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The bullshit-jobs thesis may be bullshit

• linspace 5y ago
  There have been bullshit jobs since the dawn of time, the very first time someone convinced the others he (she?) spoke with the gods and a sacrifice was needed to ensure good weather for the crops. Some will say that they provided relief from uncertainty. I say that it actually increases the bullshitness. We still have peasants and clerics and for the clerics it's never bullshit as it puts food on the table but the fact is that if they dissappeared tomorrow the crops would be taken care of and the weather would not change.
  • SyzygistSix 5y ago
    I'm not a religious person and share some of your opinions but it seems to me fairly obvious that religion has contributed a lot to social coherence and organization. There's a reason it is almost endemic in post hunter-gatherer societies despite the wide variance in beliefs. Humans are a people of stories and a shared common narrative was probably critical to provide societal cohesion and build a sense of community and purpose.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• iamsaitam 5y ago
  "The Economist" releasing an article pro-capitalism appealing to the worthiness of their base (1.).. in which world would they agree with the author of the book? 1. "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations, and a resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour."
• dools 5y ago
  Of course it is bullshit. As if a capitalist society would produce so much truly wasted effort. The people who think their job is bullshit just don’t have the perspective to understand how it fits into the broader scheme of things. It’s idealistic hokum.
  • applepple 5y ago
    Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market. Businesses just follow the money. It can be as inefficient as society allows it to become. As long as most people can ignore the reality. If the banks were only loaning people money to collect sea shells, then the entire global economy would end up revolving around sea shell collection. Then some rational people would eventually write books claiming that seashell collection is a bullshit job, we don't need so many seashells... Then people like you would post comments saying "That's not true, obviously we need seashells because capitalism would never allow for such inefficiency."
    • dools 5y ago
      Nothing like a bit of reduction ad absurdum to start the day. I don’t deny that there is some wasted effort, what I argue against is that the amount of truly wasted effort is significant and that the measure for whether or not a job is bullshit should be that the person doing the job thinks it shouldn’t exist. We are capitalist in as much as you and I are allowed to build a machine and pay people to run it. I agree there are no free markets, all markets are created by governments just as all currency is.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      > Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market. I don't know which it's more of; mysterious or annoying that people keep repeating this... simplistic fallacy. WTF does one have to do with the other?!? "Capitalism" or "a free market" is how the game is played or what it is about; "currency" or the monetary supply is just the markers used to count points in the game. They're not the same thing. In the game of Monopoly new currency is injected constantly, when players get 200 $ (? IIRC) for completing each lap around the board. Does that make the goal of the game not about amassing all the money[1] and bankrupting the other players? No, of course not. The goal of the game and the markers used to count progress towards that goal are different things. Conflating them is committing a stupid fallacy, even more so in real life than in the game. ____ [1]: All the money in circulation, regardless of how much that happens to be.
• bhaak 5y ago
  > When the book came out, this columnist was unimpressed [...] This commentator is very skeptical of people that speak about themselves in the third person. Only Julius Caesar is allowed to do that.
• jl2718 5y ago
  Highly suspicious data collection methods. “Well gee I walked around the office asking people if their job was essential and everybody said it was.”
  • addicted 5y ago
    It’s far far more rigorous and far less loaded than the question Graeber’s theory was based on. Graeber’s question was, paraphrased, “do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world”. This is an objectively loaded question. For example, I could rephrase that question as “do you think your job makes a contribution to the world” and lose absolutely nothing. The only purpose the “meaningful” adjective serves is to arbitrarily raise the bar for which people would answer yes to the question. The only thing useful Graeber’s research possibly showed is that people with more education have a higher standard for what they consider a meaningful contribution to the world than people with less education.
    • jl2718 5y ago
      Actually I think both surveys are meaningless. The meaningful part is that the popular interest seems to affirm a repressed feeling that is extremely common.
• de_keyboard 5y ago
  I think bullshit jobs are a consequence of massive orgs, which have similar internal problems to command economies seen in places like the USSR. Is it surprising that there is massive waste? However, these large orgs continue to exist since the industries they are in have massive barriers to entry, reducing competition and allowing for lots of dead weight.
  • presentation 5y ago
    I’m not so sure that the opposite extreme of having a ton of small, redundant competitors who individually cannot optimize economies of scale, would result in anything near globally optimal outcomes.
    • de_keyboard 5y ago
      Yes, the many small competitors scenario means no one achieves economies of scale. There is little to no dead-weight inside each company, but consumers must pay more because the overall system is inefficient. Going back to the "mega-corp" scenario, if you are a lazy person, a good strategy would be to join an org in a defensible (ideally monopolized) industry and work just hard enough to not get fired. Find yourself a bullshit job!
• sudoaza 5y ago
  Two words "call centers"
• julienreszka 5y ago
  There are no bullshit jobs, only poorly executed deliverables.
• mauritzio 5y ago
  The question is does the person performing the job him/herself finds it usefull what he/she does. Is doesn't matter if it is useful in your eyes. Because it has to do with appreciation, selfconfidence identification, finding satisfaction. If your are just being giving the feeling to be stupid useless replacable person by letting you jump trough useless hoops to please undefinable goals for more powerfull and this happens in a statistical signifant amount then it tells something about current state of society and gives you some questions: why ist that ? , how do we handle the other humans around us?, what is causing that mindset and in what future, how would you/we like to live together?
