A Review of Graeber's Essay on “Bullshit Jobs” (2013)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0

by swatow • 11 years ago

57 46 11 years ago

economist.com

zhte415• 11 years ago

Link to the article discussed here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

rikibro• 11 years ago

<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?

camgunz3• 11 years ago

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

jraedisch2• 11 years ago

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.

jraedisch2• 11 years ago

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

gaius6• 11 years ago

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.

littletimmy• 11 years ago

Your thought experiment applies to a very very few jobs.

I don't necessarily want a cashier or a postman who has devoted his entire life to their career. Just 1-2 days a week is more than enough to be a very proficient cashier or postman.

One can even go the other way and say that I don't want a prostitute or truck loader that has devoted their entire life to their profession, for the obvious reason of physical degredation.

gaius6• 11 years ago

It applies to any skilled job, or job in which experience matters or regular practice matters. A straight up cashier no, but a salesman, yes. A waiter no, a sommelier or fromagier, yes. And so on.

mkingston• 11 years ago

Your comment assumes that more time spent on an activity increases proficiency. All other things kept equal, this is likely true. However, if dentist B works two days per week and spends one day per week on deliberate practice, I would quite likely prefer to see dentist B when I need work done. The salient point being that we ought to be able to work less overall, have more diversity of (work) experience and still be better at what we do.

bottled_poe• 11 years ago

hmmm... What about those people who really are passionate about their field. These people might seek enough pay and lower hours, so that they can get back to problems that are actually challenging and interesting.

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

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.

Taken to its extreme form that implies that only the best dentist in the world has any work. But even finding a dentist that is accepting new customers, especially if one is seeking an NHS dentist, can be quite difficult. I don't see anyone turning their noses up at a dentist because that dentist happens to only work two days a week.

I am also unsure that extra experience would allow the dentist to differentiate themselves that far in quality. It is not uncommon, if you interview a lot of people in some capacity, to meet a large number of people who seem to have done, rather than the 5 or 10 years work on their CV, one year 5 or 10 times – in terms of the experience that they have garnered and the things they've achieved. Other people have done far less work in their lives, but have crammed far more into it, or have achieved far better results. Sometimes that's because of their personality – how readily they put themselves forwards for things, other times it's because of the nature of their employment. If dentist B is of the latter type, and dentist A is of the former type, then I would choose dentist B.

Quite aside from the question of why a dentist would publish how many days a week they worked. If my dentist worked 2 days a week, chances are I wouldn't know.

api2• 11 years ago

Dentistry is not a bullshit job. It's not even an edge case.

gaius6• 11 years ago

Here's the secret: there aren't many bullshit jobs. Sure it can be hard sometimes for an individual to see how their particular cog forms a part of the overall machine, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't do something that others depend on.

intopieces• 11 years ago

How would a person who goes to the dentist every six months for cleanings/check-ups/etc know what their dentist does on her time off? As far as I know, my dentist shows up 10 minutes before I do and leaves 30 seconds after. I just don't think a profession exists with the rigid structure you propose.

camgunz3• 11 years ago

One of the major points of the "basic income" movement is that technology is supposed to let us work less. In this case, Dentist B could just leverage the knowledge of other dentists as posted on the internet. Or we would devise more effective professional development programs. Or Dentist B would quit altogether, and we could build remote dentistry technology, allowing Dentist A (and others like her) the ability to service far more patients. Etc. etc. etc.

zeteo• 11 years ago

two workers in skilled jobs, let's say they're dentists. [...] 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?

So you only read the first half of the first quote? Reading the entire paragraph makes it clear that it's not referring to dentists:

technology has been marshalled, 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 [...] spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

_delirium• 11 years ago

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.

gaius6• 11 years ago

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

hacknat• 11 years ago

My dentist is B! She works ~20 hours a week and devotes the rest of her time to parenting. She has an office with two tech rooms and two operating rooms. She went to a good school and seems to do a good job imo. I could care less that she doesn't work frequently. The one pain point is that she does outsource less routine procedures to an oral surgeon (this has affected me once), but her prices are unbeatably low for the area. Were dentists really the best you could come up with? Isn't it one of the most routine professions ever?

zby2• 11 years ago

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... - 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.

samjordan2• 11 years ago

Complexity is a good word to generalize. I think there are a lot of specific reasons for these BS jobs. It is much easier for a manager to report that he has increased productivity in his division 10%. Rather than report that he has fired 40% of his employees because they were not really doing anything useful. In the first situation the manager is going to get a pat on the back for improvements. In the second situation his managers are going to want to know how this waste of resources was happening in the first place. Also the manager could be looking at a demotion since he isn't responsible for as many people any more.

morsch• 11 years ago

What you're talking about regarding work is pretty close to what Marx called alienation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

crdoconnor4• 11 years ago

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

What's so laughably silly about it?

zby2• 11 years ago

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? """

a8da6b0c91d2• 11 years ago

150 years ago leisure was rare and valuable. Being idle rich marked you as elite.

Now it's the opposite. Anyone in the west can easily be idle and afford an OK standard of living. It's having a "professional" job that marks you as elite, because there aren't nearly enough such jobs for those who are capable.

So you get large numbers of people hustling to land and hold various sorts of dumb office jobs. Mostly because the job is a coveted status marker.

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

Anyone in the west can easily be idle and afford an OK standard of living.

How?

michaelochurch• 11 years ago

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.

A Review of Graeber's Essay on “Bullshit Jobs” (2013)

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