The 1st & last David Graeber book I reviewed/summarized was "Debt - The First 5,000 Years".
I had to quit reading that book several times. It was just too depressing! So much of the book is, the many, many ways humanity has invented to implement slavery.
It took me just over a year to write the review/summary, which came in at 35.8k words - oops!
The book was 226k words. So my review/summary was a paltry ~16% of the size of the original. Actually not so bad.
I am not going to follow my in-depth, chapter-by-chapter format for "Bullshit Jobs". I'm going to try & hit the high points, with lots of excerpts. Plus, I have an overall uncomfortable conclusion about the meaning of this work.
So this whole thing got started in 2013, when Graeber published an article in a new radical magazine Strike!, titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs".
The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it?Graeber then includes the article. It starts off referencing a piece we've come across several times before: "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren", by John Maynard Keynes, 1930. I think I first talked about this piece in my very 1st post on Economy of Plenty. Like everyone else, Graeber wants to know, where are the 15 hour work weeks that Keynes predicted?
I'm going to just excerpt the points I highlighted in the Preface to get us started:
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.The initial post in "Strike!" went viral, was translated into 12 languages. Polls taken of workers got to as high as 40% of workers saying they had bullshit jobs - Graeber had guestimated 20%....
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
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But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs".
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For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers,
actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants to similarly vanish....
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working three- to four-hour days.
Graeber got hundreds of enthusiastic responses. He recounts many of these tales of woe bullshit throughout the book.
Back to Preface excerpts:
All I did in the essay was to pursue this insight: whenever you find someone doing something in the name of economic efficiency that seems completely economically irrational (like, say, paying people good money to do nothing all day), one had best start by asking, as the ancient Romans did, “Qui bono?”—“Who benefits?”—and how.I hadn't remembered Graeber slamming the inequality/out-of-control-oligarchy issue as much as he does.This is less a conspiracy theory approach than it is an anticonspiracy theory. I was asking why action wasn’t taken. Economic trends happen for all sorts of reasons, but if they cause problems for the rich and powerful, those rich and powerful people will pressure institutions to step in and do something about the matter.
Ugh. He uses the "s" word. Slavery really is at the core of western civilizations, just as it was in Roman law.
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.
Chapter 1, "What Is a Bullshit Job?".
Graeber takes 3 iterations to get to his "Final Working Definition":
Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.LOL, leading into the Final Working Definition. Graeber really has a gift for describing things which are completely appropriate, but also completely orthogonal to normal viewpoints....
Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
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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.
There seems to be a certain fascination about what kind of job being a Mafia hitman is:
This point allows us to refine our definition even further. When people speak of bullshit jobs, they are generally referring to employment that involves being paid to work for someone else, either on a waged or salaried basis (most would also include paid consultancies). Obviously, there are many self-employed people who manage to get money from others by means of falsely pretending to provide them with some benefit or service (normally we call them grifters, scam artists, charlatans, or frauds), just as there are self-employed people who get money off others by doing or threatening to do them harm (normally we refer to them as muggers, burglars, extortionists, or thieves). In the first case, at least, we can definitely speak of bullshit, but not of bullshit jobs, because these aren’t “jobs,” properly speaking. A con job is an act, not a profession. So is a Brink’s job. People do sometimes speak of professional burglars, but this is just a way of saying that theft is the burglar’s primary source of income. No one is actually paying the burglar regular wages or a salary to break into people’s homes. For this reason, one cannot say that burglar is, precisely, a job, either.Graeber defines 3 general classes of jobs. He 1st discussses "shit jobs":
Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.&, I will point out, they often literally involve shit, i.e., cleaning toilets.
So:
So far, we have established three broad categories of jobs: useful jobs (which may or may not be shit jobs), bullshit jobs, and a small but ugly penumbra of jobs such as gangsters, slumlords, top corporate lawyers, or hedge fund CEOs, made up of people who are basically just selfish bastards and don’t really pretend to be anything else.Next up, Jeffrey Sachs. Somehow I had missed this, up to just now. The only online course I ever took was Sachs's "The Age of Sustainable Development", in 2013. Sachs shares his insight into Wall Street types:
If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core . . . both parties are up to their necks in this.In the useful jobs category: (which may or may not be shit): the politician I hero-worshipped for years, BHO, Barack Hussein Obama, completely threw Main Street under the bus in favor of a "soft landing" for Wall Street in the 2008 crisis. I completely believe, this is where the Democratic Party put us on the road to The Orange Turd.But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I have waited for four years . . . five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I’ve not seen it once.
Capitalism hates labor. It hates workers. It hates real people, with children, bills, etc.
the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs. (As we’ll see, in some companies, this was literally the case.) The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.We are in Late Stage Capitalism. Which loves only 1 thing: $$$. It's only purpose is to convert everything into $$$. Hence our current rape/pillage/strip for parts government.
So, of course, it LOVES AI. A post recently, an interview between Paul Krugman & historian Heather Cox Richardson, both mentioned how there had ever been another instance of corporations INSISTING that their employees adopt a new technology.
Doctorow also recently posted, comparing this situation to when the new tech was the web. Corporate IT totally fought having to support their users' desire to use the web. The users were crazy for the web.
Versus, with GenAI, creatives like it, everyone else hates it.
Chapter 2, "What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?"
Oh boy, a taxonomy! Graeber recounts lots of stories of jobs sent in to him in each of the 5 species:
I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.Phew! That was a lot! But Graeber is not quite done with his taxonomy. The chapter now has a section "on complex multiform bullshit jobs".
- what flunkies do
Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important.Another term for this category might be “feudal retainers.” Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.
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You cannot be magnificent without an entourage. And for the truly magnificent, the very uselessness of the uniformed retainers hovering around you is the greatest testimony to your greatness.
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Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction and the subsequent redistribution of the loot.
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assigning people minor tasks as an excuse to have them hang around making you look impressive has a long and honorable history
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- what goons do
The use of this term is, of course, metaphorical: I’m not using it to mean actual gangsters or other forms of hired muscle. Rather, I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them.
The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society.
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- what duct tapers do
Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. I am adopting the term from the software industry, but I think it has more general applicability.
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The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.
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There is, it seems, a whole genre of jobs that involve correcting the damage done by a superior who holds his position for reasons unrelated to ability to do the work.
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- what box tickers do
I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.
