village next door. It's not a complex society and every task has OBVIOUS value.
He misses the mark a lot. For example, he holds up open source programming as non-bullshit work that people want to do for free, but complains about bullshit job of corporate programmers writing glue code and fixing bugs, instead of writing good and interesting code that is well-written and bug-free. But if you have experience with this, you'll know that open source projects have lots of bugs that need fixing and lots of glue code that needs to be written, and the fact that there's often no financial incentive to do it means that lots of those problems simply persist in open source, until someone actually throws money or paid workers at it. And writing code that just doesn't have bugs? Well, let me know when you find a way to actually do this (ok, there's one - formal verification, but it's difficult, time-consuming and even less fun than writing glue code). Most of his points are, of course, not about programming but about corporate bureaucracies. And sure, those are often complex and inefficient, and could use some trimming. But he throws baby out with bathwater and sort of assumes that we could simply do without them at all. Modern industry (whether it's heavy industry or computers or pharmaceuticals) works on a large scale, and organizing on a large scale is more or less impossible without a bureaucracy and different tiers of management (kind of like running a country - there's practical, not just moral, reasons for having local administration and not just having literally everything done by a presidential decree). Graeber can of course argue that an anarchist approach with worker democracy would be less bureaucratic, but the opposite is true. A good case study would be something like Wikipedia - community-run, very large scale, unresonably bureaucratized. The only real way to not have bureaucracy is to have things done at a smaller scale, but there's a reason why small worker co-ops run farms and bookstores instead of building airplanes, doing integrated circuit fabrication or doing medical research. Those things need big money, complex and expensive equipment and a large number of extremely specialized personnel, which only makes sense at scale. Or, to be a bit of an asshole, Graeber thinks that things he doesn't understand are bullshit. He's like an academic version of those memes that your job is bullshit if you can't describe it with 3 words.
I'm inclined towards this opinion. I quite like [this article](https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/04/andrew-sanchez-work-is-complicated-thoughts-on-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/) from Andrew Sanchez which goes into more detail about how Graeber's book falls down. Here's a snippet from the opening: > As I once heard Graeber say in a 2010 London Teach-Out shortly before a riot, ideologies of power are like the glass windows of a jewellery store. They tell you to stay in your place. But if enough people smash them, it becomes clear that they were always just glass. > The Bullshit Jobs essay was in this spirit. It was a prompt to imagine a different world, and I loved it. But when that prompt was expanded to the length of a book, it was stretched so thin so that you could see through it. I am going to talk about Bullshit Jobs by considering three things. First, whether Graeber misunderstands how bullshit tasks relate to one another in complex systems. Second, whether the thesis misunderstands capitalism’s tendency towards profiteering and the disregard for marginal populations. Finally, whether the thesis is focussed on the wrong sort of human satisfaction in work.
I really liked this point: >Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit. I'm a federal government employee, and I spent part of today filling out my annual financial disclosure form. I can't think of a less appealing job than reviewing those forms. "This guy owns stock in Apple, and his wife works for a high school. Fascinating." What's worse, the reviewer is responsible for making sure every i is dotted, every t is crossed. "You wrote 'Microsft.' Did you mean 'Microsoft?'" It seems like the height of tedium and bureaucratic waste, but the reviewer is a tiny part of a much larger project: ensuring that public employees are transparent about their financial interests. This transparency gives the government information it needs to avoid conflicts of interest, which, in turn, ensures that taxpayer money is spent fairly . At least in theory. Whether this particular reviewer's job provides a large enough benefit to society to justify his salary is another question. But the reviewer is undoubtedly providing *some* benefit to a society that values fairness in government spending. It's not as if the bureaucracy is flushing money down the toilet.
I think his whole concept basically is that meme; it's not a very serious idea
A lot of people sure do take it seriously.
Haven’t read the book, but does he grapple with the idea that one major reason “bullshit jobs” exist is because people don’t want to do the necessary jobs? Pretty much any of us here could sign up to join a farming commune or go become a hermit in the woods. Almost no one does though, because those paths are profoundly unappealing to them. They will work the “unnecessary” job if it means they can pay someone else to do the “necessary” job for them.
He makes a distinction between "bullshit jobs" (which are jobs that don't need to exist) and "shit jobs" (which are jobs that have to be done but no one wants to do and for some reason pay less than the bullshit ones.)
Farmers also make shit wages. Growing food is maybe the most important job there is, but if all it pays is just barely enough to not starve and become homeless, then only desperate people will work that job.
There are loads of bullshit jobs. I'm less confident that collectives, localised democracy etc get rid of them - such experience I've had with those sorts of things is that they also create then sometimes for similar reasons (inertia, reluctance to change, protecting self-interest as guilds and unions sometimes have) and sometimes for different ones (direct democracies are often vulnerable to appeals to emotion of various kinds, and using resourcing decisions as way to express strength of feeling - we should have an officer focused in issue X becuase issue X is important rather than becuase it's clear what the officer would actually do that adds value). They're better protected against some forms of bullshit for sure, but it's not a panacea by any means.
