In Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber examines the current phenomenon of jobs that seem unnecessary. Why do insurance claims examiners need to exist? Or for that matter, most bankers, financiers, medical administrators, university administrators, and the like. Graeber concludes that most of these jobs exist due to a complex of mutually reinforcing constraints, concerns, and goals to which politicians, liberal elites, and corporations have committed themselves.
Graeber bases his book on an essay he wrote in 2013, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” This essay got fantastic interaction and many people shared or reposted or retweeted it to their friends and coworkers. Graeber solicited feedback from readers and was inundated with anecdotes about their bullshit jobs, some of which were amusing and many of which were depressing. Graeber collected these anecdotes and used them to come up with his five classifications of bullshit jobs, as well as for expanding on his earlier theory about why bullshit jobs exist.
Graeber himself is a bit of an interesting character. He is a University of Chicago-trained anthropologist and an anarchist who has written multiple books and numerous research papers. He achieved some notoriety in 2005 when Yale University, where he was an associate professor, declined to renew his teaching contract. Graeber and others speculated that this may have been connected to his involvement with protests and direct action, including his support for the efforts of some Yale students to unionize Yale graduate students. Graeber's non-reinstatement by the university was met with condemnation from several eminent anthropologists including Maurice Bloch and Laura Nader (the sister of Ralph Nader). Ultimately, Yale chose not to reinstate Graeber, although he was granted one year of sabbatical. He now lectures at the London School of Economics.
Graeber begins the book with a discussion about what makes a job bullshit. Graeber distinguishes a bullshit job from a shit job. A shit job is a job that needs to exist or provides an obvious social good, but is low-paying, onerous, monotonous, dangerous or generally just a bummer. In other words, shit. Think custodians, lawn crews, road and construction workers, store shelf stockers and cashiers, childcare providers, nurses, and low-paid medical staff, etc. These professions are contrasted with bullshit jobs, jobs which are essentially unnecessary. Graeber's example list cites “HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, [and] corporate lawyers…” Graeber claims that if these sorts of jobs were to simply and suddenly vanish, the world probably wouldn't be much worse off and might actually be markedly improved.
Graeber attempts to define why some jobs are bullshit and what makes them so. By the end of the first chapter, Graeber establishes this definition of bullshit jobs:
Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.1
This definition serves Graeber for the duration of the book. He uses it to distinguish between jobs that are bullshit and jobs that are merely bad, low-paying, dull or harmful.
Graeber breaks bullshit jobs down into five, non-mutually exclusive categories. These are:
- Flunkies
These jobs essentially exist to fill out numbers in a sort of neo-feudal retinue that Graeber alleges has cropped up in corporate circles and at universities. When a manager needs to hire more people so he can have more people to manage, those people are flunkies.
\ - Goons
Goons essentially exist to do jobs that are harmful or shouldn't exist. Call center employees, the people who investigate welfare recipients, urine analysis centers for drug addicts, etc.
\ - Duct tapers
People hired to solve problems that are either intentional or known but won't be solved. For instance, an employee hired to forward emails to the right people, even though that could be automated, but a VP doesn't like the idea of it being automated, so it's done manually. They exist to solve easily-solvable problems.
\ - Box tickers
Jobs that exist purely to say such-and-such box has been ticked. People whose job it is to verify that their company is in compliance with industry or trade or government regulations and requirements. For instance, yearly PCI (payment cards industry) compliance investigations and reports.
\ - Taskmasters
People who make work for other people but don't do much themselves. Ticket filers, those who tell people what tasks to work on, managers and the like.
One idea that Graeber consistently attacks in his book is the idea that people would choose not to work if they didn't have to. Graeber claims that many economists simply assume that people only work due to financial considerations, and would simply become listless layabouts given the opportunity. He says as much here:
The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course, they'll take it. In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case. Human beings certainly tend to rankle over what they consider excessive or degrading work; few may be inclined to work at the pace or intensity that ‘scientific managers’ have, since the 1920s, decided they should; people also have a particular aversion to being humiliated. But leave them to their own devices, and they almost invariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do.2
It seems that most people actually know this to be the case. Take for instance shipwreck literature, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. In these books the shipwrecked Europeans work quite vigorously on their islands, constructing dwellings, fashioning clothing, and even generally improving the land, often quite in advance of what they need in order to survive. It would be almost unthinkable that shipwreck survivors would simply lounge on the beach all day, even though they absolutely could. Graeber chalks the popular conception of people as naturally lazy up to a convenient myth perpetrated by economics. The concept of marginal utility lends itself to the interpretation that people will only work if they find it advantageous to do so. This ignores psychology which suggests that people almost always find some way to occupy their time for many reasons including staving off boredom, gaining a sense of accomplishment or feeling that they are in some way useful.