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  Graeber's weakness of not being a bean counter (and maybe at a deeper level also not a "systems" thinker) was also his incredible advantage: to be able to sense and interpret the current "reality" of much of the western world but not be transfixed by it but rather place it the context of the far more diverse historical human experience. Have not read Bullshit Jobs but was deeply impressed by Debt and his debunking of centuries of ossified, self-serving dogma. The current low signal to noise cacophony around cryptocurrencies is just another validation of how deeply illiterate we are (collectively) about fairly fundamental aspects of how our societies function, even something like money that all of us handle daily and most of us think quite important. This is not just the confusion of the "common man", until 2008 all mainstream, Nobel prize winning, economists did not think the private banking system was important in economic development - being just "an intermediary" that can be factored out of the "equations". In the many comments to this post (which in itself is a good thing - may it inspire some smart cookies to carry Graeber's torch) the discussion quickly degenerates in the "markets versus state" caricature in a manifestation of the same inadequate interpretation framework. "Markets" existed since the first three-way encounter and exchange of some goods and associated exchange rates. However corporates (expressing the enforceable interest of an industrious subset of humanity) and states (purportedly expressing the interest of "all", at least within a "nation") did not. Markets have no morality: its an information technology that can facilitate trade in slaves, human organs, human labor or human personalities (=adtech), or nuclear and chemical (=CO2) waste. Who is the gatekeeper of the morality of what and how is produced and traded? Oligopolistic corporate interests corrupting puppet state entities? Entrenched autocracies with the organized private sector simply a puppet satellite constellation? We need to get to a better level of discourse before we hit terminal planetary and societal boundaries and that, my friends, is no bullshit job.
• oytis 5y ago
  "In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear" It is not at all, in fact it's pretty basic. Every nurse, farmer, firefighter, garbage man etc. can answer "yes" in good conscience. Asking whether the job is "useful" is pretty meaningless though, even utterly meaningless jobs are useful to someone.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dalbasal 5y ago
  This article isn't quite arguing along the same axis as Graeber. He wasn't working with a purposely illegible definitions, and builds of a sort of taxonomy of bullshit, with one type not really related to another. I found the anthropological perspective fairly refreshing. Instead of starting from a definition, model or theory, it starts from people's opinions. It is certainly worth exploring that many people feel their job is bullshit. People know what bullshit means to them. Grafting that onto a tightly defined (in this case marxist) concept like "Alienation" is the opposite of that. If companies didn't have as many lawyers, other companies wouldn't need as many. If accounting rules were simpler, we'd need fewer accountants. That's one type of bullshit. Another might be lawyers and accountants who just don't do much. Those don't reduce to the same thing, as this article attempts to. I think if a writer chooses the term "bullshit" rather than a more precise term, and that frames things. If someone makes a scientific argument, you don't negate it with a legal one. Anyway... I read Graeber's book simultaneously with "complacent class," By Tyler Cowen. I was amused by the serendipity. Cowen's is from the other end of the philosophical spectrum. His book had a Schumpeterian feel. Both were examining areas that are hard to measure, and thus aren't "where the light is" in terms of the old economist adage. It's easy to measure the productivity of steel workers, harder to define productivity of administrative work... the kind of work that has become very prevalent. Both note (I think) some similar pseudo data points. One was that most (other people's) attempts to quantify office workers productivity did not find that PCs introduction in the 90s had any effect. Graeber thinks about it in decidedly non economist terms. Office workers produce "paperwork," letters, memos, reports, etc. We now have a lot more of these, thanks to Dell. The "data point" is academia. Both note a (this one is more legible) a steep rise in administration/academic ratios at universities. To me, I found the argument convincing. I suspect FB may be the most inefficient organisation that has ever existed... or close. Twitter too, on a smaller scale. I strongly suspect that if FB's ad business happened to generate only $5bn, they would run FB on that budget instead. I don't think FB would be different, acquisitions aside. That's not a proveable suspicion though. Meanwhile Wikipedia, for all the flak it receives for expansive expenses, is incredibly resource efficient. It's also a very big site, and it runs on a budget 1,000X smaller than FB's. It runs on a smaller budget than stackoverflow, a site modeled on wikipedia. I strongly suspect that if it had been founded as a startup, Wikipedia would spend many times more. The reason both books were interesting to me is that they consciously try to sidestep the "are efficient market theories true?" question. Its tedious and we have hundreds of years of boring articles like this one on commenting on it.
• k__ 5y ago
  "educated workers who need the money to pay off student debts" Many countries don't have the student debts issue, but still have jobs some consider BS. I mean, this is probably a big problem in the US, but the focus on this very local thing feels kinda obsessed to me. "We have it worse than our parents, because of student dept!", well we have it worse too, even without the dept...
• chalst 5y ago
  Lousy headline. The study the story is based on does not dismiss Graeber's work as bullshit: > Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs. He may have been way off the mark with regards how common BS jobs are, but he was right to link people’s attitudes towards their jobs to their psychological wellbeing, and this is something that employers – and society as a whole – should take seriously. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/one-in-twenty-workers-are-in-useless-jobs-far-fewer-than-previously-thought https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/one-in-twenty-workers-ar...
• cryptica 5y ago
  This article is intellectually dishonest; it's obviously trying to push forward an agenda. Any honest person who has participated in the economy in the past decade and possesses any common sense at all will know that BS jobs are real. Consider the quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." In spite of this, many people today will openly acknowledge that their jobs are useless; against their own interests. There are no incentives for people to think this way and yet they do. Not only that, but the idea of jobs becoming increasingly useless aligns perfectly with what you would expect to happen as a consequence of reserve banks constantly printing new currency to 'prop up' the markets whenever they threaten to collapse. Of course that would make people more complacent, lazier, dumber, etc... Every time you give incompetent people an unfair advantage, you're making is harder for competent people to compete against them. Our system is constantly propping up incompetent people and hurting competent people. It's almost impossible to bootstrap a startup these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the few bootstrapping success stories were part of a gaslighting agenda. There is no free market. I wouldn't be surprised if many successful people today were essentially hand-picked by the financial elite; possibly selected based on their psychopathic tendencies. A hierarchy of psychopaths destroying the economy and the planet while gaslighting the world into doubting their own eyes. The whole scheme is so obvious at this stage. I wonder how much the author of this article got paid to write it.
