I recently finished reading
David Graeber's "Bullsh*t Jobs," a book I'd been planning to read for some time, but which I finally got around to as a form of psychological protest against my current employment. I am now curious if anyone else is familiar with Graeber's argument, and whether Atlas agrees with it. I am not posting this on the book board because I would like to get more than one reply per year.
This article is a condensed version of Graeber's book. Essentially, Graeber is an anarcho-communist who theorizes that automation and increased industrial efficiency in the 1900s essentially eliminated most of the real need for humans in the first world to participate in work. However, this could not last, because in a capitalist system people need some source of income to consume products, and in order to earn income, a person must demonstrate that they are willing to sacrifice their time/effort.
Graeber believes that since the 1940s or so, this sacrifice has become largely performative. He asserts that roughly half of all jobs in the economy exist for "bullsh*t" reasons-- engaging in problem-solving that solves nothing, acting as a status symbol for a company or superior, being "on call" when one is not really needed most of the time. Graeber's theory is peppered with (to put it charitably) somewhat unscientific evidence, including anecdotes mailed to him by readers and polls in which ~40% of workers say their jobs "contribute nothing to society."
While this book was certainly not a serious sociological or anthropological study, I believe there is quite a lot of truth to it. First, Graeber is right that the technological innovations of the early 1900s essentially rendered many workers useless and redundant to the economy. I believe that this redundancy is to blame for stagnating American wages-- workers simply have no bargaining power anymore, because the amount of truly essential work continues to shrink while the labor pool continues to grow. This trend, accelerated by automation and globalization, was also identified by Andrew Yang (and in a much less intellectually rigorous way, by Donald Trump).
I also share Graeber's disdain for the deplorable boomer platitudes of people like Mike Rowe, "grindset" social media gurus, and anyone else who touts the value of a "hard day's work." These people are essentially masochists who believe that they are tempering themselves to become stoic, noble puritan laborers-- but what they do not realize is that the """work""" they idolize typically involves sitting on one's ass for eight hours a day writing emails, making PowerPoint presentations, looking through spreadsheets, and attending Zoom meetings. These experiences are utterly detached from reality and nobody has ever gained any insight or enlightenment by performing them. And more generally, worshipping "work" is something I generally associate with stupid and uncreative people. Only an utter moron can derive pleasure from performing a repetitious and pointless task without once considering ways to make it more efficient, streamlined, or practical. Laziness breeds innovation. "Work ethic" breeds nothing but stagnation and monotony. I can only conclude that these people are either stupid or just gluttons for debasement and self-flagellation. Probably some combination of the two.
However, I do think Graeber misdirects his attention at a system that he imagines to be some type of modern extension of feudal hierarchies and mense lords. As an anarchist, Graeber hates capitalism-- and this hatred blinds him to deeper analysis of why a system ostensibly built on competition and efficiency has become one of corruption and waste.
This is where I began thinking about my current job and how it fits into the capitalist system. Graeber says that most of these wasted "bullsh*t jobs" exist in the private sector rather than the public sector, and on the surface he's right. I work for a private firm. My firm's customers are private organizations, and our job is to find causes of action against other private organizations. And I can indeed attest that my job should not exist, contributes nothing to society, and is a monumental waste of time, money, and resources. Graeber would thus probably classify my job as a "private sector bullsh*t job." What this ignores, of course, is that my entire firm exists solely because of a particular cause of action authorized by a particular statute in a particular piece of federal legislation. Every minor act by Congress causes ripple effects through time and through our social hierarchies, until eventually entire companies exist solely to extract transaction costs from the private entities that are benefitted and burdened by the legislation.
Is it any surprise that the "bullsh*t jobs" Graeber hypothesizes emerged at around the same time as the modern regulatory state? And is it any surprise that an anarcho-communist would not have much interest in investigating the nuances of the interactions between the state and private enterprise-- two entities that he considers inseparably intertwined and equally evil? The way I see it, the state can create bullsh*t jobs in three different ways:
1) Direct Bullsh*t: Occurs when the government creates useless and wasteful positions and then populates them with useless and wasteful bureaucrats. This includes everything from welfare department administrators to the multiple redundant deans at public universities.
2) Second-Order Bullsh*t: Occurs when the government enacts some type of regulation requiring private enterprise to create particular positions (often in the form of "compliance officers"). Here the bullsh*t job in question is directly associated with a particular regulation or set of regulations. My job falls into this category.
3) Third-Order Bullsh*t: This type of bullsh*t job is the most detached from government action, and it is the type that Graeber ignores. What I call "third-order bullsh*t jobs" are jobs that arise out of the lack of competition between private entities. My logic is as follows: The more regulated an industry is, the higher the barriers are for new entrepreneurs to enter that industry. Since a market with high barriers to entry cannot be easily rejuvenated by new ideas and innovators, the industry naturally consolidates towards a small number of large, unwieldly firms with several layers of hierarchy and too many employees and departments to keep track of. These types of organizations (epitomized by the financial sector) have no incentive to cut costs and crack down on waste because they know they have no meaningful competition. They are economic apex predators, and without any superior predators to cull the herd every so often, they are allowed to become bloated, byzantine, Kafkaesque nightmares of inefficiency. I believe that this phenomenon, more than anything, contributes to Graeber's "Bullsh*t Jobs," especially seeing as there appears to be a direct correlation between how heavily regulated an industry is and how much it draws Graeber's ire.
But Graeber is correct about one big thing: Our politicians are completely complicit in the propagation of bullsh*t jobs. Far from seeing this as a problem, our leaders consider wastefulness a
solution... to high unemployment. Never mind that every regulation they pass creates a ripple effect that generates mountains of pointless paperwork and positions that create literally no value. Their goal is to just keep adding teats to the fat pig that is American law, until all of us are reduced to suckling piglets-- parasites that only exist because of obscure statutes and incomprehensible codes of conduct. This is why certain people (even people on this site!) continue to push the insane idea of a "jobs guarantee"-- they want to create more bullsh*t for people to mooch off of. It is a disgusting state of affairs, and if nothing else, I appreciate this book for calling my attention to it.
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