Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber
The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It
Many surveys ask if people are happy at work. None ask whether their jobs should exist in the first place.
Given the technological advances of the past century would expect that we’d be working only 15 hour weeks these days. But it’s as if we’re making up bullshit jobs just to keep ourselves busy and occupied.
[bq] “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”
[bq] “Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.”
[bq] “We have become a civilization based on work - not even ‘productive work’ but works as an end and meaning in itself.”
1. What is a Bullshit Job?
[bq] One key identifier: “If the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world."
Even more key factor: Even the person who does the job can’t convince himself of a good reason why it needs to be done.
Traditionally probably more bullshit jobs (and less supervision) in public sector than in private sector, but they can really be found everywhere.
UK poll by YouGov found that 37% of people think their job made no meaningful contribution to the world, all they did was be visibly busy. Schouten & Nelson poll in Holland found same for 40% of people [p.6]. Those are not e.g. service workers with shitty but meaningful/necessary jobs. These are mainly random office workers.
Shit jobs are not necessarily bullshit jobs. In fact, many bullshit jobs are not shit jobs but seemingly cushy office jobs.
More than just being pointless, there’s usually also some pretence or fraud in bullshit jobs. Even if the jobholder doesn’t believe in the value, he still mist keep up that image.
Self-perception is the best measure of bullshit jobs If someone thinks their job is bullshit, it probably is.
[bq] “Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.”
Bullshit job holders can often be seen as high achievers, while secretly they know the truth and feel like it’s all based on a lie.
The private sector is now often just as bloated and bureaucratic as the public sector.
While at the bottom of the company hierarchy things are more and more downsized and optimized, more and more admin and managerial roles spring up.
Almost all jobs contain some bullshit aspects, and the ratio of this seems to be increasing.
[bq] “More than half of working hours in American offices are spent on bullshit, and the problem is getting worse.”
[bq] “We can probably calculate that at least half of all work being done in our society could be eliminated without any real difference at all. […] We could easily become societies of leisure and institute a twenty-hour workweek. Maybe even fifteen-hour week. Instead we find ourselves, as a society, condemned to spending most of our time at work, performing tasks that we feel make no difference in the world whatsoever.”
2. What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?
Five basic types of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and task masters.
Flunkies:
Make someone else look/feel important, kind of like feudal retainers.
Extreme example: Elevator operators.
Managers jobs in some cases entirely rely on the existence of flunkies.
Goons:
Hired to do some form of manipulative or aggressive jobs, like telemarketers or lobbyists.
Often involves talking people into things you know aren’t good for them.
Duct Tapers:
People who are there to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
E.g. undoing the damage done by sloppy/incompetent superiors.
Box Tickers:
Allow an organisation to claim they are doing something which in reality they are not.
E.g. committee to investigate things no one is ever going to do anything about anyway. Many reports are also just filed away and never looked at or used.
Task Masters:
Type I: Assign tasks to others who didn’t need to be told to do so
Type II: Actively create new bullshit work to assign to others
There are also more complex bullshit jobs that mix several of these five types.
3. Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?
Despite knowingly being paid for essentially doing nothing, many people with bullshit jobs are unhappy or even depressed.
Parents now often feel like kids should have work experience in school or college, rather than get real experiences for some years without money concerns, even if that work is utterly pointless.
Economic theory is based on costs and benefits. But this is empirically really unsuitable to human behaviour/motivation. Most people would actually rather do a shit (but useful) job, than get paid to do nothing at all.
Early on children discover and immense “pleasure at being the cause”, seeing that they can influence things in their surrounding, whether that’s useful or not. This is the basis of play. Make-believe play is great. But make-believe work is terrible, following outside-imposed rules.
Make-believe work is a pretty new phenomenon. For most of human history it was understood that there were “periodic intense bursts of energy followed by relaxation.”
