
Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism - wyclif
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism
======
perfunctory
One of my most favorite essays on the subject: [0]

In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just
six days a state of emergency was declared, and after nine days the city had
to give up and give the strikers their way.

In May 1970 Ireland’s bank employees decided to go on strike.

At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a
standstill.

> Heading into the summer of 1970, Ireland braced itself for the worst.

> And then something odd happened. Or more accurately, nothing much happened
> at all.

> In July, the The Times of England reported that the “figures and trends
> which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect
> on the economy so far.” A few months later, the Central Bank of Ireland drew
> up the final balance. “The Irish economy continued to function for a
> reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for
> business,” it concluded. Not only that, the economy had continued to grow.

In the end, the strike would last ... a whole six months!

[0] [http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-
than-b...](http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-
bankers/)

~~~
dagw
One big difference is these cases I suspect is the power of unions and
regulations. If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their
own ad hoc sanitation service where they'd drive around a neighborhood in a
van and for a dollar a bag they'd drive your trash to the dump they'd be
stomped down on by unions and regulations in a flash. If a hypothetical Irish
banking union had sent thugs each pub acting as an ad hoc clearing house or
convinced the brewers union to not deliver beer to 'strike breaking' pubs the
the situation probably would have played out very differently.

Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is
also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void
left by the striking workers.

~~~
davidgrenier
If the situation is shit are you so sure that someone would come in to fill in
the void? Your scenario relies on the fact that people, in desperate need,
were willing to pay more which is exactly what those on strike revendicated.

~~~
clarkmoody
If the alternatives are doing a nasty job or not having any money, there are
plenty of people who will do the job.

In the case of the union, their wages were probably artificially high due to
the government keeping out competition.

> someone would come in to fill in the void

If a good or services is demanded by the consumer, then someone will find a
way to satisfy that demand, barring market interference by the state (for
legal business - you get black markets otherwise).

~~~
davidgrenier
I agree that someone will come in and fill the job, but it will cost more to
swap your entire staff, why not front the salary your employees asked for in
the first place. Turnover costs a fortune.

------
Areading314
Lots of stuff just plain wrong, e.g.:

> If you can’t afford to send your kid to a top college and then support them
> for 2-3 years doing unpaid internships in some place like New York or San
> Francisco, forget it, you’re locked out

<s>Unpaid internships aren't a thing in the US, they are not even
legal</s>Looks like they are a thing...maybe just outside of tech. Or:

> Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no
> difference.

The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their
work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is
useful or not since they are the ones paying for it.

Labor productivity is constantly increasing, if you measure it in a
systematic, rather than anecdotal way. Here is an article about some trends in
US labor productivity, notice that even though growth has slowed it is still
steadily increasing: [https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-
producti...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-productivity-
trends-from-the-bottom-up/)

~~~
sien
Yeah.

Graeber's theory of what jobs are BS doesn't really work. For instance, say a
surgeon decides 'hey, y'know people are going to die anyway, my work is
useless' then according to Graeber's definition their work is BS while most
people would say it is useful work.

But one that says that anything people pay for does't really work either. Say
I'm rich and pay you $100K a year to go somewhere and do nothing. Surely that
is useless.

However, no doubt there really are quite a lot of jobs out there that don't
need to be done. I've certainly had pretty pointless jobs. 37% of people say
their job is pretty much useless which is remarkable.

Graeber's book is worth a read, my review is here for anyone interested (
[https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-
jobs-a-...](https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-jobs-a-
theory/) )

~~~
tokyodude
Sometimes I do wonder though, even "good" jobs (for some definition of
"good"). For example, I can work on some tech, say mp5 (made that up), knowing
full well it will be replaced in 5-10yrs by mp6. Now I get maybe the
person/team who invented mp5 are bringing the world forward. But as some
programmer on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox adding
mp5 support to those OSes there's a part of me that knows my work is temporary
and it bugs me for some reason.

