> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.
This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though.
>They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" is vague aspirational follow your dreams guff. Who actually makes a world scale impact? You don't have to be Greta Thurnberg to be doing useful work that's valuable to those around you. The implication is if you're not changing the world, you're wasting your life. It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
> the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work”
> In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" [...] It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
You're right that Graeber's question is vague (it could do with improvement/narrowing) but the first question quoted above isn't so much worse but just completely irrelevant. They've asked an entirely different question unrelated to what Graeber was trying to get at.
If I don't "have the feeling of doing useful work", does that mean my job is not useful, or my job is potentially useful but carried out inefficiently. Am I attempting useful work but blocked from doing so by some administrative or practical barrier? Do I consider myself insufficiently talented or qualified at my job to carry it out in a useful manner.
Graeber's question, while in need of improvement, is at least asking about the right things: the jobs themselves. This new question is asking about the people's individual relationships to their jobs, not the actual purpose of the role.
The economist is trying to redefine "bullshit jobs" to mean simply "jobs which hold no value to anybody". This excludes zero sum jobs - they are useful to someone.
Graeber defined "bullshit jobs" as jobs which hold no value to society at large. This includes zero sum jobs.
It's an argument over definition followed by an ad hominem - "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance".
It reminds me of this quote:
"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
>The economist is trying to redefine "bullshit jobs" to mean simply "jobs which hold no value to anybody"
That is not the case. They don't talk about who the jobs do or don't have value to at all anywhere in the article, they only address the evidence Graeber used as the basis of his book - how employees think and feel about their own employment.
I don't know about the research they are citing, perhaps that does what you say.
Is a zero-sum job defined as one where the only person benefitting is the employee? If so, it seems like the only ethical way to eliminate those jobs from the economy would be some kind of guaranteed minimum income.
One of the examples of the distinction was a guy who worked at a post production company that:
A) Made cool explosions and aliens for movies, etc. which he loved and thought counted as socially useful coz audiences did too.
B) Made hair shinier and teeth whiter and other visual trickery to give false impressions of branded products. These things served only to take market share from other similar companies that made products that weren't markedly different to theirs.
B made up the majority of what he did, hence "mainly bullshit".
Graeber's claim is that this class of job (dubbed "goons"), according to those ppolled/interviewed only exist because other people employ them too. I.e. if there were an armistice on toothpaste ads that showed white teeth nothing would really change for consumers but if one company stopped the mindshare arms race they would lose market share.
You see this argument in discussions of the finance industry a lot. What percentage of financial trading is useful allocation of capital, and how much is just shifting ownership of the things other people make?
Yep - this was also the theme of the movie Margin Call (a point rammed home by the final scene).
It's usually really hard to draw the line in finance, though - unless you're deep in the weeds.
This is partly why Graeber's attempt to look at this issue through the lens of people doing the jobs themselves was probably the best way to formulate the research.
Here's an extreme example to make the point: we pay soldiers to kill people and destroy property. At the level of our "business" (our country) this may increase "value" (our security), while at the level of "society" (the world) it may be a net loss and an enormous tragedy. The problem is that this whole idea of "the good of society/the world" is extremely fuzzy and not that useful. It presupposes the only worthwhile actions are those that increase the utility function of the entire world, which we undoubtedly lack the knowledge to do. Capitalism is just a best-try approximation at achieving that and seems to have more success than other systems we've tried.
Of course you do. You could define bullshit jobs as any job with a negative externality whose value exceeds its profitability. Many of the arguments in our society are over the existence or not of externalities and the measurement and allocation of liability for them where their existence is an agreed-upon fact.
I suspect this is based on Marx's analysis of the creation of value. That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value. So for example in Marxism making a clock creates value, but transporting that clock from the factory to a shop, giving it shelf space, advertising it and selling it to a customer all destroy value. They are additional services that increase the cost of the product, and Marx actually used the term parasitic for these activities and argued they should all be minimised or preferably eliminated.
This resulted in Marxists creating uniform, identikit societies with standardised products directly distributed wherever possible. No advertising, no consumer choice because the process of accumulating the information necessary, and selecting products on an individual basis instead of collectively is wasteful.
The result was actual productivity in the real economy collapsed because it turns out some of these parasitic activities are kind of important. They ruthlessly stripped out all the bullshit and produced stale, drab societies of bored hungry drones. Thanks guys.
Who actually needs plays, books of fiction, music, nice clothes, holidays to pretty places? Who needs nice haircuts, polished nails, stylish cars, waited service? All of that is bullshit we don't need.
The only slight problem is it eliminates everything that actually makes life worth living. It eliminates all forms of aesthetic and cultural value, recognising only productive economic value, devoted to the activity of production itself. It suborns human value to material value.
There's a big chapter of Graebers book where he discusses potential sociological causes for the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. He criticizes the labor theory of value (initially pushed by economists like Adam Smith before Marx turned it on its head as a way to radicalized workers) as pushing people to socially value 'work' in the abstract, rather than the result of work, which contributed to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs in the first place.
Graeber feels we should be concentrating less on purely economic theories of value than theories of values which involve more social interests, which seems like the more 'primary' value. In particular, he questions whether the CGI artist's job was creating value for society as a whole. The artist himself didn't seem to think he was, hence why the CGI artist felt his job was bullshit. Maybe the artist's internal system of social value included some aspect of labour value, but it's hard to say since our own perspectives on social value are so murky.
I'd love to see a source for this, I've not heard it in his name but the conclusion I came to myself is that economic activity can be divided three ways:
1. Things that create value (in the sense of producing something people want and trading it for money or other things [which can include looking at ads])
2. Things that don't add value but are necessary because markets are imperfect (advertising agencies, marketing consultants, accountants, lawyers, real estate agents, etc.)
3. Things that _exploit_ imperfect markets for profit (hedge funds, investment banks, landlords, speculators, patent trolls, etc.)
2. and 3. seems to be where the money is these days. My feeling is that a society that prioritizes 2. and 3. is not adding much value to itself, and therefore isn't in a healthy place.
> I suspect this is based on Marx's analysis of the creation of value. That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value.
Can I have a source for that please? It seems absurd.
> They are additional services that increase the cost of the product, and Marx actually used the term parasitic for these activities and argued they should all be minimised or preferably eliminated.
Today we use the term "overhead". Are you saying that the cost of distributing products should not be minimized?
> The result was actual productivity in the real economy collapsed because it turns out some of these parasitic activities are kind of important. They ruthlessly stripped out all the bullshit and produced stale, drab societies of bored hungry drones. Thanks guys.
So the Soviet economy failed because... the things it produced were not actually distributed to the people as that would have destroyed value in the eyes of the CPSU? I never heard of that theory before.
> Who actually needs plays, books of fiction, music, [...]?
As a specific example? People who like to criticise them after dinner, like Marx.
you can have your advertising and everything else you want, but if the bread and butter of your advertising strategy is over-exploiting dark patterns and others shady mechanism while keeping the products the same, are you creating value (for the consumer)?
I don't think they have any problem with the original theory of advertising, which is informing the potential consumer of your product, about its existence, its usefulness and the advantages it has over the competition.
a more coherence basis of what is said in the book is simply that a a non negligible part of today economy is about wealth extraction but disguised as wealth creation, and the people that are tasked to do that can tell.
There’s a satirical comic in the UK called Viz. when it shows scenes set in football matches there are advertising slogans on the stands saying things like “Drink Tea”, “Eat Bread”, “Fill Your Bath With Water”.
Who gets to say what is an acceptable advert? We already have regulations prohibiting misleading advertising. I suppose we could beef those up, but this goes far, far further than marginal practices in advertising. It cuts to the heart of huge swathes if service jobs, hospitality, entertainment, culture and even sport. I’m not clear how you think all this should be regulated, how such prohibitions should be enforced, and what kind of society would result.
>That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value. So for example in Marxism making a clock creates value, but transporting that clock from the factory to a shop, giving it shelf space, advertising it and selling it to a customer all destroy value.
This is the most bizarre take on the Marxist labor theory of value I've ever seen.
Do you have a source for this idea that transporting a clock destroys value?
I see - that’s philosophically, but maybe not economically different from what I was thinking of - “make-work” jobs, or jobs that could easily be replaced by automation.
Edit to add: one major difference might be in the level of skill or education the employee has/needs.
I don't really follow you. A questionnaire can only find out what the respondents think about their job. If you want to objectively know whether their jobs are actually useful, independent of their opinions or feelings, a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask.
I think Graeber makes the assumption that the statement "my job makes no (net) contribution to society" is as closest to reality as we can possibly get.
The interviewed person is probably the best to know if the job is valuable. Even if they falsely assume that their job makes no difference, the sentiment is a problem in itself.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving my interpretation of the intent.
Can you pleas explain where you got that question and phrasing from please, because I don't recognise it from the research under discussion and I don't believe it is supported by any of the evidence.
> a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask
That's fair but even still, Graeber's question should at least be probing whether people might think their jobs are useful; this new question only probes whether people think their contribution is useful individually.
If the question is rephrased to something like “if your company/product ceased to exist, would the world be better off, worse off, or no different?”
In my case, it would be no different (beyond a handful of job losses which are insignificant in the grand scheme). That, to me, is a bullshit job. Meaningless time consumption.
Is it no different because some other company would fill in the gap? Or because literally no one cares whether or not whatever your company does gets done?
If someone else would step in and do it, it’s not unique but isn’t necessarily bullshit.
This company's customers / clients and suppliers might of course care... But if the suppliers exist only to supply this, and the clients in turn don't produce anything otherwise useful either, maybe none of them really matter. So if someone else would step in and do it, that might just mean that then someone else would be doing an equally bullshit job.
> This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though.
Right, and apparently:
> those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning.
Which leads me to believe that people are not a good judge of the usefulness of their work. I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs. Perhaps the people doing them don't find the jobs meaningful, but refuse collection is certainly useful; without it, everyone would have to cart their trash to the dump, or, worse, we'd just have trash everywhere.
So it strikes me that all of this is just kinda pointless. I think we can reasonably make the argument that bullshit jobs do exist, but the number of these jobs is a very subjective take, and people seem to often incorrectly value their own jobs.
>I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs.
I think they did by and large (as did Graeber). The exceptions I remember listed were 1) "second order bullshit" - necessary jobs for "unnecessary companies".
E.g. cleaners for a debt collections call center - I don't think all reasonable people would believe this is socially useful. If the company doesnt need to exist the cleaners shouldn't either.
2) for example, cleaners who said that they were routinely ordered to clean things that already were clean or to do a small amount of cleaning and look busy the rest of the time. Performative cleaning, in other words.
The economist was specifically trying to misrepresent these examples to undermine the broader point, I think.
Beside the task there are other elements. You can almost turn any act into a pain or the opposite.
Clarity of intent. (Quality of training)
Adequate load sharing.
Interest of the approach (some petty tasks can made fun and challenging).
Then there's the systemic / social side of it. If your work flows with others. There a parallel with kinetic energy and inertia. A job where things flow is probably gonna be appreciated even if it has low value.
You can have a job where you feel useful and valuable without changing the world.
There are also jobs where you are being very useful, but it's arguably not good for society at large. You've got companies like FB that exist to just sell user data and serve ads and in HFT that milk ever penny out of the stock market where the speed of light isn't competitive enough for them, so they have to be as close to the exchanges as possible. Valuable to the company, but not through a bigger picture lens. Even worse, those companies have absorbed some of our best and brightest STEM graduates for years and prevented them from solving more noble pursuits.
Indeed, and the number of "bullshit-jobs" might actually be grossly underestimated, since I've found in general people will often try to justify the status quo and especially their own jobs. Most people would say a three-card monte street hustler has a net negative impact on society, but the hustler can argue that it's a form of entertainment, that people know what they're getting into, that people are paying a relatively small price for an iconic experience, etc.
There's a large amount of the economy that I'd consider a net negative for society - advertising and the industries created to convey it (radio, TV, most websites), credit cards, junk food, sales, etc. There are also a lot of cases where increased input doesn't seem to make people happier off. For instance, a lot of work goes into making special effects better than they were decades ago, but doesn't necessarily mean an audience in 2021 is going to enjoy movies more than an audience in 2000 did.
As a society we should probably spend a lot more time talking about where our economic output is going, and if it's going towards the things we actually want it to.
Im not personally a huge fan of Facebook, I barely use it, but the fact is I know a lot of people who do use it. I’m in several clubs and societies that use it heavily, and derive massive benefits from it. One society I’m in quadrupled in size after establishing a strong social media presence.
The value Facebook gets out of Facebook may well be obtained in questionable ways, but the fact is the service itself creates tons of value and utility for hundreds of millions of people. And yes I’m sure it causes some harm as well, definitely, but it’s not as simple as you make it out.
Before Facebook, these clubs were still on the internet and had a similar presence using junk like geocities I think. Also email threads and so forth.
Perhaps the utility of Facebook isn't zero, but I certainly think the harm (has led to genocide in some countries like Myanmar) far out weighs the benefits.
