
A Review of Graeber's Essay on “Bullshit Jobs” (2013) - swatow
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0
======
gaius
_And that, in turn, could allow households to get by or even thrive while
working many fewer hours than is now typically the case—albeit through a
pretty hefty level of income redistribution._

Consider the following thought experiment: two workers in skilled jobs, let's
say they're dentists. Dentist A works 5 days a week and the occasional
weekend, like most people do now. Dentist B figures she can get by working 1
or 2 days a week and spend the rest of her time playing roller hockey and
fishing, and on a dentist's pay, she can.

Now fast forward a year, dentist A has done 5x the dentistry of B, has
encountered 5x as many tricky situations and dealt with them, has kept her
equipment in tip-top shape because it's being used every day, has had the time
to bounce ideas off other dentists in the practice and so on. A is just after
1 year, a much more experienced and better dentist than B. So who do _you_ go
to, when you need some work done? The one who has devoted her life to
dentistry and does it every day, or the one who sort of does it on the side
when she can be bothered? Pretty soon B won't have any work _at all_ \- even
from people who like the idea of working a 2 day week!

So these ideas about falling work weeks are nice in theory, but they don't
take into account human nature and how real people think.

~~~
_delirium
Is there any scientific evidence that working 60 hours a week is causal factor
leading to improved dental outcomes? My hypothesis: the workaholic you
describe would produce worse outcomes, as is typical of individualist "hero"
doctors. The best outcomes in medicine come from following established best
practices (established via experimental study) in an orderly and consistent
fashion. This means well established procedures, work done by alert and well-
rested people with good attention to detail and willingness to _follow_ those
procedures, and as little a role as possible for seat-of-the-pants, non-data-
driven "judgment calls" based on small-sample pattern-matching to the doctor's
individual past experience. This is the main take-away of the evidence-based
medicine (EBM) movement of the past few decades.

Speaking of _real people_ in the real world, Denmark reduced its workweek from
40 to 37 hours, and this did not produce any decline in medical outcomes. I
suspect reducing to 35 or 33 or 30 would also have no such effect.

~~~
gaius
You are being over literal. The point is, in jobs where experience matters,
more will trump less most times.

------
zby
I have been thinking about that Graeber's essay intensively - because on one
hand he is strikingly right about that many people now feel that they do a
bullshit job, and on the other hand his explanation to why this happens is
laughably silly.

My conclusion is that it is the complexity. It is that people don't understand
why they do something - this makes their work meaningless for them. And
accidentally there is a big chance that their job is useless in an objective
way - it is just that the people that direct them also don't understand the
system fully.

And the complexity grows in many ways. One is that our lives are much more
regulated than they used to be - we have more laws about everything. In one
way it makes lives more fair - but the complexity from the entangling of
different laws grows quickly. Another is that we actually have less cultural
regulations. For example - take noise from parties, in the past it was that
there were just some dates when everyone was partying - because everyone had
the same religion etc.

By they way - in 'User Innovation' there is this notion of 'advanced analog
field'
[https://books.google.pl/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&pg=PA134&lpg=P...](https://books.google.pl/books?id=BvCvxqxYAuAC&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=user+innovation+advanced+analog+field&source=bl&ots=juSvWvV22M&sig=YcnPe5wCA1gv5-yIiPm-9OM6pEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YW4FVeuTJZf5auzmgYAO&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=user%20innovation%20advanced%20analog%20field&f=false)
\- an area where there is a much stronger need for something then anywhere
else. It is often that the innovation happens in that 'advanced analog field'
and later it is adopted in all other areas. Like abs was invented first for
airplane breaks - but later it was adopted by the car industry. I think that
maybe we should treat software development as a kind of 'advanced analogue
field' for law.

~~~
crdoconnor
>on the other hand his explanation to why this happens is laughably silly.

What's so laughably silly about it?

~~~
zby
This conspiracy between all company owners - this is in the article:

""" "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population
with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to
happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s)."