And that's not even at the point of BS for most people saying their job is BS.

another random thought is when you know you're being asked to do something in
an inefficient way. The job might not be useless but your time is being wasted
and it feels awful.

~~~
nsgi
It's not really temporary in that example, though, if mp5 existed for some
period of time there will always be mp5 files that some people will want to
play and adding support ensures those files are never lost.

------
ryandrake
I’ll leave this here:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian
theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors
and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true
business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it
was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had
to earn a living.”

\- R. Buckminster Fuller

~~~
snarf21
I don't necessarily disagree. But how do all these non-workers afford a new
iPhone X and a Netflix subscription and apartment? I have no idea but it is a
non trivial thing to solve.

~~~
firethief
Bucky was suggesting that it's no longer inherently necessary for everyone to
have a "job" as we see it. You're pointing out that our society demands it.
These views are definitely not in disagreement. In the kind of post-scarcity
society Mr. Fuller was talking about, having a place to live and the other
essentials of life would not be contingent on earning one's keep; if it were,
people wouldn't be free to go back to school and think about the things they
want to think about.

------
EZ-E
A lot of full time bullshit jobs become this way because of the full-time
9-to-6 requirement. These jobs usually don't justify a full time position by
themselves so it leads to people making up work and responsabilities to
justify the job's existence. ie : a designer without assignment pushing an
unneeded graphical revamp to avoid being laid off, a manager pushing new
features which has almost no use to seem busy etc

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I cannot imagine having a full time design job if you are not at a design
agency... what would you even be doing 80% of the time?!

~~~
wott
Well, why do you think we have so many re-designs (and re-structuring, and re-
packaging, and re-writing, and so on)? To keep people busy and believing that
they matter.

You don't need to imagine, it is right here, everywhere around, in
programming, in tech and in almost all other trades.

~~~
ryandrake
Bingo. Software engineers, raise your hand if you’ve ever worked for company
where your project had to undergo a full UI/UX overhaul with every major
release. This is why. These designers have a portfolio to build up, and your
software is their perpetually blank canvas!

------
mrhappyunhappy
As a UX UI designer my profession is total bullshit. It would be meaningful if
I were helping design educational apps for kids or information hubs to enrich
the world around me but the bulk of my work consists of helping companies sell
more shit to people who don’t actually need it. SaaS, ecommerce, web, most of
mobile apps - all bullshit toxic parasitic garbage that does not need to exist
and yet I help drive that industry. My life has had no professional purpose to
this point and if I dropped dead today the world would be non the wiser. To
make up for all the bullshit I produce, I try to work as little as possible to
spend as much time as possible with my family. I’ve got it down to 5 working
hours a week so far and we are getting by fine. If I can get it down to 1 hour
a week I will feel more satisfied.

~~~
wool_gather
I'm very sympathetic. The project that I'm on is building software for a
company that I detest.

> 5 working hours a week

Nice that you're able to live out your priorities! Is this contract work? That
would be quite remarkable if you were a (nominally, apparently) full-time
employee somewhere. Does your family have another person with income?

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Design and business consulting. I am not cheap but returns are worth it.
Family has additional real estate income but we are not dependent on it.

------
theprotocol
>One thing it shows is that the whole “lean and mean” ideal is applied much
more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It’s not at all uncommon
for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on
the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least
in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless
flunkies.

This part resonated with me, having seen it first hand throughout my career.
Some of the most productive people remained under constant threat of being
downsized lest they increase their output even further in some way,
disproportionately compared to those in other positions.

~~~
Noumenon72
I don't think you mean "lest" here -- they didn't threaten them to prevent
them from increasing their output, they threatened them "unless" they
increased their output.