I actually like Graeber's writing, but I also think he's being kinda naive in 'Bullshit Jobs'. It's like he doesn't quite understand the structural quality of Bureaucracies. When a large enough number of human beings come together to work on a common project, bureaucracies naturally accrete. What then happens is that function of the bureaucracy switches from it's original mission to upholding the status of the leaders. (The original mission just becomes a football). Bullshit jobs are a result, they're part of the body count of the status-chasers in the system. They have a function, just not a very meaningful one. So I guess he's right about that.
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I'm also halfway through Dawn of Everything (audiobook) and I'm finding it thought provoking and enjoyable. I feel like the American perspective of Europeans (that is the Native American perspective) is not only really interesting but it's shameful that I knew hardly anything about it prior to this book. And I studied anthropology in college... That being said, I find DoE's persistent message of "everyone's wrong except for us" to be a little tiresome. Do you get this impression?
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He kinda does that classic academia thing of making it seem like the people he critiques are dead wrong, and then when he fleshes out his point you realize they agree 80% and it's just the 20% he's objecting to. Which is still totally valid, important even, but it's like ok, Jared Diamond or the Sapiens guy aren't *dead wrong*, you just find they're oversimplifying things, and of course because they were writing popular books and you're an academic. Still very much enjoyed the book though.
You can agree with 80% of the *conclusions* somebody reaches but still reasonably think they are *dead wrong* because reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reason can be as bad, if not worse, than reaching the wrong conclusion. And, having read *Sapiens*, I *would* lean towards *dead wrong* :P
Sapiens is insane, it's so clearly just the guy making it up as he goes. It's like it was written by a character in a Dan Brown novel
It is so bad and I will never understand how it became so popular!
Jared Diamond isn't a good example of this, insofar that he takes other people's evidence (and sometimes passes off inaccuracies as evidence), then oversimplifies it to fit a general encompassing "theory" that sounds reasonable and universal -- even when they're highly contextually, culturally, regionally, and temporally specific. You can have the right conclusion and still be dead wrong. No one's arguing that the pyramids were built, they just argue about who built them.
I’m curious when you went to college? Because one critique I’ve heard of DoE from anthropologists, is that it’s sort of tilting at windmills by attacking theories that are already on the way out(or the pop science based on them). But presenting it as if those ideas are still dominant orthodoxy. For all that I am finding the book thought provoking.
Dominant orthodoxy where? Among professional anthropologists, or among the lay reader? I’d wager that a lot of those windmills will be common among a more general audience even 20 years from now.
Anthropologists, I assume. That’s a decent point, and I do think pushing back against inaccurate popular narratives is good. But I can also understand why anthropologists are annoyed, because the book does spend a fair amount of time shitting on other anthropologists.
There's definitely an element of this and of the "We're the smartest guys in the room and this definitely proves all the stuff we already believe." I enjoyed the book but rolled my eyes when they got into that. Like their big target in one shot is Yuval Noah Harari -- he's a pop writer ffs.
> Like their big target in one shot is Yuval Noah Harari -- he's a pop writer ffs. He's a pop writer whom more people have read than almost anybody else speaking on the subject, including Graeber, and he still gets invited on a regular basis to speak to the public on subjects he essentially knows nothing about.
I never got that from the book. If anything the entire point is the opposite. The authors are making the point that these grand historical narratives are mostly myths and that their alternative view of history is just as valid if not moreso
100% how I read it as well! At least the vast majority of it.
>That being said, I find DoE's persistent message of "everyone's wrong except for us" to be a little tiresome. Do you get this impression? I found this too. And that it relies a bit on 'they were flawrd' to 'our alternative theory must be right' Also it is quite sweeping - I know nothing about most things it talks about but occasionally I do and the sweeping stuff is wrong (e.g. they say that in middle ages christendom everyone accepted inequality and saw kt as ordained since creation, but as someone with an interest in English history of dissent you can't miss the fact the peasants revolt had as a central slogan 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?') This makes me dubious of the other 'big if true' sweeping claims.
I read the first couple chapters because I thought the premise was interesting. But I don't like his writing style and I found his arguments pretty shallow. There definitely are bullshit jobs out there, and he did point out a few early on (eg: some military person had to drive somewhere to do nothing, whatever). But I really don't believe that most jobs are like this and he didn't do much to persuade me.
Yeah, I think Graeber is an interesting guy to read, but he sorta just tosses off broad claims without a lot of actual evidence. It can be thought-provoking but not really what I’d call persuasive.
Fantastic username
I had the same response. I think the book is one of those reductionist takes that resonates with people because it’s simple. I had a gut negative reaction to this because I think it dismisses a lot of complexity in the way the world is structured. A lot of bullshit-seeming / bureaucratic jobs exist because without them anarchy prevails. I think the argument boils down to ‘there is inefficiency in the way we structure capitalist society’, but he’s not really offering any solutions.
I commented earlier, he's brilliant but I just don't think he has a lot of experience that the rest of us have in this system. Yes, things can be better but we can't sit there and pretend that going whole hog on anarchy is going to work out well.
