I really enjoyed this article and, as always, found your explanations to be clear and convincing. Your example of how entrenched tech companies and social media are is especially interesting right now because of all the meltdowns about Twitter. Everyone is trying to set up an alternative to Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that a clunky platform like Mastodon will win many adherents. The same thing happens with Facebook. Many years ago, a couple of friends tried to persuade me to go on Google Plus. I said no, for exactly the reasons you cite. Who is on Google Plus now? Anybody at all? And now my aunt is trying to persuade me to join the waiting list for Post. Sorry, but no. I can talk with my aunt whenever I want anyway, and I see no point in starting over from scratch on a new social-media platform that is unlikely to thrive any more than Google Plus did.
Incidentally, even though I am a former English teacher and an editor, I’m not a “whom person” either. I think it’s a relic of the case-system that is rapidly on its way out.
I think writing style and word choice matter, but a lot of people's understand of the subject stops at "proper grammar." Thats fine for many instances but it's not a personable or likeable style. I aim for something is more casual which is why you'll see stuff like, well, the word "stuff" in my articles
This is such a fascinating topic and a fascinating puzzle. Intuitively I am sometimes tempted to think that given the IT revolution since the end of the 60s and the massive expansion of globalisation, growth should have been *way* higher than it has been in the Western world than it has been. To me then, the most compelling thing about the BS jobs idea is that - if this is true - its a compelling suspect.
It seems to me that complexity in a more general sense underlies a lot of what is going on here across many (though not all) the explanations postied. I wonder if in an increasingly complex society it becomes very hard to work out the relationship of work to value (or in other words cost to value generated) for basically everyone (with the problem being worst in large organisations, public or private, whatever Grabers clearly personal political bias is).
I am as frustrated as you by the lack of precision in the Bullshit Job thesis. A box-ticker who makes sure fire regulations are followed in building construction is absolutely not a bullshit job. But a very similar health and safety related job in an area with a weighted profile of risk/harm two orders of magnitude less impactful *might* be on balance not very valuable. But no doubt the person doing that believes they're helping and providing important value - and at what point between the two jobs does it go from a net drain to a net contributor? The HR liability issue seems rooted in this. There are good reasons for having employment laws and those will necessarily create HR liability issues. But they will also increase complexity. Likewise this is a huge problem with all bureaucracy, and especially rules created by governments or departments not directly accountable for value generated (like HR) . Lots of the rules make individual sense or are well meaning: they tend to create problems in aggregate because they impose lots of hidden costs (unlike say, just a single uniform tax) that make it hard to work out the cost side of any endeavour is and perhaps contribute to a general blindness that the weight of the costs mean that the value generated by any role actually has to be many factors greater just to outweigh it *and* the statistically poor value decisions other colleagues have probably made.
It's easy - as you say - to reel off anecdotes about obviously pointless stuff where people feel disengaged with their jobs. But that doesn't cover the experience of most people in the places I've worked. I bet most of the problem is not there: it’s in just a lot of work which are in activities that just don't pay off much in comparison with the total true cost of having someone do them (wages, physical space, training, co-ordination costs etc). Its probably even true of whole organisations. Many startups fail because the value they provided just wasn't quite enough relative to the costs consumed: not because they were laughably pointless (like Juciero!) and generated no value for customers whatsoever.
We'd maybe expect an extreme pareto distribution of which people are companies are overall driving value relative to cost because success at work becomes more like success in entertainment: most people and organizations are spending most of their time fumbling in the dark because cost-to-value signals are so weak! But due to IT, when a company or person "strikes" gold with a new value driver that clearly massively exceeds cost, their reach can suddenly grow very large (much like artists whose particular, song, movie, book whatever happens to strike a chord with the public that was very hard to predict upfront). Whether that *directly* translates into rewards for that business is a separate matter but for the purpose of value it doesn't matter: the sources of value are still extremely pareto distributed. It might just as well be someone who releases groundbreaking software for free as a company like FB that quite simply has made some *very* powerful advertising tech that can genuinely and easily get you more customers way better than other advertising methods.
So, to clarify, a Bullshit Job is one that the worker himself believes to be bullshit. The worker knows he isn't doing anything useful, but he won't tell anyone because he doesn't want to get fired. Graeber isn't going around telling other people their jobs are bullshit; he's observing that people tell him their jobs are bullshit.
For the point about IT/globalization, I completely agree. I touched upon that here: https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/p/do-we-need-more-software . I just don't think our society has gotten the expected ROI out of all this stuff. This isn't unique to tech, of course. Think of how much industries like finance and consulting have grown.