• When asked "whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world", 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. (And this is what Graeber [not Gerber] wrote about.)
• When counting those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”, this was only 4.8%. (The newer research.)
It is hardly surprising that fewer people thought their job failed to clear the lower bar represented by the latter question (this is precisely what one would expect); so it's not clear what is being contradicted or refuted.
Even the data that the latter number is decreasing over time, or has a different distribution across kinds of work (than predicted by Graeber for the former question) is not necessarily a contradiction: those working in several "bullshit" jobs (under Graeber's definition) may well more frequently have a feeling of doing useful work, while also being less confident that their job itself serves a purpose and ought to exist. I can imagine this especially for the "goons" and "duct tapers" kinds of jobs (in his classification).
(In fact, if you look up and examine the full results of the YouGov poll at https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... you'll find that even among the 37% who said their job "is not making a meaningful contribution to the world", only 21% of them said they found it "Not at all fulfilling"!)
The Economist article dismisses the former question with "This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify", and you dismiss it by calling it "vague aspirational follow your dreams guff" and a "very heavily loaded" question that "hopelessly biased his conclusions", but this is all value judgement. It is not at all clear to me whether the "correct" question to ask is the latter one rather than the former one; surely it depends on what one is trying to conclude.
I’m a big fan of Graeber, his book Debt is incredible and his death was a big loss. That said, he was always more of an activist and narrative-driven writer rather than data-driven, and his work should be considered in that context IMO.
Debt, in particular, contains a lot of howlers and conspiracy theories (especially relating to the dollar as a reserve currency and descriptions of monetary systems) that really don't belong there and (in my opinion) don't strengthen the work. It's really mixed bag where there is some rich anthropological work and ambitious subject matter combined with highly politicized and tendentious claims. Definately read him, but just be aware that his concern for accuracy is about the same as Zinn's "A People's History", which has a similar density of howlers due to the political agenda getting in the way of the work. Both of these works would be vastly improved with some rigorous fact checkers cutting material out, and they would still have evidence left to support their thesis.
The fact that the person doing the job thinks so doesn't necessarily make it so. There's plenty of people who don't see any real purpose in safety belts in cars, too.
I agree with your second statement, but your first statement doesn't necessarily follow, it depends on the proportion of jobs that are bullshit....
If a human is 1% likely to think a not-bullshit-job is bullshit, and 10% likely to think a bullshit-job is bullshit, but 99% of jobs are not-bullshit, then for every bullshit job that the worker thinks is bullshit, there are 9.9 not-bullshit jobs that the worker thinks are bullshit.
Your hypothetical would lead to roughly 98% thinking that their jobs are not bullshit when 99% actually were. At that level we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The actual numbers are more like 60% non bullshit / 40% bullshit, though.
I bet everyone in tech who has been around for a while has been in enough of _those_ meetings to be able to at least relate to what a bullshit job it.
Most probably have also seen the type of manager that is less concerned with the work people underneath them do (because they don't understand or care) and more with the prestige, making sure people stay there, even if they contribute nothing - either because they can't or wouldn't. Worse, eventually the former turn into the later with enough time to resign to the situation.
There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management.
It's challenging in such organizations to have meaningful cross-functional communication between the people who do the actual work and who need to understand each other. Why? Because these management layers also [try to] mediate all cross-functional interaction in formalized meetings which they run like court proceedings-- they're called by various names: "hand-offs", "gates", etc. The point is they're one-direction process-flow "ceremonies" that don't have real discussion between the parties involved.
What has to happen to workaround this is that the individuals who need to really communicate must seek each other out informally (or "offline" as the PM-derps would say), sometimes this works, sometimes it's a setup for one party getting snubbed by the other because they're beset with too many meetings.
So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
For years, I've made slides to report status on things (as a line manager, not a project manager) and I've tried to figure out ways to automate it. No amount of tags or epics or whatever in Jira seem to do it. It always has to be done by hand because what's actually happening is a lot of editorial curation, contextualization with other things going on at the company or in the industry, etc. (Please, if someone has a better idea, let me know!)
At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.
> There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management
I think everyone agrees.
> So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
Here we disagree. You are positing that it's possible for there to be a large org without this fat layer, and I think this is unlikely. It's like complaining about entropy or the n^2 communication cost. Something may be terrible yet impossible to avoid. Making big bureaucracies as efficient as small bureaucracies is a really, really, hard problem. It may well be an unsolvable problem that comes with scale, sort of the flipside of how many things are more efficiently produced in large quantities, and it could be that the "optimal" size of a business is where these two trade-offs balance out -- e.g. where the scaling costs of the bureaucracy meets the efficiency gains of scale production.
It’s not so much a rhetorical trick as it is how anthropology works. If you want to investigate something qualitative, you have to employ something like grounded theory[1]. Ie., collect enough qualitative data that patterns start to emerge.
Then you can criticize various aspects of the way it was done of course, but that’s standard scientific method, and doesn’t necessarily reduce it to just rhetorics.
The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. _Why_ they believe that is a matter of speculation, and will vary from person to person. The political question - what does this fact say about how our society is organized? - is also necessarily speculative, and this is what makes up the polemical part of the book. Graeber has a theory about why work is unfulfilling, and he argues for it.
I can't see much that is wrong with this. You might disagree with his conclusions, in which case you can critique them or offer alternatives. This is very different from disagreeing with the claim that there are people who think that their jobs are meaningless. I can't tell which you are disagreeing with.
>The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large.
Except that the article shows that this just isn't the case, depending what you mean by 'society at large'. Gerber's question was about a 'meaningful contribution to the world', but if you ask people if they are doing useful work you get completely different statistics.
It looks like slipping in the phrase 'the world' in the question sets a completely unrealistic and for most people unattainable standard, but jobs don't have to be world changing to be worthwhile.
How about going backwards from Graeber's line of thought. His conclusion in the book is to introduce a universal basic income to get rid of bullshit jobs.
If we turn that around the question becomes: How many jobs (and what kind of jobs) would still be there if people had UBI and wouldn't need to work for a living?
You're assuming the premise implicitly, that there are a large number of bulshit jobs, but Gerber did not show this and his evidence for it is thoroughly discredited. If there are in fact very few bulshit jobs, the 'problem' of how to deal with them is moot.
I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls.
If you can actually show that many current occupations are in reality not productive, then of course that's something we need to address. However that has not been shown and even if it is true, it's not clear why so many people and companies are willingly funding these roles with their own money.
So if you are claiming is that vast numbers of people in the economy are 'wrong' about their spending and hiring habits, you've got a fair bit of work to do to establish that (let's be clear, it has not been established) and come up with a credible plan as to what to do about it, and who gets to decide what the 'right' thing to do is.
> I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls.
Yes. That's exactly the goal of the UBI. That nobody NEEDS to work anymore. How many burger flipper are there that work as burger flipper because they like burger flipping?
Your implicit assumption is that only paid work is real work. But if you remove money as the main motivator for work, people will look for more meaningful occupations and that's where we circle back to Graeber's bullshit jobs which don't qualify as meaningful work.
Child care, elder care. Cleaning the house, cooking the meals, getting the groceries, checking the homework, packing the lunches, scheduling the playdates, planning the parties, booking the doctor’s appointments, getting everyone where they need to be, paying the bills, making the calls, preparing activities.
As for taxes, we’ve chosen to allow income inequality to reach ridiculous levels. There are other choices.
Oh I agree completely about income inequality, it's a serious problem. I don't think taxation is the solution though, at least not straightforwardly. The problem isn't so much not enough taxing people, it's taxing the wrong things and giving ta breaks to encourage rent seeking behaviour. So we should seriously look at land value taxes for example, but that doesn't necessarily mean increasing overall taxation. The tick is getting the balance right so you're not distorting your economy.
>So we’re just going to close all the restaurants, eat at home and take sandwiches with us everywhere because nobody will want to work in service jobs?
This is a strawman. Nobody is claiming that we'll close all restaurants. People who want extra money (or just want something to do) will work in service jobs, and if the supply of workers is too low then that will heavily incentivise automation and investing in productivity improvents.
> People who want extra money (or just want something to do) will work in service jobs, and if the supply of workers is too low then that will heavily incentivise automation and investing in productivity improvents.
As well as, possibly (and hopefully), rising pay in hitherto underpaid jobs.
The people who work do so because they PREFER to, and that's because giving up some of their time, in order to be able consume, is seen as a good trade-off.
Redistributing what the highly productive produce to the less productive just leads to a less optimal allocation of resources for productivity, that results in a lower level of production and thus consumption than what people would prefer.
I think it would be more accurate to say that you thoroughly reject his argument. You've left 18 comments on this thread but many seem to be predicated on the assumption that your outlook is wholly objective and rest upon premises whose validity is questionable.
I'm not sure whether you clicked on the link, but note that the line you quote was in response to a comment asking "David Graeber is an anthropologist […] What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs?". You're calling it a rhetorical trick etc: that may make sense if he had employed it in the book, but as a response to the specific comment he was replying to, it seems reasonable. (That's why I included "(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)
I’m trying to figure out the point you’re trying to make. I’ve never heard of the Socratic approach as being incorrect or pointless, I just think if it as a completely standard rhetorical technique. Does using it render the argument invalid? Is it wrong to have an opinion on a subject after researching it? What’s your challenge to the substance of what he has found?
It's not incorrect or pointless, but it's disingenuous. It's a trick. You claim both that you do not know and others can not know before you make a large variety of knowledge claims.
It is to make your project seem less dogmatic, and yourself more humble.
Here,
> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else
This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.
He wrote a book on what people thought about their own jobs.
The economist's rebuttal was to claim that making a meaningful contribution to the world was, in the opinion of the author, "a high bar to clear" for job doers and try to supplant that only with "I have the feeling of being useful" as sufficient for a job to be not bullshit.
It's not trying to undermine the concept of defining jobs by what the job doers say about them.
Thus by simply redefining "non-bullshit jobs" as jobs which are useful to someone rather than useful to society at large, the economist makes no actual comment on the "zero sum jobs" component of "bullshit jobs".
> This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.
This is such bizarre reasoning it stunned me. The point of the book as to describe a trend of people feeling that their jobs were pointless, "Bullshit", so to speak. But going from there to assuming that the book asserts a universal criteria for what job is Bullshit, without even reading the book, is ???
> Anthropologists are not qualified to... Anthropologists however are trained to... ... a bullshit job is defined as ...
I am not qualified to do X. However I am qualified to do Y. Ah! Y enables me to do X. So let me do X.
The first sentence there is a lie to massage the impact of the later ones. He literally defined what a "Bullshit Job" is, he wrote a book about it. The conceptual scheme of the entire book is his. He wrote the surveys; he defined the topic.
The idea that he is just a passive receiver of a coherent theory of jobs is false; and this is just a rhetorical gambit to disguise the fact that, no, he is the major architect of this idea and of the whole project.
And this becomes more blindingly obvious when other people attempt to repeat a survey asking whether their job is "bullshit" and find only 5% of people saying so.
I don't know, if a lot of people believe that their own job shouldn't exist, isn't that an interesting and worthwhile finding in and of itself? Perhaps we question the validity of that belief, but few of us have a large enough circle to even get an inkling of how common this point of view might be.
The surveys didn't ask people if their jobs shouldn't exist. That's Gerber's thesis, but it's not the actual questions or opinions being canvased, and it increasingly looks like it's just not a supportable conclusion. Please read the article, it lays out the issues very clearly.
Well-designed survey results are objective and reproducible. There are margins of error as with all measurements, and maybe these margins are wider than in some fields and narrower than in others, but asking people for their opinions isn't necessarily bad science just because it happens to involve opinions.
Right which is where attempts to confirm the thesis come in, and as the article shows it looks like Gerber's conclusions were based on a heavily loaded question that severely biased the answers.
Because people are involved in measuring or even defining a thing does not make that thing non-objective, though it can make it stupidly hard to study.
For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones.
A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense.
Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.
No. The problem is more that Graeber didn't refine the concept enough.
Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't. 2) are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible. 3) are socially, politically, and/or environmentally toxic.
These are all different kinds of bullshit. They are bullshit jobs for reasons that should be obvious. The bullshit is about far more than alienation. It happens when the jobs lower net social stability, longevity, and prosperity, and promote short-term inequality over long-term opportunity.
Since that's the opposite of The Economist's ethical system - the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea.
Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically.
Fortunately this created a memorable meme which helped people question what they were doing.
If The Economist has started printing rebuttals, that suggests the meme was effective.
> even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea.
Damming the concept of “markets” as “self-harming” and “unstable” is an asinine statement. Of course not every instantiation of a market is flawless and without trade offs. Any sufficiently large-scale social system is rife with weird second order effects.