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We’re all familiar with box ticking as a form of government. If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad—taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops—the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second of all, it’s a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it. (This is usually not true, either.) A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not.
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If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports.
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- what taskmasters do
Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves. Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.
Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators. Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.
it can also sometimes be clear that a job is bullshit but still be difficult to determine precisely which of the five categories it belongs to. Often it may seem to contain elements of several. A box ticker might also be a flunky, or might end up becoming a mere flunky if the organization’s internal rules change; a flunky might also be a part-time duct taper or become a full-time duct taper if a problem arises and, instead of fixing it, the boss decides it would be easier to just reassign one of his idle minions to deal with the effects.2 last points in this chapter:
- Work performed in support of a bullshit job automatically becomes a 2nd order bullshit job. LOL, 37% of jobs are 1st order bullshit jobs, & 37% of the 63% of jobs that are not bullshit are 2nd order bullshit jobs.
If you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much.
I should add as a final note there was really only one class of people that not only denied their jobs were pointless but expressed outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These were—predictably enough—business owners, and anyone else in charge of hiring and firing.
Chapter 3, "Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1)"
Workplaces are fascist. They’re cults designed to eat your life; bosses hoard your minutes jealously like dragons hoard gold.
Graeber returns to a concept he developed in "Debt" - I don't remember him tying in "Debt" this much, but it makes perfect sense. Like the rest of the book, this chapter is highly anecdotal.
—NouriI wrote about the phenomenon of “moral confusion.” I took as my example the fact that throughout human history, most people seem to have agreed both that paying back one’s debts was the essence of morality and that moneylenders were evil. While the rise of bullshit jobs is a comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar moral embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract. (“We can’t just give poor people handouts! Then they won’t have any incentive to look for work!”) On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends to contradict these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and react to situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would predict. The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials, these theories about human nature are wrong.
Section titles:- about one young man apparently handed a sinecure who nonetheless found himself unable to handle the situation
Good word, sinecure. I think originally with liturgical origins? - concerning the experience of falseness and purposelessness at the core of bullshit jobs, and the importance now felt of conveying the experience of falseness and purposelessness to youth
- why many of our fundamental assumptions on human motivation appear to be incorrect
This section opens with a nice quote from Nikola Tesla, about a non-bullshit job:
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
Ha ha, our old friend, "homo economicus", as usual, gets kicked around a bit. Possibly the worst model of human behavior ever developed. But he is still at the bottom of most modern economic theory.Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists’ model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs. The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it.
So what is missing in a meaningless job? Agency. Purpose. Sense of self-worth.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.
There is endless empirical evidence to back this up.
As early as 1901, the German psychologist Karl Groos discovered that infants express extraordinary happiness when they first figure out they can cause predictable effects in the world, pretty much regardless of what that effect is or whether it could be construed as having any benefit to them.
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Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that “they” are the thing which just caused something to happen—the proof of which is the fact that they can make it happen again. Crucially, too, this realization is, from the very beginning, marked with a species of delight that remains the fundamental background of all subsequent human experience. ...
A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.
- a brief excursus on the history of make-work and particularly of the concept of buying other people’s time
We encounter German philosopher Schiller.
Freedom is our ability to make things up just for the sake of being able to do so.
There is an involved discussion of the concept of buying another person's time - a relatively new concept, apparently....
Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake. 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.
Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.
Hah! So the "school-to-prison" system was originally a "school-to-factory" system. Substituting "prison" (or in our current ICE era, "concencentration camp") for "factory" just lowered the wages substantially.Meanwhile, workers rebelling against oppressive conditions began adopting the same language. Many early factories didn’t allow workers to bring their own timepieces, since the owner regularly played fast and loose with the factory clock. Before long, however, workers were arguing with employers about hourly rates, demanding fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, the twelve-hour day, and then the eight-hour day. But the very act of demanding “free time,” however understandable under the circumstances, had the effect of subtly reinforcing the idea that when a worker was “on the clock,” his time truly did belong to the person who had bought it—a concept that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to their great-grandparents, as, indeed, to most people who have ever lived.
Lots of examples of "busy work". I'm paying for your time, you have to be doing something to benefit me at all times.[I may get into this in more detail later, but, this really doesn't fit with my recollection of my work history. When I was a welder, then a ship-fitter at JeffBoat, if it rained, we sat in the break room/cafeteria & played cards (euchre) - there was no question of busy work. When I delivered plane tickets, when we were waiting for tickets, there was no question of busy work - we played cards (cribbage) in the break room. But, this was in 1969-1972, pre-Reagan. Reagan was when everything started getting worse for everyone but billionaires.]
But ultimately, the need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.
So the situation was not, in the final analysis, all that fundamentally different from when me and my fellow dishwashers had to pretend to clean the baseboards. It is like taking the very worst aspect of most wage-labor jobs and substituting it for the occupation that was otherwise supposed to give meaning to your existence. It’s no wonder the soul cries out. It is a direct assault on everything that makes us human.
Chapter 4, "What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 2)"
The 1st section in this chapter is "why having a bullshit job is not always necessarily that bad".
The YouGov poll found that while 37 percent of all British workers felt their work served no purpose, only 33 percent of workers found it unfulfilling.
??? I think this probably the default case. People don't like to be miserable.The 2nd section is "on the misery of ambiguity and forced pretense".
LOL, here's a good dodge!
I also always made sure to have at least two projects run by different bosses, so that I could tell both of them that I was spending a lot of time on the other project.
The 3rd section is "on the misery of not being a cause".As noted in chapter 3, much of our sense of being a self, a being discrete from its surrounding environment, comes from the joyful realization that we can have predictable effects on the environment. This is true for infants and remains true throughout life.
I haven't shared too many of the stories that Graeber recounts, but I like a phrase at the end of this 1. This is from a temp employee whose task was to check scanned data for company loyalty cards for errors. Company policy required the data to be checked 3 times?!?!?Nigel: It is hard to explain what this level of entranced boredom was like. I found myself conversing with God, pleading for the next record to contain an error, or the next one, or the next. But the time seemed to pass quickly, like some kind of near-death experience.