And, finally, I think the signal-to-value issue in IT is spot on. I should have used the entertainment analogy in my piece. A fantasy publishing house can spit out 19 duds, but if the 20th is Harry Potter, they're in the black. I'm speaking from data analytics, I can tell you that a lot of people absolutely believe that they don't add any value to the company. But it's really hard for upper management to spot which analysts do and don't provide value, so if they view the department as a whole as worthwhile, they might as well just keep everyone.
1) On monopoly stuff I would check out Matt Stoller. I find his explanations of how this would work to be excellent (and me summarizing would be a disservice) even if I disagree with him on everything else.
2) I think Parkinson's Law deserves lots of credit and is partially why the pandemic exasperated the bullshit jobs issue. Instead of "I need to spread two hours of work out over eight" it became "I can do my two hours of work and then go play Red Dead Redemption 2 for seven hours." And although yes, you could fire three other people and give me their jobs, Parkinson's is baked into the equation. You're paying me to spread two hours of work over eight. If you expect me to do eight hours worth of work I expect more money.
3) We definitely don't have a free market. We have a mixed economy with free market elements but due to regulatory capture it primary services existing firms. This is I think largely responsible for bullshit industries.
I worked in a bullshit industry: personal injury law. There's no reason for this to exist. Treatment costs money because we chose a pay for play Healthcare system because it's better for doctors and health insurance companoes (this also gives rise to the insurance subrogation industry). You could also easily mandate that the insurance company pays for lost wages and a fixed amount for the intangible industries. But it's much, much cheaper for the insurance companies to have the adversarial system. Which spawns an entire bullshit industry. And there's countless bullshit industries!
Anything you can link me to for Matt Stoller? Should I just check out his book? They have it at my library, but I often find popular nonfiction to be bloated by like 5x.
As for healthcare/personal injury, Graeber makes a special point about this in the book. Apparently there's an interview with Obama, in which the then-president said that wouldn't pursue a UK-style system since it would eliminate hundreds of thousands of private healthcare jobs. I think he mentioned that about a third or US healthcare spending is on administration, compared to like 5% in the UK.
I'm not sure I understand point #2. Are you saying this increases the number of bullshit jobs, or it just makes jobs feel more bullshit? If it's the latter, I can see that. You can convince yourself you're doing 40 hours of work when you're at the office, but it's harder to create that delusion when you're watching the World Cup in your PJs.
Thank you so much for the shout-out!
I really enjoyed this article and, as always, found your explanations to be clear and convincing. Your example of how entrenched tech companies and social media are is especially interesting right now because of all the meltdowns about Twitter. Everyone is trying to set up an alternative to Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that a clunky platform like Mastodon will win many adherents. The same thing happens with Facebook. Many years ago, a couple of friends tried to persuade me to go on Google Plus. I said no, for exactly the reasons you cite. Who is on Google Plus now? Anybody at all? And now my aunt is trying to persuade me to join the waiting list for Post. Sorry, but no. I can talk with my aunt whenever I want anyway, and I see no point in starting over from scratch on a new social-media platform that is unlikely to thrive any more than Google Plus did.
Incidentally, even though I am a former English teacher and an editor, I’m not a “whom person” either. I think it’s a relic of the case-system that is rapidly on its way out.
I think writing style and word choice matter, but a lot of people's understand of the subject stops at "proper grammar." Thats fine for many instances but it's not a personable or likeable style. I aim for something is more casual which is why you'll see stuff like, well, the word "stuff" in my articles
Excellent follow-up to your review.
This is such a fascinating topic and a fascinating puzzle. Intuitively I am sometimes tempted to think that given the IT revolution since the end of the 60s and the massive expansion of globalisation, growth should have been *way* higher than it has been in the Western world than it has been. To me then, the most compelling thing about the BS jobs idea is that - if this is true - its a compelling suspect.
It seems to me that complexity in a more general sense underlies a lot of what is going on here across many (though not all) the explanations postied. I wonder if in an increasingly complex society it becomes very hard to work out the relationship of work to value (or in other words cost to value generated) for basically everyone (with the problem being worst in large organisations, public or private, whatever Grabers clearly personal political bias is).
I am as frustrated as you by the lack of precision in the Bullshit Job thesis. A box-ticker who makes sure fire regulations are followed in building construction is absolutely not a bullshit job. But a very similar health and safety related job in an area with a weighted profile of risk/harm two orders of magnitude less impactful *might* be on balance not very valuable. But no doubt the person doing that believes they're helping and providing important value - and at what point between the two jobs does it go from a net drain to a net contributor? The HR liability issue seems rooted in this. There are good reasons for having employment laws and those will necessarily create HR liability issues. But they will also increase complexity. Likewise this is a huge problem with all bureaucracy, and especially rules created by governments or departments not directly accountable for value generated (like HR) . Lots of the rules make individual sense or are well meaning: they tend to create problems in aggregate because they impose lots of hidden costs (unlike say, just a single uniform tax) that make it hard to work out the cost side of any endeavour is and perhaps contribute to a general blindness that the weight of the costs mean that the value generated by any role actually has to be many factors greater just to outweigh it *and* the statistically poor value decisions other colleagues have probably made.