We can only analyze the efficacy of markets by comparing them against their alternative. Ironically – given one of your complaints about markets is monopolism – the most common alternative to markets is monopolism by the government. Yet, governments suffer from the same bureaucratically-induced problems that you are attributing to organizations operating in markets. Indeed, they have it worse because they don’t have the external pressure of competition to keep their bad behavior in check. Accountability in the public sector is significantly worse than in the private sector. History is filled with state-owned monopolies that failed to adapt to changing situations and degrade into obsolescence while still bleeding the public of money.
Every social system over-produces some things and under-produces other things, in constantly shifting proportions as time goes on. Of all systems, sufficiently competitive markets are the best at dynamically adjusting to minimize both surpluses and shortages. State-owned monopolies are truly abysmal at matching supply and demand. There’s textbooks worth of material as to why this is the case.
And perhaps, you may be referring to some notion of “totally free markets”. But there are no totally free markets. All markets are subject to the formal laws of their various operating jurisdictions and the norms that come from operating in society. The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior. There are notable counter examples where there isn’t consumer choice, but those organizations get dragged in the media and are forced to change in the court of public opinion.
So, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about. What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?
The truth doesn't have to be entirely one or the other. Markets can be good and regulation can be good at the same time. And both can have risks for bad outcomes as well.
It's interesting how folks on one extreme will point out every fault of the other, with their own reasons explaining away critiques of their favorite side.
> The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior.
This puts a lot of trust in people being well informed and having enough energy to react. We live in a complex world, and it's nearly impossible for consumers to each vote with their wallets on every aspect of life. In theory I could vet every food, drug, and hardware supplier personally before buying anything. But I'd rather have the most safety critical stuff regulated before it can be offered for sale.
> The great thing about markets is that when a company does bad things, the public usually can switch providers, thus punishing bad behavior. There are notable counter examples where there isn’t consumer choice, but those organizations get dragged in the media and are forced to change in the court of public opinion.
Err yeah, like Amazon and Google and Disney and Comcast and $INSERT_MEGACORP_HERE totally don't buy out competitors, or use dominance in one field to buy dominance in another field.
But all the major market instabilities have been solved by government bailouts even in the current way of things. So they are provenly unstable and require government propping them up constantly with public money.
I think you are the one espousing fairyland. Without the private gain public loss “market” we have now, half the market would have died in 2008 and the other half would have died last year…
This is implying that externalities of bad government policies (ie encouraging high home owner rates) weren't the main cause of the market needing a bail out.
That’s what made the money worthless in the first place yes. Badly regulated markets. The financial market then made the problem orders of magnitude worse. Again, not enough regulation.
It’s so weird how a story of greedy investors turned out to be the fault of the government in the end. “You set it in place, we simply had to bite!”
Obviously that’s hyperbole but I did have a look and industrial activity in the USA declined by 46%. Global trade dropped by 70%. GDP itself dropped by about 30%, from what I could find.
By contrast, the Great Recession of 2008 saw a GDP drop of 4.3%.
So, yes, without government bailouts, markets can fail _catastrophically_
To be clear, I am by no means a market-maximalist. I'm claiming that markets are an extremely effective way to govern the production of goods and the allocation of labor, compared to their alternatives. Further, I'm claiming that any sweeping claim that "markets" as a concept are bad is uninformed and patently wrong.
With that said, we have different tools for different scenarios. In 2020, we used the "national funding, mobilization, and redistribution" tool to combat COVID and I think that was probably smart. Doing so necessarily wasted a lot of money (through graft, incompetent capital allocation, ec.). But optimal capital allocation was not the most important thing last year. We wanted safety! State intervention wins here!
With respect to other market instabilities, well, it gets complex. 2008 was a mess of government, quasi-government, and private market behaviors all in a toxic dance.
In any case, most markets most of the time absolutely do not require the government to step in. The economy is breathtakingly large. I mean, just really, truly stupendously massive. I hear "capitalism is bad" and "markets are toxic" claims a lot, but I've never heard a viable proposal that could realistically function as effectively as a predominantly market system.
Also, I'm not claiming that our current markets are perfect. Certainly they are not. It's clear that there are huge issues in a significant number of industries (hospitals, housing, and education are all suffering from cost disease).
We can (should!) take a crack at fixing the issues we have. Most of those fixes will come bottoms-up through creative-disruption, and some will come tops-down through policy and regulation.
It's important to look at these things as tools in a toolbox, not totalitarian dogma in an ideology.
That just means markets need corrections, not that there is an alternative. Exchange of goods is going to take place regardless. You can have the government control all economic activity outside the black market, but that leads to for worse outcomes which only benefits the party elite.
Why would a political organization plan the economy, as opposed to a specialized government agency? You're confusing dictatorships and planned economies.
Perhaps read “party” as “entity” or “organization of people” as in the phrase “a party to the agreement” or whatever?
That being said, I see no way that a governmental organization which plans the economy could fail to be political, by which I mean, closely connected to highly contentious government policy decisions.
Of course it will be, that's just the nature of making decisions. But these decisions have to be made anyway. It's better if they depend on the policies of an elected government than the whims of rich people.
If I put my cynic hat on for a moment, normal government policies often depend on the whims of rich people as we are, unequal access to lobbying is a problem.
I mean the thing is even a fully govenment-run, centralized economy, is a market. Each individual decides, is it worth continuing to do the shit they tell me to do? Or should I resist and suffer whatever coercion the state brings down on me. That's a choice, and thus it's an exchange (In the banal case, I exchange my labor in return for political favour; in the extreme case: I exchange my labor in return for not going to a gulag). Maybe not a "free" one, but it is a market nonetheless and most criticisms of market failure apply, with adjustments, to such a system, too.
You are describing individual workers in a planned economy, but a market description applies from the point of view of the planner as well: goods still have rates of substitution and thus cost in every way that matters, regardless of whether you choose to measure it in dollars or kilograms of wheat; closing your eyes and pretending they don’t is only going to make your plan less efficient. In fact, when Kantorovich tried to figure out how to make one more efficient (resulting in both a Stalin Prize and a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, but no shifts in the Soviet bureaucracy), the free parameters of his model ended up being prices even if no pieces of paper with signatures of bankers were changing hands.
Which is not to say a market is a good thing in any specific implementation. What it is, in this degree of generality, is inevitable. That a (more or less) free exchange of tokens of value is a good way to achieve the optimum is an additional assumption that needs separate justification, but seems to be plausible so far, or at least lacking in shattering disproof. Still, there is a hell of a lot of distance between these and any particular Western country in the year of our Lord 2021. Going from being dissatisfied with the latter to rejecting the former is like immediately blaming the compiler when your home-grown TLS implementation gets hacked. I mean, compilers bugs do exist, but that giant ASN.1 serializer looks mighty suspicious. (Tax code, antitrust enforcement, employees’ rights, need I continue?)
I think your argument actually also touches on something that I see as a fault in recent Western socialist or socialist-aligned movements, which is that market forces and capitalism are often improperly separated. There is often a large focus on how the market is evil, even when it's discussed in a language that decries them as problems of capitalism; for example, people might blame problems such as high rents on capitalism, and then imagine that nationalizing real estate companies will fix it, which it of course most likely won't. So, kind of coming at this from the other side, I do agree that a clear separation is necessary when talking about capitalism vs socialism on the one hand, and market economies vs planned economies on the other hand. But then you have to explain: what is the difference between a market economy and a planned economy, in an age where economic planning in China takes prices and market forces into account, while in the West, a company like Amazon, operating within the market, is so large that it has to do demand planning akin to the Soviet bureaucracy, lest they over- or under-order produce? Which of these societies is truly "more market"?
I think that the market can indeed be a very valuable system to reduce all kinds of inefficiencies. But at the same time, changes in tax code or antitrust enforcement will not alter capitalism's natural tendency toward monopolization, which ultimately turns everything into a planned economy anyhow. So in my opinion, the question is about how to effectively use the positive effects of the market, while also avoiding the less-positive effects that private enterprise has on society at large. And it seems to me like Kantorovich may have been closer to finding an answer than HFT yuppies at wall street will ever be.
Most of our global economic activity is governed by markets. We also happen to have the largest, wealthiest, and healthiest human population in history right now. So I agree with you, but also not sure where you’re disagreeing.
> We can only analyze the efficacy of markets by comparing them against their alternative.
No, it can also be done theoretically, by actually computing the costs of production (required to sustain certain level of consumption) from something like Leontief matrix. And then comparing with reality. It hasn't been done, mostly because the required data are private, but it is possible to do in principle, and I would argue that it would be very instructional for any society to do such a calculation (and make the result publicly available).
> What’s the fairyland alternative to “markets”?
There are many alternatives, but you have to understand that almost nobody wants to replace markets as a whole. So the replacement is always partial.
Socialism supporters oppose capitalism, which is defined by two characteristics - (1) labour markets and (2) capital mostly privately owned. (Let's now put aside that free market and property ownership are actually completely orthogonal concepts.)
You can have a system which mostly gets rid of either one or both of these. For example, you replace (1) with worker cooperatives based on democratic control and replace (2) with a national investment fund that is again under shared ownership of the citizens. Both of these have been tried and work..
Does such a system replace all markets? No, but it replaces the chunk (labour market) that is considered the most contentious.
>No, it can also be done theoretically, by actually computing the costs of production (required to sustain certain level of consumption) from something like Leontief matrix. And then comparing with reality. It hasn't been done, mostly because the required data are private, but it is possible to do in principle, and I would argue that it would be very instructional for any society to do such a calculation (and make the result publicly available).
No it can't. Value (in the sense generally used in economics) can only be known through people's revealed preferences, and it's not possible to reveal people's preferences without giving them the chance to express them in a market. Markets require people to sacrifice money/labor/time to purchase things, which gives a much more meaningful measure of those things being valued than if people were just asked, surveyed or whatever and didn't have to put their money where their mouths were.
First, what I was proposing was not about preferences at all, but rather about how things are produced - if you want, you can just take the current consumption preferences, or put in your own into the model. For example, the model could tell you what the price of drugs would be without all the marketing expenses, and I claim it would be (in the U.S., say) several times smaller, and as such we can measure efficiency of the system (or different systems) if we compare reality to this theoretical value. Here efficiency is just a measure of how much waste the real system needs (and this might differ from neoclassical economics definition of "efficiency").
Speaking of preferences, I think you're buying too much into Hayek's free market ideology here. I don't think was proven in any way, in fact as you state, if the definition of preference is that cannot be revealed in other way, then you're starting with that as an axiom.
I would also say that I was born in a socialist system (with almost completely regulated market and planned economy), and it seems the last problem this system had was that the people's preferences weren't clear. In fact, if they weren't clear (for example, as queues for basic necessities) then you wouldn't be able to say that system was inefficient! Also, there was some internal competition, new products were created, and so on. The thing really was that the prices didn't reflect the preferences, which created lots of inefficiency (waste).
Agreed. There is this attempt at an “ah ha! I found a market failure!” and people extrapolate that to “capitalism is a failure and the source of all our problems”.
This of course ignores the incredible reduction in worldwide poverty over the past 50 years due to capitalism.
Of course research at some point involves the economy and therefore the economic system that happens to be dominant. Most countries have little use for Dollars by the way, preferring their own currencies.
Capitalism systematically creates poverty both between countries (by extracting wealth from poorer countries) and within countries (by systematically depriving low income earners of adequate resources).
>Capitalism systematically creates poverty both between countries (by extracting wealth from poorer countries) and within countries (by systematically depriving low income earners of adequate resources).
This is the first time I have heard this. Usually the argument is that globalization creates a world middle class and drags each countries' middle class toward that world middle class. The world middle class is wealthier than the Chinese middle class so they get pulled up. The world middle class is less wealthy than the American middle class so they get pulled down.
> Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically.
Really? I thought he actually did divide "bullshit jobs" into different categories (5 of them total) in his book.
But I am not even sure that your 1,2,3 is so separate. Isn't creating jobs that nobody needs and nobody would notice if they went away also alienating and, consequently, toxic? Isn't that just a matter of extent?
Anyway, I agree that free markets cannot be a solution to any moral problem, because participation in markets is by definition symmetric and voluntary, and so they cannot consistently impose any values. (But the people who push the markets do want them to, for ideological reasons, appear as if they are inevitable, and this requires the capability to resolve moral ambiguity.)
The other problem is that other people already wrote extensively on better refinements of the concept, coming up with theories of positional goods, conspicuous consumption, signalling, information asymmetry within bureaucratic organizations, economic rent extraction etc. As well as explaining why a lot of jobs which in an ideal world filled with ideally-behaving people wouldn't exist could actually be necessary and useful in the real world, and why professions often seen (especially by their participants) as extremely meaningful and impactful like the arts are often funded by those that aren't, like advertising.
Graeber's definition of a "bullshit" job as one the worker didn't feel was meaningful - the canonical example being his lawyer friend who would rather people paid him for his hobby of making music - and his claim that the private sector was creating them as some sort of workfare program feels comparatively naive.
I think you're right, but I also think what Graeber was legitimate in the sense that he went at it from the other end.
