In it Graeber argues that a lot of our jobs are bullshit, so they don't contribute to society at all, they just waste our time and give us the source of income. We live in a culture where you have to justify your own existence through the job and because of that we are having more and more of those bullshit jobs that do nothing, they just give us money necessary to stay live. We are essentially cogs in a big machine that should probably work us, while it seems like we are meant to work for it.
I think this happens because of how our society is structured – people who make decisions ad the top society don't have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives, which is unfortunate consider that they get disproportionate rewards for their own roles. I think we should strive to create more horizontal based decision making procedures with how we organize society, possibly based on ideas like worker cooperatives or decentralized planning. What are your opinions about this phenomenon of bullshit jobs?
by InternalEarly5885
41 Comments
As someone with a bullshit job who has read *Bullshit Jobs,* I think he is spot on. When you stop to think how far so many jobs are from actually producing anything of necessity or even joy, or helping people with their own actual needs, it can really boggle the mind how much stupid shit you can actually receive an income for.
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I totally agree that it was an insightful book… I wrote a [blog article](https://abbygoldsmith.com/bs-jobs-enshittification/) about it.
> I hope society stops incentivizing salaried drudge work by forcing that to be the only possible way for average citizens to get healthcare and family care.
I thought his take was spot on, his writing is entertaining and his anarchist philosophy is fascinating. I also recommend one of his other books “debt – the first 5000 years”. It’s a shame he passed away, I would have liked to hear his opinions on the post-covid world.
I haven’t read the book, so maybe he addresses this, but I think it’s really difficult to quantify how useful a job is because our world is so vastly complex and changing all the time. Also, I think people vastly overestimate what “contributes to society.”
I don’t care that my profession is meaningless. It gives me time to scroll reddit.
The global securities annual trading volume is around $40 trillion. Of that, about $200 billion is actual new investments (IPOs) that create new companies. The rest of it is just a casino. $40 TRILLION supporting all those bullshit jobs that produce NOTHING. Worse, 60% of all US tax breaks go toward that activity. WTF??
I read the first couple chapters because I thought the premise was interesting. But I don’t like his writing style and I found his arguments pretty shallow. There definitely are bullshit jobs out there, and he did point out a few early on (eg: some military person had to drive somewhere to do nothing, whatever). But I really don’t believe that most jobs are like this and he didn’t do much to persuade me.
It’s a long time since I read it but I remember thinking a lot of it was spot-on when I did – though I’ve been lucky never to consider my own jobs bullshit so my agreement wasn’t based in personal experience.
As for your own analysis, I don’t think it’s because the people at the top aren’t aware for the most part, but because they benefit from the system as it is. All for more horizontal organising though!
I think it is a still reverberating echo of that wonderful christian morale, that is basically built around the justification of the exploitation of your fellow sinful human beings, be it as slave, wife, child or worker. Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken”. I find it curious to see that a lot of people acknowledge the existence of bullshit jobs, but when you bring a universal base income to the table, it is almost universally dismissed, throughout the western world. The mistrust in ourselves, the disbelieve that the vast majority of people would want to contribute to society even if they are not explicitly paid (as long as they have their basic needs met) for it, is so deeply engrained, that we rather start a nuclear war and burn our entire civilization to the ground than live with the idea that a small percentage of freeloaders would profit from a universally beneficial system.
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I think it’s an interesting phenomenon and an interesting premise for a book, but definitely not as ubiquitous as he makes out. Which I think is just a symptom of the kind of book he wanted to write. He wanted a grand, sweeping societal narrative, rather than a handful of interesting case studies, so he kind of had to stretch the truth a bit to fit it into that framework. But it does make for an interesting read, just requires a little bit of suspension of disbelief.
It reminds me of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. In it, all the telephone sanitizers were sent away on a space ship as it was a bullshit job anyway. A few years later, everyone on the planet died because of an illness that was spread via phones.
It’s just the most modern take on a pair of fairly orthodox Marxist arguments (specifically, alienation in industrial society on one hand, and capitalism enabling the existence of “unproductive” labor on the other), and I don’t mean this as a putdown, just how I understand where he is coming from.