The 4th section is, "on the misery of not feeling entitled to one’s misery".There was something about the sheer purity of the social uselessness of this job, combined with the crippling austerity of the process, that united the Data Perfecters. We all knew that this was bullshit. I really think that if we had been processing applications for something that had a more obvious social value—organ transplant registration, say, or tickets to [the] Glastonbury [rock festival]—then it would have felt different. I don’t mean that the process would have been any less tedious—an application form is an application form—but the knowledge that no one cared about this work, that there was really nothing of any value riding on how we did the job, made it feel like some sort of personal test of stamina, like Olympic endurance boredome for its own sake.
Ugh.
I am suggesting, then, that the very meaninglessness of bullshit employment tends to exacerbate the sadomasochistic dynamic already potentially present in any top-down hierarchical relationship.
The 5th section is, "on the misery of knowing that one is doing harm"....
Just as a prisoner in solitary confinement inevitably begins to experience brain damage, the worker deprived of any sense of purpose often experiences mental and physical atrophy.
The stories in this section are heart-breaking. Having a job that requires you to have poor, damaged people jump through hoops to qualify themselves for government help. "Soul destroying".
In all this, we are moving into somewhat different territory. Much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror when it comes to knowing you are involved in actively hurting others. Guilt, for obvious reasons. Terror, because in such environments, dark rumors will always tend to circulate about what is likely to happen to whistle-blowers. But on a day-to-day basis, all this simply deepens the texture and quality of the misery attendant on such jobs.
The chapter ends with a coda, "coda: on the effects of bullshit jobs on human creativity, and on why attempts to assert oneself creatively or politically against pointless employment might be considered a form of spiritual warfare".Let me conclude by returning to the theme of spiritual violence.
The chapter concludes:It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than ... being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises. To become a monster. It has not escaped my notice, for example, that the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves. They terrify because they menace not just your body but also your soul.
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Useless or insidious jobs that involve pretenses to public service are perhaps the worst,
Sadomasochistic power dynamics frequently emerge. (In fact, I would argue they will almost invariably emerge within top-down situations devoid of purpose unless explicit efforts are made to ensure that they do not—and sometimes even despite such efforts.) It is not for nothing that I’ve referred to the results as spiritual violence. This violence has affected our culture. Our sensibilities. Above all, it has affected our youth. Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.
How this has come to happen, and how the current situation has become normalized or even encouraged, is a topic we will explore in chapter 5. It needs to be addressed, because this is a genuine scar across our collective soul.
Chapter 5, "Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?"
Here's the 1st [long] paragraph of this chapter:
If the preceding chapters merely described forms of pointless employment that have always been with us in one way or another—or even that have always been with us since the dawn of capitalism—then matters would be distressing enough. But the situation is more dire still. There is every reason to believe that the overall number of bullshit jobs, and, even more, the overall percentage of jobs considered bullshit by those who hold them, has been increasing rapidly in recent years—alongside the ever-increasing bullshitization of useful forms of employment. In other words, this is not just a book about a hitherto neglected aspect of the world of work. It’s a book about a real social problem. Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.
Continuing ...So part of the reason no one has noticed is that people simply refused to believe that capitalism could produce such results
Wow, these graphs are really interesting. From a 3 sector to a 4 sector economy. The added sector: information.
Almost everyone assumed that the rise of such jobs had something to do with the rise of finance capital—even if there was no consensus as to how. It just seemed to make sense that, just as Wall Street profits were derived less and less from firms involved in commerce or manufacturing, and more and more from debt, speculation, and the creation of complex financial instruments, so did an ever-increasing proportion of workers come to make their living from manipulating similar abstractions.
So, muppet news flash - proliferation of bullshit jobsThese days, it’s hard to recall the almost mystical aura with which the financial sector had surrounded itself in the years leading up to 2008. Financiers had managed to convince the public—and not just the public, but social theorists, too (I well remember this)—that with instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and high-speed trading algorithms so complex they could be understood only by astrophysicists, they had, like modern alchemists, learned ways to whisk value out of nothing by means that others dared not even try to understand. Then, of course, came the crash, and it turned out that most of the instruments were scams. Many weren’t even particularly sophisticated scams.
correlated withcaused by the financialization occurring in our Late Stage Capitalism system? Hold that thought ...Yes! That appears to be what Graeber was thinking.
All I am really arguing in this book is that just as much of what the financial sector does is basically smoke and mirrors, so are most of the information-sector jobs that accompanied its rise as well.
OMG, it just seems that anymore, here in 2026, EVERYTHING IS A SCAM. Nobody's trying to just do business. Everybody is trying to trick you into bullshit fees, unnecessary subscriptions, etc. & I'm going to say, if I'm an employee trying to help my corporate employer grift the rubes, than that is a bullshit job.But here we return to the question already raised in the last chapter: If these are scams, who, exactly, is scamming whom?
The 1st section is: a brief excursus on causality and the nature of sociological explanation.
In the case of bullshit jobs, this means we can ask three questions:
2nd section: sundry notes on the role of government in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs- On the individual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?
- On social and economic levels, what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?
- On the cultural and political levels, why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?
OMG, I was such an Obama fanboy, & I still think that he is the greatest orator of my lifetime. But, how badly did he misuse his superpower? Still, he did 8 years as the 1st black president with grace & the inspiration of hope. On the other hand ...
Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America:
3rd section: concerning some false explanations for the rise of bullshit jobs“I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”
I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun....
So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
4th section: why the financial industry might be considered a paradigm for bullshit job creation
LOL, it's funny how much of this goes back to the 19th century or earlier.
As long ago as 1852, Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, was already making fun of the legal profession with the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—in which two teams of barristers keep the battle over a huge estate alive for more than a lifetime, until they’ve devoured the whole thing, whereupon they simply declare the matter moot and move on. The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.
This is followed by example after example of ... financial fraud?5th section: on some ways in which the current form of managerial feudalism resembles classical feudalism, and other ways in which it does not
Hah, I just today read an article, about how a CEO laying off people to replace them with GenAI completely misunderstood the financial author he quoted as being his inspiration. This reminds me of that.
“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.
6th section: how managerial feudalism manifests itself in the creative industries through an endless multiplication of intermediary executive ranks...
Generally speaking, extra managers are hired with the ostensible purpose of improving efficiency. But in this case, there was little to be improved; the workers themselves had boosted efficiency about as much as it was possible to do. But the managers were hired anyway. What this suggests is that what we are really dealing with here has nothing to do with efficiency but everything to do with changing understandings of the moral responsibilities of corporations. From roughly 1945 to 1975, there was what is sometimes referred to as a “Keynesian bargain” between workers, employers, and government—and part of the tacit understanding was that increases in worker productivity would indeed be matched by increases in worker compensation. A glance at the diagram on the next page confirms that this was exactly what happened. In the 1970s, the two began to part ways, with compensation remaining largely flat, and productivity taking off like a rocket.