~~~
theprotocol
Yep, I caught that a while after posting and kicked myself for it but failed
to edit it as I got distracted. Thanks nonetheless. :)

------
zby
I think it would be useful to divide that between jobs that are 'zero-sum',
jobs that are useless for the people who do it because they don't understand
what they are doing and jobs that are really just accidents. The root cause of
the increase of all these is the complexity of our lives:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041)

Some more on the 'zero-sum jobs' (a metaphor) - jobs that are useful to the
direct employer but are useless to the bigger organism. This can happen on
many levels: a manager employing someone just to have bigger department
(manager is the employer the biggger organism is the company), army (the
employer is the particular state the bigger organism is the whole
civilization). There are also cases where something is useless only partially
- like advertising which does a useful job of informing customers, but that
job is kind of the least important for it. There are also cases where there is
like a pair of jobs to it: like police and thieves.

~~~
bachbach
I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than
than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion.

The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers
of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization.

The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but
they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a
speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the
species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its
lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode.

Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have
to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed,
possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every
week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of
information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more
complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library
card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's
another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching
it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.

~~~
kthejoker2
It's certainly not just the Internet that has gotten more complex.

Grocery stores have gone from an average of 9,000 products for sale in 1975 to
over 55,000 today. Similar expansions of products exist in communication,
finance, automotive, fashion, appliances...

There were approximately 2,000 federal crimes in 1900. Today there are nearly
5,000.

People with college degrees skyrocketed from about 10% in 1970 to well over
25% today. Stanfofd conferred degrees in 22 majors in 1968; they offer over
120 today.

And to take a small but real example for me, when I went to consider a
preschool for my 4 year old, I received more literature on curriculum,
activities, nutritional programs, Harvard studies, diversity initiatives, and
instructor CVs ... Than I did when I chose my university back in 1998.

Or take my job as a Microsoft platform analytics professional. When I started
out it was just SQL Server and its 5-10 components. Now someone coming into
the same level is expected to have understanding of machine learning and AI,
Big Data, chatbots, log analytics and other streaming/event sourcing
capabilities, cloud architecture ..oh yeah and SQL Server and its 10-15
components ...

I can cite examples in medicine, finance, communications, linguistics (6
million words in Urban Dictionary, most of which aren't in the OED), pop
culture ...

Taken together you would easily see that all the "convenience" and
"simplicity" you're touting is completely offset by the amount of cognitive
processing we have to do to navigate our modern world. We have all been forced
to carve out mental fiefdoms - filter bubbles - just to cope. And that's led
to the break down in coordination you cite - there is less empathy because I
simply can't connect with the many someones out there with a vastly different
set of life choices than me, at least not collectively.

To celebrate diversity is to acknowledge and embrace that we can come together
on anything at all given the vast gulfs between most of us.

~~~
bachbach
This may be a semantic argument. I probably mean 'complex' as in useful
production by being more sophisticated and you probably mean 'complex' as in
there is more of it in a variety of ways.

------
redleggedfrog
I think the article makes some really good points about the bullsh*t jobs and
their effect, but I ponder the final two paragraphs in which this is said:

"Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all
those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were
important."

Would this really be true? I've heard that an artist needs something to
struggle against, something to constrain the medium they're working in, to
inspire the creation. Just having it be wide open is not optimal.

I think it's much the same for any field. You have to be challenged to have
your spirit moved to take action. You have to have a focus for your intent.

Just having copious amounts of free time might not be the cornucopia of
wonderful ideas and creations proposed in the article.

~~~
fullshark
I used to think it was true, but with the rise of
YouTube/SoundCloud/DeviantArt the internet I no longer think it’s true. Most
people really don’t have that much interesting to say. From a social
perspective I don’t think we are missing out on great art. People would be
happier though.

~~~
repolfx
No? But all those sites are filled with great art of various sorts. The
combination of easy publishing and relatively easy lives has created the sort
of "millions of people being creative and doing art" that utopians always
imagined.

------
habosa
Many times when we believe a job is bullshit we are falling victim to the
paradox of the library.

Go to your favorite library. Take one book and destroy it. Is it still a
library? Yes, of course. Destroy three more ... still a library. But what if
you keep going? Clearly one book is not a library. So ... where is the
crossing point?

The same is true of many jobs. Yes if I was vaporized tomorrow my team would
still function pretty fine. But that doesn't mean my job is bullshit. It means
that we're overstaffed for the average demand. It probably also means that 9-5
is a bit silly. But if you got rid of all of us you'd have a problem, and the
company can afford a bit of slack capacity.