As someone with a job that isn’t bullshit, a lot of what I am made to do is bullshit.
I remember a regular meeting I had to attend where administrators would give us some data in advance from a spreadsheet. We had to input it back into another spreadsheet. And then in the meeting we had to tell them what those data were, which they originally gave us. Bloody pointless.
Goodness knows the amount of superfluous management positions there are. How much money could they save (and pass along to their employees hopefully) if they got rid of them.
Maybe its about creating gaps, so that they personally don’t have to interact with employees, so they don’t have to empathize with the people they dick over so much?
That’s crapitalism. Soulless, anti-human, neofeudalist *crapitalism*.
I haven’t read this, but I’ve read Utopia For Realists by Rutger Bregman. It has a whole chapter about the value different jobs add; a bin collector strike brought the city of New York to its fucking knees in 2 weeks, but over a quarter of all bankers leaving Ireland led Irish people to just figure it out themselves and operate on community trust instead of credit score.
It also briefly touches on how finance jobs destroy economic value while research jobs create it, and the disproportionate pay each job receives.
If communism were purely about redistributing wealth then the stock market is the ultimate communist icon, because their huge salaries come from doing exactly that.
He is absolutely spot on also the larger a company is the more bullshit jobs there are.
Its claimed that large tech firms like Facebook and Google simply hire the best talent and hoard them in case they are needed. It’s partly why there has been so many tech layoffs recently. There a lot of very gifted software engineers who are just going through the motions.
I’ve been in the situation myself where we had a basic 5 – 6 page iOS app but, we had 20 iOS devs, 6 UX, 8 Product owners plus a separate backend team, plus an analytics team. The pace of work was glacial slow and in reality the whole thing could have been done by a small 4-5 man team.
Another situation in another company one of the managers resigned and a new one was appointed, this manager decided they needed a PA and was given one, they then decided that they still had too much of a work load so they appointed an assistant manager to be in charge of technical and another manager to be in charge of marketing, these assistant managers were then also given PAs, So one job turned into 6 jobs in the course of a year.
I’ve only read *Debt* and *Direct Action* by him. Loved him in my anarchists days, and still do. You’ve just reminded me to check this one out. Thanks!
incredible read that everyone should read imo, very eye opening, backed up by good data too.
By far his worst book. Where are these jobs? I wish I could get one. I’d kill for one. I’d love to make six figures and do nothing all day. But instead I’m on the brink of homelessness
I’ve read the book, and while I’m agreeing with the summary, the book didn’t add anything more meaningful than his original article did from 2016: https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/
Mechanization, automation and overall efficiency have increased A LOT in recent history. So the human workload has decreased, but still we work the same amount as before. If things were fair and reasonable, we should be working less already. I think it’s clear from this fact alone that bullshit jobs exist today.
Even Richard Nixon was promising a four-day workweek back in the day.
Haven’t read the book but I’ve always assumed this is how we keep 7 billion people from getting bored and thinking outside the box. Those in power could never stay there if we weren’t preoccupied with survival and comfort. Having read other books about revolutions in the past, I’m not sure keeping everyone busy is the worst idea. I’m sure there are better ways but I’m not smart enough to speculate on such things.
There are loads of bullshit jobs. I’m less confident that collectives, localised democracy etc get rid of them – such experience I’ve had with those sorts of things is that they also create then sometimes for similar reasons (inertia, reluctance to change, protecting self-interest as guilds and unions sometimes have) and sometimes for different ones (direct democracies are often vulnerable to appeals to emotion of various kinds, and using resourcing decisions as way to express strength of feeling – we should have an officer focused in issue X becuase issue X is important rather than becuase it’s clear what the officer would actually do that adds value). They’re better protected against some forms of bullshit for sure, but it’s not a panacea by any means.
He misses the mark a lot. For example, he holds up open source programming as non-bullshit work that people want to do for free, but complains about bullshit job of corporate programmers writing glue code and fixing bugs, instead of writing good and interesting code that is well-written and bug-free. But if you have experience with this, you’ll know that open source projects have lots of bugs that need fixing and lots of glue code that needs to be written, and the fact that there’s often no financial incentive to do it means that lots of those problems simply persist in open source, until someone actually throws money or paid workers at it. And writing code that just doesn’t have bugs? Well, let me know when you find a way to actually do this (ok, there’s one – formal verification, but it’s difficult, time-consuming and even less fun than writing glue code).