It's easy - as you say - to reel off anecdotes about obviously pointless stuff where people feel disengaged with their jobs. But that doesn't cover the experience of most people in the places I've worked. I bet most of the problem is not there: it’s in just a lot of work which are in activities that just don't pay off much in comparison with the total true cost of having someone do them (wages, physical space, training, co-ordination costs etc). Its probably even true of whole organisations. Many startups fail because the value they provided just wasn't quite enough relative to the costs consumed: not because they were laughably pointless (like Juciero!) and generated no value for customers whatsoever.
We'd maybe expect an extreme pareto distribution of which people are companies are overall driving value relative to cost because success at work becomes more like success in entertainment: most people and organizations are spending most of their time fumbling in the dark because cost-to-value signals are so weak! But due to IT, when a company or person "strikes" gold with a new value driver that clearly massively exceeds cost, their reach can suddenly grow very large (much like artists whose particular, song, movie, book whatever happens to strike a chord with the public that was very hard to predict upfront). Whether that *directly* translates into rewards for that business is a separate matter but for the purpose of value it doesn't matter: the sources of value are still extremely pareto distributed. It might just as well be someone who releases groundbreaking software for free as a company like FB that quite simply has made some *very* powerful advertising tech that can genuinely and easily get you more customers way better than other advertising methods.
So, to clarify, a Bullshit Job is one that the worker himself believes to be bullshit. The worker knows he isn't doing anything useful, but he won't tell anyone because he doesn't want to get fired. Graeber isn't going around telling other people their jobs are bullshit; he's observing that people tell him their jobs are bullshit.
For the point about IT/globalization, I completely agree. I touched upon that here: https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/p/do-we-need-more-software . I just don't think our society has gotten the expected ROI out of all this stuff. This isn't unique to tech, of course. Think of how much industries like finance and consulting have grown.
And, finally, I think the signal-to-value issue in IT is spot on. I should have used the entertainment analogy in my piece. A fantasy publishing house can spit out 19 duds, but if the 20th is Harry Potter, they're in the black. I'm speaking from data analytics, I can tell you that a lot of people absolutely believe that they don't add any value to the company. But it's really hard for upper management to spot which analysts do and don't provide value, so if they view the department as a whole as worthwhile, they might as well just keep everyone.
A few thoughts to your terrific explainer:
1) On monopoly stuff I would check out Matt Stoller. I find his explanations of how this would work to be excellent (and me summarizing would be a disservice) even if I disagree with him on everything else.
2) I think Parkinson's Law deserves lots of credit and is partially why the pandemic exasperated the bullshit jobs issue. Instead of "I need to spread two hours of work out over eight" it became "I can do my two hours of work and then go play Red Dead Redemption 2 for seven hours." And although yes, you could fire three other people and give me their jobs, Parkinson's is baked into the equation. You're paying me to spread two hours of work over eight. If you expect me to do eight hours worth of work I expect more money.
3) We definitely don't have a free market. We have a mixed economy with free market elements but due to regulatory capture it primary services existing firms. This is I think largely responsible for bullshit industries.
I worked in a bullshit industry: personal injury law. There's no reason for this to exist. Treatment costs money because we chose a pay for play Healthcare system because it's better for doctors and health insurance companoes (this also gives rise to the insurance subrogation industry). You could also easily mandate that the insurance company pays for lost wages and a fixed amount for the intangible industries. But it's much, much cheaper for the insurance companies to have the adversarial system. Which spawns an entire bullshit industry. And there's countless bullshit industries!
Anything you can link me to for Matt Stoller? Should I just check out his book? They have it at my library, but I often find popular nonfiction to be bloated by like 5x.
As for healthcare/personal injury, Graeber makes a special point about this in the book. Apparently there's an interview with Obama, in which the then-president said that wouldn't pursue a UK-style system since it would eliminate hundreds of thousands of private healthcare jobs. I think he mentioned that about a third or US healthcare spending is on administration, compared to like 5% in the UK.
I'm not sure I understand point #2. Are you saying this increases the number of bullshit jobs, or it just makes jobs feel more bullshit? If it's the latter, I can see that. You can convince yourself you're doing 40 hours of work when you're at the office, but it's harder to create that delusion when you're watching the World Cup in your PJs.
I haven't read his book but a lot of his Substack is free.
And yes I mainly meant it highlighted how much of even non bullshit jobs are bullshit done to draw out the work day.