Welcome to The Worthy House, where we offer
reality-focused writings on a variety of topics,
often on history, politics, and, in general,
on human flourishing in a post-liberal future.
I am Charles, the Maximum Leader 
of The Worthy House.
Today we are reviewing "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory,"
by David Graeber.
I am trying to understand how human beings
create value through their actions, and what
that implies for humanity.
Although this goal is hardly original, and
has occupied much brighter thinkers than me
for much of their lives, it is a necessary
step in defining Foundationalism, because
how we occupy our hands and minds, and what
effects that has on us and society, are critical
components of human flourishing.
And the economic path we have been on for
the past several decades has led to the opposite
of human flourishing, surface appearances
notwithstanding.
To guide us to flourishing, we must understand
why that is, and what can be done differently.
I am beginning with this lightweight book
(and will move on to heavyweight books, such
as Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation).
The core complaint of the author, David Graeber,
a British anthropologist, is that a substantial
majority of the white collar work in British
and American society is valueless to society
and damaging to the worker.
They have "bullshit jobs."
He defines such jobs as any job that is "pointless,
unnecessary, or pernicious," and where that
is obvious to the worker himself.
Graeber admits that all of his data is qualitative,
mostly gained by responses to his request
on Twitter for people to tell him about their
jobs.
That means this book is anecdotes all the
way down.
This is not as much of a defect as it seems,
though, since these are matters that benefit
more from thought than quantification.
Yes, the book has many defects, among them
lack of focus and mediocre writing, but the
questions Graeber raises are worth raising.
The author divides BS jobs into different,
mushy categories, but if you pull back a little,
they all boil down to the same thing-their
performance adds no value to individuals,
firms, or societies, other than payments made
to the worker for his work.
Merely unpleasant or boring jobs are not BS
jobs, as long as they have a point.
Basically, Graeber thinks a BS job is one
where if the worker simply stopped working,
nobody would notice, or care.
Or, alternatively, one where if it were made
illegal, no black market would develop (a
clever definition, though one only offered
in a footnote, when it should have been front-and-center).
Graeber also points out that BS jobs are not
just useless to society, but spiritually bad
for workers.
People do not want to live a purposeless life.
Channeling the much better writing of Matthew
Crawford (whom he does not cite), he accurately
points out that people want mastery and agency,
not just a paycheck.
"Compensatory consumerism," as Graeber calls
it, is not compensatory, although that is
all that is offered in our current setup.
What is the specific cast of BS jobs, given
that employment in sectors of the economy
such as agriculture and manufacturing has
shrunk, and BS jobs have grown?
(True, Graeber does not demonstrate they have
grown; this is more of a convincing, but not
proved, premise.)
Services have grown enormously as a percentage
of total employment, and it is there that
most BS jobs are found, Graeber says.
But he makes a key distinction: "services"
lumps together true services, such as waiters
and plumbers, with "information," meaning
"administrators, consultants, clerical and
accounting staff, IT professionals, and the
like."
We hear "information" and think "technology";
this is false-it's actually paper pushers,
with a very high percentage of BS jobs.
And of these information jobs, a vast number
of them are tied to "finance capital."
Here the rubber meets the road.
Finance capital includes not just Goldman
Sachs and Chase Bank, but also many related
and ancillary services, such as corporate
law and much accountancy.
I have long been down on the finance sector,
but have been unable to clearly formulate
why it is parasitical and essentially worthless,
to the extent it employs more people than
in, say, 1960.
Graeber sheds some light.
"In a way, one could argue that the whole
financial sector is a scam of sorts, since
it represents itself as largely about directing
investments toward profitable opportunities
in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it
does very little of that.
The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes
from colluding with government to create,
and then to trade and manipulate, various
forms of debt.
All I am really arguing in this book is that
just as much of what the financial sector
does is basically smoke and mirrors, so are
most of the information-sector jobs that accompanied
its rise as well."
Graeber claims that the existence of massive
numbers of BS jobs disproves oft-made claims
about economics.
"Economies around the world have, increasingly,
become vast engines for producing nonsense. . . .
[T]he fact that so many people are being paid
to do nothing in the first place defies all
our assumptions about how market economies
are supposed to work."
In the eyes of libertarians and so-called
free market conservatives, who think the largely
unfettered free market necessarily leads to
optimal outcomes, the value of work is in
the eye of the beholder, and all that matters
is whether someone is willing to pay at the
margin for the work.
If so, it must have value.
Orthodox Marxists similarly claim that the
existence of BS jobs is an illusion.
In Graeber's mind, both are disproven by the
empirical evidence.
Graeber is at pains to deny that the problem
is caused by government.
He's not very convincing.
First, the claimed rise in BS jobs tightly
parallels the rise in regulation, since 1970.
Second, the vast majority of his anecdotal
examples are either directly ordered by government
regulation, or are second-hand effects of
government regulation.
Most of his BS jobs that are technically in
the private sector involve either compliance
with government mandates or evasion of them.
Graeber thinks it is some kind of slam-dunk
argument that because administrators have,
supposedly, grown at a more rapid rate at
private colleges than at public colleges,
government is not the major problem.
