Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

Uggggggggghhhhhhh

Took an interesting theory and buried in poor methodology, grandiose unsupported claims, and self satisfied prose. Like seriously, this guy is so condescending, and routinely talks about how much better than everyone else he is and how he is the only one that sees things clearly. And this is not a political disagreement; I hold many of the same view points, and even think the basic theory is interesting, but seriously, this guy is a douche

If the merit of a good non-fiction novel is ‘to tell you what you already know', then this work of art by the self-proclaimed anarchist David Graeber is one of the finest in its genre.

Expounding on his breakout 2013 essay (On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs), Mr. Graeber makes a compelling case on the phenomenon of ‘bullshit jobs' - that is, jobs held by people who feel that their jobs (and by extension, them) do not add anything of value to the world - in fact, they are mighty sure of the fact that if the jobs didn't exist, the world would be better off.

In a world where work is supreme, and the unemployed are made to feel less than dirt, you can see how that might psychologically impact people who think that their jobs should be eradicated. Mr. Graeber takes us through a safari of history, culture, politics and economics to make us see and understand how this toxic and demeaning mentality seeped into the popular narrative, and how it can be rectified.

This should be essential reading for everyone.

Imagine having a job that pays you £12,000 to write a two-page report for a company meeting. Then imagine that nobody even discusses it. This is what anthropologist David Graeber would call a ‘bullshit job'.

Graeber's book on the Occupy movement and related issues was released as The Democracy Project in 2013. One of the points he raises in this book is the increase in what he calls bullshit jobs. These are forms of employment that even those holding the jobs feel should not or do not need to exist.

He sees such jobs as being:

concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not particularly good at.

a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we'd rather not be doing...if you're not destroying your mind and body via paid work you're not living right.

A fantastic analysis of our current situation. Whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions, the insights into how we ended up in a state of affairs where almost half people living in rich countries are convinced their job does not contribute anything to humanity whatsoever and would be better done away with are worth reading. The issue's looked at from both economic and cultural/historic perspectives and backed up by data where available. There were areas where it was admitted more research needed to be done in order to really confirm or deny some of the author's suspicions, but I find this acceptable (even positive) compared to omitting or otherwise glossing over the details. This book had me revisiting several assumptions I'd grown up believing by default from the standard American capital playbook, just because everyone else did, and it was viewed as somewhat distasteful for someone without a PhD or other fancy credential to question them ("What do you know?"): the efficiency of the market and its correlation (or lack of) with social value, less discussed motives of political groups, where the value of work "comes from", and what the point of working even is (or if it varies among people). It was refreshing to read something with a somewhat out-of-the-norm perspective compared to what we're taught on how society should work and what we should value, especially since many writings of the sort are often half-baked and not all that thorough. This was not that at all, and certainly can't be dismissed out of hand like so many others.

One minor qualm I had is that a lot of interesting and often relevant information was buried in the footnotes, which were at the back of the book. I imagine the editor was trying to keep things "on track", but I could have done with less flipping back and forth.

I really hope you read this book.

A good chunk of this book was anecdotal evidence, which was the most disappointing part for me. “Bullshit jobs” and everything surrounding it are severely under-researched topics, so I get the lack of statistical evidence. 

However it definitely discusses some eye-opening ideas so if not the book, I'd recommend everyone to read the original essay with the same name. 

The committees tasked with formulating the preliminary proposals to rid us of bullshit jobs, can't do their box ticking unless our world redefine the value of work, re-inverses the inverse relationship between social value and economic compensation and concedes that sometimes maybe we just don't need to work 40 hours a week.

Entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Graebers popular books seem to be poorly marketed.
The point of the book isn't to give you an explicit theory - ultimately Graeber settles on Universal Basic Income as being the one idea he'll explicitly support in this text. It's more of a philosophical work intended to give anecdotal and historical commentary about the development of “bullshit” jobs in current capitalist societies, mainly America and the UK. The definition of bullshit jobs gets laid out while acknowledging that this system is also aided by misogyny, xenophobia, religion, militarism, racism, and the phobias/isms that come with protestantism. The definition of bullshit jobs itself is supported largely by anecdotes and is the idea that a large portion of our current jobs exist only because all the other jobs actively life-supporting our society are taken up by a smaller number of our population.

