Bullshit Jobs is a 2018 book by the late anthropologist David Graeber. It is a thoroughly unique take on the questionable economic and social condition of the Western world, and it sparked some serious thinking about the cultural and economic meanings of work, pricing, and societal customs and the phases of life. Notably, Graeber adamantly withholds from specific policy (or personal life) proposals to fix any identified issue. Yet, he mentions the need to research untested solutions like UBI and generally reduce regulatory capture, emphasizing an overarching guideline for the only catch-all remedy: (true) human freedom.
Below is an article-style takeaway of my thoughts from reading and reflecting on the book, which I finished reading a week ago. This is different from my reading notes, which are unedited and include mostly quotes and author’s context from the book directly.
If you live in the Western world, take a pause. Reflect on who you are, and what states in life you’re transitioning between: student to professional, indifferent to indignant, worker to manager, child to teen, libertarian to Republican, bachelor to parent… Whatever they are, there is some transition occurring.
Now, deeply consider the immediate states you thought of. How many of them were economic? Political? Social? How would you detail each transition, if you had to explain it to a 5-year-old? Would you use numbers, to detail your deltas in income by dollars or daily free time by number of hours or body fat percentage? Would you use adjectives, from selfish to self-aware or apathetic to empathic? Would you tell a story, of a loss or gain in purity or net worth or wisdom?
In the West today, the questions above generate an odd set of answers, under a culture skewed heavily towards quantitative comparison. This closely follows the “rationality” assumption of traditional microeconomics, which relies on generating specific numeric values of utility for any given decision. After all, optimal decision makers have to optimize for something, and utility is the economist’s currency, much like the dollar is the common man’s. Yet, what parts of society and human life truly can be articulated this way, in this measure of value?
To start, what are the bounds of quantitative comparison? Qualitatively, someone in a certain mood or state of life might say an hour of time playing with one’s children is more enjoyable than an hour spent playing with one’s college friends. But more isn’t quite economic enough. How much more? Is this hour of joy worth 2.5 or 10x the other? Is it redeemable in the fictional marketplace of opportunity cost? If optimality is the guiding constraint, then the trade-off must be quantified, so that it may compare against the infinity of other life choices committable to that weird unit we call an hour of time.
Here, we find a failure of a society built on valuation. To make rational, economic decisions, one must determine optimality along any unit, be it money, time, or utility (the economist’s magic number). To do this comparison, we must first valuate along these same parameters — and we suddenly find ourselves crudely committing more valuation sins than a sleep-deprived investment banker with a sunrise deadline. And similar to the Excel models they use to represent entire economies and companies, no such valuation is transitive, and most aren’t even representative.
What is transitivity in this case? Give any economist enough data (or the same data in different formats), and they can create some sort of score, often an index or coefficient (like a DCF representing a company). But try to build back the original data, or studied society, or company, or piece of art or music from the score or cash flow it receives. It’s clearly not possible.
Importantly, while a cash flow model can arguably contribute to some company-level decision making and therefore be of analytical value to the analyst, the same can’t be said about things like happiness and efficiency indexes. These are misleading measures of qualitative situations that can fuel badly iatrogenic decision making or life advice. In this world of values and not value (values = principles/qualitative-ness), heed Alexander Pope’s great warning: a little knowledge [or the illusion of it] is a dangerous thing… [as opposed to no knowledge at all].
With this constant valuation, you are disassembling the inputs of a holistic life into falsely modular parts, with fake marginality. Life is ambiguously divided between decisions of values and decisions of value, yet we optimize along the economic latter. Beyond the sad result of living economically versus humanly, even this economic approach to life is unevenly distributed, leading to the large social inequality and confusion we see today. As it turns out, individuals must make decisions on optimality assumptions, but they get paid and rewarded on a completely different scale.
How so? Let’s look at the big stories from Graeber’s book itself, starting with the title: Bullshit Jobs. At first glance, this itself is an economic paradox. In the market economy (a stamp of the West), a job exists to serve some sort of function or to generate some sort of value that then warrants its compensation (by definition, less than the value produced). Any such job that didn’t fit this definition would be by nature a mispricing or fraud, and given time it would be an enormous inefficiency that must be washed or arbitraged away. More simply, why would people get hired or hire others to not provide net positive value? Do they actually?