He ignores that private colleges are both
wholly insulated from actual private enterprise
and are, in essence, arms of the government
and heavily regulated by it, both directly
and indirectly.
(I suspect, too, that there is a direct link
between the growth of BS degrees, such as
gender studies and the like, and the growth
of BS jobs, since nothing of value has been
learned that could be of value to any employer
producing value, so the only possible type
of job for such a graduate is a BS job.)
Graeber then points out how big business,
especially big finance business, spends enormous
sums on lobbying to demand more regulation
of themselves, thereby achieving rent-seeking
goals, then pretends the regulation was imposed
without their will.
Yet he claims this is not a problem with government,
but rather one with private business, which
is at best half-true.
But, totally aside from government, it is
certainly true that BS jobs are not automatically
eliminated by the free market.
I used to be a mergers and acquisitions lawyer
and I've seen how a lot of companies work;
it is a total myth that companies evolve toward
efficiency due to competitive pressures.
This myth is beloved of strategy professors
at business schools (none of whom, of course,
have ever run a business).
(Strategy, like leadership, is something that
simply can't be taught, and all people who
purport to teach either should be fired.)
Most big companies (and, to be fair, organizations)
are a seething mass of chaos, laziness, and
incompetence; all the productive activities
are done by a small minority of the employees,
who usually are simply hindered by the rest,
and have to spend much of their time routing
around the incompetence and the incompetents.
This is, of course, why "Dilbert" is funny-because
it's true, and everyone knows it.
So even were government not to be the largest
impetus for BS jobs, they would probably still
exist, if in smaller quantities.
This means there are really two distinct types
of BS jobs-those driven by government requirements,
which technically actually fail Graeber's
definition, since the work is pointless, but
not optional.
And true BS jobs, generated by and within
the private sector.
More generally, I'm curious if BS jobs are
purely a modern phenomenon, or have always
been around.
I suspect primarily the former, but I don't
know.
I wonder if Max Weber said anything about
BS jobs.
Are there BS jobs in today's China?
Those things would be fascinating to know,
but you won't learn any longitudinal history,
or get cross-cultural comparative analysis,
from this book.
So what explains the existence of BS jobs?
Graeber isn't terribly clear, but he characterizes
it overall as "neo-feudalism."
By this he seems to mean five things.
First, that profit maximizing is not the goal
of most modern organizations.
Rather, it is to engage in "appropriating,
distributing, and allocating money and resources."
"Managerialism has become the pretext for
creating a new covert form of feudalism, where
wealth and position are allocated not on economic
but political grounds. . . ." Second,
having people working for your organization,
but doing nothing, if you are in charge, is
a reflection of your glory, just like a medieval
lord supposedly had useless people hanging
around.
Third, offering pseudo-history about the moral
imperatives of work over time as opposed to
Marx's labor theory of value, Graeber claims
we have all internalized an ethic that doing
something purposeless, as long as it is "work,"
is more moral than not working.
Fourth, "The ruling class has figured out
that a happy and productive population with
free time on their hands is a mortal danger."
He reaches this conclusion on a "cui bono?"
analysis-if more wealth and power has shifted
to the ruling class, and organized challenges
to their power such as unions have been destroyed,
keeping the workers busy with make-work prevents
those organized challenges from recurring
(he ignores that this reduces wealth and power,
since the workers have to be paid, and that
organizing can be combined with working).
Fifth, he claims automation did kill the jobs;
we just made up new BS ones, and then tells
us (I am not kidding) that "fully automated
luxury communism" is therefore possible.
None of these parallel explanations is real
convincing, although it's hard to get a grip
on them in order to engage with them.
Regardless, Graeber ends with a call for Universal
Basic Income, while disclaiming that he's
making a policy prescription, in order that
he not be required to defend something quantitative.
UBI would allow people to walk away from soul-sucking
BS jobs, making their continuance unlikely,
which certainly seems true.
But if it is true that most BS jobs are created
by government directives of one type or another,
then those jobs are not really "pointless
or unnecessary," and someone would still have
to fill them.
They might have to be paid more, but the government
doesn't care about that.
Still, I have a certain sympathy for UBI,
as I have described in my review of Andrew
Yang's recent book, and it is certainly true
that if Graeber is right about BS jobs, UBI
might have an impact on the numbers of people
working in them.
Graeber's conclusion is that, aside from UBI,
his claims about BS jobs mean that Keynes
was right-we could all be working fifteen-hour
weeks.
Were that to happen, Graeber, like Marx and
early Communists, imagines that then everyone
will spend his days creating art and philosophy,
and thereby obtain agency and meaning.
I doubt it.
In today's society, at least, vice is the
most likely use of time.
Alternatively, maybe we'd be better off with
keeping forty-hour work weeks, and massively
increasing output, though that would only
have societal benefit if what we produced
was not consumerist ephemera, but rather a
purpose-directed society, say one devoted
to the conquest of Space.
Or maybe we could hugely benefit society by
cutting overall outside-the-home employment
hours for women, and not men, returning to
the socially superior system whereby married
women usually stayed home and raised children,
more children than we have today.