Most of his points are, of course, not about programming but about corporate bureaucracies. And sure, those are often complex and inefficient, and could use some trimming. But he throws baby out with bathwater and sort of assumes that we could simply do without them at all. Modern industry (whether it’s heavy industry or computers or pharmaceuticals) works on a large scale, and organizing on a large scale is more or less impossible without a bureaucracy and different tiers of management (kind of like running a country – there’s practical, not just moral, reasons for having local administration and not just having literally everything done by a presidential decree). Graeber can of course argue that an anarchist approach with worker democracy would be less bureaucratic, but the opposite is true. A good case study would be something like Wikipedia – community-run, very large scale, unresonably bureaucratized. The only real way to not have bureaucracy is to have things done at a smaller scale, but there’s a reason why small worker co-ops run farms and bookstores instead of building airplanes, doing integrated circuit fabrication or doing medical research. Those things need big money, complex and expensive equipment and a large number of extremely specialized personnel, which only makes sense at scale.
Or, to be a bit of an asshole, Graeber thinks that things he doesn’t understand are bullshit. He’s like an academic version of those memes that your job is bullshit if you can’t describe it with 3 words.
Too much pop, not enough science. It probably just means I wasn’t the target audience.
I actually like Graeber’s writing, but I also think he’s being kinda naive in ‘Bullshit Jobs’.
It’s like he doesn’t quite understand the structural quality of Bureaucracies. When a large enough number of human beings come together to work on a common project, bureaucracies naturally accrete.
What then happens is that function of the bureaucracy switches from it’s original mission to upholding the status of the leaders. (The original mission just becomes a football). Bullshit jobs are a result, they’re part of the body count of the status-chasers in the system. They have a function, just not a very meaningful one. So I guess he’s right about that.
Whoo-whee, I’ve got a whole damn career about this, essentially:
>I think this happens because of how our society is structured – people who make decisions ad the top society don’t have good understanding of what is happening on the local level, so because of that they have a tendency to create a lot of inefficient processes that make us waste our lives, which is unfortunate consider that they get disproportionate rewards for their own roles. I think we should strive to create more horizontal based decision making procedures with how we organize society, possibly based on ideas like worker cooperatives or decentralized planning.
The area I’ve gotten into is systems change in human services. Getting systems of agencies, organizations, policymakers, funding, service delivery professionals, the folks they serve, etc. coordinated to improve their jointly-held desired outcomes. What you’re saying here is basically what all of those folks involved tend to agree is the loose framework for why this is needed, and what needs to happen, except it’s not just the processes, and the extraneous positions, and the disconnection that get in the way.
This idea around “wasting our lives” sticks with me. And I will put a caveat here that I have not read this book, but now very much want to. Even in a set of sectors where I see hundreds, thousands of people doing “meaningful” work, and setting themselves the basically lifelong task of helping others, and improving the world, the burnout is worse than in corporate and aggressively “capitalist” workplaces. Every single conference has at least one workshop on preventing, mitigating, dealing with, addressing, or coping with burnout. These are some of the least “bullshit” jobs, and yet they’re sucking the life out of and burning through the people that do them, and often NOT having that much of an effect, or “moving the needle,” as we often say in these fields, on the incredibly huge problems they seek to address.
That’s because of what I think is probably central to the book–the jobs themselves are not the “bullshit;” the system is. The jobs I’m talking about only exist because people’s basic needs are not being met, and are in fact actively being stripped by policies, practices, and patterns ensconced in our political, economic, social, and cultural fabric specifically to keep them down and drive them further down. Every root cause analysis on things like the economic insecurity, educational barriers, infrastructural issues, and similar problems that I’ve seen take place in communities eventually starts heading toward things like “capitalism,” and “systemic racism,” and “flawed political systems.” And people edge away when that happens, and go, “Well…that’s kinda too big/complex for us to tackle here, let’s talk about the transit system.” But that’s where the roots really are.
