Review: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

A semi-serious attempt to understand a serious problem

This was an entry for Freddie deBoer's 2022 Book Review Contest.

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If you speak to any white-collar works about their job, they’ll tell you that it involves a lot of nonsense. You’ll hear about reports that no one reads, tasks only completed for optics, and projects either never complete or find themselves unusable upon completion. In the snack room or the Slack Chat, co-workers will joke about the pointless of their day-to-day work. And that’s just what people do between the forms, meetings, and emails. Popular media like Office Space or the Dilbert comics have long emphasized the pointless inherent in so much of white-collar life. The 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” didn’t break any new ground by arguing that white-collar workers perceive their work as pointless. It did so by arguing that these workers were right to do so.

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs expands on his viral 2013 essay. The London School of Economics anthropology professor provides two polls, one from the UK and another from the Netherlands, indicating that around 40% of workers don’t believe that their jobs provides a meaningful contribution to society. He also cites the popularity of his essay and his own professorial experience as a evidence for the phenomena. Bullshit Jobs defines such a job as one where employees can’t justify the position’s value but needs to pretend that they can. Graeber contrasts these roles with pernicious jobs like a mafia hitmen which, while providing no social utility, doesn’t pretend to offer social utility either. He also emphasizes that most of these jobs arise in the private sector, despite the popular perception of the efficient private sector.

Bullshit Jobs taxonomizes these roles into five types.

1. Flunkies exist to make other people feel important. These include door men and writers of in-house magazines. I see this in my field, data analytics when managers asking for presentations and visuals merely to appear data-oriented.

2. Goons counteract other firm’s goons. We see this job among corporate lawyers, search engine optimizers, marketers, and other roles that only exist because other companies have them

3. Duct Tapers temporarily fix and issue that firms could fix permanently. Examples include software developers who fix buggy freeware or low-level employees who fix the mistakes of other employees. These roles can multiply, as firms attempt to address problems by hiring more project managers, analysts, and supervisors to duct-tape the duct-tape.

4. Box Tickers help their employer pretend to do something that the firm isn’t doing. In these roles, employees may obtain feedback and ignore it or demand reports that never result in any decisions. Other box-tickers include volunteer, diversity, and compliance committees whom the executives ignore.

5. Taskmasters merely assigned work to others. These include supervisors whose subordinates need no supervision and meta-workers who add frivolous checklists and forms to other employee’s workloads.

Bullshit jobs can also occur on a sort of meta-level, where otherwise legitimate work only exists to support one of the five aforementioned roles. Examples might include the cleaners and carpenters who service an office of goons and taskmasters. Furthermore, “bullshitization” can occur, where meaningful jobs like doctors and scientists spend an increasing amount of their time on bureaucratic nonsense.

To exemplify these roles, Graeber solicited 250 testimonies from his Twitter followers. The anecdotes constitute the most enjoyable part of the book. One flunky receptionist rarely answered calls. Her role existed because firms feel more sophisticated when they hire receptionists. A duct-taper rewrites a data analyses completed by her data-illiterate boss. Another duct-taper copy-pasted emails from one form into another, despite firm having automated this process. Bullshit Jobs also lists multiple goons who advertise or sell a useless product, including one that allows customer to buy a credit report they could download for free. In other cases, dual box-ticker-flunkies spend days creating pretty reports. These reports receive praise for their visual appeal, but the bosses ignore their findings. At one firm, the HR department pretended to improve morale by creating an intranet that no one used for months. This company later forced employees to use it for a frivolous volunteering event that could have been replaced with a small donation. Other employees composed Indian classical music and wrote stage plays during, as their job only required an hour or two of work during their eight hour days. A film-industry insider discusses the bloat of development roles, where films specs, scripts, and pitches pass through layers of executives that delays projects without providing anything of value.

Though doing nothing may sound delightful, these employees often despise their bullshit jobs. These people want to impact the world, and they feel frustrated to see their talents and work-ethic channeled into the void. They also dislike pretending that their work is important. On top of that, they often think their qualms lack legitimacy. In a world of war and poverty, these works feel greedy for complaining about something as frivolous as a having a bullshit job. Yet, people rarely quit, because these jobs pay well, offer long-term security, and have comfy working conditions. Graeber argues that this creates resentment towards the working class. Professionals struggle to feel sympathy for striking auto-workers, since the latter get something that formers crave: meaningful work. We see extra resentment for the few who obtain meaning and financial security at this jobs, like the much maligned Hollywood and tech elites.

Bullshit Jobs offers a a few compelling hypotheses to explain its titular phenomena. The book blames computers for some our bullshit work. Since computers only understand information in certain formats, a lot of modern work hours involve people reformatting data for software. Students could enroll for a class in the analog days by writing their name on a piece of paper and walking through the door. Today, this requires software developers, IT professional, cyber-security experts, and their corresponding supervisors and project managers. This creates additional effort without a clear increase in productivity.

