Bullshit Jobs
A Theory
David Graeber
Simon & Schuster, 2018
Recommendation
David Graeber’s bestseller stems from a popular, brave and subversive article he wrote in 2013.
He acknowledges in the final sentences of the book that he is presenting his controversial argument to
provoke thought, not to propose solutions. The first four chapters offer amusing anecdotes about stupid jobs,
but the most thought-provoking material appears in chapters five through seven. Graeber’s insights may make
you consider whether politicians, the wealthy – and even you – collude to keep yourself and many other
employees trapped in a life of limited freedom dominated by the frustrations of meaningless work.
While always politically neutral, getAbstract suggests Graeber’s treatise to those who question the basic
elements of life and work that most folks take for granted. (Warning, as you might surmise, expect some
profanity.)
Take-Aways
Today’s corporate-driven economies emphasize pride not in what you make but in what you can buy
– a profound shift.
Corporations make fortunes from meaningless and even harmful or evil work. They have little
incentive to reduce it.
More than half of all work is meaningless and pointless.
Eliminating useless work would mean 15- to 20-hour work weeks, not 40 plus.
People believe work has value and that even pointless work is character-building.
Junk jobs proliferate, taking up more and more of the economy.
Meaningless work pays a lot. Beneficial work doesn’t.
Politicians and the wealthy want full employment; the thought of a nation of people with time on
their hands scares them
Many leaders boost their status by hiring “flunkies,” “goons,” fixers, and “box tickers.”
A “universal basic income” might separate work from living and give people a glimpse of true
freedom.
Summary
What Happened to Utopia?
Pointless, meaningless and, in many cases, harmful jobs constitute more than half of all work performed in
Western countries today. If companies eliminated worthless work and automated work that machines could
do, people would work only a few hours a day.
“This is not a book about a particular solution. It’s a book about a problem – one that most people don’t even
acknowledge exists.”
Why do most people still work 40 or more hours each week with only a small amount of vacation time each
year? Consider what they might do with their free time. Might they question events around them? Might a
leisure-based economy upset the current economy in which only the top one percent gets ahead? Might ruling
politicians and the very wealthy have orchestrated the current fake economy to keep citizens occupied with
work so they have little time for anything else?
Junk Jobs
Empty jobs are any positions in which the workers believe their labor has no meaning, helps no one, and
contributes nothing to society, or they’re jobs that workers know existing technology could easily do. This
is especially true if no one would suffer if the worker didn’t do the job. If a group of people do the same work
as you, and if they agree the work has no value, you have a fake job.
“Working serves a purpose, or is meant to do so. Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working
is an indignity.”
Many jobs mix elements of good, purposeful work and rubbish work, like a doctor who spends half the
week treating patients and half of it filling out forms. For many white-collar workers in western nations,
useless meetings, email and paperwork render more than half of their work meaningless.
A “fake ”job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that
even the employee cannot justify its existence…”
Most fake jobs garner more respect and remuneration than meaningful jobs. For example, teachers, plumbers
and firefighters, who do purposeful work, receive far less compensation and esteem than bankers, lawyers and
advertisers. Empty jobs are not the nasty or messy but useful jobs. The former contribute nothing but
pay well. The latter, like trash collectors and dishwashers, pay poorly but improve society.
Categories of Junk Jobs
Most useless jobs fall into one or more of these categories:
1. “Flunkies” – Anyone hired to make someone else look or feel more important is a flunky. These
include, for example, receptionists in quiet offices, doormen, elevator operators and various
consultants who act as window dressing, including gatekeepers who give the illusion their boss has
bigger things to do.
2. “Goons” – These workers include advertisers, telemarketers, armies and other aggressive muscle
that nations or organizations hire to push people into doing things. That work is necessary only
because competitors employ goons, too, so everyone else must follow. Workers who
convince people they need things they don’t or push an unattainable standard of appearance or
lifestyle on people who can’t afford it are doing something evil. They harm people and society.
