Bullshit Jobs A Theory

Mixed feelings about this one. I might at one point write a more elaborate review, but for now I’ll stick to some bullet points.

- If nothing else, there’s value in investigating the phenomenon that a significant percentage of the population appears to believe that (at least part of) their jobs are meaningless (bullshit jobs).
- This essay was prompted on a poll that reported the number of people with such feelings was somewhere in the 40% range. I forget the exact number and have not checked the wording of the poll.
- If this is true, and if people are correct in their assessment, eliminating such bullshit jobs could (i) give us the same level of production/standard of living with roughly half the amount of hours worked (i.e., double leisure) or (ii) double our level of production/standard of living for the same amount of hours worked. Plus give people a sense of meaning, which has value in and of itself.
- David Graeber does not try (very hard) to establish whether or not this is true. There is no thought given to how the poll was done (i.e., how were things phrased? do the results change with the order of the questions or slight reframings?) nor to more broadly studying the phenomenon - he just takes at as a fact.
- The definition of bullshit job used by David Graeber is “job that person who does it thinks is bullshit”. This is extremely unsatisfactory - who says the doer of the job is apt to evaluate this? Note that this implies that the same job can simultaneously be bullshit and not bullshit, if two people with the same job disagree on the usefulness of it. To his credit, he correctly points out that assigning value (to jobs) is a necessarily fruitless endeavor, but that does not make his definition any more satisfactory.
- For some jobs (the corporate lawyer example comes to mind), David seems to assume they are obviously bullshit. The argument goes something like: “I know someone who has a job like this and told me it was bullshit. I personally also believe it to be bullshit and that the world would be a better place without it. Therefore, I assume everyone else doing the job also internally believes it to be bullshit, but must lie about it in order to save face/maintain sanity/keep their job.”. This is extremely motivated reasoning. Perhaps the one corporate lawyer who reached out to David just fails to see the forest for the trees, or is not a good fit for the job in the first place. Who is David to decide for all the corporate lawyers who have not stated they think this that their job is bullshit?
- He acknowledges the argument (apparently also made by the Economist in response to the essay giving rise to this book) that the economy has become more complex, which might make it harder for people to see why their job might matter. He dismisses it out of hand, without much evidence or arguing. I found this extremely unsatisfying - it seems to me that this could explain (part of) the phenomenon.
- Some statements were revealing of him trying to extend his expertise to topics he does not know much about. For example, he claimed that the reason for jobs like entrepreneur and in the financial sector to not have been automated is ideological - “they” (The Powers That Be, presumably) want only to automate working-class jobs. Irrespective of the ideological claims, (i) financial sector jobs have to a large extent been automated, e.g., trading is largely handled by computers these days and (ii) we are very far from being able to automate entrepreneurship - seems to me about as far as general AI (for some definition of the concept).
- Similarly, his remarks on project managers make clear that he has never attempted managing large teams. I wonder if his opinions on the subject would change if he was tasked with running an organization of, say, 50-100 people for a year. There is an overhead inherent to attempting to have multiple people working together towards a complex common goal that he does not seem to acknowledge.
- On a more personal, irrational note, the book irked me - I just disagree very much with the author’s view on life. E.g., he apparently believes there is more value in “gossiping about one’s friends’ polyamorous love affairs” than in physical activity. I find it hard to relate to someone like this.
- To end on a positive note, I found the discussion on the history of how we came to view hard work as valuable in and of itself illuminating.