Yes, economists (especially the non-neoclassical ones) came up with all sorts of market failures. But they can seem to be a bit theoretical, as in, well, maybe these things happen in the wild, but maybe mostly not. In other words, they treat it as interesting, but disconnected, phenomena.
Graeber, as an anthropologist, just noticed lots of people being unhappy even in the situation of material abundance. And he looked for an unifying explanation. I think there definitely is a connection, but it will have to wait for somebody to analyze it in more detail.
This is why we define things mathematically to measure them when we're doing science.
For everything Graeber did well, Graeber's concept is pseudoscientific pontificating at best. Anyone can argue what bullshit is or isn't and try to fit their narrative to it.
You have to be careful about quantifying things, because you can't measure all the things you'd like to measure, but that doesn't mean they're not important. The pinnacle of science measures very simple things very rigorously, like in physics, and even there you get the occasional revolution where you realize that you've been measuring the wrong things all along.
That's for something as simple as atoms or subatomic particles. For something like people, it's far harder to take any real measurements at all. And what measurements you do take heavily colors the results you get. It would be great if we could study people the way we study atoms, but we can't.
But that doesn't mean it's not important. How we organize society is at least as important as fundamental physics. These are decisions we make every single day. We can't avoid making them just because we can't be as confident about them as we are about atoms.
That's no excuse for doing bad science, and I'm not taking a position on what's being done here. But it turns out that it's harder to define pseudoscience that we'd like it to be. The difference between "hypothesis revision" and "moving goalposts" is fuzzier than we'd like to tell ourselves, and that's something we do all the time for the hardest of sciences. The lack of math is not automatically a disqualifier. If anything, over-reliance on math in the social sciences is a red flag that somebody has measured one thing that's important to them and is crafting a theory to fit it.
It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments.
Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.
I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider.
Does this mean we should move into decision making based on a kooks worship of a sun god? Absolutely not.
But it’s incredibly uncharitable to imply that one of the most influential anthropologists of recent history is somehow unreasonable.
We should absolutely rely on quantification where we are able, but members of this community of all people should be able to recognize that we’re still early in the iterations and in our abilities to measure all of life’s chaos and complexities accurately.
Again, i’m very much so not advocating that the itch you just had in your nose means someone is talking about you and i’m definitely not advocating that the tingle you felt run up your spine was a ghost. But we would be absolutely crazy to believe that we can accurately measure most of the complexities that are humanity’s issues.
I’m not a luddite. I firmly believe that technology and science are the best way to make decisions and carry us forward. But let’s not delude ourselves to the current limits of our abilities.
Some of our smartest people understand humans the least–and we’d be fools to forget this basic fact.
> I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider.
That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking.
Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work:
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"
"When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror."
Now if Graeber had written a book on the joys of fishing, we wouldn't expect a large amount of numerical fact checks. But for a book on debt -- which is really a book on financial systems across history, we do expect that the conclusions be consistent with the data as we know it. Graeber never made those consistency checks, so much of his observations can be ruled out and they really reveal an incredible state of being out-of-touch.
That said, he does provide rich examples and historical footnotes so I would recommend that people read his book. I just wouldn't recommend that people believe him when he draws certain conclusions and that people understand they are reading a polemical rather than an academic work.
the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read. it also turns out to be a really great help reading people as well, by gauging their response.
> the debt book taught me more about life and society than any other book i’ve read.
Same for me. I'm not well read in that topic so I can't compare Debt book with anything else as such. The sheer expanse of time period it covers and various topics it touches is very impressive indeed.
FWIW I'm half way through reading "The Nature of Money"[1] which was published well before The Debt and I'm tempted to think that the Debt book is significantly influenced by the former.
Brad DeLong (economics professor) famously went to town on the book. Others did, too. Search his blog with the keyword Graeber or Google "delong graeber" to review some of the debate.
Ok, where's your data? This article cites the work of Soffia, Wood, and Burchell[1] who "use representative data from the EU to test five of [bullshit jobs theory]'s core hypotheses" and find them to be nonsense based upon opinion and conjecture.
> instead of analysing them more clinically
Can you point to a clinical analysis supporting your claims? You may be falling prey to what you accuse the Economist of: ideology over evidence.
Additionally,your viewpoint seems internally inconsistent. On the one hand, bigcorps are profit obsessed and will stop at nothing to juice margins. But also, they somehow allow jobs (ie labor cost) which produce nothing to proliferate.
Is it possible corporations, being large and complex organisms, can be obsessed with margins--yet also may harbor BS jobs?
Political kingdom building, hire to fire, and over fitting to poorly chosen metics are just a few ways I can see margin obsessed companies also maintaining BS jobs.
Bigcorpos aren't omnipotent individuals. We've all heard the apocryphal stories of people who've slipped between the gaps and kept being paid. Companies don't need to be perfect to beat the competition, they just need to be good enough.
Graeber discusses and speculates about different flavours of bullshit, that explicitly are not intended to represent different versions of the same thing. For definition/measurement, he takes an anthropologist's approach: let people define it themselves. Both you and this article are imposing another definition of bullshit. That's fine, but it just isn't the subject of the book.
He purposely chose a playful dissenting term like bullshit. He didn't say "productivity," because he wasn't writing a book on economics. He didn't say "alienation" because it wasn't a book about psychology. He does talk about those things, but they don't define it.
The reason the book is compelling is precisely because it isn't an economics or psychology book. Economics is pretty bad at measuring economic output of accounting, advertising, HR and most of the jobs that have a high rate of "my job is bullshit" takes associated with them. That means that we don't have empirical knowledge to discuss and the "argument" keeps devolving into the same theoretical (now ideological) one that Marx and Ricardo had 200 years ago... just like this article does.
No one would be making these comments if the subject was "am I a good person?"
> are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible
This is purely subjective. I've worked at a tech company where they paid me 1.5x what they could have and I STFU so the checks would keep coming (they thought they were getting a bargain), but generally the firms will try to negotiate with you for the lowest price they can get you at.
That said, the aformention job where i was overpaid was a bullshit job because the product (was there even a product? I can't tell) would not have noticed if I wasn't there (maybe the morale would have gone down? I certainly wasn't worth that much).
that's why it said "either: 1,2,3". "Was there even a product" sounds very much like "might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't."
"the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies"
The Economist regularly argues against giving markets free rein, they will talk about the negative impacts of monopolies and call for policies aimed at stopping climate change.
Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list.
I know in America there's a species of free market puritan that believes regulation is always bad, and truly free markets are some sort of anarchist paradise of unfettered freedom. I blame Ayn Rand*. There are a lot of such people, I have worked for several American companies so I've met some of them. That's not the Economist though, look up one of it's withering critiques of the American health care system for example.
* Social welfare recipient Ayn Rand, to give her full title.
>Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list.
I think maybe you are looking at the situation and thinking that both the Economist and Graeber are "on the left", which from a US political standpoint would be somewhat accurate. Looked at in other context though, compared to Graeber, and Sahlins, who he studied under, the Economist would be better viewed as free market apologists offering helpful criticism whereas Graeber and Sahlins' work often questioned economic activity from a different perspective and has been used by people who question the very basis of modern economics and markets.
For example, Sahlins' work was referenced extensively in Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work. And Graeber published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. From that perspective, the idea that the Economist is on the left is a bit simplistic and not very relevant.
I think you have to be pretty far on the right for the Economist to be at all left of you. They're very much liberal yes, in the old school sense Milton Friedman used when he described himself as a liberal. Nowadays in American political discourse liberal is a code word for socialist, and that's not the Economist at all.
Not that I have any particular hostility to socialism either. I think it's generally wrong and misguided, but mostly in a well meaning, bumbling Sir Kier Starmer sort of way. Occasionally in a pernicious, righteous, nasty minded Jeremy Corbyn sort of way. I can often work with socialists though, but I'm European so you get used to it.
I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread. Spoiler - not much.
Wow. Thanks for that. That is interesting that he even mentions Bob Black. From what little I have read from Graeber I got the impression that he, like Black, considers communism/Marxism as authoritarian and irreconcilable with anarchy as capitalism.
>I think Graeber is most likely a Marxist, and I've commented on that and what I think of it elsewhere in the thread.
I think that is the misinterpretation. Graeber and Sahlins' work seems to me to be interpreting things from outside a left/right capitalist/communist framework entirely, at least as much as possible, considering how much we have been trained to think within those frameworks.
Did you read the book or just the essay? I listened to the audionook and I’m pretty sure he went into great depth on the different flavours of bullshit jobs you mentioned.
This refutation is really weak. The prompt provided in the refutation is:
> “I have the feeling of doing useful work”
Doing useful work is not a feeling, so people probably choose the middle-of-the-road answer (sometimes), or the socially desirable answer (often/always).
It's better to ask how useful they think their work is overall. Even better to ask them about their job 5 years previous. Think about all the people who joined the US military in the early 2000's. If you asked them about their work at the time they would say it was extremely meaningful. With hindsight the number would go down drastically. Same thing with all the people who see their work tossed asunder when a new CEO takes the company in a new direction.
Or even better^2, analyze how much bullshit work is actually being done regardless of whether people feel they're useful. People rarely glimpse the big picture so they are unlikely to see if their job is a strategic blunder, even years later.
Yes, this is not a great article. Makes for a catchy headline though.
Perhaps a better notion of bullshit jobs is in terms of what happens when people stop doing them. We had some nice recent examples of that in the past year when people stopped going to work because they couldn't. This happened on an extremely large scale and it was mostly fine. Record economic growth in some countries even.
I don't think the possibility of failure informs whether it's bullshit work. Someone might be assigned the task of writing a report that no one will ever read, and they still might fail to even submit the file.
The problem with the bs work hypothesis is it assumes important human work is like a horse's work. The horse spends an hour pulling a carriage, the work is measurable and continuous.
The most valuable thing humans do are nothing like that. They involve coming up with new ideas, resolving conflict, persuading people to do things, and fixing problems. No one knows how to measure this kind of work in terms of inputs and outputs and it is clear when it is happening successfully it involves a lot of downtime and extraneous communication. Also, it's often times really unclear who the key or effective people are in this kind of work even in success. So you may need ten people developing scripts -- nine of whose work is going to be cast aside-- to get the one really valuable film script. And yes, as the author points out a lot of people exploit that pretend to be doing something useful when they aren't.
The growth of this kind of work isn't a new sickness in society, it is that we need less people working like horses and we need more people doing work we can't measure the input of effort or the output of work.
This is people saying their own jobs are useless, not other people judging their jobs as useless.
Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens. I worked at a firm that fired its entire marketing team. There was no effect on sales that anyone could notice. They just made bad ads that had no effect on anything.
You don't understand what I am saying.
>> This is people saying their own jobs are useless
Yes, people have jobs that they know are useless. They know they are just going through the motions. They are in complicated organizations that can't measure their value and they know they are free riding. However, there are also people in the same type of organizations who think they are really valuable, who may actually have a negative value. My point is that in certain types of work it is hard to measure and this results in poor attribution or exploitation (pretending you are doing something).
>> Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens.
No, that's exactly what I disagree with. You are also thinking about work the way a horse does it and not considering real world situations. Let's say I have three development execs at a movie studio and I fire one. Does something bad happen? I am still going to pick a script from one of the other two and it will be a hit or a flop. That tells me nothing about what the work out put of the third fired executive, which I might not be able to judge the impact of until I look back a few years. I know-- from experience-- that is the same with the creative director of a video game. You may not know for sure if their ideas are good or if they are did a good job unless you see through what they are doing. Or artists who are most time the useless, or mediocre, but every now and then produce an essential piece of key art.
In case it isn't obvious I work in entertainment. But I believe their are similar cases in software engineering, recruiting, strategy planning, human resources, general leadership, etc. Where firing a person tells you nothing about what they would have done had they worked for a year.
My team handles all code, documentation and release through Github.
I was asked (more like forced to) have someone in my team copying zips of our releases and converting all code documentation into google doc files (with company logo, proper format,…). All of this code and documentation is for internal use only.
No one has ever read any of those documents, since the only people that would use it are in my team, who obviously prefer not having to fill a whole page of useless fluff just to save a useful command or a quick note about the method they just wrote.
You are doing horse work-- copying and converting files-- directed by a decision maker who is making bad decisions. It's easy to measure your output. Sadly the work you do is useless because you are being directed by someone for whom the quality of their decision (in your opinion, which btw sounds like is not getting traction) is bad.
PS: You need to learn about doing the non horse work of inventing ways to get people to listen to you when you say your time is being wasted. That's work that is hard to measure, unlike copying files, but that we would both agree is valuable.
For the sake of that person's sanity, I hope they were able to automate the generation of these write-only files from the actual documentation on GitHub.
i worked for a couple of months as a data entry and my job was to convert a bunch (thousands) of pdf files into excel spreadsheets.
Since the format of the files was the same (because they were generated by a program) it wasn't hard to automate this job...
Also i disliked the company so i didn't tell it to anybody
I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.