[bq] “Not only is it what humans will do if left to their own devices, but there is no reason to believe that forcing them to act otherwise is likely to cause greater efficiency or productivity. Often it will have precisely the opposite effect.”
Work was largely unsupervised for most of history and people free to do it in any way they wanted as long as there were results. Changed on plantations where owners got worried that if slaves have idle time they might start plotting revolts or escapes, so they made up useless tasks to keep them busy.
In modern terms it’s quite different. Now, employers who pay their employees don’t feel like idleness is dangerous, but like it’s theft. They paid for that persons time so in a weird sense they feel like they own it.
[NFW: Have to change our thinking from this to thinking rather about the output of the work as the thing we are paying for, and that might actually be higher/better with more idleness]
In history people could buy a person’s product or even a person (slavery), but the idea that you can buy a person’s time would have seemed crazy. Waged-labor a very new concept.
Without clocks, time was measured by actions (e.g. cooking a pot of rice) rather than the other way round.
But eventually clocks did bring “absolute” time to everyone and made it possible to chop it up and sell it.
Points at essay: “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” by E. P. Thomson on history of clock/time.
Puritanism introduced to concept of time discipline.
First people in factories fought this notion of selling their time, but then used it for their own demands like better hourly wages, overtime pay, eight hours workdays, and eventually the notion of selling your time became fully ingrained.
Instead of being rewarded or praised for doing your work quick, if you’re paid hourly you’re often punished with pointless busy work if you finish too quick. So workers learn not to be too efficient.
[NFW: Again: Lack of time off as an enemy of efficiency, not the other way round]
In many cases people’s real job is just to be on call if something happens, and that would be totally fine and meaningful, but employers who pay by the hour can’t accept that these workers are not busy when nothing happens.
4. What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job
There are many components that make bullshit jobs so miserable, from the constant make-believe to the sheer knowledge that what you do is pointless. At best it causes boredom, but at worst severe anxiety.
Also leads to stress and workplace tension/aggression.
[bq] “‘Stress-related’ ailments seem a frequent consequence of bullshit jobs.”
[bq] “The lack of a sense of purpose eats away at people."
Immune system weakens and people actually get sucks more often. Also depression not too uncommon.
In many cases bullshit work is so draining that workers don’t feel like pursuing their creative passions outside of work.
5. Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating
The ratio of bullshit jobs is increasing.
[bq] “Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.”
[bq] “Part of the reason no one has noticed is that people simply refused to believe capitalism could produce such results.”
Also more and more trend from manufacturing and farming to service economy.
Robert Taylor, in 1992, defined fourth sector as “information work” (p. 148). This is actually the part of the service sector that has been increasing (consultants, administrators, IT professionals, …), not the waiters, barbers, or sales clerks. This knowledge work is where the highest potential for bullshit jobs lies.
Bullshit is particularly common in the financial industry, with many jobs even being done deliberately bad or inefficient to syphon of money from customers.
One ridiculous example: HR forces bank employees to take part in “voluntary” charity action, which everybody hates and knows hot phony it is, just so bank can get award for “best employer to work for”.
In many cases a lot of the middle/low level jobs could be entirely automated already, but even if presented with the facts, top executives just get angry. They are happy to sacrifice efficiency in order to keep their sense of power of having a large bloated staff under them, like feudal lords.
[bq] “I was using feudal lords and retainers as a metaphor […]. But in the case of banks, at least, it’s not clear how much is metaphor and how much is literal truth.”
If it was purely about the economics of rational capitalism, there wouldn’t be any bullshit jobs. But this doesn’t take into account emotions and politics.
[bq] “The whole point is to grab a pot of loot, either stealing it from one’s enemies or extracting it from commoners by means of fees, tolls, rents, and levies, and then redistributing it. In the process, one creates an entourage of followers that is both the visible measure of one’s pomp and magnificence, and at the same time, a means of distributing political favor: for instance […] creating an elaborate hierarchy of honors and titles for lower-ranking nobles to squabble over.”