>We live in a culture where you have to justify your own existence through the job…they just give us money necessary to stay live.
In the US, where I live, you get nothing–NOTHING–without a job, basically. Health insurance, the ability to basically even access care, was only recently decoupled from employment. And even then, only certain kinds of employment offered any insurance, and you might still have to pay for it, and it could be expensive, and you *still* have to pay for your healthcare, even *with* insurance, and it *could still be expensive.*
For fuck’s sake, the whole premise of *Breaking Bad,* that a teacher (who probably had GREAT insurance benefits, because he might have been a state government employee, through the school system) would turn drug manufacturer to pay for cancer treatment, was *not fucking implausible,* in some way. People in the US went, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” Because, *even with insurance,* every goddamn one of us probably hoped and prayed not to get a diagnosis like that, because we’d go bankrupt on the first bill. Shit, even with my “great” benefits at my state-funded job in nearly 2020, it cost me $8k to have my son, who had to spend a little under 2 weeks in the NICU because he was premature.
And with this being the case, we also have situations where folks with serious disabilities are forced into poverty because of the limits on how much money they are allowed to have in their bank accounts. Where folks who both have disabilities avoid marrying each other because they will lose their benefits and perhaps only source of income. We have folks with disabilities who keep it to themselves, and struggle without accommodations, in frantic hope that they won’t be “found out,” and deemed unemployable, because there are so many ways for employers to weasel around the illegality of discrimination, and the very real pressure of not being “fit” or meeting “performance standards” creates a climate of fear. And if you have a chronic condition, for example…you need that fucking job to get insurance, and afford health care. Especially when the stress causes you to be less well, more often. 🙃
I could go on about this forever; it’s a real sticking point for me, because *my job* is a bullshit job. I can swoop in and make as many strategic plans, and lead as many workshops, and give as many presentations as anybody wants. But it’s not gonna change the systems. Or it might, on a small-scale level. For a while. For now. Incrementally. And it can all get reversed overnight with the stroke of a pen, or the rip of a check. It’s got to be bigger, broader, higher up, and much deeper for it to really stop the bullshit.
I’ve read a few of his other works. And honestly, he is smart, genius even but there is some lacking of real world experience in his perspective. Now, I’m not saying that he hasn’t lived in the world. He was a dedicated activist and wasn’t afraid to get involved in protesting for his ideas.
But, there’s just a huge disconnect between his ideas and how the world works. Yes, there are a lot of jobs that are bullshit but most of them are born out of a genuine need. I think eventually they devolve into something worthless but for most of them there is a purpose. He talks about having bureaucratic run arounds to get power of attorney for his dying mother in Utopia. He complained about all of the forms that he had to fill out. Well, there’s a reason for that and it’s to prevent a relative from taking someone’s estate before they die. Do the forms and the bureaucracy spiral out of control? Well, yeah. That’s humanity for you.
THat being said though, I do love him and he is right, there is better ways of doing things than how we blindly move forward with the way things are. It’s just that, I don’t know, he seems to be oblivious to some things and comes off as an ivory tower inhabitant rather than one of us.
Seems like he’s done well at identifying the problem but if he’s an Anarchist then I don’t know if he has a viable solution. If there are bullshit jobs then there are essential jobs. While you may not need to compel people to work bullshit jobs, surely you need a way to compel people to work essential jobs. I know its quite basic take but I don’t really think they’v ever come up with a fix to the “who’s gonna work at the Insulin factory” problem
As someone who has had several bullshit jobs and was quite depressed as a result, this book was an eye opener.
Love that book. I distinctly remember working a corporate consultant job and realising my work consisted entirely of helping large companies shuffle money around to other large companies. We were doing “professional services” for clients who were doing professional services for other clients, and so on. The amount of levels you had to go down before anyone was actually producing anything was insane.
His examples are so terrible that it’s clear his premise is not well thought out.
Most of the “Bullshit” stems from two fundamental facts about human nature. First, people are individuals with unique goals, desires, and perspectives on how the world works. We are not aligned to a common goal. This means people will take actions that, intentionally or not, undermine the actions of others. Second, people as individuals have access to only a tiny sliver of the knowledge there is in the world.