Our societies should have been alleviated with
fewer required working hours with more groups entering into the workforce and the aid of technological advancements, but they haven't been. Required working hours being the hours required to accrue money to support yourself and to aid your family/loved ones, but also the required hours in the sense that most of us aren't truly free to quit our jobs or tell a boss, “No, I'm not coming in for the next month.” At least not without serious repercussions.

The fear and danger that automation and technological advances would yield a catastrophe for the job market in essence only affects the rich and powerful. At least, in part, until the bullshit job comes in. The simplified reason being that if you had 100 people working 40+ hours a week and had an advance in technology to reduce the workload down to only needing 50 people at 40 hours a week or 20 hours for 100 people, then what are the rich and powerful to do? This leads to the game of the job market, political propaganda (unemployment numbers/total jobs/GDP), and ultimately the creation of (more) bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs keep a working hierarchy that hinders a majority revolution that would occur. The danger of that revolution being people being able to spend their time as they choose. The danger of that being that it would lead to more free thinking and discussion. The danger of that is it leads to people being able to actively critique their environment and the employers/landlords/politicians. The danger of that being that the powerful could lose their grip as a shift majority class/caste consciousness could dissolve this systems structures that work to hinder the masses and enrich the few.

Exceptionally well-written materials. I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. Thank you so much, David for writing this.

Gospel of truths ....time and again. The entire societal system is very pretentious. I would like to encourage people who are not afraid to know the actualities of society or anyone little bit of curiosity should read it ...line by line ....

This book is right up there for some unfathomable value propositions....magnificent!

Look like living life is all about, wavering through miscreants.

Many (not only work-related) phenomena described by Graeber are imo crucial glitches of our current society which tend to be absent from a public discourse.
I think that it's not because we are not aware of them - on the contrary, we know very well that there is a problem but have no idea how to deal w/ it. Therefore even discussion is difficult & painful (the same can be said about the climate change).

Sooooo disappointed in this book after Graeber's excellent Debt: The First 5000 Years.

While I do believe there are bullshit jobs, and those that harm or subtract value from society, I found his analysis fuzzy, arguable, and to be honest, sloppy and way too tied to Marxist and elitist arguments as to value, labour, and capitalism. I felt the subjective definition of a BS job to be way too fuzzy, though ultimately I think he's on to something about the fact we should all be working less, there are many roles that adds little value (if not harming society), and there needs to be recognition of this, I felt this was shoddy. His assertion that work of value in undervalued compared to work that he says provides none lacks deeper analysis (imho).

However, I do think he is onto something in our need to decouple livelihood from work. While he says he is avoiding making policy recommendations, I do think he makes very good points about first order reasoning on Universal Basic Income (though,I feel everyone really need to do more second order effects thinking on this or some really larger experiments to understand how it might work in practice (which I am very supportive of).

I felt it was a bit long, but I believe it was to back the arguments (of which there are many) with facts and anecdotal evidence as much as possible. I think when I finished the book there was about 20% left of footnotes and citing.

The basic idea here is that there are lots of jobs that are bullshit, and the book takes you through:
a) What the strict definition of a bullshit job is
b) Giving an estimate of what jobs fit this description and refute counter-arguments to the idea that capitalism can produce pointless jobs.
c) categories of BS jobs and some nominal explanation for their existence
d) the effects that these jobs have on the humans that occupy them
e) what might be done about it

I don't want to spoil much of anything, so I'll just say I found the arguments about the existence and categorization of BS jobs much more persuasive than the possible outlined solution. He does give a caveat of how he doesn't want to offer a solution, because that would be the focus of the book so I can't tell if it's self-fulfilling prophecy or it's just hard to propose solutions to big problems.

I found the concept frankly fascinating and I really loved the thinking being laid out on how this could come to be and what it's effect on people is. The humanity in capitalism, how we ignore it or mold it to suit the raw purposes of capitalism is something I haven't seen spelled out quite like this before.