Through an mix of anecdotes and a few poignant surveys, Graeber says yes — BS jobs definitely exist, and moreover, a lot more people hold them than you might think. Over 40% of the Western workforce is self-admittedly working jobs with no “meaningful contribution to the world”, with many even thinking they were actively doing harm. A significant chunk know that their production is completely useless; think of the exabytes of spreadsheets, papers, and notations that exist solely for another layer to exist on top of them. If this BS exists at all, let alone at such a deep level, then clearly economic optimality has failed.
How? The origin and reasons for this perpetuation of BS seems to be because of an unclear mix of bad political incentives, a never-ending chain of self-preserving middlemen or other BS-job holders, and – and this is the most interesting take – a societal misunderstanding of the necessity of work.
Here are examples for each of these three apparent causes:
- Political Incentives
“I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” – President Barack Obama
A “smoking gun” quote from the President himself explicitly saying he’d rather perpetual BS and inefficiency than a wave of re-employment.
- Self Preservation
In a traditional information-services career (spreadsheets and arthritis, not heavy things and back pain), one has a significant career upgrade in going from hands-on deliverable work to various levels of management, which we agree has a lot of BS. But, if a bulk of this management is BS, think of the collective self-interest to preserve it. From top-down, no one would admit their job is BS, because that would ID their whole set of underlings as BS too, and then everyone loses their job.
There are entire divisions and chains of people (workers) who all know they are doing BS jobs, but their livelihood is on the line. Market-wise that seems inoptimal (how would so much excess cost be justified), but in reality, these are real people relying on real jobs (however BS) for pay. People reporting their own productivity and efficiency may hate working BS jobs, they hate being unemployed more – so they’ll keep up the charade.
- Society’s Misinterpretation of Work
Now we have a society where there are explicitly useless jobs because of unnecessary paper-pushers AND scared, in-too-deep employees (aka regular people who need to pay the bills and don’t want to mess it up for their peers). Societally, this changes our economic definition of a job from “getting paid to create outsized value” to “getting paid to rent out one’s time/suffer”. Rather than reduce the slog of mundane jobs with minimal utility, we end up with a structure that requires these jobs as a vessel to distribute income.
In my opinion, this third conclusion/causation for the crisis of BS jobs is Graeber’s most significant, because it
- recognizes that getting paid =/= doing something valuable (RIP the microeconomic handbook)
- raises immense questions about valuation once again, along with the meaning of time (hence the first few paragraphs of this post)
- points out that is an incongruent application of our foundational economic principles
Essentially, Western society has kept allegiance to some combination of Puritan first principles and ancient wisdoms of the ruling classes that both say: “work is the true virtue”, and “keep the people busy”. Yet, as technology and productivity and efficiency exponentially grew, these frameworks never followed.
A deeper starting question is when did your time start becoming a commodity as opposed to your production? Think of an ancient potter for example, selling his wares on a busy street walked by the royal family and the city’s richest merchants. Any of these potential customers, upon examining the potter’s offerings, had a set of consumer choices: buy the pots, buy the potter (as a slave), buy a future pot (ask the potter to make something specific within a certain timeframe). Yet, Graeber eloquently highlights that not even the emperor would consider something like “buying an hour of the potter’s time”. The concept of owning someone else’s time (without owning that other person directly) was bizarre.
However, in the modern day, it seems that ALL work is defined by this time ownership. The only exceptions are [some of those ] who are entrepreneurs, already wealthy, or in something sales/commission based where individual impact is extremely trackable. The rest of regular workers are human assets, owned by different wage-payers for huge chunks of their waking existence.
These shifts are important cumulatively. One, we already have a cultural push to work, because work is associated with righteousness versus having idle time. Two, we define work by the time put into it, as opposed to the output it generates, resulting in a hyper efficient market for people’s hours of attention but a completely artificial sense of ownership of others. Side note, this explains the big need for “productivity” pushes like blocking YouTube on a company WiFi server. If the person was always on YouTube and never did their work, they’d get fired anyways. So why punish those who do their work faster, or manage to multitask without a reduction in deliverable quality? Unless… it was never about the work, but more about the idea of owning someone’s time. And even worse, what if the work never had output/deliverables that mattered in the first place?