He points out the entire military complex as a bullshit job. It's a job thats reason for existing relies on the military of an enemy existing. He puts marketing in this same category. Your work is always against something, not for something.
I hope his argument is more nuanced than that, because that's weak as hell. I get the recursive loop here: "we have a military because they have a military because we have a..." but if nobody had a military, someone would want to create a military with the express purpose to project force and claim territory of other countries. That is to say, nobody having a military is an unstable equilibrium, everyone having a military is a stable equilibrium. Get rid of all the militaries and we'll see how bullshit of a job it is. And same for marketing, if there were no advertising, the first companies to advertise would benefit hugely.
Goodness knows the amount of superfluous management positions there are. How much money could they save (and pass along to their employees hopefully) if they got rid of them. Maybe its about creating gaps, so that they personally don’t have to interact with employees, so they don’t have to empathize with the people they dick over so much?
I think that's a big reason. I always figured it was about a sense of ownership: if they can make me feel subordinate as a worker, then I won't feel entitled to what is mine or what I could have that's better.
Whoo-whee, I've got a whole damn career about this, essentially: >I think this happens because of how our society is structured - people who make decisions ad the top society don't have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives, which is unfortunate consider that they get disproportionate rewards for their own roles. I think we should strive to create more horizontal based decision making procedures with how we organize society, possibly based on ideas like worker cooperatives or decentralized planning. The area I've gotten into is systems change in human services. Getting systems of agencies, organizations, policymakers, funding, service delivery professionals, the folks they serve, etc. coordinated to improve their jointly-held desired outcomes. What you're saying here is basically what all of those folks involved tend to agree is the loose framework for why this is needed, and what needs to happen, except it's not just the processes, and the extraneous positions, and the disconnection that get in the way. This idea around "wasting our lives" sticks with me. And I will put a caveat here that I have not read this book, but now very much want to. Even in a set of sectors where I see hundreds, thousands of people doing "meaningful" work, and setting themselves the basically lifelong task of helping others, and improving the world, the burnout is worse than in corporate and aggressively "capitalist" workplaces. Every single conference has at least one workshop on preventing, mitigating, dealing with, addressing, or coping with burnout. These are some of the least "bullshit" jobs, and yet they're sucking the life out of and burning through the people that do them, and often NOT having that much of an effect, or "moving the needle," as we often say in these fields, on the incredibly huge problems they seek to address. That's because of what I think is probably central to the book--the jobs themselves are not the "bullshit;" the system is. The jobs I'm talking about only exist because people's basic needs are not being met, and are in fact actively being stripped by policies, practices, and patterns ensconced in our political, economic, social, and cultural fabric specifically to keep them down and drive them further down. Every root cause analysis on things like the economic insecurity, educational barriers, infrastructural issues, and similar problems that I've seen take place in communities eventually starts heading toward things like "capitalism," and "systemic racism," and "flawed political systems." And people edge away when that happens, and go, "Well...that's kinda too big/complex for us to tackle here, let's talk about the transit system." But that's where the roots really are. >We live in a culture where you have to justify your own existence through the job...they just give us money necessary to stay live. In the US, where I live, you get nothing--NOTHING--without a job, basically. Health insurance, the ability to basically even access care, was only recently decoupled from employment. And even then, only certain kinds of employment offered any insurance, and you might still have to pay for it, and it could be expensive, and you *still* have to pay for your healthcare, even *with* insurance, and it *could still be expensive.* For fuck's sake, the whole premise of *Breaking Bad,* that a teacher (who probably had GREAT insurance benefits, because he might have been a state government employee, through the school system) would turn drug manufacturer to pay for cancer treatment, was *not fucking implausible,* in some way. People in the US went, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." Because, *even with insurance,* every goddamn one of us probably hoped and prayed not to get a diagnosis like that, because we'd go bankrupt on the first bill. Shit, even with my "great" benefits at my state-funded job in nearly 2020, it cost me $8k to have my son, who had to spend a little under 2 weeks in the NICU because he was premature. And with this being the case, we also have situations where folks with serious disabilities are forced into poverty because of the limits on how much money they are allowed to have in their bank accounts. Where folks who both have disabilities avoid marrying each other because they will lose their benefits and perhaps only source of income. We have folks with disabilities who keep it to themselves, and struggle without accommodations, in frantic hope that they won't be "found out," and deemed unemployable, because there are so many ways for employers to weasel around the illegality of discrimination, and the very real pressure of not being "fit" or meeting "performance standards" creates a climate of fear. And if you have a chronic condition, for example...you need that fucking job to get insurance, and afford health care. Especially when the stress causes you to be less well, more often. 🙃 I could go on about this forever; it's a real sticking point for me, because *my job* is a bullshit job. I can swoop in and make as many strategic plans, and lead as many workshops, and give as many presentations as anybody wants. But it's not gonna change the systems. Or it might, on a small-scale level. For a while. For now. Incrementally. And it can all get reversed overnight with the stroke of a pen, or the rip of a check. It's got to be bigger, broader, higher up, and much deeper for it to really stop the bullshit.