[NFW: If these lower ranking people aren’t visibly busy all the time it reduces your sense of magnificence. Not compatible with remote work.]
[bq] “‘Efficiency' has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and other presumed ‘efficiency experts’, so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.”
6. Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment
[bq] “For some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafes arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.”
[bq] “Opinion writers are the moralists of our day. They are the secular equivalent of preachers, their arguments reflect a very long theological tradition of valorizing work as a sacred duty, at once curse and blessing, and seeing humans as inherently sinful, lazy beings who can be expected to shirk that duty if they can.”
Much of economics is originally rooted in theology. Some notions are almost unquestionable. Someone hardworking must be admirable, and someone who avoids work must be contemptible.
It seems almost like there is an inverse relationship between how much social value your job creates, and how much it pays.
[bq] “There seems to be a broad consensus not so much even that work is good, but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."
[bq] About academics: “There is a sense that the pleasurable aspects of one’s calling, such as thinking, were not really what one is being paid for; they were better seen as occasional indulgences one is granted in recognition for one’s real work, which is largely about filling out forms.”
Not just academics, but everyone, has this feeling that they need to pretend to be busy, stressed and overworked to deserve their pay, and that it can’t be the genuinely enjoyable parts of their jobs that one is being paid for. Some businesses even go as far as thinking that if there’s a part of work that’s gratifying/enjoyable, they shouldn’t have to pay for it.
Work, as opposed to play, is something we don’t do for its own sake, but with a goal or utility in mind.
During Middle Ages work (especially in service in other’s households) was seen as an important part of growing up that almost everyone, from poor to rich, went through, before “graduating” this and moving on to form a family of their own and become a master rather than an apprentice.
But under capitalism this moving on part fell away and many poor became disillusioned. But middle class (mainly Puritans) were appalled that poor started marrying and having kids so early and pushed for the virtuousness of work, to fulfill these poor.
In industrial revolution Thomas Carlyle in his “Gospel of Work” said god had intentionally left the world unfinished to allow humans to complete his work through labor.
[q] “A man perfects himself by work.”
- Thomas Carlyle [Full quote p. 229, worth looking into]
[q] Carlyle believed that, as many do today, “if work is noble, then the most noble work should not be compensated, since it is obscene to put a price on something of such absolute value."
But workers were seeing it different, and focused on the value they were creating for the rich. Especially American workers, fed up with creating value for British industrialists. Those were the foot soldiers fighting the war for independence.
Later many Protestant workers actually turned virtuousness of work into an anti-capitalism idea.
[q] “Work was a sacred duty and a claim to moral and political superiority over the idle rich.”
- Dimitra Doulas and Paul Durrenberger
This view is known as “Producerism”.
But partly due to very successful campaigns by rich capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, was quickly replaced by consumerism.
[q] “We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some sort of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.”
- Buckminster Fuller
In 20th century kind of went back to Puritan perception of work as something good that forms our character.
[bq] “A sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.”
Caught up in a bizarre situation: Many define their dignity and self-worth through their work, but also many hate their jobs.
[bq] “The paradox of modern work."
If we really see work as a character-forming tool like Puritans, then it makes sense that the more we hate work, the better. Self-sacrifice. We feel that dignity and self-worth because we hate our jobs.
[NFW: Also can explain our “love” of busyness, stress, and overwork.]
7. What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?
We use pain at the workplace to justify our consumerist pleasures.
Moral envy is an interesting topic. It’s rife in religious or activism circles, where people envy others who are more virtuous than them. Same could be happening in work scenario, and be reason why middle management often resents actual workers.
[q] “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
- H. L. Mencken
One possible solution to reduce the number of bullshit jobs would be to introduce Universal Basic Income.
Would massively reduce bureaucracy, and enable poorer people to be much more equal. Would get rid of moral judgment of those who don’t work (to some extent).
It would separate work from livelihood.