If you were to mediate conflicts all day between super talented, but very quarrelsome, experts: that's useful work. If you spend your entire day mediating conflicts between mediocre developers bikeshedding over logging frameworks, a topic that only came up because of nihysim: that's a bullshit job. Those developers are not useful, and neither are you.
> I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.
What counts as real work? How many levels of indirection is allowed?
What would be the impact if that job and/or person disappeared right now (aside from personal relations; on the job, business, organization)?
Would they be missed for more than the candy jar they stocked on their desk? Would something critical go undone? Why? Was their job as a pass through (notify Alice that Bob is done)? Was the job a meaningful check (verify Alice's work then notify Bob)? Is that verification mechanical (a sanity check that can be automated) or does it require expertise (huh, that widget won't work in that gizmo, there's an issue documented at...)?
Obviously, low/negative performers disappearing can always improve things, but usually by the work itself being dispersed to competent people. Assume a competent person in the role, is it actually useful and providing value that would be missed if they left?
Exactly one. The whole point of supporting someone doing real work is that you are valuable to that person and therefore your work is real. The moment the number of levels of indirection can go beyond 1 is where it spirals to infinity, and you enter the bureaucratic nightmare world.
It might be arbitrary, but it doesn’t have to be. You can measure the human perception of indirection. The trolley proplem has a different answer if you order someone to pull the lever instead of pulling the lever your self. The Milgram experiment only works if there is at least one level of indirection, and works better the more levels there are.
I would guess an expert anthropologist would know about this cognitive effect and count for it.
I take your point, but citing Milgram is a bad idea. The Milgram experiment turns out not to work that well at all, or at best to require very specific sort of conditions to get people to behave as they did for his iteration.
Regardless of the conclusion, the experiments are robust and show that people behave differently with different levels of indirection. So the experiments can still be used to argue that the effects of indirection are real and probably measurable.
I think you’re confusing people who are bad at their jobs, with jobs that are themselves pointless.
Also, you can add software development to the “meetings/email/reports” list, because that too is just another form of admin overhead from the perspective of most businesses that exist to do something other than sell software.
I know a company -- many companies-- where there are people who do nothing all day but talk to people, send emails, and very occasionally produce presentations. I knew a few of people at Disney consumer products who had jobs like that.
Those people could probably sleep in their office some weeks and not have anything very bad happen. Every now and then, not even once a year, those people find and close deals that generate millions of dollars. By your definition they are worthless but really they are a crucial ingredient in setting up projects that create work for dozens of programmers, artists, writers, etc.
If you don't understand why people exist in an organization, it may be because they are useless. But it may also be because you don't understand their purpose.
I think it's worth pointing out the difference between "it didn't work" and "it could never work" though, the latter of which seems more like what people mean with BS jobs.
I know a fair number of people in consulting who have seen how the sausage is made, and they don't see how it's useful in any normal way. It's useful for certain parties in a firm, but it's not useful in a general sense of delivering what it says on the tin.
I work as a contractor - mainly to government and my experience is that at least 50% of people in the public sector are there purely to keep people in employment. They serve no useful purpose, and mainly create made up work for each other.
I also do very little that is useful despite bringing a great deal of skill. If they cared to ask me what I think, I would be happy to explain why all the things they get me to do are a waste of time. I’d also be more than happy to suggest some simple things they could do that would actually be useful.
From my own experience, it's not so much about keeping people in employment and more about manager maintaining oversized teams because the size of your team is a status symbol.
Have you considered that you might not have enough visibility into what they do to be able to judge? Obviously the percentage of useless work is >0% but you are just throwing numbers around.
As someone who has worked a bullshit cyber security job in government, I will say 50% is a conservative estimate. Our team had 9 people in it: 1 manager, 6 junior-mid level engineers and 2 senior engineers. The only ones that did any actual work were the senior engineers. The junior-mid engineers literally did nothing for months on end. The manager would disappear all week only to turn up on Friday mornings to give "corporate update" presentations to the team.
> Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world.
One may feel that their job is not making a meaningful contribution. That doesn't translate to the job being useless or BS.
> That doesn't translate to the job being useless or BS
Did you read Graeber's book? I have seen a lot of the mechanics described in every job I've ever done, including roles like the Box Ticker or the Flunkie - or whatever he calls the "entourage" people, it's been a minute. These types of functions exist and often don't contribute to the product, company growth or financial success. That's what bullshit means in context: busywork, economically non-functional. Now, not every compliance role (Box Ticker) is a bullshit job. Nor is every assistant (Flunkie). But enough are for the pattern to exist and Graeber to have a point.
Markets and companies, which are often assumed to be efficient, are remarkably tolerant to inefficiency in their internal politics and bureaucracies. There is also a degree to which large enough companies can just coast on prior success before they feel the impact of bad process or ill focus and start to feel they're bleeding money.
Looking at the broader economy, there are a lot of "lifestyle" products that squarely fall in the category of luxuries. There's "consultancy" that exists to play politics in companies and doesn't do anything, like SAfE/Agile/Scrum/transformation consultants (not all, but enough), management strategy consultants, etc. This is where the Economist's alienation comes in: there is no meaning to contribute to when working at one of these companies, as they offer and stimulate pure consumerism, or political faire semblant (=pretending) as a service.
My conclusion is both Graeber and the Economist are right: the left Venn diagram contains actual useless jobs (as in, don't contribute to the process). The right diagram contains a lot of meaningless jobs where the product/service is ephemeral or purely materialistic, leading to alienation. The two diagrams overlap.
As to whether 70% of jobs are contained in the union of the two? Perhaps not, but I think it's a big enough problem for it to lead to an increase in burnouts, boreouts, depression and suicide.
Companies existing in the free market could pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. Government can also pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. However the company can go out of business - the government retains their make-work labor force in perpetuity without consequence.
Not sure how to what you're responding, but governments also do compete. In particular, according to one popular interpretation of history, Soviet Union did fail to compete with United States precisely because it was filled with useless make-work.
Companies fail all the time, even long-lived ones (Sears). It takes a very long time - and a lot of societal misery - for a country to fail. Government is perhaps 100000000x less dynamic than the private sector.
There is all sorts of "government work" that comes and goes. In the 1930s, the WPA and CCA employed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and then vanished. Governments have from time to time invested/spent more on mental health care, urban design, transportation and farm consulting (to name just a few).
Perhaps you have a perception of a certain kind of individual tenure associated with government jobs ("it's so hard to fire them"). That perception might even be true, though it's a little debatable since there are some fairly legitimate reasons why these rules exist.
But even if it is true, that doesn't mean that government work over the long haul is secure.
The private sector has one sole motivator: the profit incentive. All else is incidental, including the oft touted "making the world a better place". Some companies do make an impact, like pharmaceutical companies developing a COVID vaccine or Tesla leading the charge towards using electric vehicles instead of dinosaur fueled ones. Strictly speaking, for a job not be wasteful in the private sector, it's only required to be useful, not meaningful - but it could be.
Given the motivation, "waste" has a narrow definition in the private sector: anything that doesn't contribute to the baseline. Non-waste can take many forms, e.g. improving product quality, reducing costs, managing brand perception, market research or regulatory capture. There is wiggle room for subjective assessment, like when companies see IT not as a catalyst but a cost centre and therefore fundamentally waste.
The government has a different motivator entirely: the greater good. Waste and inefficiency take on another meaning in that context. Digging and filling ditches isn't wasteful if it ensures people have an income. In a government context, it's a useful job because it achieves stated goals, but still a meaningless one.
The wars on terror and drugs are examples where it becomes more murky. For some, they are both useful and meaningful. For others, they're just one or perhaps neither.
There are also government projects that seem like waste at the time but turn out to have tremendous value and even be private sector useful today. Examples are legion in military inventions that later became staples, such as microwave ovens, the Internet, cell phones. Regardless of how you feel about landing on the moon and NASA in general, we have now have non-stick pans, GPS and solar panels.
In summary: looking at government through the lens of the private sector is failing to understand a simple truth: corporations are individualistic, where governments are collectivist even in a capitalist system.
The amount of services I want the government to provide is ~1% of what they currently do. Even the programs they administer should ideally be farmed out to the private sector rather than an internal metastasizing bureaucracy. It’s a matter of philosophy.
I was confused by this article, to be honest. I can't speak to Graeber in particular but I've read many articles about the idea of bullshit jobs and in general, the theses I read had little (although not nothing) to do with how people felt about their jobs -- it was more about the actual utility of them, in the sense of there being a bureaucratic administrative elite who are largely unnecessary and serve mostly to increase their largesse at the expense of those below them ("the MBAization of America" to reluctantly quote Musk). If anything, I think the idea is that people in these positions overvalue their positions.
I don't want to advocate for this idea necessarily, just that I think the "bullshit jobs thesis" might mean something different to different people. The Economist article closes with an admission that "part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct," discussing the adage that "people leave bad managers, not bad jobs." Many variants of the bullshit jobs thesis I think propose an increase in bad managers, who are part of a larger unnecessary management structure.
I guess overall I felt as if the Economist piece was missing a few things.
Yes. The article gets off to a bad start by comparing Graeber's people who didn't believe "their job made a meaningful contribution to the world" to a different group of people who did not "have the feeling of doing useful work" (and weirdly attempts to excuse this leap by saying that Graeber's "meaningful contribution to the world" was a high bar to clear!)
People can also derive meaning from their work and feel that it's essential, while in reality it might make very little difference if they show up on Monday.
Personally I'm fairly sure there's a large number of "bullshit jobs" and I have my own, unfounded, opinions regarding which jobs that might be. I'm just not convinced that we can identify these jobs by asking those who work in those position.
There's also the jobs that truly are essential, but only because something somewhere else is broken.
I was once asked to automate a task at a job. There was a webpage that had a dozen iframes. My task was to add a js that refreshes each iframe a minute after it fully loaded. It was a wonky type of health checker.
When I finished, I went to see the person who used the product in person. Turns out, his job was to sit in front of the webpage and refresh it every minute or so, then report it if any of the pages in the iframes failed to load. After my update, he wouldn't have to refresh the page anymore. He would just sit and watch.
I thought that his job was bullshit, and that his manager was just keeping him busy. But it turns out, I was the one who was misemployed[1].
It's really interesting what happened to you. Here's what I think about it.
There's a network of hidden, potential rivers of value flowing through society.
Companies are established in hopes of tapping into those rivers.
Once in a while some company, often by sheer chance alone will place itself in such beneficial spot of this river network that it can draw absolutely insane amount of money from there.
Form then on usual concerns about making mistakes, efficiency and doing reasonable things that are essential for survival of smaller companies no longer matter to that lucky company.
It can grow to huge proportions and spread, it can make dazzling amount of mistakes, have huge inefficiencies hiring useless or harmful people, doing unnecessary things, especially in the new places that the company grew into, but are sufficiently far away to the core that is tapping to this ample stream of cash.
This situation can last for many decades, until tectonic shifts of society fabric eventually alter the river network and the source starts to dry out, and this formerly lucky company now sees its money being taken by other lucky ones somewhere else.
Your job might have been highly beneficial to the endeavor it was a part of and removing it might have decrease efficiency of this endeavor greatly, but I strongly suspect that the whole endeavor was one of those side ones, remote from the core of the profit source of the whole corporation.
It's not that your job was useless, but probably everything two management levels up from you and everything below them was useless in the grand scheme of things for that corporation and maybe even actively harmful to their bottom line.
Corporations have to dissipate cash this way. They have to keep trying doing stupid inefficient things because that's their only chance of long term survival. They are desperately trying to discover new ample source of wealth, before the one that fuels them dries out and they have to accept all of the inefficiencies that come from this random search.
The trick "bullshit jobs" uses is to switch between two definitions of bullshit. One definition is "useless, of no benefit to the employer," and the other is "revolving around selling bullshit" (which is absolutely beneficial to the employer).
The first definition is sort of ridiculous (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless), but when challenged it reverts to the second definition, which is trivially obvious (of course most companies are trying to hawk crap).
Read the comments on this post - most of the arguments are just people switching between the two definitions.
>no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless
On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job is not "clearly useless" in the eyes of the management, even if it's obvious to other people.
More often, the usefulness of the job to the organization itself, or to people inside it, has become disconnected from its actual usefulness. For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.
This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate. Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Beurocracy is inefficient, but it's rarely completely wrong. It's very easy to tell when an employee is contributing nothing, even for a monolith.
What I think actually happens is that companies hire more people for a particular role than they need, because load balancing is difficult, or they have a structure that extracts productivity from the workforce in a way that's inefficient. But that's not the same as outright non-productivity. Those people are not useless - they're still productive, they just provide suboptimal (and maybe negative) return on investment.
> For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.
I don't think it works like that. They may invest the excess staffing budget in a productive worker they otherwise wouldn't have hired, but that's not the same as hiring someone who provides no benefit. The return that employee brings may even be negative but it's very, very unlikely to be -100%.
> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them.