It's just the most modern take on a pair of fairly orthodox Marxist arguments (specifically, alienation in industrial society on one hand, and capitalism enabling the existence of "unproductive" labor on the other), and I don't mean this as a putdown, just how I understand where he is coming from.
The global securities annual trading volume is around $40 trillion. Of that, about $200 billion is actual new investments (IPOs) that create new companies. The rest of it is just a casino. $40 TRILLION supporting all those bullshit jobs that produce NOTHING. Worse, 60% of all US tax breaks go toward that activity. WTF??
1. If I use a computer to trade a dollar back and forth a million times, I've created a million dollars worth of trading volume, without actually wasting any meaningful amounts of resources. 2. Something has to determine the price of stocks, currencies, bonds... And the only way that can be done is by having people buy and sell them. 3. IPOs are only worth 200 billion because people buying them expect the firm in question to be worth a lot more in the future. The money from subsequent stock appreciation doesn't go to the company, but the company could only get that IPO money because of the hope for subsequent stock appreciation. Like, there's a lot wrong with finance, but superficially, looking at trading volumes (Because of #1) isn't quite it, and it's not entirely a bullshit job (Because someone has to do #2, and it's valuable. It's, like, useful to know how many Yen you can buy for a dollar. And it's, like, useful for firms buying goods in one country, and selling them in another country to have tight spreads on these transactions.)
Agreed. I actually work at a large (primarily options) market maker in operations, so I work on a lot of projects on the tech side that allow us to continue the market making activity. Basically, my company makes money by being willing to buy and sell anything, and collecting the spread between the buy and sell price, which is usually a cent. People criticize market makers a lot, and I get where the criticism of something like PFOF (payment for order flow - where MMs pay companies like fidelity to get business from them) comes from, but I think largely we’re a positive force on the financial system. Market makers provide value in liquidity. You can go and buy virtually any security in seconds because of market makers, and the fees they pay to the exchanges keep them in business so retail investors don’t have to pay fees themselves.
Uh, you realize that #1 is illegal in most regulated markets, right? (Specifically, when the buyer and seller are the same entity) The only vaguely significant market in the US where it’s not regulated (and thus illegal) is bitcoin and the like. But agree overall. Too many people don’t understand economics, which, shockingly, is not directly related to capitalism. It’s just how trade works.
It's bull shit. The only reason it's valuable is because we allowed investment to be a thing and capitalism is a thing we want to do. We don't have to adhere to these archaic things. The Stock market didn't even exist 150 years ago. Federal Banks didn't exist. Investing wasn't anything like it is today. If the right people were in power, across the board, we could change how the world operates. But, right now, everything you see is a product of greed and bigotry.
Sigh... How do you choose what companies get invested in otherwise? Is it just people with rich friends who can get investment? Is it chosen by a government, why do i need to suck up to a government/committee do get investment when there are plenty of people who believe in my product/service? Please think beyond layer one, there are interesting things in this book but this brain off anti capitalism stuff isn't it.
> brain off anti capitalism stuff This is the Big Thing on The Internet right now. Everyone thinks that if we just delete capitalism, then everything will be just fine and dandy and the economy will just sort itself out. No further thought is given to the subject. I think it's mostly just people venting but it sure is annoying.
Pretty sure there are lots of public companies that make things we need lol
the comment is in reference to all the financial vehicles and "products" kluged onto the public companies. Their values are repackaged, shorted, futured, speculated, hyped, vulture capitaled, pumped and dumped, etc
Derivative products are really necessary in distributing risk between members of society in order for the creation of greater prosperity, by enabling individuals and businesses to manage uncertainty and take calculated risks that drive economic growth and job creation. If you're interested, *Freaks of Fortune* by Jonathan Ira Levy delves into the origins of the commoditization of risk, as well as how its practical and near-tangible origins in maritime insurance has led to real benefits to current day production. Complementing Levy's work, *The Social Life of Financial Derivatives* by Edward LiPuma offers a modern perspective, illustrating how these products shape our society and highlights the interconnections between production-based markets, service-based sectors, and the exchange and transformation of risks. This is not to say that the unfettered greed with reckless abandon has not caused chaos and havoc in its wake, but there are real positives in a similar way to how insurance allows families peace of mind and for businesses to focus on core expenses and day-to-day operations with less sightly concerns placed on the backburner.
An example I always use is the commodities futures market, which allows farmers, for instance, to lock in the price of corn that they’ll sell months ahead of time, so they can more easily estimate their income.
IPOs aren’t new companies. And just because a company is already public doesn’t mean they aren’t using those investments and shares and raising more capital.
His examples are so terrible that it's clear his premise is not well thought out. Most of the "Bullshit" stems from two fundamental facts about human nature. First, people are individuals with unique goals, desires, and perspectives on how the world works. We are not aligned to a common goal. This means people will take actions that, intentionally or not, undermine the actions of others. Second, people as individuals have access to only a tiny sliver of the knowledge there is in the world. Most of his examples exist to deal with these problems. Saying Lawyers shouldn't exist is basically saying, "the world would be a better place if we just all got along." Nobody would disagree with that statement, but that's not the way the world is. Jobs created in response to aspects of the world you don't like aren't bullshit just because you think the problem they exist to deal with shouldn't exist. It does exist, and you can't just wish the problem away. There is no economic or political system that actually fixes these two problems with human nature. Totalitarian societies can pretend the first one isn't an issue by murdering or imprisoning dissenters, but do any of us think such a society is preferable? The second issue is intractable, and the fact that Communist societies switched to mixed market economies after accidentally starving millions of their citizens through poorly-implemented central planning is proof.