~~~
FussyZeus
For a medium sized business you're probably right, but for a huge C-Corp? What
possible project is Bank of America going to undertake that will actually, to
borrow a metaphor from cars, redline their staff? Where everyone is coming in
and working nonstop from open to close to get something done?

~~~
vec
Is BofA going to redline all of their staff? No. But absorbing a spike at a
single department or branch is another story, and it wouldn't surprise me if
having excess capacity already on hand is more efficient overall than trying
to reassign individual workers on demand.

Besides, actually working on a team that's redlined is _exhausting_ , and
doing it for more than a few weeks is a recipe for burnout. There's real
business value in high employee morale and a low turnover rate, and having
some amount of built in slack at normal operating capacity seems like a
relatively cheap and reliable mechanism to safeguard that value long term.

~~~
FussyZeus
Except the article is saying that employee morale in these places is in the
toilet, so apparently it's not all that effective.

------
molteanu
> Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all
> those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were
> important.

Is there really any reason to believe that this would amount to anything?
Sure, there might be some people out there who would do useful or important
work. But isn't there also the possibility that the majority of people would
just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe we
would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long?

Maybe a rather unintended purpose of some of these bullshit jobs is to put a
strain on the endless desires some of us might have.

~~~
coldtea
> _But isn 't there also the possibility that the majority of people would
> just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe
> we would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long?_

And why not? Is there some ethical imperative that says you should not "have
fun and go to the beach all day long", if you have what you need to go by?

I'd extend Pascal's praise of idleness: ""All human evil comes from a single
cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." \-- to including "go to the
beach" and such along with sitting still in a room.

The point (and I think Pascal's point) is not doing nothing, but in being able
to be content without having to create schemes and busywork when there's no
need for any, but instead find satisfaction to being itself.

~~~
davemp
Pascal is talking about an inherent need in humans to be busy. I do not see
how denying such a need would be very effective at increasing satisfaction.
Ignoring human nature just seems idealistic to me, like ignoring the target
architecture of the software you're trying to hyper-optimize.

~~~
coldtea
> _Ignoring human nature just seems idealistic to me_

Well, evolutionary humans started as animals not much different in behavior
and inherent needs than gorillas. All civilization has been made by "ignoring
human nature" in its original form and thus transforming it.

------
PaulAJ
Reading about the choice between reasonable pay and rewarding work, I was
reminded of this Dilbert cartoon. As usual, Scott Adams got there first.

[http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02](http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02)

------
ram_rar
Honestly, if it wasnt for health insurance benefits that comes with full time
jobs. I would gladly work as a freelancer and build software that actually has
a real world impact.

~~~
isolli
Hasn't Obamacare addressed that? Or are you worried that the exchanges may go
away?

~~~
weiming
Speaking from experience, premiums go up every year, coverage
decreases/copayments increase, and plans often get discontinued. I've had to
switch to a different plan three times now.

------
golergka
> Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no
> difference.

I'm simply not convinced that if a worker believes that his job makes no
difference it really is so.

Most people I ran into don't really understand importance of such things as
safety, maintenance, record-keeping and other things that don't give instant
gratification. Taxi drivers are constantly surprised that I buckle up in the
rear seat (while they don't buckle up themselves in the drivers') and tell me
that I shouldn't worry about the police - without giving any thought to actual
security. Junior developers that I mentor always have to be reminded about
good practices and not cutting corners - and I am certain that they're much
brighter than average developer out there.

It's very easy to imagine how such people would see their jobs as meaningless
while they're actually performing a neccessary, although not often needed,
function.

~~~
perfunctory
In my anecdotal experience it's actually the highly educated people, very well
aware of what they do, who often find their jobs meaningless.

------
holografix
I’d love to see a study of whether so called “bullshit jobs” rise in
percentage to real jobs at a business when the number of employees goes up.