Some companies, maybe. I've known enough companies that tolerated and in some cases enjoyed fat, to understand as a rule what you're claiming doesn't hold. Including lots of fat shaped like management layers. Other forms of fat include "we don't want to fire these people, so let's give them symbolic work until they retire", "these are all friends of people in upper management, so don't fire them even though nobody knows what they actually do", "these people were hired as a PR stunt and now they really don't have much to do", "we have to go through the motions of doing this project, even though everyone knows it's doomed, it's just for show anyway", and many, many more.
Companies can be very, very inefficient and still work.
> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them.
That depends on the company. How about the 'growth engines' whose primary goal is to be acquired? I don't think these claims work in a world where the axiom 'the goal of a company is to make more money than it spends' is broken.
>This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate
No, it's very easy to demonstrate. The staff themselves will tell you. In fact, the article we are discussing begins by citing two surveys which show huge numbers of employees (tens of millions if the survey is accurate) believe they are not doing useful work or are not contributing meaningfully to the world.
A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?)
B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.)
Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.
"Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist" [1]
Companies are the most rational and levelheaded of God's creations, and so could never engage in any activity so at odds with their raison d'etre, like wasting budget on useless endeavors. Why, with all the well-trained MBAs filling out the bureaucrat ranks these days, I'm sure business has never been more efficient!
(no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless)
A bit naive to think that companies are 100% efficient and don’t make mistakes. Companies aren’t robots, they’re a collection of people, people make mistakes.
I’ve seen executives in the past identify an issue and hire someone to solve that problem, executive didn’t understand the problem, person left the company position wasn’t filled again.
I think they make mistakes, and as with your example, those mistakes tend to get fixed. Net negative jobs are the exception, not the rule, and completely useless jobs are the vast exception.
> no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless
That would be true only if leadership was 100% omniscient and knowledgeable in all topics. The problem is that ultimately only leadership and shareholders are incentivized by company profits.
People on a salary care more about their personal salary and benefits, and while those should theoretically correlate with company profits, the feedback loop is extremely long and can be affected by external factors, potentially concealing inefficiencies, ultimately allowing people on a flat salary to prioritize their personal gains at the detriment of the company's gains.
And the above still assumes good faith and mere lack of skill. When you include fraud or mis-selling into the mix (such as big consulting companies charging insane sums for unkept promises then outsourcing the actual work to incompetent people) the problem becomes so much bigger.
This paper uses a substantially different (and in my opinion useless) definition of bullshit.
People feel useful if their work contributes towards achieving objectives. If you're on a ship taking on water, bailing out that water is incredibly useful. On the other hand a security guard who hasn't had to deal with an incident in years probably feels quite useless.
Meaningfully contributing however requires that objective to be one that needs doing. If the ship is only taking on water because some basic maintenance has been neglected, that doesn't make it any less important to bail out the water, but it's BS that you have to in the first place. While the security guard may never do anything productive, simply being available on the off chance there is an incident is a major and indispensable reduction of risk for the organization which depending on circumstances, may very well not be able to operate without it; certainly not BS at all.
Most people do work hard to deal with the problems they face day in and day out. That doesn't mean the problem should have existed in the first place, and Graeber correctly defines a bullshit job in such a way that a very much not-bullshit employee can nevertheless find themself in the soul crushing position of working a bullshit job. Any alternative definition where that soul crushing situation isn't possible completely misses the point of his research.
This article is intellectually dishonest; it's obviously trying to push forward an agenda. Any honest person who has participated in the economy in the past decade and possesses any common sense at all will know that BS jobs are real.
Consider the quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
In spite of this, many people today will openly acknowledge that their jobs are useless; against their own interests. There are no incentives for people to think this way and yet they do.
Not only that, but the idea of jobs becoming increasingly useless aligns perfectly with what you would expect to happen as a consequence of reserve banks constantly printing new currency to 'prop up' the markets whenever they threaten to collapse. Of course that would make people more complacent, lazier, dumber, etc... Every time you give incompetent people an unfair advantage, you're making is harder for competent people to compete against them. Our system is constantly propping up incompetent people and hurting competent people. It's almost impossible to bootstrap a startup these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the few bootstrapping success stories were part of a gaslighting agenda.
There is no free market. I wouldn't be surprised if many successful people today were essentially hand-picked by the financial elite; possibly selected based on their psychopathic tendencies. A hierarchy of psychopaths destroying the economy and the planet while gaslighting the world into doubting their own eyes.
The whole scheme is so obvious at this stage. I wonder how much the author of this article got paid to write it.
Lousy headline. The study the story is based on does not dismiss Graeber's work as bullshit:
> Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs. He may have been way off the mark with regards how common BS jobs are, but he was right to link people’s attitudes towards their jobs to their psychological wellbeing, and this is something that employers – and society as a whole – should take seriously.
Graeber's weakness of not being a bean counter (and maybe at a deeper level also not a "systems" thinker) was also his incredible advantage: to be able to sense and interpret the current "reality" of much of the western world but not be transfixed by it but rather place it the context of the far more diverse historical human experience. Have not read Bullshit Jobs but was deeply impressed by Debt and his debunking of centuries of ossified, self-serving dogma. The current low signal to noise cacophony around cryptocurrencies is just another validation of how deeply illiterate we are (collectively) about fairly fundamental aspects of how our societies function, even something like money that all of us handle daily and most of us think quite important. This is not just the confusion of the "common man", until 2008 all mainstream, Nobel prize winning, economists did not think the private banking system was important in economic development - being just "an intermediary" that can be factored out of the "equations".
In the many comments to this post (which in itself is a good thing - may it inspire some smart cookies to carry Graeber's torch) the discussion quickly degenerates in the "markets versus state" caricature in a manifestation of the same inadequate interpretation framework. "Markets" existed since the first three-way encounter and exchange of some goods and associated exchange rates. However corporates (expressing the enforceable interest of an industrious subset of humanity) and states (purportedly expressing the interest of "all", at least within a "nation") did not. Markets have no morality: its an information technology that can facilitate trade in slaves, human organs, human labor or human personalities (=adtech), or nuclear and chemical (=CO2) waste. Who is the gatekeeper of the morality of what and how is produced and traded? Oligopolistic corporate interests corrupting puppet state entities? Entrenched autocracies with the organized private sector simply a puppet satellite constellation? We need to get to a better level of discourse before we hit terminal planetary and societal boundaries and that, my friends, is no bullshit job.
If you ever worked in a corporate environment for at least a day, you will not need a scientific paper to understand that bullshit jobs is in fact a thing and it is quite real.
i suspect that economics is something of a bullshit science, where they draw arbitrary conclusions from hand picked data; (In this case one could ask both sides on what kind of professions they were surveying) also economists always act surprised when a real event like the great recession or great depression happens; other social sciences seem to be less detached from actual reality.
I also had this suspicion for some time. In reality they have a large amount of premises in their economic models which must be true in order for the conclusion to follow.
Also there is e.g. a large amount of empiric data supporting minimum-wage laws are beneficial and also a large ammount of empiric data showing it's harmful!
Conslusion: there are no solutions only tradeoffs.
Its weird to see people completely dismiss an entire field just because they disagree with it. If someone said the exact same thing about another social science, like sociology or gender studies, it would see a pretty big pushback in the same circles that dismiss economics. And I frankly I don't see how you could argue that modern economics are more prone to arbitrary conclusions and cherry picking than idk say psychology or race studies.
Btw I'm curious, do you have an example of economists being surprised by a recession? Because they usually don't claim to be able to predict one in the first place. There's a huge difference between pop econ columnists who write clickbait predictions and the actual academic consensus in the field.
1. Some of the harshest criticisms of economics (both orthodox and heterodox) comes from ... economists.
2. Some of the harshest criticism of other social sciences comes from ... economists. (Notably of sociology, though also variously ecology, systems theory, and cybernetics.)
One thing true at all times and places: there is plenty of bullshit to stuff every category you can think of, with more left over.
Bullshit that doesn't benefit employers, bullshit that doesn't benefit customers, bullshit that doesn't benefit governments, bullshit that doesn't benefit citizens.
> Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning.
If your survey of 44,000 workers across 35 countries found that admins view their jobs as not useless, your survey is fucked.
I have a hard time believing that garbage men and janitors would describe their jobs as useless. They may be undesirable (to some) but there is no argument whatsoever to be made for them being useless.
It may just be the common perceptions of these jobs are so pervasive, it influences the worker's own assessment. It's certainly in character for the bureaucrats to consider their jobs to be important. Desensitized to petty politics and constant surveillance, they probably thought their answers would get back to their boss, and didn't want to appear redundant.
I kind of questioned Graeber's thesis but I do think he was onto something. I think most management jobs are bullshit jobs in that they don't contribute very much but are easy and well paid. You then have a whole underclass who actually do the work. It's not too different from ancient Greece where the society depended on slavery to function. The pandemic showed that very few of our jobs are essential. A large proportion of the population in the west could be not working yet society still functioned. It's only when things slow down in the east (where things actually get made) that it causes problems.
I’ve noticed this attitude of “management is useless” and it tends to be people who don’t have a great view of the entire company that say this.
Having worked at some large companies, organization is a massive challenge. It’s not hard to get 10,000 smart people working hard. Getting them all working towards the same goal is not easy at all.
That perception comes from a fact that it's such a hard challenge that people usually fail at it. And despite failing at it hard, things tend to be sort of ok, at least in the short term.
So the perception forms that managers are bad and not that necessary.
“Management is useless” usually comes from people who have never tried it, don’t know what it means, or have had a bad manager once and hastily generalized from there.
"Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed."
I would say management is definitely not useless, but it's hard to evaluate manager's impact, so people who get promoted can be in fact awful managers. The only way to measure their performance seems to be the performance of the unit they manage, which is often achieved contrary to their personal impact rather than because of it.
The fulcrum of the Economists argument gives away their bias. They say that “asking people if their job contributes something meaningful to the world is a high bar indeed”. That made me laugh out loud.
A lot of words around the payoff -- "Alienation depends on how the workers are treated by those in charge. “If managers are respectful, supportive and listen to workers, and if workers have the opportunities for participation, to use their own ideas and have time to do a good job, they are less likely to feel that their work is useless,” the researchers write."
In my experience, any manager with even a shred of self awareness and emotional sensitivity figures out that the people who work for you care exactly as much for their work as they believe you care about them.
I don't think caring is enough. In fact, it's quite a mindfuck too have a manager that cares about your emotional state, but at the same time undermines everything you do at work and fails to advance your interests or sing your praises. Outside of abuse, that is one of the worst employee situation you can be in, unless you don't care about career growth and are very happy with where you are. Hell, I would take an emotionally abusive, verbally abusive boss that promotes me, and catapults my career over a caring boss that doesn't, because I'm the type of person who doesn't care about what my boss throws at me, it rolls off of me (I am aware that some people need more external validation and emotional support than I do, so I do not recommend the latter as a management strategy).
It isn't your boss' decision to have you promoted. It is your boss' colleagues: the decision isn't made in a vacuum. Best your boss can do is give you opportunities to obviously display that value to their peer group. All people have a limited amount of mindshare to spend on tasks. To move up, you must claim some of their headspace (in a positive manner, of course).
When people take time to consider one another and field of play they also tend to understand everyone, that playfield and potentially themselves better. Not understanding people in our lives is a waste of time, energy, resources, and all of that comes with greater cost and risk exposure not associated with meaningful returns.
I think bullshit jobs are a consequence of massive orgs, which have similar internal problems to command economies seen in places like the USSR. Is it surprising that there is massive waste? However, these large orgs continue to exist since the industries they are in have massive barriers to entry, reducing competition and allowing for lots of dead weight.
I’m not so sure that the opposite extreme of having a ton of small, redundant competitors who individually cannot optimize economies of scale, would result in anything near globally optimal outcomes.
Yes, the many small competitors scenario means no one achieves economies of scale. There is little to no dead-weight inside each company, but consumers must pay more because the overall system is inefficient.
Going back to the "mega-corp" scenario, if you are a lazy person, a good strategy would be to join an org in a defensible (ideally monopolized) industry and work just hard enough to not get fired. Find yourself a bullshit job!
In a way this is strange question, and topic, how to decide what is and what is not relative to determine what is bullshit job.
Yesterday something else interesting happen, "Yana Sizikova: Russian tennis player arrested at French Open over match-fixing allegations", what is that to do with anything?
From one angle just imagine someone was arrested for playing game. Imagine child on playground being arrested for playing with marbles. But, things are not that simple this adult game was connected with money, and everything what has connection with money we give some kind of value, so much that we are keen to put someone in prison.
In the same way, we grow economy, create roles, watch our security, value things, help others trying to go around fundamental question that needs answer - who owns and who has right to access resources in the society where everything is fully automated?
The paper this article is based on: Soffia, M.; Wood, A.J.; Burchell, B. Alienation is not 'bullshit': an empirical critique of Graeber's theory of BS jobs, Work, Employment and Society 2021.
Choice quote: "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."
A fair definition would be: a job is bullshit if when someone stops "doing it" there is minimal or positive effect on the economic output.