3. “Duct tapers” – These workers fix unnecessary messes other people leave behind. Bug fixers in
software or editors fall into this category. They constantly fix the same problems made by people
who wouldn’t need cleaning up after if they did their jobs better or had the necessary tools.
4. “Box tickers” – Organizations create meaningless work so they can say they’ve done the task and
can check off the box. They do the work for appearance’s sake only. The people who do this work
generally know it’s pointless, whether they’re creating pretty but useless slide decks, writing
attractive but worthless reports, or sitting on important-sounding, but completely irrelevant
committees.
5. “Task masters” – Many managers and supervisors preside over teams who don’t need them. These
teams could do their work as well or better without another layer of meddling management above
them. Worse, these useless managers occupy their empty time cooking up useless tasks for their
teams to perform so they seem busy and keep their subordinates under pressure.
How Bad Jobs Do Harm
People performing junk jobs – even if they receive high prestige, ample salaries and plenty of autonomy, and
don’t have to do much – still dislike their situations. Most people seek purpose and meaning in their work and
in their lives. They’re sad when they believe their work helps no one, delivers no value and may do harm.
Most economists build their models on the assumption that people seek the most pay for the least
work; evidence proves them wrong. Lottery winners often return to work, for example, and prisoners clamour
for work assignments when they could choose to do nothing. Meaningless work by itself doesn’t cause
despair. However, having someone imposing worthless, irrelevant work upon you can destroy your soul.
“A majority of...information workers do feel that if their jobs were to vanish, it would make very little
difference to the world.”
The opportunity for people to force meaningless work on other people arose only recently, with the notion of
paying people for their time. For centuries, employers paid people on the basis of their production. Today,
most people receive a pay check based on a standard work week measured in hours. Those hours belong to
their employers, who may prefer that employees do anything – even useless work – instead of nothing.
This makes no sense to people who wish for purposeful tasks; it erodes their morale.
“Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy
jobs that are effectively made up.”
When companies don’t assign pointless, made-up work, people who have empty jobs fake being busy by
making up worthless work. Decent managers may tacitly acknowledge the lack of work, but most expect their
employees to keep up the pretence. Even when this means playing online games or watching cat videos, most
people who know their labour has no meaning experience discontent and disengagement.
“Huge swaths of people...spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really
need to be performed.”
Meaningless labour exacerbates other problems at work. It raises tempers, reduces camaraderie, and
diminishes tolerance. It contributes to adverse health conditions, including heightened stress and depression.
These conditions are often worse in people who enjoy respect, social prestige, and high pay for their fake
jobs, presumably because all the rewards make them feel guilty. Performing labour of no value for
organizations – like non-profits – that exist to do good, erodes morale and harms health even more rapidly.
Meaningless “jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of
spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.”
When organizations assign people hollow work they commit “spiritual violence.” Many employees try to
keep their equilibrium by surreptitiously using their time at work for other purposes, such as learning
a language or pursuing unrelated research of personal interest. Ultimately, however, only a small percentage
of people can stay in a hollow job while avoiding serious psychological and physical harm.
A Growing Phenomenon
In theory, competition in a capitalist system should prevent waste in business, so junk jobs shouldn’t last for
long. Communism deliberately created needless factory jobs, and capitalism creates an equal number of
pointless office jobs. The number of fake jobs and those that are made up of junk work has grown quickly
over the past few decades. The fast rise of information industry jobs and office work since the 1960’s
coincides with this trend. Most of those jobs are useless.
“Just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs. capitalist regimes somehow ended
up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs.”
Politicians promise jobs and low unemployment to get elected. Whether the jobs contribute anything matters
little. Even President Barrack Obama, champion of health care reform, said that millions of useless jobs in
health care deserve protection. The US health care system employs at least three million people who fill out
forms for insurance purposes. A single-payer system would eliminate these jobs overnight.