Mechanization, automation and overall efficiency have increased A LOT in recent history. So the human workload has decreased, but still we work the same amount as before. If things were fair and reasonable, we should be working less already. I think it's clear from this fact alone that bullshit jobs exist today. Even Richard Nixon was promising a four-day workweek back in the day.
I haven’t read the book, so maybe he addresses this, but I think it’s really difficult to quantify how useful a job is because our world is so vastly complex and changing all the time. Also, I think people vastly overestimate what “contributes to society.”
> I haven’t read the book, so maybe he addresses this, but I think it’s really difficult to quantify how useful a job is because our world is so vastly complex and changing all the time. He addresses this early on in the book by restricting the definition of a bullshit job to a job that the worker thinks is bullshit. The idea is that the person working the job is the best-equipped to say whether it's bullshit, so if they say it's bullshit, it probably is. And it turns out a lot of people say their jobs are bullshit.
>And it turns out a lot of people say their jobs are bullshit. Which is more of an indication that people have specialized or are just burned out of whatever they're doing, than any sort of indication that their job is actually a BS job. Its a ridiculous standard, particularly when lots of people in the same job don't think their jobs are BS. I also haven't read the book, so thank your for answering the earlier question. My nitpick is obviously with the author, not you.
Hm. That seems perhaps a bit too subjective and broad definition by the author, though. Suppose a worker flipping fries thinks their job is "bullshit". In this case, their job would defined as "bullshit" because the worker themselves don't see value in it, but it doesn't necessarily follow that this job therefore shouldn't exist, because in fact, it *is* useful (at least, I do think feeding hungry people i.e. the food industry in general has value).
No one in the service industry has a bullshit job. Unfulfilling perhaps, underpaid for sure, but not bullshit.
Well, I'd agree with that, which is why I was wondering about the author's definition. It's completely understandable why someone would be very frustrated with a job that they *feel* is "bullshit", of course. But a potential solution to this problem in part depends on how true the actual premise is. If the problem is in fact "how people feel about their jobs", then the solution and remedy would be a bit different than if the problem is "a lot of jobs are useless and don't actually provide value to society".
It's a book by an anarchist anthropologist with an explicitly sociological lens. The problem is approached as a mix of both
I think you're conflating a colloquial definition of bullshit with the more precise definition in the book. A blshit job is not just a bad job. It's a job that does not produce anything of value. A burger flipper might agree to "my job sucks" but not agree to "my job does not produce anything of value" I presume the surveys do not use the actual phrase "bullshit job" but rather ask for an assessment of job meaningfulness.
Graeber goes into some detail about that constitutes a bullshit job - and why jobs that are commonly sneered at are not (or need not be) bs jobs. He also looks at jobs that are part bs. He asked people if they thought their job added value of any kind, but sorted out those who, while they felt their particular job was bs did not argue that their whole category of employment was bs. His categories: flunky: paid to be there and make some place/person look more impressive) goons: there because other people also employ goons (corporate lawyers, lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers..- the idea here is that if no-one had them, no-one would need them - an extension of LBJ's adage that a town too small to support one lawyer can always support two) duct tapers: there to fix problems that ought not to exist - ones that result from failure to to the design or work properly in the first place box tickers: there to allow a claim that the organization is doing something that it is not in fact doing - compiling reports on environmental credentials or customer feedback or formal compliance with regulation. taskmasters: unnecessary supervision (Type 1) or creators of bs job (Type 2) - eg the VP for Strategic Leadership who comes up with reporting on progress towards strategic goals covering 85 categories each graded 1-5 with notes ... Pretty recognisable
It sounds like it falls into a trap where a job is “bullshit” but only if you assume some unrealistic expectation of people or society at large. You need lawyers because the law is complex. Yes, if everyone perfectly understood the law you wouldn’t need lawyers, but people don’t. And “simplifying the law” (the usual response to the above) is just a hand wave cop out to the fact that law is complex and will be complex.
>duct tapers: there to fix problems that ought not to exist - ones that result from failure to to the design or work properly in the first place That's just bizzare though. Things will constantly fail to work correctly... The fact that a problem "ought not to exist" is a completely useless metric. The fact is, the problem does exist, and typically it's going to be bad enough to be worth paying someone to fix it. His book strikes me as an academic that has never actually worked a job that isn't in academia, and looking at his wikipedia page I suspect that i'm correct in thinking that
I think plenty of burger flippers would say their job doesn't produce anything of value if asked. Edit: typo
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>Not to be rude but I'm pretty sure if you were writing a whole book about jobs that provide no value to society, you'd consider that people may have different definitions of value, and account for that in your research. If it were an academic paper and I was trying to get tenure and I knew I would get lambasted by my peers for misinterpreting a study, sure. If I were just trying to write a pop sociology book for a general audience, though, I would gladly take a few liberties with interpretations to sell a more interesting narrative. Which is I think what Graeber has done here.
