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This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though. >They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feel

• lucideer 5y ago
  > the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” > In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" [...] It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question. You're right that Graeber's question is vague (it could do with improvement/narrowing) but the first question quoted above isn't so much worse but just completely irrelevant. They've asked an entirely different question unrelated to what Graeber was trying to get at. If I don't "have the feeling of doing useful work", does that mean my job is not useful, or my job is potentially useful but carried out inefficiently. Am I attempting useful work but blocked from doing so by some administrative or practical barrier? Do I consider myself insufficiently talented or qualified at my job to carry it out in a useful manner. Graeber's question, while in need of improvement, is at least asking about the right things: the jobs themselves. This new question is asking about the people's individual relationships to their jobs, not the actual purpose of the role.
  • simonh 5y ago
    I don't really follow you. A questionnaire can only find out what the respondents think about their job. If you want to objectively know whether their jobs are actually useful, independent of their opinions or feelings, a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask.
    • pinguin7 5y ago
      I think Graeber makes the assumption that the statement "my job makes no (net) contribution to society" is as closest to reality as we can possibly get. The interviewed person is probably the best to know if the job is valuable. Even if they falsely assume that their job makes no difference, the sentiment is a problem in itself. I am not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving my interpretation of the intent.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • simonh 5y ago
        Can you pleas explain where you got that question and phrasing from please, because I don't recognise it from the research under discussion and I don't believe it is supported by any of the evidence.
    • lucideer 5y ago
      > a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask That's fair but even still, Graeber's question should at least be probing whether people might think their jobs are useful; this new question only probes whether people think their contribution is useful individually.
  • pydry 5y ago
    The economist is trying to redefine "bullshit jobs" to mean simply "jobs which hold no value to anybody". This excludes zero sum jobs - they are useful to someone. Graeber defined "bullshit jobs" as jobs which hold no value to society at large. This includes zero sum jobs. It's an argument over definition followed by an ad hominem - "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". It reminds me of this quote: "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
    • bashinator 5y ago
      Is a zero-sum job defined as one where the only person benefitting is the employee? If so, it seems like the only ethical way to eliminate those jobs from the economy would be some kind of guaranteed minimum income.
      • pydry 5y ago
        One of the examples of the distinction was a guy who worked at a post production company that: A) Made cool explosions and aliens for movies, etc. which he loved and thought counted as socially useful coz audiences did too. B) Made hair shinier and teeth whiter and other visual trickery to give false impressions of branded products. These things served only to take market share from other similar companies that made products that weren't markedly different to theirs. B made up the majority of what he did, hence "mainly bullshit". Graeber's claim is that this class of job (dubbed "goons"), according to those ppolled/interviewed only exist because other people employ them too. I.e. if there were an armistice on toothpaste ads that showed white teeth nothing would really change for consumers but if one company stopped the mindshare arms race they would lose market share.
        • bashinator 5y ago
          I see - that’s philosophically, but maybe not economically different from what I was thinking of - “make-work” jobs, or jobs that could easily be replaced by automation. Edit to add: one major difference might be in the level of skill or education the employee has/needs.
• kelnos 5y ago
  > This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though. Right, and apparently: > 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. Which leads me to believe that people are not a good judge of the usefulness of their work. I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs. Perhaps the people doing them don't find the jobs meaningful, but refuse collection is certainly useful; without it, everyone would have to cart their trash to the dump, or, worse, we'd just have trash everywhere. So it strikes me that all of this is just kinda pointless. I think we can reasonably make the argument that bullshit jobs do exist, but the number of these jobs is a very subjective take, and people seem to often incorrectly value their own jobs.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    Beside the task there are other elements. You can almost turn any act into a pain or the opposite. Clarity of intent. (Quality of training) Adequate load sharing. Interest of the approach (some petty tasks can made fun and challenging). Then there's the systemic / social side of it. If your work flows with others. There a parallel with kinetic energy and inertia. A job where things flow is probably gonna be appreciated even if it has low value.