“The more one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”
In the private sector, employers hire people to fulfil contracts. They pay workers one amount and then bill
their time to customers at much higher rates. The longer those people work, the more their employers can
charge. This leads to rampant waste, deliberate obfuscation, and perverse incentives to work poorly or
slowly. The decades-long expansion of new levels of management and decision-making in Western
economies adds layers of bureaucracy, useless paperwork, endless approvals, meetings, and presentations.
Many firms put people in purposeless jobs to give the appearance of success and importance.
Why Worthless Work Endures
For almost a century, economists predicted that in the future people would have shorter work weeks, with
lives devoted to family, pursuing creative passions or enjoying leisure. Even though these economists were
correct – nations could easily shorten the work week, dramatically and with no discernible negative impact –
the last 100 years showcase ever-increasing work hours. People work more hours now than they did 100 years
ago, but most of their work is made-up and worthless.
"Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense."
When half of all work produces nothing or harms society, it seems logical to eliminate it. Instead, economies
generate more useless work. This issue receives little fanfare because most people don’t recognize useless
work as an issue. They might believe that much of government work is worthless, but they believe so strongly
in capitalism’s efficiency they can’t or won’t see its enormous waste.
“We could easily rearrange matters in such a way that pretty much everyone on earth lived lives of relative
ease and comfort.”
Most people tacitly accept that the more useless a job, the more it should pay, and the more a job contributes
and helps people, the less it should pay. This seduces people into fighting for and keeping meaningless
positions, like hedge fund managers, lobbyists and marketers. The prevailing system seems to say
that because firefighters and teachers do meaningful work, they should accept the punishment of low wages.
“Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract...but we don’t think a lot about what being free or
practicing freedom might actually mean.”
Most people believe in the inherent value of work – they celebrate all legal work as valuable. They believe
work builds character, so the more difficult and painful the job, the better. They believe that the real path to
responsible adulthood lies not in pursuing your passions but in doing something difficult, even if it damages
your body and spirit. This centuries-old Puritan principle – the work ethic – still looms large in Western
cultures and values. People see work as the only path to true, responsible adulthood. Whether they would
admit it or not, many would have a hard time living in a leisure society.
“If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity...how could they
possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?”
The moral value of work once meant learning a trade or craft and taking pride in making things. Today’s
corporate-driven economies emphasize pride not in what you make but in what you can buy – a profound
shift. As people graduate from school, start careers, build families, acquire mortgages, and so on, they grow
increasingly dependent on the system, even if they hate it – another reason so many people tolerate
meaningless jobs.
End Empty Jobs
The means exist to change life so all seven billion people on the planet could live comfortably. Machines,
robots and artificial intelligence make an increasing amount of human effort unnecessary. Firms could relieve
workers of mundane, repetitive work, so these people could labour less and spend their time on tasks
requiring creativity and emotional intelligence. But companies don’t do this. Even when people acknowledge
the proliferation of fake jobs, many don’t see it as a problem. Politicians believe in full employment. The
ruling classes – politicians and the very wealthy – fear a citizenry with time on its hands. Companies make
money from useless work, and useless props shore up their illusion of importance. Workers participate in this
fraud, seduced by the high pay and prestige of worthless jobs. An outdated work ethic and the inability to
imagine what they would do if they were free from full time work sustain their misguided ambitions.
Universal Income
If nations separated work from making a living, more people might open their eyes to the harmful effects of
meaningless work. A universal basic income – a modest, living wage given to every citizen – would eliminate
significant empty work. The tens of millions of bureaucrats who operate the current, demeaning social welfare
bureaucracies of the world could be let go to help pay for a fair and universal income. This would promote a
form of equality for all – young and old, poor and wealthy, black and white, men and women – and reduce
the need to accept fake work. Ultimately, if all workers had financial security, some would still choose useless
work or do nothing. Their numbers could never come close to the number of workers today who know their
work has no meaning, even when working for a good purpose is their highest ambition.
About the Author
David Graeber is an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics. He formerly taught at Yale
University.