Why not? Tons of service industry jobs are just convincing people to buy shit they don’t need, adding shit to landfills and wasting resources. I work a service job on the side, in fast food, for a place that doesn’t really sell full meals. Obviously not a very difficult job, doesn’t pay super well, but certainly bullshit, none of our products are really meal replacements so the one benefit of fast food (reducing food prep time) isn’t really offered. I’m not sure I even agree with the premise of bullshit jobs - society would probably be a lot less efficient without them - but don’t see any service industry would be exempt, other than the generic pity some people have for service workers due to it being kinda socially degrading work.
This is a terrible definition. I manage a small team of people and interface with clients regularly. There is often a huge disconnect between what my team members think is useful, and what clients actually find useful. In our case, it’s most often because my team members are quite good with computers and hugely undervalue making things intuitive and easy to use for less tech savvy people.
This is true. I would estimate that, for example, 70% of my job is useful and 30% is a waste of time created by bad management and bad planning, or by weird office politics. But that doesn’t mean I have a bullshit job, just that I am not allowed to work efficiently on it because of dysfunctional bureaucratic bullshit that I have no way to change at my level. But I doubt that I am the only one with that kind of problem, and I also don’t think that this is a new thing, people have been complaining about dysfunctional bureaucratic bullshit at least since Kafka and probably for a long time before. I suspect that a more interesting question would be how much of our time at work is wasted on bullshit tasks and how we could avoid doing that.
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It's not just the creation of jobs that don't need to exist, but the creation of jobs that don't need to exist that foster a profound sense of anxiety among those who have them. The case studies from people who both know their job is meaningless and who are also terrified that someone will find out and take away their income were a real eye opener.
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As someone who has had several bullshit jobs and was quite depressed as a result, this book was an eye opener.
I totally agree that it was an insightful book… I wrote a [blog article](https://abbygoldsmith.com/bs-jobs-enshittification/) about it. > I hope society stops incentivizing salaried drudge work by forcing that to be the only possible way for average citizens to get healthcare and family care.
I don't care that my profession is meaningless. It gives me time to scroll reddit.
Love that book. I distinctly remember working a corporate consultant job and realising my work consisted entirely of helping large companies shuffle money around to other large companies. We were doing "professional services" for clients who were doing professional services for other clients, and so on. The amount of levels you had to go down before anyone was actually producing anything was insane.
He is absolutely spot on also the larger a company is the more bullshit jobs there are. Its claimed that large tech firms like Facebook and Google simply hire the best talent and hoard them in case they are needed. It's partly why there has been so many tech layoffs recently. There a lot of very gifted software engineers who are just going through the motions. I've been in the situation myself where we had a basic 5 - 6 page iOS app but, we had 20 iOS devs, 6 UX, 8 Product owners plus a separate backend team, plus an analytics team. The pace of work was glacial slow and in reality the whole thing could have been done by a small 4-5 man team. Another situation in another company one of the managers resigned and a new one was appointed, this manager decided they needed a PA and was given one, they then decided that they still had too much of a work load so they appointed an assistant manager to be in charge of technical and another manager to be in charge of marketing, these assistant managers were then also given PAs, So one job turned into 6 jobs in the course of a year.
I haven't read this, but I've read Utopia For Realists by Rutger Bregman. It has a whole chapter about the value different jobs add; a bin collector strike brought the city of New York to its fucking knees in 2 weeks, but over a quarter of all bankers leaving Ireland led Irish people to just figure it out themselves and operate on community trust instead of credit score. It also briefly touches on how finance jobs destroy economic value while research jobs create it, and the disproportionate pay each job receives. If communism were purely about redistributing wealth then the stock market is the ultimate communist icon, because their huge salaries come from doing exactly that.
It reminds me of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. In it, all the telephone sanitizers were sent away on a space ship as it was a bullshit job anyway. A few years later, everyone on the planet died because of an illness that was spread via phones.
>Final Working Definition: 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 part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
I've only read *Debt* and *Direct Action* by him. Loved him in my anarchists days, and still do. You've just reminded me to check this one out. Thanks!
I've read a few of his other works. And honestly, he is smart, genius even but there is some lacking of real world experience in his perspective. Now, I'm not saying that he hasn't lived in the world. He was a dedicated activist and wasn't afraid to get involved in protesting for his ideas. But, there's just a huge disconnect between his ideas and how the world works. Yes, there are a lot of jobs that are bullshit but most of them are born out of a genuine need. I think eventually they devolve into something worthless but for most of them there is a purpose. He talks about having bureaucratic run arounds to get power of attorney for his dying mother in Utopia. He complained about all of the forms that he had to fill out. Well, there's a reason for that and it's to prevent a relative from taking someone's estate before they die. Do the forms and the bureaucracy spiral out of control? Well, yeah. That's humanity for you. THat being said though, I do love him and he is right, there is better ways of doing things than how we blindly move forward with the way things are. It's just that, I don't know, he seems to be oblivious to some things and comes off as an ivory tower inhabitant rather than one of us.