And here is an article arguing that jobs are legitimate as long as people "feel useful". Well, this is precisely the problem. They fill offices with workers because it feels good to have subordinates. Responsibility is part of the career reward system, and people derive their identities from jobs and careers.
That’s true of nearly every job. If every founder in Ycombinator shut down their company today and fired all their employees, thereby killing all those jobs, there will be minimal effect on the economic output. Largely because the vast majority of jobs here are early stage startups which haven’t had a chance to bloom, and the vast majority will fail anyways, but we don’t know which ones will ahead of time.
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear"
It is not at all, in fact it's pretty basic. Every nurse, farmer, firefighter, garbage man etc. can answer "yes" in good conscience.
Asking whether the job is "useful" is pretty meaningless though, even utterly meaningless jobs are useful to someone.
It’s far far more rigorous and far less loaded than the question Graeber’s theory was based on.
Graeber’s question was, paraphrased, “do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world”. This is an objectively loaded question. For example, I could rephrase that question as “do you think your job makes a contribution to the world” and lose absolutely nothing. The only purpose the “meaningful” adjective serves is to arbitrarily raise the bar for which people would answer yes to the question.
The only thing useful Graeber’s research possibly showed is that people with more education have a higher standard for what they consider a meaningful contribution to the world than people with less education.
Actually I think both surveys are meaningless. The meaningful part is that the popular interest seems to affirm a repressed feeling that is extremely common.
The funniest thing about this article is what it says about worker alienation in Marxist theory. It says worker alienation depends on how well workers are treated by their bosses. But that’s simply not what the theory says. Marxist theory as best as I understand refers to worker alienation from the products of their own labor due to capitalist ownership of the means of production. It is the lack of worker ownership of the means of production that produces alienation, not how well they are treated. There are of course other meanings of of the word alienation, but the article states in one paragraph that Graeber was right about worker alienation as an aspect of Marxist theory, and then in the very next sentence says worker alienation depends on how workers are treated by their bosses. From my understanding of one of the basics of Marxist theory, that’s not what the theory says.
The question is does the person performing the job him/herself finds it usefull what he/she does. Is doesn't matter if it is useful in your eyes. Because it has to do with appreciation, selfconfidence identification, finding satisfaction. If your are just being giving the feeling to be stupid useless replacable person by letting you jump trough useless hoops to please undefinable goals for more powerfull and this happens in a statistical signifant amount
then it tells something about current state of society and gives you some questions: why ist that ? , how do we handle the other humans around us?, what is causing that mindset and in what future, how would you/we like to live together?
The Economist is generally pushing an agenda, and the agenda is "capitalism is always right". If you buy their conceptual framework, the idea that you can be paid for BS work can't be right since Mr. Market always knows best, and he wouldn't pay for an activity which adds no value.
However, if you don't buy the "capitalism is always right" Ansatz, then it's quite easy to see paid BS work as yet another market failure ... or worse, as a way to keep workers busy so they don't cause trouble for "the system". Which I believe was one of Mr. Graeber's main points.
>or worse, as a way to keep workers busy so they don't cause trouble for "the system". Which I believe was one of Mr. Graeber's main points.
Are you suggesting there's a global cabal of executives colluding to create bullshit jobs to keep the populace in check? Absent that, I doubt this is actually the reason, because it suffers from the free rider problem. If you spend money keeping workers occupied, you'll be reaping the benefits (them not revolting) but so will your competitors who aren't spending any money on such jobs. Prisoner's dilemma would suggest that companies that don't collude would defect, and none of them would be hiring for bullshit jobs.
What we have today is not capitalism. Capitalism requires free markets. What we have today is a market propped up by money centralized printing. The winners are chosen by the money printer.
maybe its entirely possible that capitalism in its pure form (whatever that may be) may be too unstable to survive without any kind of regulatory framework* , so then we have a state to manage the system, and the players manipulate it to thier own ends... causing more and more regulatiry capture...
* note how "free" the market was before the great depression and the subsequent regulations that followed to stabilize things, then repeal of said regulations that lead to one financial collapse after another (savings and loan crisis, early 2000s financial troubles, 2008 financial crisis etc etc)
The great depression was caused by a sudden, significant contraction of the currency supply which occurred as a result of people realizing that banks did not hold enough currency to pay all depositors, this triggered panic and bank runs and then subsequent over-hoarding of currency by individuals.
The real problem was not a fixed currency supply, it was the sudden contraction in the currency supply which caused people to over-react and hold onto currency too tightly. It self-corrected eventually as the panic subsided and investments resumed.
If banks had enough deposits to pay all depositors, bank runs would not have mattered, there would not have been a panic and there would not have been a contraction in the currency supply and there would not have been an economic depression.
I don't know if pure capitalism can work without any regulation but manipulating the money supply is definitely not the solution.
There have been bullshit jobs since the dawn of time, the very first time someone convinced the others he (she?) spoke with the gods and a sacrifice was needed to ensure good weather for the crops. Some will say that they provided relief from uncertainty. I say that it actually increases the bullshitness. We still have peasants and clerics and for the clerics it's never bullshit as it puts food on the table but the fact is that if they dissappeared tomorrow the crops would be taken care of and the weather would not change.
I'm not a religious person and share some of your opinions but it seems to me fairly obvious that religion has contributed a lot to social coherence and organization. There's a reason it is almost endemic in post hunter-gatherer societies despite the wide variance in beliefs.
Humans are a people of stories and a shared common narrative was probably critical to provide societal cohesion and build a sense of community and purpose.
A short article that ends with "That’s life." doesn't really inspires me anything.
Unemployment is high in many developed countries, and society is unable to occupy people with meaningful activities, to give sense to their existence, or even to give enough money to unproductive people so that they can be happy enough.
I have been depressed and unemployed for a long time, and the fact that you literally have to beg for a job just so you can get out of bed and see other people shows that work doesn't matter. Salary doesn't matter.
Work and labor has become a religion because people are afraid they might not have any purpose or to end up alone and excluded from society. You can even see unions doing politics and fighting capitalists, but completely disregard people who are unemployed.
Once you give enough money to everyone so that they have a right to exist, get shelter and food, maybe people won't be alienated by work.
This little write-up says next to nothing. If you want to engage with a critique of David Graeber's work on 'Bullshit Jobs,' you might as well skip to the paper linked at the bottom of this column - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015....
"educated workers who need the money to pay off student debts"
Many countries don't have the student debts issue, but still have jobs some consider BS.
I mean, this is probably a big problem in the US, but the focus on this very local thing feels kinda obsessed to me. "We have it worse than our parents, because of student dept!", well we have it worse too, even without the dept...
A market can be perfectly competitive and still revolve around the buying and selling of bullshit.
For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people.
Just because something is bullshit doesn't mean it's useless. For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!
My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways:
- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends.
- Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands.
And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.
Sao Paulo banned billboards and public advertising for over a decade. It's certainly an interesting idea. I'm very grateful for the lack of billboards and advertising in my town, as well as the rest of my life due to using adblocking software and extensions. I realize that it's still endemic in media but appreciate the visual sanity in my life.
This article has more info and some revealing pictures.
>- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends.
wars are zero sum too (the land up for grabs is fixed). does that mean armies are bullshit?
Yes, and for that very reason. Graeber puts armies and advertising in the same category in his Bullshit Jobs book, in fact, which was a lot more interesting a read than I was expecting from the title. IIRC he considers that one of the easier-to-understand categories and doesn't spend a ton of time on it. One side spends, so then the other side has to, now both are about as well off as if neither had increased spending.
Yes, of course. The only excuse the world government has for not banning them is that it doesn't exist. Actual governments have no excuse for permitting advertising as it currently exists.
The question whether wars actually improve our technological knowledge is fascinating and complex.
There is no doubt that the threat of being murdered by another bunch of people concentrates the minds a lot. You will do your utmost not to get yourself and your loved ones killed, which means a lot of technological improvements in order to win the war, or at least force the enemy to negotiate a ceasefire.
On the other hand, several future Einsteins, Flemings and Korolevs might just get flattened to bloody pulp in the trenches at the age of 18, before they even had a chance to show their intellectual capacity. That is a major loss, too, and one whose true dimension cannot be guessed.
They're bullshit in the sense of overall human progress (ie. we'd be better off if we could all get along and never have wars), but that doesn't answer the original question of whether it can exist in competitive markets.
It's worth noting that this isn't unique to online advertising: the quote "Half of all advertising is worthless; the trouble is, we don't know which half" is over a century old.
>For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. [...] For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!
It goes beyond making people "feel better". It's about variance and/or managing risk. eg. so if you die of cancer with a wife and 3 kids they won't end up in the poor house.
To be clear, I'm not saying that every single financial/insurance product is bullshit. However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now.
You may see it as a variant of Parkinson's law: Bullshit expands so as to use up all the resources available for its consumption.
>However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now.
What are some examples? Maybe with adblock I'm missing all the complex derivatives being peddled to people these days, but the financial products I know of are pretty straightforward.
This is not Graeber’s argument. Most people responding to the survey talked about the role itself, not the overall ethics of their profession. A society of writers still needs someone to sell the pencils. What’s crazy is how many people are in vestigial make-work roles, divorced from any kind of meaning or even commercial transactions.
Actual competitive markets are made of competing firms, and firms can't (in general) optimise.
1. Holmstrom's theorem tells us that no payment system for a team of agents can have a budget in balance, be in Nash equilibrium, and be Pareto efficient.
2. Since firms are definitionally teams of people, and since you don't get a choice whether the budget balancing or the workers optimise, this means that firms must sacrifice Pareto efficiency.
3. If firms can't always seek out the Pareto frontier, then a competitive market composed of firms will not satisfy the conditions for Walras' theorem to hold, and so competitive markets can't necessarily reach equilibrium.
Holmatrom theorem can have a budget surplus, With Nash Equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. Businesses are (ideally) run with a budget surplus, with profit extracted.
There are always systemically fewer jobs than there are people that want them - deliberately so as a matter of policy.
For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market.
In the UK we currently have 3.5 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work, but only 0.6 million unfilled vacancies.
>For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market.
Why should both sides be equal? Easy counter-example: I'm sure everyone on earth would like an iphone (demand of 8 billion) but the supply is far less than that.
The purest markets we have are the financial markets and level 2 data tends to exhibit this quality.
Demand is desire plus ability to pay - which is why your iPhone example is deficient. That’s why billions go without and why people go for the alternatives.
However everybody needs a job to be able to live. There is no alternative to selling your labour hours in a modern world. Extracting from others is a fallacy of composition.
Huge amounts of the economy are not competitive markets, even ignoring state enterprises.
For instance: large companies and monopolies can stand to sustain a lot of "bullshit" as anticompetitive pressures and just economics of scale and generally just social inertia (e.g. "well competitor X might be cheaper but do they represent higher risk?") let them get away with inefficient practices. They have to do a lot of bullshit before this becomes a risk to them.
Most companies have some elasticity on this also when what they can spend is not directly tied to their revenue and their competitive position in the market. I.e. they can raise more money than their competitive position might suggest through either loans or investment. Loans and investments cannot be perfectly efficient because there is always incomplete information when awarding finance. This may occur in some types of startups but it's true for many established companies as well.
It's not necessarily the case either that bullshit jobs have to be stable in order to represent a large chunk of the labour market either. They may be wiped out by competitive pressures in one area only to open up in another.
Charities/non-profits may also provide another place for bullshit jobs to hide. Not all charities are perfectly efficient and they do not operate competitively.
In almost every corner of the economy there are inefficiencies where bullshit jobs can hide.
I'm really curious about the perspective and life experience of posters who didn't read Greaber's book and go "yep, I've been that person a couple times, and almost everyone I know has complained to me at one time or another that one of their jobs was bullshit and didn't need to exist, usually with a nice, long explanation of all the nothing they do". That such jobs exist—and yes, in the private sector, not just government—was in no way the interesting part of that book, for me, but just an obvious fact of life. The cataloguing of why, and the exploration of trends and consequences, was the interesting part.
There must be very little overlap between my place in the world and the people whose reaction is, "nah, that can't possibly be true".
The idea is that if most jobs were bullshit, it should be quite easy for a new business to capture market share. There are many people who have the capital and are looking for such opportunities.
This would only be true if the market share of a company is inversely correlated to the number of bullshit jobs in said company. There might be such a link because less money spent on bullshit job salaries means more money available for the marketing budget but it's not at all clear IMO that such a correlation exists and if so, how strong it is. Case in point: We can observe that there are many extremely profitable companies (say, Disney or Oracle) that nonetheless do not have a reputation for being all that bullshit-free.
In many cases, things like customer lock-in, natural monopolies or intellectual property catalogs serve as significant barriers to entry even for well capitalized new businesses, and these barriers can more than outweigh the costs of having half your employees being essentially useless. Finally, an argument could be made for resilience in staffing. The very leanest organisation would have bus factors of 1 for every single job and the first sick employee means problems. Even raising the redundancy to "only" two people per critical function means that you just created a ton of bullshit jobs. (since most of these people will be severely underutilised)
Among other things this idea ignores (and which other commenters mentioned), there's also time factor. The one thing that's often forgotten wrt. the market.