• specialist 5y ago
  I've only just now read the paper (link below), so this is from the hip: Graeber floated an explanation (bullshit jobs) for the data gathered (grumpy workers). It was not a study, nor ever presented as such. This is follow up research, a proper study. IIRC, as Graeber had encouraged. The researchers propose the Marxist notion of alienation as an alternate theory for the phenomenon Graeber originally daylighted. While the researchers reduce the likely scope of alienation, they emphasize that millions of people are impacted, which should not be ignored. Graeber has no particular animus towards finance, as The Economist suggested. He's grumpy about corporatism and bureaucracy. If The Economist is offended by Graeber's work, that's on them. -- Research cited by Economist: "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015... Buried lede: "But part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct. Employees who think their work is useless tend to feel anxious and depressed. The reason, the academics suggest, is linked to the Marxist idea of “alienation”, which described what artisans felt in the 19th century when they stopped working for themselves and were dragooned into factories." Bonus link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
• anemoiac 5y ago
  This little write-up says next to nothing. If you want to engage with a critique of David Graeber's work on 'Bullshit Jobs,' you might as well skip to the paper linked at the bottom of this column - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015....
• jokoon 5y ago
  A short article that ends with "That’s life." doesn't really inspires me anything. Unemployment is high in many developed countries, and society is unable to occupy people with meaningful activities, to give sense to their existence, or even to give enough money to unproductive people so that they can be happy enough. I have been depressed and unemployed for a long time, and the fact that you literally have to beg for a job just so you can get out of bed and see other people shows that work doesn't matter. Salary doesn't matter. Work and labor has become a religion because people are afraid they might not have any purpose or to end up alone and excluded from society. You can even see unions doing politics and fighting capitalists, but completely disregard people who are unemployed. Once you give enough money to everyone so that they have a right to exist, get shelter and food, maybe people won't be alienated by work.
• jjk166 5y ago
  This paper uses a substantially different (and in my opinion useless) definition of bullshit. People feel useful if their work contributes towards achieving objectives. If you're on a ship taking on water, bailing out that water is incredibly useful. On the other hand a security guard who hasn't had to deal with an incident in years probably feels quite useless. Meaningfully contributing however requires that objective to be one that needs doing. If the ship is only taking on water because some basic maintenance has been neglected, that doesn't make it any less important to bail out the water, but it's BS that you have to in the first place. While the security guard may never do anything productive, simply being available on the off chance there is an incident is a major and indispensable reduction of risk for the organization which depending on circumstances, may very well not be able to operate without it; certainly not BS at all. Most people do work hard to deal with the problems they face day in and day out. That doesn't mean the problem should have existed in the first place, and Graeber correctly defines a bullshit job in such a way that a very much not-bullshit employee can nevertheless find themself in the soul crushing position of working a bullshit job. Any alternative definition where that soul crushing situation isn't possible completely misses the point of his research.
• graphtrader 5y ago
  The summary of the thesis in that article just sounds really stupid. Why are we even wasting time talking about this. I use to love the Economist but it is just a waste of time now as well.
• fighterpilot 5y ago
  https://archive.is/jTht4 https://archive.is/jTht4
• mentatz 5y ago
  The Economist is bullshit.
  • world_peace42 5y ago
    And it’s usually trying to push an agenda, to boot.
    • tchalla 5y ago
      In this case, they are reporting on a specific research which was published 2d ago. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
      • petra 5y ago
        Research can have biases too.
        • tchalla 5y ago
          Of course! Everything can have a bias - that's well understood. Just because something can have one, doesn't mean it does. If one finds bias in the research methods or data in the article - one can conduct their own study and submit their results. Ironically, the research from Cambridge talks about a bias in the original thesis of "BS jobs".
      • world_peace42 5y ago
        Yes, I read the article. I'm confused; is this supposed to constitute a rebuttal?
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      I don't think The Economist is trying to hide that. In fact they are pretty open about their opinions and what they support.
      • 5y ago
• tchalla 5y ago
  > Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. One may feel that their job is not making a meaningful contribution. That doesn't translate to the job being useless or BS.
  • cton 5y ago
    By the same token, not feeling as if your job is useless doesn’t mean you derive meaning from your work.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      People can also derive meaning from their work and feel that it's essential, while in reality it might make very little difference if they show up on Monday. Personally I'm fairly sure there's a large number of "bullshit jobs" and I have my own, unfounded, opinions regarding which jobs that might be. I'm just not convinced that we can identify these jobs by asking those who work in those position. There's also the jobs that truly are essential, but only because something somewhere else is broken.
  • FatalLogic 5y ago
    Yes. The article gets off to a bad start by comparing Graeber's people who didn't believe "their job made a meaningful contribution to the world" to a different group of people who did not "have the feeling of doing useful work" (and weirdly attempts to excuse this leap by saying that Graeber's "meaningful contribution to the world" was a high bar to clear!)