Regardless, I can't recommend this book.
The reader learns very little, except for
the premise, which is good as a thought experiment,
and seems intuitively at least partially right,
but is in no way proven.
The book, annoyingly, lacks an index.
The author spends a lot of time quoting tedious
interlocutors, who say things such as "I [can't]
wait for full communism" and rejoice at their
supposed rebellion in wearing discreet Communist
paraphernalia to work.
And then there are several ludicrous small
errors that suggest lack of care in writing.
No, "sheriff" does not come, via Norman Sicily,
from anglicization of the Arabic sharif.
It comes, as the OED says, from the Old English
words for "shire" and "reeve," and I knew
that without consulting the OED.
No, the job of footmen in Victorian England
was not to "run alongside carriages checking
for bumps in the road"; that function had
long disappeared by the reign of Victoria.
No, secretaries in the twentieth century did
not do "80 to 90 percent of their bosses'
jobs," and no, it would not be "fascinating
to write a history of books, designs, plans,
and documents attributed to famous men that
were actually written by their secretaries."
No, the "main reason the Soviet economy worked
so badly" was not "because they were never
able to develop computer technology efficient
enough to coordinate such large amounts of
data automatically."
No, simply giving the cash spent on fostering
children to their biological parents would
not prevent the need for the children to be
fostered.
On balance, don't read this book.
Just read my review!
Now, let's do some thinking of our own.
Let's assume there are in fact a very large
number of BS jobs, and let's imagine that
everyone who has one simply stays home and
reads Proust.
What would happen?
On Graeber's premises, there would be no drop
in actual value produced.
Nothing bad would happen, since nothing that
needed doing would stop being done.
But it seems to me what would happen is that
consumption would go down.
Since our money supply is infinitely flexible,
money is created to pay people to do BS jobs.
That money would no longer be paid to those
people (except if partially replaced by UBI).
I am turning next to Mariana Mazzucato's The
Value of Everything, which focuses on what
GDP is as related to value, from which I hope
to widen my understanding, which I freely
admit is very incomplete on this and related
topics.)
But in turn, those who formerly held BS jobs
would now be unable to purchase goods and
services that are not BS (since by definition
all BS services will have disappeared).
If demand for goods and services that are
not BS declines, necessarily supply of those
goods and services will decline.
Real GDP would therefore soon decline as well,
creating a downstream real effect.
Graeber ignores this, simply assuming that
the total number of hours worked in non-BS
jobs will stay the same.
Instead, it will go down, at least partially
obviating his pleasant dream of fifteen-hour
work weeks with no reduction in overall real
output.
If this is true, it suggests our entire economy
is largely based on fictions, a game of musical
chairs, kept going by debt, monetary manipulation,
and the growth of BS jobs.
(It appears, and I am sure that the Austrian
School-types will like this analysis as much
as they probably dislike the idea that BS
jobs exist in defiance of economic orthodoxy,
that what makes this possible is fiat currency.
Whatever the many possible drawbacks of the
gold standard, when fiat money did not exist,
I am pretty sure there were no BS jobs.)
The only way to avoid this would be to substitute
non-BS jobs for existing BS jobs.
Let's try the reverse line of thought.
What if everyone dropped Proust and instead
started working eighty-hour weeks (not necessarily
outside the home-whatever GDP may include,
work inside the home is still work, and often
the most societally productive), at non-BS
jobs that actually produced goods and services
valued by others?
(Society would also have to be relieved of
all the government regulations that produce
BS jobs.)
Well, a lot of actual value would be produced.
But if all the extra time worked was used
to produce, say, more and more polished games
for the iPhone, that isn't really a benefit
for society, even if it is technically value
and not BS work.
On the other hand, if it was used to produce
the engineering and machines to conquer Space,
or any other number of truly productive endeavors,
it would be a benefit for society.
Perhaps the distinction here is between activities
that are primarily consumptive in nature,
and have no overarching societal benefit,
and those that are capital-increasing, and
do have some overarching benefit.
Ah, but of what does that capital consist?
As always, we should begin with the end in
mind, and that end, for Foundationalism, is
human flourishing within the constraints of
reality.
I think that a flourishing society is one
with high aggregate social capital, as well
as high aggregate tangible capital.
In many ways, a society maximizes itself when,
at the same moment, a man is building rockets
to mine asteroids, a woman is raising and
teaching her children, and a priest is bringing
cheer to the sick and hope to the despairing.
The cumulative capital of a civilization is
hard to measure, but it exists, and it consists
of many different things done by that civilization
(but not, please note, all things done).
The ultimate discussion, and answer, then,
is to figure out how society can best maximize
actual value produced by the labor of its
members.
No doubt much of the answer is cultural, since
central planning certainly isn't going to
do it (but I note that cultures that produce
any significant amount of, much less maximize,
aggregate capital are very rare throughout
history).
Such things are what I am going to ponder
in my next several economics reviews; I will
try not to drag it out too long, and I am
eager for commentary from readers to help
me guide my thoughts.