Most of his examples exist to deal with these problems. Saying Lawyers shouldn’t exist is basically saying, “the world would be a better place if we just all got along.” Nobody would disagree with that statement, but that’s not the way the world is. Jobs created in response to aspects of the world you don’t like aren’t bullshit just because you think the problem they exist to deal with shouldn’t exist. It does exist, and you can’t just wish the problem away.
There is no economic or political system that actually fixes these two problems with human nature. Totalitarian societies can pretend the first one isn’t an issue by murdering or imprisoning dissenters, but do any of us think such a society is preferable? The second issue is intractable, and the fact that Communist societies switched to mixed market economies after accidentally starving millions of their citizens through poorly-implemented central planning is proof.
Perhaps it’s true, but our developed world is massively complex. So while it may seem some jobs are extraneous, like Bob over in the shop and Becky up in customer relations, they help keep the whole moving forward.
A great example is Twitter. It had a huge team supporting it, for good reasons, and when Musky took over and fired most of the company, it immediately became clear in loss of quality and features. It’s not recovered as yet and probably won’t.
Right now medical care in hospitals and clinics is being hollowed out due to treatment of nurses. The hedge fund people want a skeleton crew at all times, but medicine doesn’t function well that way, so someday soon someone will write a paper or article on the unnecessary deaths due to the nursing shortage.
Read it, he gave some compelling examples at the start but as it went on it became more and more jobs he just doesn’t like, and it dragged on for about 150 pages too many.
I take a far more realistic and dark approach to thinking about this book. I read it and to me it sounded like a teenager complaining about a superficial understanding of a deeper reality
1. It takes a lot of people to make our modern economy work, and we distribute that work in a way that sometimes gets so thin it can seem bullshitty. The complex products we have today that improve our lives come from hyper-complex bureaucratic systems. They, seemingly, are beyond his understanding so he just doesn’t like them. His summary of open source vs corp programming was so painfully naive it made me write off the entire book.
2. Work is randomly useful, and regularly not useful in the modern world. Now that we have enough food water and shelter for the vast majority of us, we now work in a way that often hunts for value again as opposite than ‘farms’ it in a predictable way.
3. Money is a thing we made up to ensure we don’t kill eachother just to have something to eat. Humans are a very violent species when they are bored. This is a reality I accept entirely, and I think bullshit jobs, at the very least keep us from realizing that underlying reality.
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I have come to terms with what he calls ‘bullshit’ jobs, and I think he comes off as a teen ranting about a world he’s just beginning to understand.
It’s good to start a conversation, and it has a bunch of funny anecdotes. But it’s not 6 rigorous. It’s not supposed to, but it really feels like he brings up the idea and that it needs a deep dive. I loved the section on his explanation of medieval jobs. I immediately noticed the quality jump in rigor, and it turns out it was because that was basically his thesis. Would love to see sociological research of the bullshit job phenomenon, as I did relate a lot to it.
Look at it this way 250 years ago “jobs” didn’t exist at all.
Even 120 years ago, most people didn’t have jobs.
Then 100 years ago, the first economists were emloyed by governments and we saw the transition of the state from being a place people lived to a place people were expected to support.
I’m necroposting to this thread because I just read the book. I found it very thought-provoking. Graeber probably overstates the extent of the issue, and some of his specific examples can be quibbled with. But the phenomenon absolutely exists.
What was interesting to me is that Graeber is coming at this from a leftist perspective, but it strikes me that a lot of right-wing populists would agree with him that the phenomenon exists–they would just see the solution as massive layoffs. Look at what Musk did with Twitter. It has gotten a lot worse since he took over, but that’s mostly due to purposeful policy decisions that have made it suck. Firing 80% of the workforce doesn’t seem to have (significantly) affected its operations.
My personal take-away was that everyone would be a lot happier if we could stop pretending. There are plenty of jobs that need to exist, and require that someone be on call or present, but don’t actually require 40 hours of work per week. Letting those workers use their time as they see fit while not busy would do a lot to increase the overall happiness in the world. And I think that’s part of what people loved about work from home so much during the pandemic — they could get their work done, and then use the rest of their time productively instead of putting on a show of looking busy.