I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that
protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact
too happy? How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring, and if much
of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep
them on during recessions? """

~~~
crdoconnor
>This conspiracy between all company owners

What do you think the American Enterprise Institute is for? Cato? Chambers of
Commerce? The multitude of other business umbrella lobby groups? What did you
think they did other than come together to form a united front to represent
their interests (conspire)?

>I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that
protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact
too happy?

I don't see why one would conclude that at all.

>How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring

Via a labor market which they try to mold using government policy to fit their
interests.

>if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not
just keep them on during recessions

Periodic cullings help keep the rest of the employees suitably terrorized.

~~~
chongli
_What do you think the American Enterprise Institute is for? Cato? Chambers of
Commerce? The multitude of other business umbrella lobby groups? What did you
think they did other than come together to form a united front to represent
their interests (conspire)?_

We're talking about a conspiracy to hire people for no other reason than to
keep them busy so they don't revolt. This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a
company owner, gain by adhering to this conspiracy? What I lose is obvious:
huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish nothing. This conspiracy does
not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge artificial externality
with no apparent free-riding.

~~~
crdoconnor
>We're talking about a conspiracy to hire people for no other reason than to
keep them busy so they don't revolt.

No, we're talking about hiring people for this reason, among others.

>This is laughably absurd. What do I, as a company owner, gain by adhering to
this conspiracy?

You mean a share holder? Nothing. You seem to be laughably under the
impression that the company is run for your personal benefit. It isn't.

>What I lose is obvious: huge waste on salaries for jobs that accomplish
nothing.

You explain why companies hire based upon headcount instead of pure cost. It
_doesn 't_ make intrinsic sense, but that's how it happens.

>This conspiracy does not pass the economics sniff test: it purports a huge
artificial externality with no apparent free-riding.

Congratulations, you just assumed away the principal-agent dilemma.

~~~
chongli
Now you're just moving the goalposts. My response is directed towards the
original claim made in Graeber's essay, not your liberal interpretations
thereof.

~~~
crdoconnor
If you use neoclassical assumptions like you did, his claims _are_ absurd.
However, we live in the real world, not some magic fantasy of perfect markets,
perfect competition and zero transaction costs.

------
zhte415
Link to the article discussed here: [http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

~~~
rikibro
<i>That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do
9-5?</i>

Sorry for the off-topic, but is it normal to work from 9am to 5pm? Does this
mean people have no lunch time, or they work "only" 7 hours?

~~~
camgunz
Most places I've worked are 8-5 with an hour lunch. Like you, I don't know
where 9-5 comes from.

~~~
throw_away
It was a hit song in 1981:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_to_5_(Dolly_Parton_song)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_to_5_\(Dolly_Parton_song\))