The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it.
If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing.
(Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.)
In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium
apologies to ask such a naive question, but im trying to understand, what is the basis that it is thought 'a market is "trying" to reach an equilibrium'...
maybe im too hung up on the semantics/wording, but im genuinely curious because in my mind "the market" isnt really "trying" to reach anything.... maybe its agents are (gain a profit, hoodswink someone, make a fair exchange, etc etc)... so in aggregate there may be some result over time, but i find it hard to imagine its trying to reach an equilibrium per se...?
If you read the book, it mostly contends with this idea, that competition is supposed to root out these inefficiencies, and it claims that it doesn't.
Maybe it is intrinsic to human nature, to create these bullshit jobs. In fact, isn't this exactly the same argument against so called "socialism"? That once you have a big government bureaucracy, public sector employees start working for themselves, rather than to serve the public. Well the same is true of big corporate bureaucracies.
Yes that's the theory, yet currently any company with sufficient capital or geopolitical advantage can be an effective market leader, while at the same time operating inefficiently at a loss.
That is if you believe something can be done about the existence of bullshit jobs.
From my experience and in my opinion, when an organization pushes past the point where everybody knows everybody else and where one person can understand the whole apparatus there's absolutely nothing that can you can do but accept the reality of losing complete control and oversight.
Another aspect: the increasing number and depth of rules and regulations imposed by laws on organizations creates the need of bureaucrats that simply sign checklists without actually checking anything. You can know the jobs are bullshit but can't simply choose not to comply.
Some whole departments are there just for show. In this age you have to look like you care about the environment, social issues, etc. And while really caring would be quite expensive and in some cases completely debilitating for the business a few people making powerpoints and social media posts do the trick.
And then there's government jobs, markets ruled by monopolies, corruption, nepotism, and a million other things.
"Another factor is the human tendency to adopt the culture of their profession; those who sell assault rifles or homeopathic medicines eventually come to believe they are doing good work."
Right, and this is why surveying people on whether they think their jobs are meaningful is an inadequate means of determining if the jobs are actually meaningful to society. This should not be a subjective determination.
No doubt people in finance feel like they are the most necessary jobs on the planet because they touch so much of the world's money.
But it is not their money. Someone has to earn it first before the financial sector can touch it.
Also, the question is not whether it is "good work" but whether it is "necessary work".
I've only just now read the paper (link below), so this is from the hip:
Graeber floated an explanation (bullshit jobs) for the data gathered (grumpy workers). It was not a study, nor ever presented as such.
This is follow up research, a proper study. IIRC, as Graeber had encouraged.
The researchers propose the Marxist notion of alienation as an alternate theory for the phenomenon Graeber originally daylighted.
While the researchers reduce the likely scope of alienation, they emphasize that millions of people are impacted, which should not be ignored.
Graeber has no particular animus towards finance, as The Economist suggested. He's grumpy about corporatism and bureaucracy. If The Economist is offended by Graeber's work, that's on them.
"But part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct. Employees who think their work is useless tend to feel anxious and depressed. The reason, the academics suggest, is linked to the Marxist idea of “alienation”, which described what artisans felt in the 19th century when they stopped working for themselves and were dragooned into factories."
Debatable. My $300,000 FANG job was bullshit. In the end I worked 6 hours a week and was still considered a top performer. I had to quit because of how bored I was. Either the job was bullshit or I’m just very very competent. I lean towards the former though.
I know what you mean, from a certain perspective. I do nothing most days, but internal teams use the platforms I built/developed. I’m around to janitor problems now, since I “own” them. Being an SME on a thing can seem like bullshit, but my presence and knowledge is still valuable to those users. Still critical in a crisis too. Also I can take like 4 hour naps and work on my hobbies. Maybe just try finding other things to do lol
Say you're working in a call-center for an insurance company. You could look at it one way - you're a small part of a great thing, the idea of inn-sewer-ants, that means people in society have some level of safety when things go wrong.
But it becomes alienating when you see that it, along with pretty much all business, is a construct to funnel wealth to the people at the top, whilst extracting as much value as it can from the powerless people at the bottom.
Capitalism is innately more alienating the closer to the bottom you are, because due to the division of labour, people no longer have much of a connection to the results of the work they are doing, unless they are in an industry that is innately creative, such as coding, or vocational and involves seeing the direct results of helping people out.
Alienation may be part of it, but it could also be due to a variance in how people perceive the world.
A health insurance company might have employees with different understandings of how the world works. Some may feel they are helping people who are sick, and others may feel they are skimming money off the top of sick people.
The former employees might feel quite satisfied with their work and the later naturally feels depressed and anxious.
Or the more cynical people are more likely to feel alienation (not because alienation causes cynicism - though it does - but because cynicism causes alienation).
But ideal workers who are neither naive nor cynical - how do they see the situation?
I think that's the crux of it. Society has got more complex with industrialisation and globalisation. There's those at the top who have autonomy and are well paid and then you have an army of workers at the bottom who have no say in anything. Capitalism is fundamentally about exploiting labour - you have to extract more value from the worker than it costs to hire him to make a profit. Exploiting labour has become a lot easier in the last 40 years with developing countries joining the labour pool.
"The Economist" releasing an article pro-capitalism appealing to the worthiness of their base (1.).. in which world would they agree with the author of the book?
1. "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations, and a resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour."
This article isn't quite arguing along the same axis as Graeber. He wasn't working with a purposely illegible definitions, and builds of a sort of taxonomy of bullshit, with one type not really related to another.
I found the anthropological perspective fairly refreshing. Instead of starting from a definition, model or theory, it starts from people's opinions. It is certainly worth exploring that many people feel their job is bullshit. People know what bullshit means to them. Grafting that onto a tightly defined (in this case marxist) concept like "Alienation" is the opposite of that.
If companies didn't have as many lawyers, other companies wouldn't need as many. If accounting rules were simpler, we'd need fewer accountants. That's one type of bullshit. Another might be lawyers and accountants who just don't do much. Those don't reduce to the same thing, as this article attempts to.
I think if a writer chooses the term "bullshit" rather than a more precise term, and that frames things. If someone makes a scientific argument, you don't negate it with a legal one.
Anyway... I read Graeber's book simultaneously with "complacent class," By Tyler Cowen. I was amused by the serendipity. Cowen's is from the other end of the philosophical spectrum. His book had a Schumpeterian feel. Both were examining areas that are hard to measure, and thus aren't "where the light is" in terms of the old economist adage. It's easy to measure the productivity of steel workers, harder to define productivity of administrative work... the kind of work that has become very prevalent.
Both note (I think) some similar pseudo data points. One was that most (other people's) attempts to quantify office workers productivity did not find that PCs introduction in the 90s had any effect. Graeber thinks about it in decidedly non economist terms. Office workers produce "paperwork," letters, memos, reports, etc. We now have a lot more of these, thanks to Dell. The "data point" is academia. Both note a (this one is more legible) a steep rise in administration/academic ratios at universities.
To me, I found the argument convincing. I suspect FB may be the most inefficient organisation that has ever existed... or close. Twitter too, on a smaller scale. I strongly suspect that if FB's ad business happened to generate only $5bn, they would run FB on that budget instead. I don't think FB would be different, acquisitions aside. That's not a proveable suspicion though.
Meanwhile Wikipedia, for all the flak it receives for expansive expenses, is incredibly resource efficient. It's also a very big site, and it runs on a budget 1,000X smaller than FB's. It runs on a smaller budget than stackoverflow, a site modeled on wikipedia. I strongly suspect that if it had been founded as a startup, Wikipedia would spend many times more.
The reason both books were interesting to me is that they consciously try to sidestep the "are efficient market theories true?" question. Its tedious and we have hundreds of years of boring articles like this one on commenting on it.
I was surprised by the cheerleading in HN when Graeber’s work was published because it made no sense to me. I personally think that 70% of people who work in any company in which Paul Graham has invested are doing bullshit jobs - but surely no one cares what jobs I consider bullshit.
But that’s the rub, a job is bullshit iff the worker doing the job considers it bullshit. Also, it’s a matter of degrees. You don’t have some part of your job that you honestly don’t consider to be bullshit? A meeting that could have been an email? Some interaction with HR? You’ve never once been effected by political infighting or careerism?
i recommend everyone read the book referenced here. ignore the haters in the comments, it will change your life. it will at the very least make you consider how to spend the actual time that we’re alive. it’s up to you to comprehend and therefore benefit, since, in this world, it’s dangerous information.
And the newspaper's quite refreshingly and frankly open about that fact:
And now we beg to submit the following detail of the plans which we have thoroughly organised to carry into effect these objects of our ardent desires, in the following PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country....
That’s great, and I’m a sea otter because it is so written. Send me a link to the portfolio of everyone who has influence over what gets written and I’ll show you how they decide what to publish.
I'm sorry, but are you agreeing with me that the Economist has a clearly articulated editorial bias or not?
Because quite plainly, they do.
And I would expect that to be exercised through editorial control and directives.
If you think the Economist does NOT have an editorial bias, or a different editorial bias, what is your basis for claiming so, and in the latter case, what is that bias?
You seem to be putting "disagree with dredmorbius" ahead of "express myself clearly". Try the latter.
I’m a bit speechless at this point. I’ve written about 5 posts so far stating that they have a bias, the actual one definitely not clearly articulated, including several you’ve responded to. No offense, I think what I’ve written is clear, but that you may be confused.
Of course! Everything can have a bias - that's well understood. Just because something can have one, doesn't mean it does. If one finds bias in the research methods or data in the article - one can conduct their own study and submit their results. Ironically, the research from Cambridge talks about a bias in the original thesis of "BS jobs".
That would be the The Economist Group, and by extension it's owners. Had it been a stock company with thousands or millions stockholders it would be safer to assume that they most likely doesn't hold that much influence over the editorial content, but I believe The Economist Groups only have a handful stockholders.
Ideally I'd say that "they" are the editors, but we don't know what level of influence the owners have, so "they" could be the Cadbury family.
Yes, I'm familiar. Based on the drivel that comes out of the Economist on a regular basis, I've long made the conclusion that "they" and whomever their close friends are/they vacation with are the "editors". I don't think it's a remarkable claim. I'm not expecting to see any WaPo articles criticizing Amazon anytime soon, either.
It might not follow the guidelines - but I given it's about an article that tries to rebut "bullshit jobs", it's a lot more valid (and funny) than saying "I think X is bullshit" in any other circumstance.
Of course it is bullshit. As if a capitalist society would produce so much truly wasted effort. The people who think their job is bullshit just don’t have the perspective to understand how it fits into the broader scheme of things.
Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market. Businesses just follow the money. It can be as inefficient as society allows it to become. As long as most people can ignore the reality.
If the banks were only loaning people money to collect sea shells, then the entire global economy would end up revolving around sea shell collection.
Then some rational people would eventually write books claiming that seashell collection is a bullshit job, we don't need so many seashells... Then people like you would post comments saying "That's not true, obviously we need seashells because capitalism would never allow for such inefficiency."
> Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market.
I don't know which it's more of; mysterious or annoying that people keep repeating this... simplistic fallacy. WTF does one have to do with the other?!? "Capitalism" or "a free market" is how the game is played or what it is about; "currency" or the monetary supply is just the markers used to count points in the game. They're not the same thing.
In the game of Monopoly new currency is injected constantly, when players get 200 $ (? IIRC) for completing each lap around the board. Does that make the goal of the game not about amassing all the money[1] and bankrupting the other players? No, of course not. The goal of the game and the markers used to count progress towards that goal are different things.
Conflating them is committing a stupid fallacy, even more so in real life than in the game.
____
[1]: All the money in circulation, regardless of how much that happens to be.
There is a massive difference. In monopoly, everyone gets the same amount when they cross 'Go'. If we had taken the rule from the real world, people would be paid proportionally to their net worth (value of all assets). Real life is even less fair than monopoly in that aspect.
If two people own shares of a company which grows at 10% per year; one person owns $1 million worth of shares and another owns $1000 worth of shares. The first person gets $100K worth of additional wealth in the first year, the other person gets only $100... Then the following year, the compounding effect increases the gap between them even more.
Even if that growth was completely natural (no central bank intervention), it would still be unfair... But what makes the system so incredibly unjust is that all this growth is ARTIFICIAL. The central banks print money and push it into the economy; the institutions on the front line then basically use that new money to pay one another for services; thus wiping out each other's debts using the freshly printed money. It's a giant, multi-layer pyramid scheme.
Nothing like a bit of reduction ad absurdum to start the day.
I don’t deny that there is some wasted effort, what I argue against is that the amount of truly wasted effort is significant and that the measure for whether or not a job is bullshit should be that the person doing the job thinks it shouldn’t exist.
We are capitalist in as much as you and I are allowed to build a machine and pay people to run it. I agree there are no free markets, all markets are created by governments just as all currency is.