Ie: 100 employees = 10% bs 1000 employees = 25% bs

I’ve deal with whole groups at people at certain organisations that I simply
used to call: “corporate politicians”. They don’t produce anything, they get
information from A, manipulate it to make them look good, then broadcast it or
send it straight to B. A good way to test for one is to tell them at an
appropriate time that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.

If you get smiles and nods and winks, you’re dealing with one. I guess they
never stop to consider that if everyone thought like that, no one would know
anything.

------
granshaw
There’s a difference between the position itself being useless and someone
being underutilized. Businesses often staff up to be able to react quickly if
needs change, although most of the time some staff might be given just
busywork, leading to the impression that they have a bullshit job.

------
troels
Not sure I buy in to the whole thesis here, but I really like the term
"managerial feudalism" \- Great little soundbite.

------
alexandercrohde
I found this aside really interesting, it helped me understand other
perspectives:

"Everyone hates the political class who they see (in my opinion, quite
rightly) as basically a bunch of crooks. But all the other resentments make it
very difficult for anyone to get together to do anything about it. To a large
extent, our societies have come to be held together by envy and resentment:
not envy of the rich, but in many cases, envy of those who are seen as in some
ways morally superior, or resentment of those who claim moral superiority but
who are seen as hypocritical. "

------
haaen
David Graeber doesn't even acknowledge that most bullshit jobs are in
governments. The man is really an intellectual: he lacks common sense. Also,
when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with other pitfalls in his
reasoning, he walked out of the room twice.

[https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-
ongeloof...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-
ongelooflijke-hoeveelheid-dode-tijd-bijgekomen-~bcc09392/)

------
cyborgx7
>“People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way
that makes some kind a positive difference.”

This sounds like people are just rediscovering alienation[1] again.

1.:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation)

------
wolfi1
somehow this reminds me of the telephone sanitizers of Golgafrincham

------
Jaruzel
Link to the original Essay:

 _On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber_

[https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

------
asimpletune
Has anyone read his book?

~~~
jostylr
He explored in detail his theory of five different kinds of bullshit jobs and
supplied some very memorable anecdotes. He had some analysis of economic
trends coinciding. For example, 40% of the workforce in the 1940s was in
farming, now it is 1%. Automation happened and his theory is that instead of
massive unemployment, our system basically created this bullshit jobs level.
It is kind of a feudal capitalist version of a guaranteed job benefit.

I found it quite enjoyable and particularly the explanation and relation to
feudal ideas. Why are productive workers being squeezed out while the
managerial class is expanding? Shouldn't the opposite actually happen (fewer
workers with better automated oversight controls should need less managers,
not more).

His final chapter leads to a proposal about UBI as a way of walking out of
this trap.

He explores the explosion of administration in universities. Basically, lots
of money flowing in and it has to go somewhere. So it goes to a level that can
be easily cut (administrators) instead, of say, paying adjuncts more which is
not easy to walk back from.

It is a fast read and has some interesting ideas in it. It is not a definitive
scholarly piece of work, but it provides a starting point for understanding
how bs jobs arise when there is plenty of excess going on (lots of profits =>
bs jobs )

Some related readings: "Debt, A 5,000 Year History" and "The View from Flyover
Country"

~~~
hyperpape
How well does he characterize what those bullshit jobs are? Which industries
are they in? What are their titles, what are they doing on a daily basis?