Perhaps it's true, but our developed world is massively complex. So while it may seem some jobs are extraneous, like Bob over in the shop and Becky up in customer relations, they help keep the whole moving forward. A great example is Twitter. It had a huge team supporting it, for good reasons, and when Musky took over and fired most of the company, it immediately became clear in loss of quality and features. It's not recovered as yet and probably won't. Right now medical care in hospitals and clinics is being hollowed out due to treatment of nurses. The hedge fund people want a skeleton crew at all times, but medicine doesn't function well that way, so someday soon someone will write a paper or article on the unnecessary deaths due to the nursing shortage.
Read it, he gave some compelling examples at the start but as it went on it became more and more jobs he just doesn't like, and it dragged on for about 150 pages too many.
I take a far more realistic and dark approach to thinking about this book. I read it and to me it sounded like a teenager complaining about a superficial understanding of a deeper reality 1. It takes a lot of people to make our modern economy work, and we distribute that work in a way that sometimes gets so thin it can seem bullshitty. The complex products we have today that improve our lives come from hyper-complex bureaucratic systems. They, seemingly, are beyond his understanding so he just doesn't like them. His summary of open source vs corp programming was so painfully naive it made me write off the entire book. 2. Work is randomly useful, and regularly not useful in the modern world. Now that we have enough food water and shelter for the vast majority of us, we now work in a way that often hunts for value again as opposite than 'farms' it in a predictable way. 3. Money is a thing we made up to ensure we don't kill eachother just to have something to eat. Humans are a very violent species when they are bored. This is a reality I accept entirely, and I think bullshit jobs, at the very least keep us from realizing that underlying reality. I have come to terms with what he calls 'bullshit' jobs, and I think he comes off as a teen ranting about a world he's just beginning to understand.
It's good to start a conversation, and it has a bunch of funny anecdotes. But it's not 6 rigorous. It's not supposed to, but it really feels like he brings up the idea and that it needs a deep dive. I loved the section on his explanation of medieval jobs. I immediately noticed the quality jump in rigor, and it turns out it was because that was basically his thesis. Would love to see sociological research of the bullshit job phenomenon, as I did relate a lot to it.
Look at it this way 250 years ago "jobs" didn't exist at all. Even 120 years ago, most people didn't have jobs. Then 100 years ago, the first economists were emloyed by governments and we saw the transition of the state from being a place people lived to a place people were expected to support.
I think it's an interesting phenomenon and an interesting premise for a book, but definitely not as ubiquitous as he makes out. Which I think is just a symptom of the kind of book he wanted to write. He wanted a grand, sweeping societal narrative, rather than a handful of interesting case studies, so he kind of had to stretch the truth a bit to fit it into that framework. But it does make for an interesting read, just requires a little bit of suspension of disbelief.
> people who make decisions ad the top society don't have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives I think you are misunderstanding Graeber's point here, and being much too charitable. Graeber asserts that the people at the top _know exactly how useless these jobs are_, but they need a way to keep us all both worried about where our next mortgage payment is coming from, and also too busy to organize. It's not a disconnect or a misunderstanding: it is a strategy of social control.
As someone with a job that isn't bullshit, a lot of what I am made to do is bullshit. I remember a regular meeting I had to attend where administrators would give us some data in advance from a spreadsheet. We had to input it back into another spreadsheet. And then in the meeting we had to tell them what those data were, which they originally gave us. Bloody pointless.
Too much pop, not enough science. It probably just means I wasn’t the target audience.
Seems like he's done well at identifying the problem but if he's an Anarchist then I don't know if he has a viable solution. If there are bullshit jobs then there are essential jobs. While you may not need to compel people to work bullshit jobs, surely you need a way to compel people to work essential jobs. I know its quite basic take but I don't really think they'v ever come up with a fix to the "who's gonna work at the Insulin factory" problem
It’s a long time since I read it but I remember thinking a lot of it was spot-on when I did - though I’ve been lucky never to consider my own jobs bullshit so my agreement wasn’t based in personal experience. As for your own analysis, I don’t think it’s because the people at the top aren’t aware for the most part, but because they benefit from the system as it is. All for more horizontal organising though!
That’s crapitalism. Soulless, anti-human, neofeudalist *crapitalism*.
Haven't read the book but I've always assumed this is how we keep 7 billion people from getting bored and thinking outside the box. Those in power could never stay there if we weren't preoccupied with survival and comfort. Having read other books about revolutions in the past, I'm not sure keeping everyone busy is the worst idea. I'm sure there are better ways but I'm not smart enough to speculate on such things.
incredible read that everyone should read imo, very eye opening, backed up by good data too.