  • etripe 5y ago
    > That doesn't translate to the job being useless or BS Did you read Graeber's book? I have seen a lot of the mechanics described in every job I've ever done, including roles like the Box Ticker or the Flunkie - or whatever he calls the "entourage" people, it's been a minute. These types of functions exist and often don't contribute to the product, company growth or financial success. That's what bullshit means in context: busywork, economically non-functional. Now, not every compliance role (Box Ticker) is a bullshit job. Nor is every assistant (Flunkie). But enough are for the pattern to exist and Graeber to have a point. Markets and companies, which are often assumed to be efficient, are remarkably tolerant to inefficiency in their internal politics and bureaucracies. There is also a degree to which large enough companies can just coast on prior success before they feel the impact of bad process or ill focus and start to feel they're bleeding money. Looking at the broader economy, there are a lot of "lifestyle" products that squarely fall in the category of luxuries. There's "consultancy" that exists to play politics in companies and doesn't do anything, like SAfE/Agile/Scrum/transformation consultants (not all, but enough), management strategy consultants, etc. This is where the Economist's alienation comes in: there is no meaning to contribute to when working at one of these companies, as they offer and stimulate pure consumerism, or political faire semblant (=pretending) as a service. My conclusion is both Graeber and the Economist are right: the left Venn diagram contains actual useless jobs (as in, don't contribute to the process). The right diagram contains a lot of meaningless jobs where the product/service is ephemeral or purely materialistic, leading to alienation. The two diagrams overlap. As to whether 70% of jobs are contained in the union of the two? Perhaps not, but I think it's a big enough problem for it to lead to an increase in burnouts, boreouts, depression and suicide.
• RivieraKid 5y ago
  This is what I've been suspecting. It can't be true in competitive markets.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • handrous 5y ago
    I'm really curious about the perspective and life experience of posters who didn't read Greaber's book and go "yep, I've been that person a couple times, and almost everyone I know has complained to me at one time or another that one of their jobs was bullshit and didn't need to exist, usually with a nice, long explanation of all the nothing they do". That such jobs exist—and yes, in the private sector, not just government—was in no way the interesting part of that book, for me, but just an obvious fact of life. The cataloguing of why, and the exploration of trends and consequences, was the interesting part. There must be very little overlap between my place in the world and the people whose reaction is, "nah, that can't possibly be true".
  • bottled_poe 5y ago
    To some extent sure, but the market isn’t perfectly competitive either.
  • Rygu 5y ago
    A competitive market may become efficient, companies therein not always.
    • RivieraKid 5y ago
      The idea is that if most jobs were bullshit, it should be quite easy for a new business to capture market share. There are many people who have the capital and are looking for such opportunities.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        This ignores the possibility that it’s difficult to avoid winding up with at least bullshit jobs in any organization.
• scythe 5y ago
  The paper this article is based on: Soffia, M.; Wood, A.J.; Burchell, B. Alienation is not 'bullshit': an empirical critique of Graeber's theory of BS jobs, Work, Employment and Society 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015... Choice quote: "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."
• radmuzom 5y ago
  I was surprised by the cheerleading in HN when Graeber’s work was published because it made no sense to me. I personally think that 70% of people who work in any company in which Paul Graham has invested are doing bullshit jobs - but surely no one cares what jobs I consider bullshit.
  • lmohseni 5y ago
    But that’s the rub, a job is bullshit iff the worker doing the job considers it bullshit. Also, it’s a matter of degrees. You don’t have some part of your job that you honestly don’t consider to be bullshit? A meeting that could have been an email? Some interaction with HR? You’ve never once been effected by political infighting or careerism? If so I’d love to hear what you do.
  • smcl 5y ago
    For what the worth that is something I have found myself believing in recent years too
• spamizbad 5y ago
  Interesting to see The Economist cite a paper that essentially says Marx was right (about labor alienation)
  • dmfb 5y ago
    Yeah, it happens periodically. I take it to simply suggest the ruling class isn’t worried about a thing.
• antihero 5y ago
  I think it's highly linked to alienation. Say you're working in a call-center for an insurance company. You could look at it one way - you're a small part of a great thing, the idea of inn-sewer-ants, that means people in society have some level of safety when things go wrong. But it becomes alienating when you see that it, along with pretty much all business, is a construct to funnel wealth to the people at the top, whilst extracting as much value as it can from the powerless people at the bottom. Capitalism is innately more alienating the closer to the bottom you are, because due to the division of labour, people no longer have much of a connection to the results of the work they are doing, unless they are in an industry that is innately creative, such as coding, or vocational and involves seeing the direct results of helping people out.
  • state_less 5y ago
    Alienation may be part of it, but it could also be due to a variance in how people perceive the world. A health insurance company might have employees with different understandings of how the world works. Some may feel they are helping people who are sick, and others may feel they are skimming money off the top of sick people. The former employees might feel quite satisfied with their work and the later naturally feels depressed and anxious.
    • antihero 5y ago
      So would it folllow that more naïve people are less likely to feel alienation?
      • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        There is evidence that mildly depressed people tend to have a more accurate outlook on the world.
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        Or the more cynical people are more likely to feel alienation (not because alienation causes cynicism - though it does - but because cynicism causes alienation). But ideal workers who are neither naive nor cynical - how do they see the situation?
• MillenialMan 5y ago
  The trick "bullshit jobs" uses is to switch between two definitions of bullshit. One definition is "useless, of no benefit to the employer," and the other is "revolving around selling bullshit" (which is absolutely beneficial to the employer). The first definition is sort of ridiculous (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless), but when challenged it reverts to the second definition, which is trivially obvious (of course most companies are trying to hawk crap). Read the comments on this post - most of the arguments are just people switching between the two definitions.
