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The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen: > Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games”

The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen: > Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day. Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

rayiner 8y ago
Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided. The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  "The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff. Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  I disagree. In all my experience working in corporate, most problems we solved with technology would have been better solved by having better simpler policies in place. The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to tons of bullshit jobs.
  - qplex 8y ago
    It's not inefficiency in systems design. Some jobs are simply bullshit to begin with, and what actually enables us to have them around are the very efficient systems we have.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    What makes you think those simpler policies would work? The real world is complex and messy because people are complex and messy. It's like looking at the Windows or Linux source code and saying it "would have been better solved by having better simplier policies in place." It's superficially true in that you could have simpler designs that accomplish any given function of those operating systems. But for the most part e.g. Linux evolved the way it did for a reason, and almost none of the 20+ million lines in the source tree are "bullshit code."
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      And I'd say a lot of that complexity in both cases is because of one reason: people will want to abuse the system
    - rorykoehler 8y ago
      If that were true my companies current strategy of throwing change management consultants at problems rather than programmers wouldn't be half as successful as it is. Your windows /linux example is a bad one and i don't think designing /building Linux could ever be classified as a bullshit job. As for real world complexity this applies mainly to physical phenomena (self driving cars for example) and less to bureaucratic business organisational structures which is where most bs jobs also happen to exist.
- factsaresacred 8y ago
  > "The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." Lol. Go to Thailand (3% unemployment) or China and watch the meaningless jobs. Where the cost of labour is cheaper than the cost of capital and where there's government incentives to present zero unemployment, you will find groups of people waving cars out of condos, gangs of old ladies sweeping up nothing all day, and people acting as human signs. Much of this is unnecessary, or can be replaced, at least, with more efficient methods.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    That what I have against his calling these jobs bullshit; these jobs are bullshit for people who have other options; people doing these jobs in Thailand and China feel better because they got that job and are not sitting at home being bored. Anecdotal; a Chinese colleague and friend sent me a happy WeChat message a few weeks ago that his father is out of his depression finally because the state gave him a ‘bullshit’ job watching a corridor into some tiny neighborhood. A lot of people simply need the a job to feel worthwhile; doensn’t matter what the job is.
throw_away2 8y ago
So he mischaracterized one misunderstood job. Does that invalidate the whole theory? Has every administrator role this critic encountered been useful and worthwhile? Also, this criticism only really addresses the first, taxonomic part of the book, which was by far the least interesting.
- chris_wot 8y ago
  He mischaracterized at least three seperate jobs in the posted article. He mischaracterized the worth of compliance personnel, corporate lawyers, and PR team members.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > Does that invalidate the whole theory? David Graeber is, as far as I can tell, a professor of anthropology. Which means he doesn't have domain expertise in any of the areas he's criticizing. Indeed, I could (flippantly, but honestly) say that I think "professor of anthropology" is a bullshit job, but then again I'm a severely left-brain guy and I'm going to assume there is a social value there that's just going over my head. To put things another way: my wife once asked me what my interest was programming-wise. I told her it was compilers and programming languages. And she asked: well, don't they have those already? I strongly suspect if people get a 3% exposure to programming (e.g. writing yet another JS framework), like Graeber is doing with the various jobs he talks about, they'd think that programming is also full of "bullshit jobs." But that would be a conclusion arising out of ignorance.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    I think the difference between an anthropologist like Graeber and an economist like Cowen is that they observe the system at different levels. Cowen judges the value of jobs from "inside the system" (with the system = contemporary capitalism), whereas Graeber takes a perspective outside the system and argues that the "zero/negative-sum game" (as Cowen said) is the problem. To illustrate with a drastic example: Suppose you have two workers, one who digs holes and one who shovels the same dirt back into the hole to close it. Outside the system, it's obvious that they're not doing any meaningful work. Inside the system, there's probably some argument why these jobs are useful. (Maybe government regulations require that their company dig at least X holes per month. Or you could argue that it's good because it increases GDP or reduces unemployment.)

rayiner 8y ago

Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided. The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.