Where did the profits from this increased productivity go? Well, much of it, as we are often reminded, ended up swelling the fortunes of the wealthiest 1 percent: investors, executives, and the upper echelons of the professional-managerial classes. ... Another considerable chunk of the benefits of increased productivity went to creating entirely new and basically pointless professional-managerial positions, usually—as we’ve seen in the case of universities—accompanied by small armies of equally pointless administrative staff. As we have seen so often, first the staff is allocated and then someone has to figure out what, if anything, they will actually do.
In other words, the feudal analogy is not even really an analogy. Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered “economic” and what is “political.”
LOL, feudalism, FTL! In academia:
Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.
In Hollywood:Where once the Hollywood studio system relied on a relatively simple relation between producers, directors, and writers, recent decades have witnessed an apparently endless process of managerial sub-infeudation, resulting in a daunting array of producers, subproducers, executive producers, consultants, and the like, all in constant search for something, anything, to actually do.
A while ago, I did a spreadsheet for the most recent John Legend album: songwriters/song: 2-11, average 5.625 ; producers/song: 1-5, average 3.08.Final section: conclusion, with a brief return to the question of three levels of causation
So the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs is being laid at the feet of financialization:
It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes—that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies—effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.
...
There seems to be an intrinsic connection between the financialization of the economy, the blossoming of information industries, and the proliferation of bullshit jobs.
...
If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman. It is increasingly a system of rent extraction where the internal logic—the system’s “laws of motion,” as the Marxists like to say—are profoundly different from capitalism, since economic and political imperatives have come to largely merge. In many ways, it resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.
Chapter 6, "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work.
So nobody in MSM or the world in general is calling "bullshit" on bullshit jobs. In fact it's often the opposite: why is this generation such a bunch of slackers? Where is their work ethic?
—Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675These calls always seem to involve everyone working more—despite the fact that, as noted, in ecological terms, a mass reduction of working hours is probably the quickest and easiest thing that could be done to save the planet.
1st section: on the impossibility of developing an absolute measure of valueEconomists measure value in terms of what they call “utility”: the degree to which a good or service is useful in satisfying a want or need, and many apply something like this to their own jobs. Do I provide something useful to the public?
Section 2: how most people in contemporary society do accept the notion of a social value that can be distinguished from economic value, even if it is very difficult to pin down what it is...
To a large degree, needs are just other people’s expectations.
...
saying all value comes from work is obviously not the same thing as saying that all work produces value.
Ah, it takes a while, but finally we get down to it: $$$.
What money brings into the picture is the ability to make precise quantitative comparisons.
Section 3: concerning the inverse relationship between the social value of work and the amount of money one is likely to be paid for itthere are certainly office buildings in the world—I’m sure anyone reading this book can think, just off the top of her head, of several—that, were they to simply vanish, would leave the world much better off.
From a 2017 economics paper:Yet in many of these are precisely the people who get paid the very highest salaries.
...
Very few economists have actually attempted to measure the overall social value of different professions; most would probably take the very idea as something of a fool’s errand; but those who have tried tend to confirm that there is indeed an inverse relation between usefulness and pay.
the most socially valuable workers whose contributions could be calculated are medical researchers, who add $9 of overall value to society for every $1 they are paid. The least valuable were those who worked in the financial sector, who, on average, subtract a net $1.80 in value from society for every $1 of compensation.
A British study shows the same results, but, with the volume turned up to 11. Low paid, blue color workers add social value; finance, advertising, accountants have negative social value. & the latter group are paid at prolly up to 10x the rate of the former group....
Here was their overall breakdown:
- researchers 9
- schoolteachers 1
- engineers .2
- consultants and IT professionals 0
- lawyers –.2
- advertisers and marketing professionals –.3
- managers –.8
- financial sector -1.5
We really, really saw which jobs mattered during COVID. I reviewed a book that does a good job of discussing these issues: "Foundational Economy", 2020.
So why are the people who do nothing for the overall social good - actually they add to the social bad - paid so much more than the unglamorous professions that actually benefit us all? This is The Question.
Whatever the reasons—and myself, I believe that class power and class loyalty have a great deal to do with it—what is perhaps most disturbing about the situation is the fact that so many people not only acknowledge the inverse relation but also feel this is how things ought to be. That virtue, as the ancient Stoics used to argue, should be its own reward.
Man, does that suck or what? Having a daughter & son-in-law who are teachers, I see how this goes. They care so much & work so hard & have advanced degrees & are paid completely mediocre salaries.I think tho, looking at The Question through the lens of 2026, when the oligarchs have taken the gloves off, that the answer to The Question is the same as the answer to almost every question nowadays:
BECAUSE THAT'S HOW THE ULTRA-RICH FOLKS WANT IT.
Graeber reproduces a 6 step argument from "moral philosopher G. A. Cohen [1941-2009] [who] argued that a case could be made for equality of income for all members of society".The logic is impeccable.
Well, OK, I guess. Ahh, we saw Cohen before, in "Calling Bullshit". Note, he is totally a commie, so, a fellow traveler.So where does this end up?
an emerging “voluntariat,” with capitalist firms increasingly harvesting the results not of paid labor but of unpaid interns, internet enthusiasts, activists, volunteers, and hobbyists, and “digitally sharecropping” the results of popular enthusiasm and creativity to privatize and market the results.
Next up, ugh, time for some "religion ruins everything".Section 3: on the theological roots of our attitudes toward labor
Summarizing, there is not a single religion that does not see work as punishment for human's having offended the gods in varying ways.