  • Ecstatify 5y ago
    (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless) A bit naive to think that companies are 100% efficient and don’t make mistakes. Companies aren’t robots, they’re a collection of people, people make mistakes. I’ve seen executives in the past identify an issue and hire someone to solve that problem, executive didn’t understand the problem, person left the company position wasn’t filled again.
    • MillenialMan 5y ago
      I think they make mistakes, and as with your example, those mistakes tend to get fixed. Net negative jobs are the exception, not the rule, and completely useless jobs are the vast exception.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    > no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless That would be true only if leadership was 100% omniscient and knowledgeable in all topics. The problem is that ultimately only leadership and shareholders are incentivized by company profits. People on a salary care more about their personal salary and benefits, and while those should theoretically correlate with company profits, the feedback loop is extremely long and can be affected by external factors, potentially concealing inefficiencies, ultimately allowing people on a flat salary to prioritize their personal gains at the detriment of the company's gains. And the above still assumes good faith and mere lack of skill. When you include fraud or mis-selling into the mix (such as big consulting companies charging insane sums for unkept promises then outsourcing the actual work to incompetent people) the problem becomes so much bigger.
• sbrorson 5y ago
  The Economist is generally pushing an agenda, and the agenda is "capitalism is always right". If you buy their conceptual framework, the idea that you can be paid for BS work can't be right since Mr. Market always knows best, and he wouldn't pay for an activity which adds no value. However, if you don't buy the "capitalism is always right" Ansatz, then it's quite easy to see paid BS work as yet another market failure ... or worse, as a way to keep workers busy so they don't cause trouble for "the system". Which I believe was one of Mr. Graeber's main points.
  • cryptica 5y ago
    What we have today is not capitalism. Capitalism requires free markets. What we have today is a market propped up by money centralized printing. The winners are chosen by the money printer.
    • andrekandre 5y ago
      maybe its entirely possible that capitalism in its pure form (whatever that may be) may be too unstable to survive without any kind of regulatory framework* , so then we have a state to manage the system, and the players manipulate it to thier own ends... causing more and more regulatiry capture... * note how "free" the market was before the great depression and the subsequent regulations that followed to stabilize things, then repeal of said regulations that lead to one financial collapse after another (savings and loan crisis, early 2000s financial troubles, 2008 financial crisis etc etc)
      • cryptica 5y ago
        The great depression was caused by a sudden, significant contraction of the currency supply which occurred as a result of people realizing that banks did not hold enough currency to pay all depositors, this triggered panic and bank runs and then subsequent over-hoarding of currency by individuals. The real problem was not a fixed currency supply, it was the sudden contraction in the currency supply which caused people to over-react and hold onto currency too tightly. It self-corrected eventually as the panic subsided and investments resumed. If banks had enough deposits to pay all depositors, bank runs would not have mattered, there would not have been a panic and there would not have been a contraction in the currency supply and there would not have been an economic depression. I don't know if pure capitalism can work without any regulation but manipulating the money supply is definitely not the solution.
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  No. The problem is more that Graeber didn't refine the concept enough. Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't. 2) are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible. 3) are socially, politically, and/or environmentally toxic. These are all different kinds of bullshit. They are bullshit jobs for reasons that should be obvious. The bullshit is about far more than alienation. It happens when the jobs lower net social stability, longevity, and prosperity, and promote short-term inequality over long-term opportunity. Since that's the opposite of The Economist's ethical system - the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea. Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically. Fortunately this created a memorable meme which helped people question what they were doing. If The Economist has started printing rebuttals, that suggests the meme was effective.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I know in America there's a species of free market puritan that believes regulation is always bad, and truly free markets are some sort of anarchist paradise of unfettered freedom. I blame Ayn Rand*. There are a lot of such people, I have worked for several American companies so I've met some of them. That's not the Economist though, look up one of it's withering critiques of the American health care system for example. * Social welfare recipient Ayn Rand, to give her full title.
    • SyzygistSix 5y ago
      >Have you ever read the Economist? Pretty much every article they write about markets is about how to better mitigate exactly the problems you list. I think maybe you are looking at the situation and thinking that both the Economist and Graeber are "on the left", which from a US political standpoint would be somewhat accurate. Looked at in other context though, compared to Graeber, and Sahlins, who he studied under, the Economist would be better viewed as free market apologists offering helpful criticism whereas Graeber and Sahlins' work often questioned economic activity from a different perspective and has been used by people who question the very basis of modern economics and markets. For example, Sahlins' work was referenced extensively in Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work. And Graeber published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. From that perspective, the idea that the Economist is on the left is a bit simplistic and not very relevant.
• FormFollowsFunc 5y ago
  I kind of questioned Graeber's thesis but I do think he was onto something. I think most management jobs are bullshit jobs in that they don't contribute very much but are easy and well paid. You then have a whole underclass who actually do the work. It's not too different from ancient Greece where the society depended on slavery to function. The pandemic showed that very few of our jobs are essential. A large proportion of the population in the west could be not working yet society still functioned. It's only when things slow down in the east (where things actually get made) that it causes problems.
  • falcor84 5y ago
    >most management jobs ... are easy {{Citation needed}}
  • refurb 5y ago
    I’ve noticed this attitude of “management is useless” and it tends to be people who don’t have a great view of the entire company that say this. Having worked at some large companies, organization is a massive challenge. It’s not hard to get 10,000 smart people working hard. Getting them all working towards the same goal is not easy at all.
    • oytis 5y ago
      I would say management is definitely not useless, but it's hard to evaluate manager's impact, so people who get promoted can be in fact awful managers. The only way to measure their performance seems to be the performance of the unit they manage, which is often achieved contrary to their personal impact rather than because of it.
    • scotty79 5y ago
      That perception comes from a fact that it's such a hard challenge that people usually fail at it. And despite failing at it hard, things tend to be sort of ok, at least in the short term. So the perception forms that managers are bad and not that necessary.
    • jl6 5y ago
• wetpaws 5y ago
  If you ever worked in a corporate environment for at least a day, you will not need a scientific paper to understand that bullshit jobs is in fact a thing and it is quite real.
  • an_opabinia 5y ago
    Yeah. > Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. If your survey of 44,000 workers across 35 countries found that admins view their jobs as not useless, your survey is fucked.
    • DangitBobby 5y ago
      I have a hard time believing that garbage men and janitors would describe their jobs as useless. They may be undesirable (to some) but there is no argument whatsoever to be made for them being useless.
      • courtf 5y ago
        It may just be the common perceptions of these jobs are so pervasive, it influences the worker's own assessment. It's certainly in character for the bureaucrats to consider their jobs to be important. Desensitized to petty politics and constant surveillance, they probably thought their answers would get back to their boss, and didn't want to appear redundant.
  • MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    i suspect that economics is something of a bullshit science, where they draw arbitrary conclusions from hand picked data; (In this case one could ask both sides on what kind of professions they were surveying) also economists always act surprised when a real event like the great recession or great depression happens; other social sciences seem to be less detached from actual reality.
    • 5y ago
• georgeecollins 5y ago
  The problem with the bs work hypothesis is it assumes important human work is like a horse's work. The horse spends an hour pulling a carriage, the work is measurable and continuous. The most valuable thing humans do are nothing like that. They involve coming up with new ideas, resolving conflict, persuading people to do things, and fixing problems. No one knows how to measure this kind of work in terms of inputs and outputs and it is clear when it is happening successfully it involves a lot of downtime and extraneous communication. Also, it's often times really unclear who the key or effective people are in this kind of work even in success. So you may need ten people developing scripts -- nine of whose work is going to be cast aside-- to get the one really valuable film script. And yes, as the author points out a lot of people exploit that pretend to be doing something useful when they aren't. The growth of this kind of work isn't a new sickness in society, it is that we need less people working like horses and we need more people doing work we can't measure the input of effort or the output of work.
  • nitwit005 5y ago
    This is people saying their own jobs are useless, not other people judging their jobs as useless. Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens. I worked at a firm that fired its entire marketing team. There was no effect on sales that anyone could notice. They just made bad ads that had no effect on anything.
    • georgeecollins 5y ago
      You don't understand what I am saying. >> This is people saying their own jobs are useless Yes, people have jobs that they know are useless. They know they are just going through the motions. They are in complicated organizations that can't measure their value and they know they are free riding. However, there are also people in the same type of organizations who think they are really valuable, who may actually have a negative value. My point is that in certain types of work it is hard to measure and this results in poor attribution or exploitation (pretending you are doing something). >> Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens. No, that's exactly what I disagree with. You are also thinking about work the way a horse does it and not considering real world situations. Let's say I have three development execs at a movie studio and I fire one. Does something bad happen? I am still going to pick a script from one of the other two and it will be a hit or a flop. That tells me nothing about what the work out put of the third fired executive, which I might not be able to judge the impact of until I look back a few years. I know-- from experience-- that is the same with the creative director of a video game. You may not know for sure if their ideas are good or if they are did a good job unless you see through what they are doing. Or artists who are most time the useless, or mediocre, but every now and then produce an essential piece of key art. In case it isn't obvious I work in entertainment. But I believe their are similar cases in software engineering, recruiting, strategy planning, human resources, general leadership, etc. Where firing a person tells you nothing about what they would have done had they worked for a year. (edited for spelling)
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  You can also listen to the audio of this story https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/071%20Business%20-%20Bartleby-dbd600d883e47dfea6480aa054257808.mp3 https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/071%20Business%... archive.is is of course blocked in some countries If just want plain old text curl https://amp.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit \ |grep -o "<p.*</p>"|tr -cd '\12\40-\176' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
• sporkologist 5y ago
  I think a bullshit job is one where you don't get paid, or get paid very little.
  • goldenchrome 5y ago
    Debatable. My $300,000 FANG job was bullshit. In the end I worked 6 hours a week and was still considered a top performer. I had to quit because of how bored I was. Either the job was bullshit or I’m just very very competent. I lean towards the former though.
    • pram 5y ago
      I know what you mean, from a certain perspective. I do nothing most days, but internal teams use the platforms I built/developed. I’m around to janitor problems now, since I “own” them. Being an SME on a thing can seem like bullshit, but my presence and knowledge is still valuable to those users. Still critical in a crisis too. Also I can take like 4 hour naps and work on my hobbies. Maybe just try finding other things to do lol
    • bagacrap 5y ago
      I think tech just scales that way. A little bit of competency paired with the inevitable accrual of expertise goes a long way.
• throw_away 5y ago
  They get different answer by asking a different question and moving the bar and then pass the entire thesis off as envy? Dismal science, indeed.
  • aabhay 5y ago
    The fulcrum of the Economists argument gives away their bias. They say that “asking people if their job contributes something meaningful to the world is a high bar indeed”. That made me laugh out loud.
• svat 5y ago
  David Graeber had created an account here on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber), and this was his most recent comment, from January 2020 (he died in September 2020): > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist. (in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)
  • golergka 5y ago
    The fact that the person doing the job thinks so doesn't necessarily make it so. There's plenty of people who don't see any real purpose in safety belts in cars, too.
    • pydry 5y ago
      There's probably more people with bullshit jobs who think they are not bullshit than vice versa. Humans have an innate desire to be useful.
      • gpm 5y ago
        I agree with your second statement, but your first statement doesn't necessarily follow, it depends on the proportion of jobs that are bullshit.... If a human is 1% likely to think a not-bullshit-job is bullshit, and 10% likely to think a bullshit-job is bullshit, but 99% of jobs are not-bullshit, then for every bullshit job that the worker thinks is bullshit, there are 9.9 not-bullshit jobs that the worker thinks are bullshit. Edit: Repaired math (2 minutes after posting)
        • pydry 5y ago
          Your hypothetical would lead to roughly 98% thinking that their jobs are not bullshit when 99% actually were. At that level we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. The actual numbers are more like 60% non bullshit / 40% bullshit, though.
• peteretep 5y ago
  Are there tools that will take a paper, do a tree of citations, and find ones that have been debunked
• rStar 5y ago
  most economists have bullshit jobs, since they are, almost to a one, stenographers to power.
  • harry8 5y ago
    Not many economists employed at the economist fwiw.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "Another factor is the human tendency to adopt the culture of their profession; those who sell assault rifles or homeopathic medicines eventually come to believe they are doing good work." Right, and this is why surveying people on whether they think their jobs are meaningful is an inadequate means of determining if the jobs are actually meaningful to society. This should not be a subjective determination. No doubt people in finance feel like they are the most necessary jobs on the planet because they touch so much of the world's money. But it is not their money. Someone has to earn it first before the financial sector can touch it. Also, the question is not whether it is "good work" but whether it is "necessary work".
• rStar 5y ago
  i recommend everyone read the book referenced here. ignore the haters in the comments, it will change your life. it will at the very least make you consider how to spend the actual time that we’re alive. it’s up to you to comprehend and therefore benefit, since, in this world, it’s dangerous information.
• slt2021 5y ago
  If you ever seen The Office Space movie you can't possibly question Graeber's thesis
• musicale 5y ago
  > prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance or other capitalist occupations > resentment that such people earn so much more than those who work in the caring professions or manual labour It's more than this; it's also how some people who work in finance actually feel about their own jobs.
• ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  This refutation is really weak. The prompt provided in the refutation is: > “I have the feeling of doing useful work” Doing useful work is not a feeling, so people probably choose the middle-of-the-road answer (sometimes), or the socially desirable answer (often/always). It's better to ask how useful they think their work is overall. Even better to ask them about their job 5 years previous. Think about all the people who joined the US military in the early 2000's. If you asked them about their work at the time they would say it was extremely meaningful. With hindsight the number would go down drastically. Same thing with all the people who see their work tossed asunder when a new CEO takes the company in a new direction. Or even better^2, analyze how much bullshit work is actually being done regardless of whether people feel they're useful. People rarely glimpse the big picture so they are unlikely to see if their job is a strategic blunder, even years later.
  • jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Yes, this is not a great article. Makes for a catchy headline though. Perhaps a better notion of bullshit jobs is in terms of what happens when people stop doing them. We had some nice recent examples of that in the past year when people stopped going to work because they couldn't. This happened on an extremely large scale and it was mostly fine. Record economic growth in some countries even.
  • dantheman 5y ago
    Not all work is a success, and when people fail it's definitely not bullshit work.
    • MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      I don't think the possibility of failure informs whether it's bullshit work. Someone might be assigned the task of writing a report that no one will ever read, and they still might fail to even submit the file.
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    > “I have the feeling of doing useful work” I'm sure the paper-pushers, the process guardians, the SAFe certified ninjas, the box tickers are convinced their job is of utmost importance. Not that it always isn't. Sometimes you need people like that. But only sometimes.
• ChuckMcM 5y ago
  A lot of words around the payoff -- "Alienation depends on how the workers are treated by those in charge. “If managers are respectful, supportive and listen to workers, and if workers have the opportunities for participation, to use their own ideas and have time to do a good job, they are less likely to feel that their work is useless,” the researchers write." In my experience, any manager with even a shred of self awareness and emotional sensitivity figures out that the people who work for you care exactly as much for their work as they believe you care about them.
  • ddingus 5y ago
    Consideration given is consideration due. First manager who cared made that obvious, and was a mentor for many years. We had this talk and I also asked why: Because maybe you will do the same, give as you got. I have. Those relationships go well past whatever company gig got them started.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      I don't think caring is enough. In fact, it's quite a mindfuck too have a manager that cares about your emotional state, but at the same time undermines everything you do at work and fails to advance your interests or sing your praises. Outside of abuse, that is one of the worst employee situation you can be in, unless you don't care about career growth and are very happy with where you are. Hell, I would take an emotionally abusive, verbally abusive boss that promotes me, and catapults my career over a caring boss that doesn't, because I'm the type of person who doesn't care about what my boss throws at me, it rolls off of me (I am aware that some people need more external validation and emotional support than I do, so I do not recommend the latter as a management strategy).
      • ddingus 5y ago
        I wrote consideration for a reason. Caring is not enough! When people take time to consider one another and field of play they also tend to understand everyone, that playfield and potentially themselves better. Not understanding people in our lives is a waste of time, energy, resources, and all of that comes with greater cost and risk exposure not associated with meaningful returns. Unnecessary costs and risks do add up.
• 6510 5y ago
  This article didn't need to exist.
• johbjo 5y ago
  A fair definition would be: a job is bullshit if when someone stops "doing it" there is minimal or positive effect on the economic output. And here is an article arguing that jobs are legitimate as long as people "feel useful". Well, this is precisely the problem. They fill offices with workers because it feels good to have subordinates. Responsibility is part of the career reward system, and people derive their identities from jobs and careers. (I see Graeber used a different definition ...)
  • addicted 5y ago
    That’s true of nearly every job. If every founder in Ycombinator shut down their company today and fired all their employees, thereby killing all those jobs, there will be minimal effect on the economic output. Largely because the vast majority of jobs here are early stage startups which haven’t had a chance to bloom, and the vast majority will fail anyways, but we don’t know which ones will ahead of time. That does not mean they are bullshit jobs.
    • anoncake 5y ago
      That's different. The expected value of your work's utility can be positive even if it's likely zero.
• Animats 5y ago
  But zero-sum work is real. This includes much of advertising.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  I work as a contractor - mainly to government and my experience is that at least 50% of people in the public sector are there purely to keep people in employment. They serve no useful purpose, and mainly create made up work for each other. I also do very little that is useful despite bringing a great deal of skill. If they cared to ask me what I think, I would be happy to explain why all the things they get me to do are a waste of time. I’d also be more than happy to suggest some simple things they could do that would actually be useful.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Big companies are the same, that problem isn't restricted to the private sector.
    • HPsquared 5y ago
      The difference is, (until recently) inefficient private companies could go bankrupt.
  • pharmakom 5y ago
    Have you considered that you might not have enough visibility into what they do to be able to judge? Obviously the percentage of useless work is >0% but you are just throwing numbers around.
    • PakistaniDenzel 5y ago
      As someone who has worked a bullshit cyber security job in government, I will say 50% is a conservative estimate. Our team had 9 people in it: 1 manager, 6 junior-mid level engineers and 2 senior engineers. The only ones that did any actual work were the senior engineers. The junior-mid engineers literally did nothing for months on end. The manager would disappear all week only to turn up on Friday mornings to give "corporate update" presentations to the team.
  • littlestymaar 5y ago
    From my own experience, it's not so much about keeping people in employment and more about manager maintaining oversized teams because the size of your team is a status symbol.
• TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  The funniest thing about this article is what it says about worker alienation in Marxist theory. It says worker alienation depends on how well workers are treated by their bosses. But that’s simply not what the theory says. Marxist theory as best as I understand refers to worker alienation from the products of their own labor due to capitalist ownership of the means of production. It is the lack of worker ownership of the means of production that produces alienation, not how well they are treated. There are of course other meanings of of the word alienation, but the article states in one paragraph that Graeber was right about worker alienation as an aspect of Marxist theory, and then in the very next sentence says worker alienation depends on how workers are treated by their bosses. From my understanding of one of the basics of Marxist theory, that’s not what the theory says.
• ibudiallo 5y ago
  I was once asked to automate a task at a job. There was a webpage that had a dozen iframes. My task was to add a js that refreshes each iframe a minute after it fully loaded. It was a wonky type of health checker. When I finished, I went to see the person who used the product in person. Turns out, his job was to sit in front of the webpage and refresh it every minute or so, then report it if any of the pages in the iframes failed to load. After my update, he wouldn't have to refresh the page anymore. He would just sit and watch. I thought that his job was bullshit, and that his manager was just keeping him busy. But it turns out, I was the one who was misemployed[1]. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/the-40-million-dollar-job https://idiallo.com/blog/the-40-million-dollar-job
  • scotty79 5y ago
    It's really interesting what happened to you. Here's what I think about it. There's a network of hidden, potential rivers of value flowing through society. Companies are established in hopes of tapping into those rivers. Once in a while some company, often by sheer chance alone will place itself in such beneficial spot of this river network that it can draw absolutely insane amount of money from there. Form then on usual concerns about making mistakes, efficiency and doing reasonable things that are essential for survival of smaller companies no longer matter to that lucky company. It can grow to huge proportions and spread, it can make dazzling amount of mistakes, have huge inefficiencies hiring useless or harmful people, doing unnecessary things, especially in the new places that the company grew into, but are sufficiently far away to the core that is tapping to this ample stream of cash. This situation can last for many decades, until tectonic shifts of society fabric eventually alter the river network and the source starts to dry out, and this formerly lucky company now sees its money being taken by other lucky ones somewhere else. Your job might have been highly beneficial to the endeavor it was a part of and removing it might have decrease efficiency of this endeavor greatly, but I strongly suspect that the whole endeavor was one of those side ones, remote from the core of the profit source of the whole corporation. It's not that your job was useless, but probably everything two management levels up from you and everything below them was useless in the grand scheme of things for that corporation and maybe even actively harmful to their bottom line. Corporations have to dissipate cash this way. They have to keep trying doing stupid inefficient things because that's their only chance of long term survival. They are desperately trying to discover new ample source of wealth, before the one that fuels them dries out and they have to accept all of the inefficiencies that come from this random search.
• NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
  In a way this is strange question, and topic, how to decide what is and what is not relative to determine what is bullshit job. Yesterday something else interesting happen, "Yana Sizikova: Russian tennis player arrested at French Open over match-fixing allegations", what is that to do with anything? From one angle just imagine someone was arrested for playing game. Imagine child on playground being arrested for playing with marbles. But, things are not that simple this adult game was connected with money, and everything what has connection with money we give some kind of value, so much that we are keen to put someone in prison. In the same way, we grow economy, create roles, watch our security, value things, help others trying to go around fundamental question that needs answer - who owns and who has right to access resources in the society where everything is fully automated?