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

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.