Top top it off, let’s now consider pricing these clearly different types of time. Clearly, not all jobs are worth the same. This applies to BS jobs too: an insurance risk modeling manager might be raking in six figures, while a government project quality assurance manager might be earning a fraction of that, for virtually the same uselessness. But what about the discrepancy between that sought-after “usefulness” and pay as well? Here, Graeber’s outlines his succinct mental model: a simple graph with an x-axis of personal satisfaction and societal value, and a y axis of wages/pay.
Immediately we see a weird negative trend: schoolteachers, who have daily impact on students and decade-long impact on raising a new citizenry, are barely at the national median if lucky. Social workers, who may save a life or provide intense emotional aid multiple times a day, are in poverty. Beyond the anecdotes, let’s justify the real life positioning on the x-scale versus their relative y-rating: the city of New York’s trash workers, who are woefully underpaid, went on strike for 3 days and put the entire city government and population on its knees. A European country’s bankers pulled a similar withholding of services, but to a completely different result. Despite 6 months of “striking”, society was virtually indifferent(the people were cleverly just exchanging uncashed checks as tender, with little functional difference to trading actual money).
This is not an extraordinary revelation by any means, as most people growing up hear some version of “either save the world, or pay your bills”. Indeed, we are aware as a society that there are very few well-paid, meaningful jobs – you can either have one or the other. But in the context of a world where bills-must-be-paid and work-must-be-done, the plight of personally miserable, time-and-resource-wasting BS job holders becomes more questionable. Why are we paying millions of paper-pushers and middle managers to both slow everyone else down and live terrible, meaningless existences, when there are so many fulfilling things that could be done by the same talent and time?
And here, society’s approach to work becomes a dark agent. In some twisted balancing act, it seems we recognize the personal and communal utility of the most needed jobs, and end up designating them the worst paid. It’s a dehumanizing, economic logic: how could it be fair to be both happy and fulfilled and get paid enough? The utility from wealth can’t be also paired with the utility from work otherwise there would be a clearly better choice… and then who would slave away? Importantly, whether this vile trade off of true utility and pay is intentional by some grand economic design or accidental in the societal outcome is completely irrelevant. What matters is the outcome, and something must be done.
At this point, let’s reconsider our microeconomic assumptions of life, namely the concepts of valuation and “optimality” decision making. Their implications of marginal substitution across time, money, purpose, and pleasure create are just incompatible with being a whole human. Just think of the average person’s planning: n years of suffering with small gaps for n hours of fulfillment to generate some level of $ that finally allows for n years of “retirement”, in which many finally find true freedom but are often tired from the process and are just waiting to die.
Add in the leverage of technology and the cultural fear of “free time and laziness” and you realize this situation is completely fake and unnecessary. If the data going into the economic models is false, so will be its resulting indexes and scores and valuations. And what are our input data/assumptions? That 1) work = productivity, 2) time can be marginally substituted, 3) impact and wealth are interchangeable?, and 4) our default state is something to be avoided?… clearly something’s off.
The average person will NOT become a leech on society when given the freedom to choose their behavior. Endless studies show people being more “productive” and creative at higher magnitudes when guaranteed their met basic needs. Think of the children able to play and learn without any insecurity versus the ones scrapping for a dollar to make ends meet. The former is true freedom, the latter is playing chess when your starting board is always 3 moves away from checkmate. Society should expand that freedom, not try to create things like BS jobs and technology hoarding that makes it forever elusive.
Humans live along different values that are truly not quantifiably comparable. Yet, we assume, evaluate, and condemn humans based on their decision making between the above, tying it all to some level of monetary value. If our definitions of work continue to rely on this artificial divisible, transitive ownership of time, the condition of most workers (most people) will not improve. Their economic condition is not the same as that of their lives and soul.
In a society that’s largely solved “suffering labor” like that of the peasant farmers of old with technology, the next step isn’t inventing its new incarnation, wrapped in corporate jargon and regulatory necessities. It is now truly moving towards the principle of human freedom, freedom to work at whatever, and not just due to a goal of compensation. We can’t continue the inconsistency of valuing work and labor while not letting it be meaningful and productive. No more bullshit jobs, and no more bullshit reasons to have them.