Most of his examples in interviews sound like office workers, but what
percentage of office workers would have to be working bullshit jobs for his
37-40% numbers to be realistic? I have a hard time squaring his claim with
what I know about the jobs people do: See, for instance, a breakdown by
industry: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-
industry-...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-
sector.htm), or by occupation: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-
projections-and-...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-projections-
and-characteristics.htm)

~~~
jostylr
I take his piece to largely be about self-identified bullshit jobs. While many
of the jobs he describes, such as transcribing boxes on a form into a system
that is never consulted by anyone or hiring someone to guard an entirely empty
room, are clearly useless to society, he also describes jobs that have some
benefit to someone, but the one performing them feels wasted. While many jobs
have various stresses, both mental and physical, he wanted to explore the
particular stress of not having much, if anything, to do as well as the stress
of doing stuff that is pointless or harmful.

He does categorize the types of bs jobs into several categories:

1\. Flunkies. They are largely around to make others feel more important by
having others around. Often busy little tasks that don't seem to have much to
do with a job description or being useful. Sometimes they sit somewhere just
as a warm body. 2\. Goons. Largely those without social value. An example
might be someone who edits advertisements to make women look unrealistically
thin in a way that makes real women feel bad about themselves. These are non-
good PR types, corporate lawyers, telemarketers... 3\. Duct Tapers. These are
people doing something that only exists because the problem is not fixed, for
some reason. Example is of a form submission setup that must be routed to a
person because they decided to change the format but did not change a program.
Or being a "proofreader" of someone whose reports are beyond awful. 4\. Box
Tickers. They serve to simply ensure that some rule is being observed.
Example: someone filling out a preference form that someone has to put in
somewhere but the results are never consulted. Others might be highlighting
pointless forms, helping people jump through government hoops, asking for
funds, or be bureaucrats almost anywhere. 5\. Taskmasters. People who assign
tasks to others even though those others could easily figure out what they
need to do (Type 1) or people who create and oversee bullshit jobs (Type 2):
"strategic" and other buzzwordy bullshit.

In addition to those, there are useful jobs that only exist to support useless
jobs, such as those cleaning offices of those are useless.

I am not sure where he puts the following, but he had two stories of people
where they were essentially hanging out just for an emergency to happen: an
engineer managing a rapid response team that never, ever got called to do
anything and a caretaker for an elderly woman who was largely fine, but could
not be left alone. He writes how they at first tried to find something to do
with themselves in a productive fashion, but then simply couldn't take it
anymore and quit.

I think he wanted to explore what are the implications of jobs where the one
doing it feels useless, whether they were actually useless or not.

The 30-40% of jobs figure comes from both limited surveys where people rate
their jobs as well as looking at some statistical growth of jobs. As
automation took away a lot of physically productive jobs in the past 70 years,
jobs in the information/management/financial sectors grew to fill in that gap,
which is roughly 30-40% from the graphs he provided. In his mind, particularly
as he is an anarchist, such jobs are majority useless and/or harmful.

For me, I'm simply interested in the idea of finding ways to help people find
engaging work because I think society benefits from that the most. I also
found it interesting that the ones who had the hardest time being in a useless
job are from the working class. While uselessness and boredom is soul crushing
for everyone, there are systems of raising that it more palatable.

I would also say that this is largely a starting point for many further
explorations of these ideas. This is a narrative of exploration, not a fully
flushed out scientific theory. It was definitely written with a popular
audience in mind in order to, hopefully, stimulate more analysis rather than a
report on findings.

~~~
hyperpape
Thanks. I ask because while feeling like your job is useless is sad, the
really provocative claim is that most people are sitting around doing nothing
of value to anyone.

And having read your description of the useless jobs, I'll reiterate that
while I'd entertain the idea that 40% of people think their jobs are bullshit,
I don't think those 5 categories possibly contain 40% of workers.

------
black_puppydog
The General Intellect Unit podcast also discusses Graeber's work [1]. They
call themselves 'Cybernetic Marxists' so don't expect this to be neutral. :P

[1]:
[http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/](http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/)

------
lurcio
vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas

------
dawidw
“People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that
makes some kind a positive difference.” - That's the bullshit. I just want to
make positive difference in my wallet. And then I can think about the rest of
the world.

~~~
Hermel
Yes, the wallet is usually the first priority. However, I believe that doing
work that has a deeper meaning is more satisfying. I've observed that it is
for example very demotivating for employees if their work gets dismissed (i.e.
when they worked hard on a project for months and then the project gets
cancelled).

~~~
dawidw
Of course - if two jobs give similar income, you look at other factors. But if
you can earn 10x more than now but in bullshit work (playing all day computer
games etc. - as described in article) which job would you choose?