We are, as the existentialists liked to put it, condemned to be free, forced to wield the divine power of creation against our will, since most of us would really rather be naming the animals in Eden, dining on nectar and ambrosia at feasts on Mount Olympus
The Judaic Old Testament is particularly odious. "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food", & for women, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children”. Just a reminder, Jehovah is possibly the most evil character in all of fiction.Section 4: on the origins of the northern european notion of paid labor as necessary to the full formation of an adult human being
Section 5: how, with the advent of capitalism, work came to be seen in many quarters either as a means of social reform or ultimately as a virtue in its own right, and how laborers countered by embracing the labor theory of value
By “capitalism,” here I am referring not to markets—these had long existed—but to the gradual transformation of relations of service into permanent relations of wage labor: that is, a relation between some people who owned capital, and others who did not and thus were obliged to work for them. What this meant in human terms was, first of all, that millions of young people found themselves trapped in permanent social adolescence. As the guild structures broke down, apprentices could become journeymen, but journeymen could no longer become masters, which meant that, in traditional terms, they would not be a position to marry and start families of their own. They were expected to live their entire lives effectively as unfinished human beings. Inevitably, many began to rebel, give up on the interminable waiting, and began marrying early, abandoning their masters to set up cottages and families of their own—which, in turn, set off a wave of moral panic among the emerging employing class very reminiscent of later moral panics about teenage pregnancy.
Apparently, this stuff is happening around the 16th century. We run into Thomas Carlyle, [1795-1881], "an enormously popular essayist, who, concerned with the decline of morality in the new Age of Mammon, proposed what he called a Gospel of Work"....
It was at this moment that one can speak of the birth of the proletariat as a class—a term derived appropriately enough from a Latin word for “those who produce offspring,” since in Rome, the poorest citizens who did not have enough wealth to tax were useful to the government only by producing sons who could be drafted into the army.
Of course, a Gospel of Work.
The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up?
So this is the poshes, telling the working man how lucky he is to be able to sanctify himself via the glory of work. &, the work is so glorious, he should actually be happy to do it for free! Why would he dicker about his actual wage. On the other hand ...By the 1830s, ... It is important to emphasize just how universally accepted the labor theory of value became in the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists. “The solid rock on which their idea of the good society rested,” as one historian put it, “was that labor created all wealth.” The word “capitalist” at that time was largely a term of abuse. When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Wow, who knew Abe was a fellow traveler?Section 6: concerning the key flaw in the labor theory of value as it became popular in the nineteenth century, and how the owners of capital exploited that flaw
I turned to America for a reason. The United States plays a key role in our story. Nowhere was the principle that all wealth derives from labor more universally accepted as ordinary common sense, yet nowhere, too, was the counterattack against this common sense so calculated, so sustained, and so ultimately effective. By the early decades of the twentieth century, when the first cowboy movies were being made, this work was largely complete, and the idea that ranch hands had once been avid readers of Marx would have seemed as ridiculous as it would to most Americans today. Even more important, this counteroffensive laid the groundwork for the apparently bizarre attitudes toward work, largely emanating from North America, that we can still observe spreading across the world, with pernicious results.
Wow. The Robber Barons v1.0 were impressive. But they would be quivering jelly faced with our current Robber Barons v4.0.In the immediate wake of the Civil War all this began to change with the first stirrings of large-scale bureaucratic, corporate capitalism. The “Robber Barons,” as the new tycoons came to be called, were at first met (as the name given them implies) with extraordinary hostility. But by the 1890s they embarked on an intellectual counteroffensive, proposing what Doukas and Durrenberger call, after an essay by Andrew Carnegie, a “Gospel of Wealth”
Meanwhile, the memes that really keeps industries thriving, "process knowledge", which Doctorow has been espousing lately, started to come under attack:The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on popular knowledge. Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else.
"Turn workers into extensions of the machinery". Nothing changes. Cory Doctorow would call this a "reverse centaur" - his book "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" comes out in late June, 2026.Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
But even when it comes to factory labor, there is something of a darker story. The initial instinct of most early factory owners was not to employ men in the mills at all, but women and children: the latter were, after all, considered more tractable, and women especially, more inured to monotonous, repetitive work. The results were often brutal and horrific. The situation also left traditional male craftsmen in a particularly distressing situation; not only were they thrown out of work by the new factories, their wives and children, who used to work under their direction, were now the breadwinners.
Capitalism is always trying to get rid of workers. Graeber discusses at length a campaign to completely automate & get rid of London subway workers. He published a sarcastic guide to new subway users:Please ensure you are thoroughly familiar with London Underground’s 11 lines and 270 stations before traveling . . . Please ensure that there are no delays in your journey, or any accidents, emergencies, incidents, or evacuations. Please do not be disabled. Or poor. Or new to London. Please avoid being too young or too old. Please do not be harassed or assaulted while traveling. Please do not lose your property or your children. Please do not require assistance in any way.
I play the song, "Salt of the Earth", by the Rolling Stones. A surprisingly fun song to play. Man, there should be a "Salt of the Earth" premium paid.This next is just so sad ...
That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds. To some degree, the skill at reading others’ emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don’t have to learn how to do interpretive labor nearly as well because they can hire other people to do it for them. Those hirelings, on the other hand, who have to develop a habit of understanding other’s points of view, will also tend to care about them.
Oof. Time got a reality check ...In fact, there was never a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Karl Marx, or Charles Dickens, working-class neighborhoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs “productive”? In what sense and for whom? Who “produces” a soufflé? It’s because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value; but doing so blinds us to the reality that most working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects, than it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things.
Section 7, the last: how, over the course of the twentieth century, work came to be increasingly valued primarily as a form of discipline and self-sacrificeWe 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.
Ugh. I so detest the "Gospel of Wealth". At some level I appreciate the teachings of Black Commie Hippie Jebus. The "Gospel of Wealth" would make the real Jebus hurl ...
—Buckminster FullerHowever this may be, the “Gospel of Wealth” counteroffensive has been successful, and the captains of industry, first in America, then increasingly everywhere, have been able to convince the public that they, and not those they employ, are the real creators of prosperity. Their very success, however, created an inevitable problem. How are workers supposed to find meaning and purpose in jobs where they are effectively being turned into robots? Where they are actually being told they are little better than robots, even as at the same time they are increasingly expected to organize their lives around their work?
LOL! Is this next really true? It has never been true for me. I'll put off a discussion of that until My Conclusion.The obvious answer is to fall back on the old idea that work forms character; and this is precisely what seems to have happened. One could call it a revival of Puritanism, but as we’ve seen this idea goes much further back: to a fusion of the Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam with the Northern European notion that paid labor under a master’s discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.
...
The fact that it does remains something of a stubborn paradox because the “Gospel of Wealth” and subsequent rise of consumerism was supposed to have changed all that. No longer were we to think of ourselves as expressing our being through what we produced, but rather, through what we consumed: what sorts of clothes we wear, music we listen to, sports teams we follow. Especially since the seventies, everyone has been expected to sort themselves out into tribal subcultures as sci-fi geeks, dog lovers, paintball enthusiasts, stoners, or supporters of the Chicago Bulls or Manchester United but definitely not as longshoremen or Catastrophe Risk Analysts.
There have been an enormous number of surveys, studies, inquests, and ethnographies of work over the course of the twentieth century. Work about work has become a kind of minor industry in its own right. The conclusions reached by this body of research—and what follows appears to hold true, with only minor variations, for both blue- and white-collar workers virtually anywhere in the world—might be summarized as follows:
This next quote references Al Gini. I presumed this was the guy who invented the Gini Index, the most widely used measure of economic inequality in a country.- Most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living.
- Most people hate their jobs.
We might refer to this as “the paradox of modern work.”
Nope. The Gini Index was developed by Corrado Gini [1884-1965], an Italian fascist & eugenicist! Barf!
After many years of research on the topic, Gini finally came to the conclusion that work was coming to be considered less and less a means to an end—that is, a way of obtaining resources and experiences that make it possible to pursue projects (as I’ve put it, values other than the economic: family, politics, community, culture, religion)—and more and more as an end in itself. Yet at the same time it was an end in itself that most people found harmful, degrading, and oppressive.
LOL, I got to just quit saying "Ugh". But, ugh. Jebus Cripes, all workers are supposed to be Jebus on the cross, suffering??? Fuck that!How to reconcile these two observations? One way might be to return to the arguments I made in chapter 3 and to acknowledge that human beings essentially are a set of purposes, so that without any sense of purpose, we would barely be said to exist at all. ... We have returned to Carlyle: work should be painful, the misery of the job is itself what “forms character.”
Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to Carlyle, who includes in his celebration of work one chapter that consists entirely of a peculiar diatribe against happiness. Here he was responding to the utilitarian doctrines of men like Jeremy Bentham [1747-1832], who had proposed that human pleasure could be precisely quantified, and therefore all morality reduced to calculating what would provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Happiness, Carlyle objected, is an ignoble concept. “The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man that he cannot work, that he cannot get his pursuit of wealth, power, comforts, and pleasure, has always and must always be complemented by a doctrine of work as self-sacrifice, as valuable precisely because it is the place of misery, sadism, emptiness, and despair. As Carlyle put it:
Seriously??? I think I'll vote for "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" rather than "a crown of thorns".“All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble, be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too, all dignity is painful. A life of ease is not for any man . . . Our highest religion is named the Worship of Sorrow. For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but there is a crown of thorns!”
Chapter 7, "What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?"
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
Phew! Final chapter! Whipping & driving down the stretch! Including ever more & larger excerpts!
—George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London...
I would like to end this book with a few thoughts about the political implications of the current work situation, and one suggestion about a possible way out.
What I have described over the last two chapters are the economic forces driving the proliferation of bullshit jobs—what I’ve called managerial feudalism—and the cosmology, the overall way of imagining the place of human beings in the universe, that allows us to put up with this arrangement. The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible. The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one’s work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.
Section 1: on how the political culture under managerial feudalism comes to be maintained by a balance of resentmentsAll this is genuinely perverse.
...
Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of ... “a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.
People in consumer societies, even those in bullshit jobs, do eke out some kind of a life—though one might ask how viable such forms of life really are in the long term, considering that the stratum of the population most likely to be trapped in pointless employment would also appear to be the most likely to have lives marked by episodes of clinical depression or other forms of mental illness, not to mention, to fail to reproduce.
Oof. It is at times so hard to encounter new concepts. Current case in point: moral envy.It’s not nearly so clear why those middle managers should resent the factory workers. But often middle managers, and even more, those managers’ administrative assistants, clearly do resent factory workers, for the simple reason that the latter have legitimate reason to take pride in their work. A key part of the justification of underpaying such workers is simple envy.
Several examples of people in bullshit jobs resenting people in non-bullshit jobs - people actually making something, or helping someone. Culminating with:Moral envy is an undertheorized phenomenon.
It’s quite the same with the otherwise inexplicable drum-beat of animosity directed, in the United States, against primary and secondary school teachers.
In contrast to teachers, who are the public servants who can never, never, under any circumstances, be criticized? Why, the military, of course....
Again, I think this can only be put down to moral envy. Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying “Thank you, thank you for all you did for me.” For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.
There is one major exception to the rule that anyone pursuing a useful or high-minded line of work, but who also expects comfortable levels of pay and benefits, is a legitimate target of resentment. The rule does not apply to soldiers, or anyone else who works directly for the military. To the contrary, soldiers must never be resented. They are above critique.
Wow. True dis. I find myself totally annoyed at all the Disney child performers who grow up to be the next generation of musical acts to be forced down the public's throat.I’ve written about this curious exception before, but it might be helpful to recall the argument very briefly, because I think it’s impossible to really understand right-wing populism without it. ... For right-wing populists, in particular, military personnel are the ultimate good guys. One must “support the troops”; this is an absolute injunction; anyone who would compromise on it in any way is a traitor pure and simple. The ultimate bad guys in contrast are the intelligentsia. Most working-class conservatives, for instance, don’t have much use for corporate executives, but they usually don’t feel especially passionate about their dislike for them. Their true hatred is directed at the “liberal elite” (this divides into various branches: the “Hollywood elite,” the “journalistic elite,” “university elite,” “fancy lawyers,” or “the medical establishment”)—that is, the sort of people who live in big coastal cities, watch public television or public radio, or even more, who might be involved in producing or appearing in same. It seems to me there are two perceptions that lie behind this resentment: (1) the perception that members of this elite see ordinary working people as a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, and (2) the perception that these elites constitute an increasingly closed caste; one which the children of the working class would actually have far more difficulty breaking into than the class of actual capitalists.
It also seems to me that both these perceptions are largely accurate. The first is pretty much self-evidently true if reactions to the 2016 election of Donald Trump are anything to go by. The white working class in particular is the one identity group in America toward which statements that might otherwise be immediately denounced as bigoted (for instance, that a certain class of people are ugly, violent, or stupid) are accepted without remark in polite society. The second is also true if you really think about it. We might again look to Hollywood for an illustration. Back in the thirties and forties, even the name “Hollywood” would tend to evoke images of magical social advance: Hollywood was a place where a simple farm girl could go to the big city, be discovered, find herself a star. For present purposes, it doesn’t really matter how often this actually happened (it clearly did now and then); the point is at the time, Americans did not see the fable as inherently implausible. Look at a list of the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays and you are likely to find barely a single one that can’t boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree. The film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste. Is it surprising, then, that Hollywood celebrities’ pretensions to egalitarian politics tend to ring a bit hollow in the ears of most working-class Americans? Neither is Hollywood in any way an exception in this regard. If anything it’s emblematic of what has happened to all the liberal professions (if, perhaps, a trifle more advanced).
Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. If you think about it that’s not an unreasonable assessment. A truck driver’s daughter from Nebraska might not have very much chance of becoming a millionaire—America now has the lowest social mobility in the developed world—but it could happen. There’s virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times.
Back to the truck driver's daughter:
In the United States, of course, all this is very much complicated by the country’s legacy of slavery and inveterate racism. It’s largely the white working class that expresses class resentment by focusing on intellectuals; African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.
Well, that is something I had never heard of before. Like most liberal elite snobs, I view joining the army as joining the employer of last resort. But, particularly through corn belt america, as the farming jobs continue to go away, it is the most common way out.The reality of the situation first came home to me over a decade ago when attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.
The above discussion carries on, into a battle of the values of the left vs. those of the right.
Section 2: how the current crisis over robotization relates to the larger problem of bullshit jobs
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Now you're talkin'! I want to live in a bright, shiny future, with NO HUNGRY CHILDREN. Make it so!
—H. L. MenckenA crisscrossing of resentments increasingly defines the politics of wealthy countries. This is a disastrous state of affairs.
...
In many respects, the science-fiction fantasies of the early twentieth century have become possible. We can’t teleport or place colonies on Mars, it’s true, but we could easily rearrange matters in such a way that pretty much everyone on earth lived lives of relative ease and comfort.
Graeber returns to something he mentioned earlier, which to me was 1 of the unexpected things I learned from this book: that the hippies (I was 1) had an effect on history - a bad one. The establishment reaction against the hippie's smelling a post-scarcity utopia led to Reagan & to our current oligarchy.
Time for a 1969 musical break:
The latest wave of robotization has caused the same moral crises and moral panics as the sixties. The only real difference is that, since any significant change in economic models, let alone property regimes, is now treated as definitively off of the table, it’s simply assumed the only possible result will be to convey even more wealth and power to the 1 percent.
& note, Graeber is talking about "the latest wave of robotization" in 2016 - Generative AI is totally not a factor at this point.LOL, Graeber now does a whirlwind tour of various sci-fi franchises!
Included are:
- Vonnegut;
- Stanislaw Lem;
- Star Trek.
Graeber's comment on the Lem story:
This might seem heavy-handed, but sometimes, I think, a dose of heavy-handed Marxism is exactly what we need.
He then goes back to The Question:So the more automation proceeds, the more it should be obvious that actual value emerges from the caring element of work. Yet this leads to another problem. The caring value of work would appear to be precisely that element in labor that cannot be quantified.
Graeber next gets a little eerily prescient, talking about what computers can & cannot do. Some of what he puts in the "cannot do" column is very similar to what I would say GenAI can do badly. Hmmm ...LOL, these diagrams are hilarious! 1st (actually, Graeber puts this 2nd), "Creation of Course Profile/Syllabus (Non-managerial):
Versus, the managerial version:
There are similar diagrams for "Creation of Exam", which are even worse.
The critical thing about this diagram is that each of those additional lines represents an action that has to be performed, not by a computer, but by an actual human being.
Section 3: on the political ramifications of bullshitization and consequent decline of productivity in the caring sector as it relates to the possibility of a revolt of the caring classes
I immediately question this section title, for its use of the world "revolt". Somehow, it seems to me that there is never going to be anything bad enough to actually trigger a revolt in the USA. The bulk of the populace has too many cool toys. Maybe if the fascists continue to accumulate power to where they decide to take away some of peoples' toys? But, it seems more to me that the fascists will instead work on giving people more toys, to keep them distracted. Gambling, say, & cryptocurrency.
Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.
Graeber is so astute. This next piece, over the last few years I have been coming to increasingly realize. & Graber is realizing it completely in 2018.since Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom, it’s been the ostensibly left parties that have most embraced the rule of finance, received the largest contributions from the financial sector, and worked the most closely with financial lobbyists to “reform” the laws to make all this possible.
But I think we're done with this. The tech bros are contributing $$$ that dwarf Wall Street. Democrats have to move beyond $$$.Section 4: on universal basic income as an example of a program that might begin to detach work from compensation and put an end to the dilemmas described in this book
Graeber comes down hard on the side of UBI, yay! Interestingly, he dismisses the JG - Job Guarantee - concept of prescriptive MMT - Modern Money Theory. I think because he feels it would lead to the same kind of bullshit bureaucracy that means-testing always does.
Even a successful campaign for a fifteen-hour week would be unlikely to cause the unnecessary jobs and industries to be spontaneously abandoned; at the same time, calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of bullshit.
There is a fairly lengthy dialogue with a public servant Leslie:So would a guaranteed jobs program.
Leslie is a Benefits Advisor in the United Kingdom, that is, she works for an NGO whose purpose is to guide citizens through the elaborate obstacle course successive governments have set up to make it as difficult as possible for those out of work, or otherwise in material need, to get access to the money the government claims it has set apart for them.
So of course the conservatives, GOP, neo-nazis, whoever, are always in favor of all flavors of means testing. Because they wind up screwing people. Which, if those people are poor (given) & have darker skins (often), is of course the whole point of the means testing....
Leslie told me of studies that demonstrate that any system of means testing, no matter how it’s framed, will necessarily mean at least 20 percent of those who legitimately qualify for benefits give up and don’t apply.
Yay, we're done! Here's the last 3 paragraphs of the book:
It’s hard to escape the impression that for many of those who, like Obama, defend the existence of bullshit jobs, that’s one of the most appealing things about such arrangements. As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else. At the very least, this is further incentive not to do anything about the situation.
Be this as it may, however, it opens the way to my second and final point. The first objection typically raised when someone suggests guaranteeing everyone a livelihood regardless of work is that if you do so, people simply won’t work. This is just obviously false and at this point I think we can dismiss it out of hand. The second, more serious objection is that most will work, but many will choose work that’s of interest only to themselves. The streets would fill up with bad poets, annoying street mimes, and promoters of crank scientific theories, and nothing would get done. What the phenomenon of bullshit jobs really brings home is the foolishness of such assumptions. No doubt a certain proportion of the population of a free society would spend their lives on projects most others would consider to be silly or pointless; but it’s hard to imagine how it would go much over 10 or 20 percent. But already right now, 37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless. Roughly half the economy consists of, or exists in support of, bullshit. And it’s not even particularly interesting bullshit! If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?
This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don’t think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.
I'm not sure what changed, but, rereading this book to write this review/summary, I got a lot more out of it.
My initial reaction to this book was: to "call bullshit".
A lot of this is flavored by my own experience of all the jobs I have held in my life. I enjoyed every job I had. I loved being a bagger & produce clerk (the stories about 50# bags of potatoes I could tell you!) at Kroger, age 16-17. I loved being a welder & ship-fitter, summer jobs, age 18-19.
When I worked at Tube Turns div Chemtron, 1994-1997, age 23-26, I loved learning the way of metal, troubleshooting problems making pipe fittings (elbows, tees, reducers, manifolds) on the shop floor. Meanwhile, I was writing FORTRAN code to determine if we could repurpose existing equipment to produce manufactured specials.
We also made special fittings for nuclear submarine nuclear reactor cooling plants. Inconel & monel, nickel/copper alloys, very precisely tooled fittings. The DoD (actually, it was probably General Dynamics or some such) sent us 5' of specs, we were expected to generate 10' of response to those specs.
My boss at the time loved doing that work. But, his boss decided we needed backup for him in that role. I was appointed. I told that boss, "If Phil can't do it, I will, but, he loves it, why not let him keep doing it?". No, no, we want you to do it. So 3 months later I was employed elsewhere - at DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, where I always put my hand up if the question was, "Who wants to get trained to support ...?"
If I had had to do those DoD RFPs, I would have considered that bullshit. But, maybe, the bullshit wasn't the job? The bullshit was the DoD specs? Although, I guess you really do want pretty tight specs for nuclear submarine reactors.
Graeber calls out financial analysts as a profession whose jobs are probably bullshit. I have a young (early 30s) acquaintance who has a degree in Finance & who manages a team of 8 financial analysts for a major insurance company. I asked them, "Do you have a bullshit job?"
They replied, "No. We produce meaningful data analyses, that help our company design its products. But, do I have to deal with corporate bullshit? Of course I do, if you work for a large corporation, you have to deal with corporate bullshit."
So again, the job was not bullshit, the corporation was bullshit?
I talked to the guy next to me flying from FL to KY. He was a 2nd level manager of auditors for the state of KY. I think he liked the job better when he was actually a 1st level auditor. He would schedule audits with counties as he liked & never had a problem arranging vacations.
1st level auditors have a 1st level manager, per every dozen or so auditors. The auditors send their audit documents to these guys, who review them for errors, maybe send them back, maybe edit them a little, then send them on to the guy I was talking to. He reviews them & decides their disposition - is there possibly fraud that goes to law enforcement?
His current job, it's harder to schedule vacation. The reports pile up when he's gone.
He told me all this after I asked him "Do you have a bullshit job?". I think he might have wanted to say yes.
My view may be skewed because I had jobs that may have been bullshit, but they were pre-Reagan. 1980 & Thatcher-Reagan was when everything started going to shit. But, all my post-1980 jobs, I never felt they were bullshit. I felt I built products that helped people. Hmmm, maybe I was helping them do their bullshit jobs? So I had 2nd order bullshit jobs?
Also, I think back to everyplace I worked. I think of the jobs of the people I worked with. I really can't think of any that I would consider bullshit jobs.
My wife calls me a pollyanna. Maybe my generally overall positive attitude is slanting my view?
Or, looking back at Chapter 2, maybe I am identifying as a business owner. I was senior management/executive level for ~1/2 of my career.
But still, as to Graeber's claims. His 37% figure, for people who say they have bullshit jobs, is based on a single YouGov survey of Britons. And the language of the survey was 'does your job "make a meaningful contribution to the world" ?' That's maybe too big of an ask.
And the "100s of replies he has received from people". 100s out of 100 millions of workers - an infinitesimal fraction of the workforce. &, self-selected.
So I have wondered, is this whole theory mostly just selection bias? People who agreed with his thesis responding strongly in agreement, while those who think it's bullshit aren't interested enough to take the time to tell him that?
On the other hand, going back to Keynes' perpetually charming "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren": where is our 15 hour workweek?
Graeber's has convincingly identified the canonization of the Protestant Work Ethic, work as building character, the financialization we are undergoing in our current late stage capitalism, the belittling of caring jobs, & god forbid, those hippie punks wanting to just live life & not work?!?!?
I'm surprised Graeber never invoked "Idle hands are the devil's workshop". Hmmm, Proverbs 16:27. This was a fav of all my family's matriarchs.
The thing I'm scratching my head over now: the oligarchs used to want people to have bullshit jobs. Now they are pushing GenAI & actively planning to use it to get rid of bullshit jobs. Why? Doctorow very recently had an article about how solipsistic the oligarchs are. The rest of us aren't real people to them, we are more like NPCs.
Is this just a matter of degree maybe? Leon Skunk et al have become so unbelievably rich that they are breaking new ground in entitlement, solipsism, & general assholery? I mean after all, Skunk bribed the Orange Turd with $250M & got a license to gut all the federal agencies he didn't like via DOGE. That was not on my bingo card as a possibility. Ugh.
Skunk has now come out not in favor of Universal Basic Income, but in favor of Universal High Income. Yeah, right. I've already said that "I think Leon Skunk & the rest are selling them a bill of goods, to try to get someone other than corporate managers to like GenAI."
Plus, maybe the oligarchs change of direction is a consequence of living in a griftocracy? Generally not giving a shit is a mild side effect of being in complete rape-and-pillage, strip-for-parts mode.
I'm not sure I can come to a conclusion about this just yet. It is of course sad that we lost Graeber to COVID. It would be incredible to get his read on the Bullshit Apocalypse.
Regardless, I'm glad that Graeber seemed to wind up on the side of UBI. FTW!
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #126.
- about one young man apparently handed a sinecure who nonetheless found himself unable to handle the situation