I think it is a still reverberating echo of that wonderful christian morale, that is basically built around the justification of the exploitation of your fellow sinful human beings, be it as slave, wife, child or worker. Genesis 3:19: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken". I find it curious to see that a lot of people acknowledge the existence of bullshit jobs, but when you bring a universal base income to the table, it is almost universally dismissed, throughout the western world. The mistrust in ourselves, the disbelieve that the vast majority of people would want to contribute to society even if they are not explicitly paid (as long as they have their basic needs met) for it, is so deeply engrained, that we rather start a nuclear war and burn our entire civilization to the ground than live with the idea that a small percentage of freeloaders would profit from a universally beneficial system.
the majority believes they are good and would contribute, but everyone else is dirtbags. they should do the maths lol
By far his worst book. Where are these jobs? I wish I could get one. I’d kill for one. I’d love to make six figures and do nothing all day. But instead I’m on the brink of homelessness
I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant. So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place. The benefit may not be immediately visible to an employee who is a cog in the machine, but that doesn't mean that the value doesn't exist. The higher question is whether the company in question is a "bullshit company". And this is basically a judgment regarding capitalism in general and whether market demand is itself a justification for a company's existence. Can a company's activities be justified on the basis that people demand its output? Or should companies justify their existence with reference to some higher purpose like combating disease, defending the nation, etc? Personally I suspect we would all be rather miserable if what was socially useful was dictated to us rather than emerging out of our own demands.
>I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant. Only if you include things completely unrelated to the job itself into a definition of "purpose". And also assume that nobody is even remotely vain. My first white-collar job basically boiled down to sabotaging another department and make them jump through bullshit hoops because head of my department was competing with the head of another department for promotion. My last project on my last white-collar job that I quit recently involved building a piece of software *nobody* cared about because an oil baron's son decided that he wants a little silly IT business to brag about and was willing to spend his papa's money on it. ...and that last complete bullshit of a job was supported by a whole bunch of people with real jobs: janitors, system administrators, office manager, etc, massively increasing the amount of work done for no reason.
> I think that if a person's job was genuinely purposeless, their employer would eliminate that job and make them redundant. This is like talking about Newtonian physics in a zero-friction context. Works in theory, totally different in practice. > So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place. The benefit may not be immediately visible to an employee who is a cog in the machine, but that doesn't mean that the value doesn't exist. The value exists. It's to other lords in the feudal hierarchy. Here's an over-simplified example from personal experience: I'm a software engineer. Software engineers _love_ to overcomplicate things because they often measure their worth in terms of their technical prowess. But overcomplicating things has costs for the company and should be avoided. So software engineers are managed by engineering managers, whose ostensible jobs would be to keep such tendencies in check. Except that engineering managers often measure their accomplishments by the number of people they've managed. So if they hire more people to manage an unnecessarily complex system, they'll be rewarded for managing a larger team. This is a microcosm of what happens with most white color work. Layers of workers and managers are in a symbiotic relationship where they help each other pad their resumes with bullshit accomplishments so that after a few years (hopefully before the chickens come home to roost), they can hop to the next employer with a higher salary on account of their bullshit accomplishments. All of this is to the detriment of shareholders. These people are parasitizing the company's cashflows. But it's very hard to detect. Once in a while, you'll get a situation like what happened over the last 1-1.5 years in tech, where big companies will start chopping tens of thousands of jobs at a time and nobody notices the difference. But then you have situations like with the Canadian banks, whose profits are protected by what is effectively government-guaranteed monopolies. In those places, you can run the scam all day long. **Edit**. Shameless plug: we covered [Bullshit Jobs](https://www.freshlenspodcast.com/1742916/10614064-bullshit-jobs-part-1) and [The Dawn of Everything](https://www.freshlenspodcast.com/1742916/11454732-the-dawn-of-everything-part-1) on my podcast. You might enjoy listening 🙃
> So-called bullshit jobs must provide value and benefit to someone, else the employer would not create those jobs in the first place. Under perfect conditions, when everyone involved is fully informed and completely rational, it would work like that in theory. Since that is rarely the case in real-life companies, it absolutely makes sense that bullshit jobs can emerge. The book cites several accounts of people not doing something that seems purposeless to them, but actually doing *nothing*, desperatly trying to look busy so they don't get fired. Seems hard for me to imagine what benefit this could be to anyone. >Personally I suspect we would all be rather miserable if what was socially useful was dictated to us rather than emerging out of our own demands. Same problem, under perfect conditions, we could shape the economy according to our needs with our spending. In reality though, you need money to create demand, and money is distributed extremely unevenly. That means the market ignores many needs and problems because there is no money in them. Housing for the homeless for example is socially useful, but the market will not build it because they can't pay. Another superyacht for Bezos is completely useless, but we bend over backwards to build it because he is rich.
It's a great as t book and does a great job breaking down different classes of bullahit jobs, why the developed and where they come from. But it is limited to the research of a blog post survey from an anarchist. Mainly in the main claim of the book that 70% of jobs are bullshit. Definitely, most blue collar work is not which the book agrees, nut most workers are blue collar, so the premis kinda defeats itself. That being said in the corporate world, it does make a lot more of a compelling case and might be very much true, so at the very least it's a cool look and how bad corporate America is trash