nickpsecurity 8y ago
"The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff. Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.
rorykoehler 8y ago
I disagree. In all my experience working in corporate, most problems we solved with technology would have been better solved by having better simpler policies in place. The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to tons of bullshit jobs.
- qplex 8y ago
  It's not inefficiency in systems design. Some jobs are simply bullshit to begin with, and what actually enables us to have them around are the very efficient systems we have.
- rayiner 8y ago
  What makes you think those simpler policies would work? The real world is complex and messy because people are complex and messy. It's like looking at the Windows or Linux source code and saying it "would have been better solved by having better simplier policies in place." It's superficially true in that you could have simpler designs that accomplish any given function of those operating systems. But for the most part e.g. Linux evolved the way it did for a reason, and almost none of the 20+ million lines in the source tree are "bullshit code."
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    And I'd say a lot of that complexity in both cases is because of one reason: people will want to abuse the system
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    If that were true my companies current strategy of throwing change management consultants at problems rather than programmers wouldn't be half as successful as it is. Your windows /linux example is a bad one and i don't think designing /building Linux could ever be classified as a bullshit job. As for real world complexity this applies mainly to physical phenomena (self driving cars for example) and less to bureaucratic business organisational structures which is where most bs jobs also happen to exist.
factsaresacred 8y ago
> "The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." Lol. Go to Thailand (3% unemployment) or China and watch the meaningless jobs. Where the cost of labour is cheaper than the cost of capital and where there's government incentives to present zero unemployment, you will find groups of people waving cars out of condos, gangs of old ladies sweeping up nothing all day, and people acting as human signs. Much of this is unnecessary, or can be replaced, at least, with more efficient methods.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  That what I have against his calling these jobs bullshit; these jobs are bullshit for people who have other options; people doing these jobs in Thailand and China feel better because they got that job and are not sitting at home being bored. Anecdotal; a Chinese colleague and friend sent me a happy WeChat message a few weeks ago that his father is out of his depression finally because the state gave him a ‘bullshit’ job watching a corridor into some tiny neighborhood. A lot of people simply need the a job to feel worthwhile; doensn’t matter what the job is.

throw_away2 8y ago

So he mischaracterized one misunderstood job. Does that invalidate the whole theory? Has every administrator role this critic encountered been useful and worthwhile? Also, this criticism only really addresses the first, taxonomic part of the book, which was by far the least interesting.

chris_wot 8y ago
He mischaracterized at least three seperate jobs in the posted article. He mischaracterized the worth of compliance personnel, corporate lawyers, and PR team members.
rayiner 8y ago
> Does that invalidate the whole theory? David Graeber is, as far as I can tell, a professor of anthropology. Which means he doesn't have domain expertise in any of the areas he's criticizing. Indeed, I could (flippantly, but honestly) say that I think "professor of anthropology" is a bullshit job, but then again I'm a severely left-brain guy and I'm going to assume there is a social value there that's just going over my head. To put things another way: my wife once asked me what my interest was programming-wise. I told her it was compilers and programming languages. And she asked: well, don't they have those already? I strongly suspect if people get a 3% exposure to programming (e.g. writing yet another JS framework), like Graeber is doing with the various jobs he talks about, they'd think that programming is also full of "bullshit jobs." But that would be a conclusion arising out of ignorance.
- majewsky 8y ago
  I think the difference between an anthropologist like Graeber and an economist like Cowen is that they observe the system at different levels. Cowen judges the value of jobs from "inside the system" (with the system = contemporary capitalism), whereas Graeber takes a perspective outside the system and argues that the "zero/negative-sum game" (as Cowen said) is the problem. To illustrate with a drastic example: Suppose you have two workers, one who digs holes and one who shovels the same dirt back into the hole to close it. Outside the system, it's obvious that they're not doing any meaningful work. Inside the system, there's probably some argument why these jobs are useful. (Maybe government regulations require that their company dig at least X holes per month. Or you could argue that it's good because it increases GDP or reduces unemployment.)