Graeber compares work to play, drawing on the ideas of the psychologist Karl Groos, and reasons that perhaps the reason bullshit make-work grates so hard on people is that it's a very clear message that they are subordinated to another person. If your boss gives you an order that's reasonable, that makes sense because he's your boss. But if your boss gives you a stupid order with no more justification than “I told you to” or “I'm the boss, do what I say,” it's infuriating because there is no clearer signal that you are entirely at their mercy. Graeber summarizes this idea thusly: “If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom."3
At certain points in the book, Graeber's training as an anthropologist shines through. Midway through the book, he discusses the concept of wage-labor and how it is a relatively recent invention. Nowadays it's a deeply ingrained belief that if one is being paid to do a job, they can generally be told how to go about it. However, this was absolutely not the norm until recently. Historically a person would pay another person for a good, for instance paying a blacksmith for a horseshoe. However, one couldn't demand that the blacksmith work faster or harder just by virtue of being the one paying him. If you told a blacksmith how fast to make a sword he would be liable to refuse to work for you, and a blacksmith could generally afford to do that unless you were a noble. In general, the only way you could make a demand on the blacksmith for faster production or how they go about their craft would be to enslave them. The history of wage-labor is a really interesting topic that Graeber talks about at some length. He cites a book on the subject called The Ancient Economy by M. I. Finley.
Graeber also discusses how many of our most basic commonsense ideas about economics may not actually be rooted in economics at all. For instance, Adam Smith was not what we would think of as an economist, but rather a philosopher specializing in morality. It's hard to imagine that Smith's ideas of morality wouldn't affect his nascent understanding of the field of economics. Graeber also discusses the religious and economic handwringing that took place during 16th Century England concerning the refusal of young men to spend time in service before marrying. Apparently, in England and Northern Europe, it was common for young men to be indentured to another family for a period of “service” during which the young man would learn proper comportment and hopefully a skilled trade such as glassworking, metalworking, carpentry or some other craft. Women would also be indentured to learn to keep a home and raise children. However, due to the atrophy of the guild system, young men eventually couldn't hope to become master craftsmen, meaning they would forever spend their time in the employ of another person. Due to the then-current expectation that a craftsman have his own shop prior to marrying, this effectively meant many young men could never hope to marry. Therefore, they rebelled against this structure of began marrying early. Religious figures became quite concerned about the possibility that the nation would be overrun with the indigent. This is what sparked Thomas Malthus’ writing of “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in which he argued that the state should do its utmost to curb overpopulation and the continued breeding of the lower classes.
Graeber also makes an interesting point about what he calls the “voluntariat” or the phenomenon of millions of people volunteering their labor for free and creating profits for corporations. Probably the most recognizable example of this is the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement. Millions of programmers across the world have contributed to open-source projects, which are frequently used by companies to turn a profit. Medium is another good example. Medium invites millions of users to write articles to appear on the site in hopes that their work may attract the engagement of many other users. If they do get a lot of engagement with their article, Medium may pay them some amount of money. But the vast majority of users never make anything from the platform, and instead, simply volunteer their work in the hopes that they may get something out of it. This might not seem strange because we've become so used to it, but imagine if you researched and wrote a news piece and submitted it to a newspaper. If the newspaper declined to pay you for the piece, citing lack of interest in the story or poor writing, but still published anyway, you'd likely feel like you'd been ripped off. Even though that is exactly what Medium does, but due in part to the online nature of the medium (heh heh) you don't see it that way.
A particularly interesting question Graeber poses near the end of the book is the question of what would have happened to the Soviet Union if they'd had computers. One of the greatest challenges for the Soviet Union was one of organization. Any centrally planned economy needs great organization, and unfortunately, the Soviet Union fell before the widespread adoption of computers. If they had stuck around for another decade, what would have happened? Might they have overcome their difficulties with central planning? It's an interesting question.
In summary, Graeber's book is well worth the time. It's relatively short and packed chockerbock full of interesting topics and questions, in addition to Graeber's central argument that there are a great many unnecessary jobs. It's quite a remarkable book, and it's surprising it isn't better known. Graeber makes a strong case that many of the current jobs in our economy could be eliminated and people could work greatly reduced hours with relatively little negative impact. Graeber closes out the book with a short discussion of how we might be able to achieve this goal and recommends a universal basic income (UBI).
There are a ton of great book recommendations in this book, which includes a bibliography. This is just a selection of the ones that seemed essential.
- Rutger Bergman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
- Lynn Chancer, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness
- Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy
- Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
- Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
- John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power
- —, The New Industrial State
- —, The Affluent Society
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
- —, The Utopia of Rules: Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
- Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory
- John Holloway, Crack Capitalism
- Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White
- Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
- Richard Sennett, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen