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> 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

> 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.
- addicted 5y ago
  Just because parts of a job are not as efficient as they might be, does not mean the job itself is “bullshit”.
  - lmohseni 5y ago
    Contrapositively, all jobs require a certain amount of bullshit, to varying degrees.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Companies existing in the free market could pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. Government can also pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. However the company can go out of business - the government retains their make-work labor force in perpetuity without consequence.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There is all sorts of "government work" that comes and goes. In the 1930s, the WPA and CCA employed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and then vanished. Governments have from time to time invested/spent more on mental health care, urban design, transportation and farm consulting (to name just a few). Perhaps you have a perception of a certain kind of individual tenure associated with government jobs ("it's so hard to fire them"). That perception might even be true, though it's a little debatable since there are some fairly legitimate reasons why these rules exist. But even if it is true, that doesn't mean that government work over the long haul is secure.
  - etripe 5y ago
    The private sector has one sole motivator: the profit incentive. All else is incidental, including the oft touted "making the world a better place". Some companies do make an impact, like pharmaceutical companies developing a COVID vaccine or Tesla leading the charge towards using electric vehicles instead of dinosaur fueled ones. Strictly speaking, for a job not be wasteful in the private sector, it's only required to be useful, not meaningful - but it could be. Given the motivation, "waste" has a narrow definition in the private sector: anything that doesn't contribute to the baseline. Non-waste can take many forms, e.g. improving product quality, reducing costs, managing brand perception, market research or regulatory capture. There is wiggle room for subjective assessment, like when companies see IT not as a catalyst but a cost centre and therefore fundamentally waste. The government has a different motivator entirely: the greater good. Waste and inefficiency take on another meaning in that context. Digging and filling ditches isn't wasteful if it ensures people have an income. In a government context, it's a useful job because it achieves stated goals, but still a meaningless one. The wars on terror and drugs are examples where it becomes more murky. For some, they are both useful and meaningful. For others, they're just one or perhaps neither. There are also government projects that seem like waste at the time but turn out to have tremendous value and even be private sector useful today. Examples are legion in military inventions that later became staples, such as microwave ovens, the Internet, cell phones. Regardless of how you feel about landing on the moon and NASA in general, we have now have non-stick pans, GPS and solar panels. In summary: looking at government through the lens of the private sector is failing to understand a simple truth: corporations are individualistic, where governments are collectivist even in a capitalist system.
croes 5y ago
Things like the often cited Corruption Perceptions Index are determined the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
derbOac 5y ago
I was confused by this article, to be honest. I can't speak to Graeber in particular but I've read many articles about the idea of bullshit jobs and in general, the theses I read had little (although not nothing) to do with how people felt about their jobs -- it was more about the actual utility of them, in the sense of there being a bureaucratic administrative elite who are largely unnecessary and serve mostly to increase their largesse at the expense of those below them ("the MBAization of America" to reluctantly quote Musk). If anything, I think the idea is that people in these positions overvalue their positions. I don't want to advocate for this idea necessarily, just that I think the "bullshit jobs thesis" might mean something different to different people. The Economist article closes with an admission that "part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct," discussing the adage that "people leave bad managers, not bad jobs." Many variants of the bullshit jobs thesis I think propose an increase in bad managers, who are part of a larger unnecessary management structure. I guess overall I felt as if the Economist piece was missing a few things.

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.

addicted 5y ago
Just because parts of a job are not as efficient as they might be, does not mean the job itself is “bullshit”.
- lmohseni 5y ago
  Contrapositively, all jobs require a certain amount of bullshit, to varying degrees.
seibelj 5y ago
Companies existing in the free market could pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. Government can also pay people all day long to do useless work, like digging ditches and filling them. However the company can go out of business - the government retains their make-work labor force in perpetuity without consequence.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  There is all sorts of "government work" that comes and goes. In the 1930s, the WPA and CCA employed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and then vanished. Governments have from time to time invested/spent more on mental health care, urban design, transportation and farm consulting (to name just a few). Perhaps you have a perception of a certain kind of individual tenure associated with government jobs ("it's so hard to fire them"). That perception might even be true, though it's a little debatable since there are some fairly legitimate reasons why these rules exist. But even if it is true, that doesn't mean that government work over the long haul is secure.
- etripe 5y ago
  The private sector has one sole motivator: the profit incentive. All else is incidental, including the oft touted "making the world a better place". Some companies do make an impact, like pharmaceutical companies developing a COVID vaccine or Tesla leading the charge towards using electric vehicles instead of dinosaur fueled ones. Strictly speaking, for a job not be wasteful in the private sector, it's only required to be useful, not meaningful - but it could be. Given the motivation, "waste" has a narrow definition in the private sector: anything that doesn't contribute to the baseline. Non-waste can take many forms, e.g. improving product quality, reducing costs, managing brand perception, market research or regulatory capture. There is wiggle room for subjective assessment, like when companies see IT not as a catalyst but a cost centre and therefore fundamentally waste. The government has a different motivator entirely: the greater good. Waste and inefficiency take on another meaning in that context. Digging and filling ditches isn't wasteful if it ensures people have an income. In a government context, it's a useful job because it achieves stated goals, but still a meaningless one. The wars on terror and drugs are examples where it becomes more murky. For some, they are both useful and meaningful. For others, they're just one or perhaps neither. There are also government projects that seem like waste at the time but turn out to have tremendous value and even be private sector useful today. Examples are legion in military inventions that later became staples, such as microwave ovens, the Internet, cell phones. Regardless of how you feel about landing on the moon and NASA in general, we have now have non-stick pans, GPS and solar panels. In summary: looking at government through the lens of the private sector is failing to understand a simple truth: corporations are individualistic, where governments are collectivist even in a capitalist system.

croes 5y ago

Things like the often cited Corruption Perceptions Index are determined the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

derbOac 5y ago

I was confused by this article, to be honest. I can't speak to Graeber in particular but I've read many articles about the idea of bullshit jobs and in general, the theses I read had little (although not nothing) to do with how people felt about their jobs -- it was more about the actual utility of them, in the sense of there being a bureaucratic administrative elite who are largely unnecessary and serve mostly to increase their largesse at the expense of those below them ("the MBAization of America" to reluctantly quote Musk). If anything, I think the idea is that people in these positions overvalue their positions. I don't want to advocate for this idea necessarily, just that I think the "bullshit jobs thesis" might mean something different to different people. The Economist article closes with an admission that "part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct," discussing the adage that "people leave bad managers, not bad jobs." Many variants of the bullshit jobs thesis I think propose an increase in bad managers, who are part of a larger unnecessary management structure. I guess overall I felt as if the Economist piece was missing a few things.