  • pydry 5y ago
    >I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs. I think they did by and large (as did Graeber). The exceptions I remember listed were 1) "second order bullshit" - necessary jobs for "unnecessary companies". E.g. cleaners for a debt collections call center - I don't think all reasonable people would believe this is socially useful. If the company doesnt need to exist the cleaners shouldn't either. 2) for example, cleaners who said that they were routinely ordered to clean things that already were clean or to do a small amount of cleaning and look busy the rest of the time. Performative cleaning, in other words. The economist was specifically trying to misrepresent these examples to undermine the broader point, I think.
• dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  If the question is rephrased to something like “if your company/product ceased to exist, would the world be better off, worse off, or no different?” In my case, it would be no different (beyond a handful of job losses which are insignificant in the grand scheme). That, to me, is a bullshit job. Meaningless time consumption.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Is it no different because some other company would fill in the gap? Or because literally no one cares whether or not whatever your company does gets done? If someone else would step in and do it, it’s not unique but isn’t necessarily bullshit.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      This company's customers / clients and suppliers might of course care... But if the suppliers exist only to supply this, and the clients in turn don't produce anything otherwise useful either, maybe none of them really matter. So if someone else would step in and do it, that might just mean that then someone else would be doing an equally bullshit job.
• 7thaccount 5y ago
  I think this may be over reading into it. You can have a job where you feel useful and valuable without changing the world. There are also jobs where you are being very useful, but it's arguably not good for society at large. You've got companies like FB that exist to just sell user data and serve ads and in HFT that milk ever penny out of the stock market where the speed of light isn't competitive enough for them, so they have to be as close to the exchanges as possible. Valuable to the company, but not through a bigger picture lens. Even worse, those companies have absorbed some of our best and brightest STEM graduates for years and prevented them from solving more noble pursuits.
  • bnralt 5y ago
    Indeed, and the number of "bullshit-jobs" might actually be grossly underestimated, since I've found in general people will often try to justify the status quo and especially their own jobs. Most people would say a three-card monte street hustler has a net negative impact on society, but the hustler can argue that it's a form of entertainment, that people know what they're getting into, that people are paying a relatively small price for an iconic experience, etc. There's a large amount of the economy that I'd consider a net negative for society - advertising and the industries created to convey it (radio, TV, most websites), credit cards, junk food, sales, etc. There are also a lot of cases where increased input doesn't seem to make people happier off. For instance, a lot of work goes into making special effects better than they were decades ago, but doesn't necessarily mean an audience in 2021 is going to enjoy movies more than an audience in 2000 did. As a society we should probably spend a lot more time talking about where our economic output is going, and if it's going towards the things we actually want it to.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Im not personally a huge fan of Facebook, I barely use it, but the fact is I know a lot of people who do use it. I’m in several clubs and societies that use it heavily, and derive massive benefits from it. One society I’m in quadrupled in size after establishing a strong social media presence. The value Facebook gets out of Facebook may well be obtained in questionable ways, but the fact is the service itself creates tons of value and utility for hundreds of millions of people. And yes I’m sure it causes some harm as well, definitely, but it’s not as simple as you make it out.
• svat 5y ago
  Consider the two data points being discussed: • When asked "whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world", 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. (And this is what Graeber [not Gerber] wrote about.) • When counting those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”, this was only 4.8%. (The newer research.) It is hardly surprising that fewer people thought their job failed to clear the lower bar represented by the latter question (this is precisely what one would expect); so it's not clear what is being contradicted or refuted. Even the data that the latter number is decreasing over time, or has a different distribution across kinds of work (than predicted by Graeber for the former question) is not necessarily a contradiction: those working in several "bullshit" jobs (under Graeber's definition) may well more frequently have a feeling of doing useful work, while also being less confident that their job itself serves a purpose and ought to exist. I can imagine this especially for the "goons" and "duct tapers" kinds of jobs (in his classification). (In fact, if you look up and examine the full results of the YouGov poll at https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/g0h77ytkkm/Opi_InternalResults_150811_Work_W.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... you'll find that even among the 37% who said their job "is not making a meaningful contribution to the world", only 21% of them said they found it "Not at all fulfilling"!) The Economist article dismisses the former question with "This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify", and you dismiss it by calling it "vague aspirational follow your dreams guff" and a "very heavily loaded" question that "hopelessly biased his conclusions", but this is all value judgement. It is not at all clear to me whether the "correct" question to ask is the latter one rather than the former one; surely it depends on what one is trying to conclude.