The book also notes the professionalization of the left-of-center. When power organized labor to the offices, professions exploited this power to protect their well-paid and pointless positions. President Obama, the book notes, worried about an NHS-style universal healthcare program, as such a program would eliminate over a million private-sector healthcare bureaucrats.

True to his anarchist sympathies, Graeber also emphasizes the perils of hierarchy. In a hierarchal organization, the information flow functions much better in the downwards direction than the upwards one, meaning that the higher-ups might remain unaware of how much bullshit occurs below them. Incompetent managers can also proliferate bullshit work when their underlings remain too petrified to criticize them for doing so.

On the other hand, some of these theories make little sense. Graeber crafts a theory of “managerial feudalism,” where capitalists hire layers of bureaucrats to protect their wealth from the people who produce it. The author compares this with traditional feudalism, where unproductive warriors and retainers sat between peasants and craftsmen. If you failed to understand those last two sentences, it’s because the book fails to clarify this theory despite its numerous mentions. Other times, Graeber argues that firms create unnecessary work to avoid a populace with too much free time on its hands, though its hard to tell if that’s an implication of managerial feudalism or a different model altogether. I don’t think that thesis makes much sense either. Capital, it seems, would gain much more power eliminating excess labor demand and increasing desperation among the populace. Graeber also denies an explicit conspiracy among firms to create needless labor. though I don’t see how such an equilibrium could occur without coordination, however, as each firm would increase its profits by trimming the fat.

Graeber derides traditional “economic theory,” though I think it can help us here. Every economics student learns about the “principal-agent problem” where an individual’s incentives misalign with the person or organization they represent. While companies maximize profit, individual employees see little connection between their own life satisfaction and the bottom line. Hence, the worker often engages in self-interested behavior that hurt’s the company’s profitability. As one example, managers gain more prestige when more people work under them. LinkedIn bios will boast about managing a team of over 200 people but never about managing a team of 50 people when an inefficient manager would have hired 200. Graeber himself cites this issue, though he sees it as an aberration, rather than an example, of traditional economic thought. In one example, a bank executive refuses to consider automation because doing so would eliminate many of their subordinates. Graeber fails to realize how this fits with standard microeconomic theory.

Graeber proposes Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to bullshit jobs. He argues that such a program it would both eliminate the bureaucracy associated with means testing and allow people to quit and spend their time on something more useful. The book supports this claim by citing the innovative artists and thinkers who owed their livelihoods to the 60s welfare state. I’m not so sure. Most people want a lifestyle more glamorous than the one earned by a minimum income, meaning the desire to take these bullshit jobs would remain. I also think high openness-to-experience or low conscientiousness people can forget how few people think like them. Many of us like that our jobs feature routines, schedules, and hierarchy and would find it stressful to work without them. For these reasons, though, I also concur with Graeber when he argues that a UBI wouldn’t cause masses of people to exit the workforce. Even though UBI might not solve the problem (and the book itself hedges its support for the policy), I support framing bullshit jobs as a policy issue. I hope future wonks propose legislation that would reduce the quantity of bullshit work.

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Since his passing in 2020, we can now, sadly, speak about David Graeber’s legacy in the past tense. He entered the public consciousness with 2011’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. I haven’t read that book, but review indicate that it presents muddled theories and erroneous claims. Yet, the book captivated readers and convinced many to join the Occupy Wall Street protests, where Graeber coined (or at least popularized) the slogan “We are the 99%.” I think time will tell a similar story about Bullshit Jobs. The books’ main theoretical conceit, managerialism feudalism, makes little sense, and evidence for bullshit jobs consists of two vague polls and anonymous stories from his Twitter follows. Yet, again, the idea seems right. The 2013 essay attracted so many readers that it crashed the website that published it. When I discuss the book with co-workers, they always laugh and add some bullshit job stories of their own.

Unlike Graeber, I studied traditional, neoliberal economics for my undergraduate and graduate education. There, I learned to discover truth through multivariate calculus, regression models, and natural experiments. While I still respect statistical inference and mathematical models, I’ve accepted that some knowledge exists outside rigorous academic study. If I talked to some of my former professors, they’d probably reject the notion of bullshit jobs. Shouldn’t companies just lay everybody off and cash the savings? I don’t know what to make of theories that contradict our simple observations about the world. If the leading zoologists announces that “dog” was a myth, would we stop believing in dogs? Or would we stop would stop believing zoologists? I think some truths reside in the stories we circulate among ourselves in private conversations, and Graeber excelled in amplifying, and sometimes embellishing, these truths.