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Comment by seibelj

4 years ago

I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit.

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seibelj

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beaconstudios  4 years ago

So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it?

If so, welcome aboard.

  • smugglerFlynn  4 years ago

    Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.

    You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.

    In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.

    Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.

    • dragonwriter  4 years ago

      > Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.

      > You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.

      You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly enforced (corporate) law.

      I mention this because...well, you might want to read more of Graeber’s work (or even just more of Bullshit Jobs) to understand why.

    • beaconstudios  4 years ago

      David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.

      There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.

      12 replies →

  • MattGaiser  4 years ago

    My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing the person.

    For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it was under development.

    No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.

    But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax after all expenses were considered.

    • beaconstudios  4 years ago

      Yeah that's bullshit though - it's a warped incentive caused by social systems. In a healthy social system, these incentives to make money doing pointless bullshit should be minimised. David Graeber is an anarchist, and the whole bullshit jobs concept is a criticism of capitalism.

DarylZero  4 years ago

I found his bullshit jobs article to be terrible and unconvincing, and many of the things he said about jobs just inaccurate.

But I think your objection is not very strong and his thesis can be rescued from it.

> it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker

I think a lot of jobs really are "bullshit jobs," not because they have no value to the payer, but because they have negative value to the economy overall.

For an extreme example, some people are willing to pay to have witnesses murdered so that they can continue committing crimes without legal repercussions.

Or, some people are doing jobs that are purely for positional advantage and that are even "cancelled out" by other people in other companies doing another job. Advertisers seeking to take over market share from competing companies.

Or, some extractive industries may be more beneficially halted because of negative externalities; but those who benefit from the extraction will still hire people.

felix318  4 years ago

You can create a job whose only function is to increase your cost and consequently allow you to charge more for your product or service. It doesn’t work if you do it on your own, but it does work if you can get the government to force your competitors to do it too.

If you pay close attention, you will find that most government regulations that affect whole industries are actually the result of lobbying by the industries themselves. This is clearly visible in finance but it happens for almost any industry where there are powerful players.

No one wants to increase their productivity without a corresponding increase in revenue - this includes corporations as well as individuals. Bullshit jobs need to be created to maintain high prices in face of constant downward pressure.

originalvichy  4 years ago

Read excerpts of his book or his essays on the topic. You might be suprised.