it's shorthand for a tedious job.

~~~
camgunz
Yeah I know it's shorthand now, but I was trying to figure out where it came
from and why.

I bit the bullet and googled it, and found out that people were just paid for
lunch, or they weren't paid (37.5 hours a week, half hour lunch).

------
jraedisch
I tend to think that automation demands redistribution, and working and
earning wages and thereby product has proven a good mechanism to redistribute.
So that is, why there are jobs with a high bullshit share. I also think, that
rather than being steered by some privileged elite, society as a whole values
stability instead of uncertain outcomes of everyone realizing his true
potential.

------
jraedisch
It would be awesome if there was some mechanism to mix comments from different
places. The economist comments are interesting.

------
michaelochurch
I think that, in order to understand what's happening, we need to look back at
the 1920s and '30s. We saw sudden improvements in agricultural yield, causing
commodity prices to plummet. You'd think of that as a good thing: more food.
However, in the U.S. and Canada, it led to widespread rural poverty by the
mid-1920s. That led to corporate and bank failures in the late 1920s and
general poverty in the 1930s.

In the late Gilded Age, the prevailing attitude was that poverty was a sort of
bitter "moral medicine" that punished laziness and sin. So no one stepped in.
But poverty turned out to be a cancer that spreads until it takes down a whole
society. When people are economically disenfranchised and there is no economic
reward in helping them, businesses tied to their fortunes also fail. The
disease spreads. Rural poverty in 1925 led to corporate and bank failures
circa 1928 and a full-blown Great Depression by 1931.

We can look at farm subsidies in 2015 and say that they're unnecessary and
antiquated and we're right. (Worse yet, they seem to benefit corporate food
producers more than individual farmers or sustainable agricultural practices.)
However, the reason why those controls exist is because we learned, very
painfully, about what can happen when food prices collapse. That's _why_ those
protections exist, even if they're ridiculous (leading to the unhealthy
overuse of high-fructose corn syrup, for example) in 2015.

Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia took an altogether different route: fascism,
and a communism that was the same thing in left-wing clothing. Rather than
face the chaotic economic meltdowns that were occurring in freer countries,
they instituted authoritarian societies that managed to distract the populace
from economic struggles and class conflict by replacing those with narratives
of nationalistic and racial conflict. It was evil, and disgusting, and self-
serving on the part of the elite (because it allowed them to rape the country
while blaming external agents or disliked ethnic groups) but, at least
subjectively, it took the edge off of the Great Depression for the common
people. (One could alternatively argue that the starvation and misery were
just externalized. The Ukrainian Holodomor was far worse than the North
American Great Depression.) In the end, it led to things far worse, as we
(quite sadly) know.

What happened to agricultural commodities in the 1920s is happening to _almost
all human labor_ in the 2010s. The good news is that we don't seem to be
taking quite the same path as in the 1920s: there are more social and economic
controls, and the specifically racial or nationalistic impulse of the fascist
movement is unlikely to re-emerge in respected institutions. This is a crisis,
but it's a different kind. It's more widespread, but less severe (unless we're
only in the early stages). We're nowhere near the Great Depression or fascism,
and as of 2015, society (at least, in the U.S.) seems to be on the mend. We
are better off than we were 10 years ago-- in the nightmare of the peak Bush
years of 2001-2006, when fascism really seemed around the corner-- although we
haven't made as much ground as we might like.

"Bullshit jobs" exist because people are protecting themselves from creeping
de-necessitation. In the fight to stay employable, the more politically savvy
are playing games to create _the appearance_ of high output and performance,
and the less savvy are often caught up in those games without knowing it. This
drives the efficiency of rendered work down-- a sort of organic self-limiting
element on increasing efficiency and rapid change-- but makes it almost
impossible to tell who can be unemployed harmlessly and who is actually
essential. What Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" are the innately _political_
jobs. We don't have many entrepreneurs or programmers anymore, but we have a
lot of private sector politicians who call themselves such.

One thing that you see amid destabilization, as well, is the feudal impulse.
The European nobles are the descendants of the warlike people who provided
protection as the Roman Empire disintegrated in the 3rd-8th centuries.
Similarly, people cling to those (either people or institutions) who can
provide protection from market chaos. Universities earn $200,000 per head on
the _promise_ of a credential that is _supposed_ to insulate a person from
here-and-there wage fluctuations (because the liberal arts education makes you
_generally_ employable as a leader) even though they haven't really been
delivering that protection. The job of corporate management, these days, has
more to do with providing protection from vision-less, cost-cutting (read:
cost- _externalizing_ ) executive assholes than building a team or supporting
subordinates' careers. Even in the VC-funded world, we see a frank re-
emergence of feudalism, with investors as manorial lords and founders as
vassals, and the same mythology around these 25-year-old, white male
"entrepreneurs" as existed around 21-year-old white men (i.e. knights) with
armor and battle axes, 1000 years ago.

Bullshit jobs exist because staying employed, in complex organizations, often
has more to do with extending and enjoying political protection than the work
itself. This keeps people on a monthly salary and prevents things from going
from "stupid, tedious and annoying" to "I'm completely fucked if I don't find
work in 3 months".

I wish I had a solution, and I don't. The sad thing that one learns in
studying the 1920s-50s is that humans tend only to cut away the bullshit in a
perceived existential crisis, and (this is most important) one that threatens
the elite as much as (or more than) the rest. In war, humans can advance and
innovate. R&D spending goes up, full employment becomes the norm, and petty
differences are put aside. Sadly, though, no one has found anything but
violent conflict that has that effect. In peace, the elite (such as our
corporate elite) wages a slow-burning and subtle class war to keep itself in
place at any cost, and this keeps them comfortable until mounting civil
dysfunction (usually in multiple nations at once, allowing violent conflict)
reaches a flash point and sets something off that threatens to take down
absolutely everyone. And then (and often only then) do the private-sector
social climbers go into hibernation and does the demand for real (non-
bullshit) work reach a level that can involve everyone.

