Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
You can't debate nutters. "professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers" are clearly not bullshit jobs. They are precisely how products and resources are allocated, produced, and sold. That entire bottom paragraph from finance to health services are vastly important in an advanced economy. He seems to want us to go back to being farmers. What a quack.
Calling David Graeber a quack is to miss the mark entirely. He's an accomplished author and anthropologist with a critically acclaimed book on the history of debt and economic systems.
He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.
It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
> Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.
See a quack. Most of us in the real world know that managers, no matter how much we despise them or even if we are of the many that thing most manager suck, we know their job is to organize those underneath then. A number of these manager-less companies in the last year have had to introduce managers because they actually do server a purpose: managing!
He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group (I still have memories of walking by them every day and had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment).
The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life (like being a manager over grad students, and managing part of OWS), without it strictly being called a manager.
I don't think it's fair to say that Graeber claims that all managerial work is pointless.
Here's a relevant part of the essay in question:
> In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
It's not a scientific study, but he's talking about people who themselves believe their own job to be basically pointless.
I've had such jobs myself, so I sympathize with the idea.
> I've had such jobs myself, so I sympathize with the idea.
Indeed. I am a programmer and I can sympathize too! So far all my jobs but one were of the utterly bullshit kind. That's the reason I decided to steer clear of the web world in the future - it seems to me that this part of our industry is made almost entirely out of bullshit, and is mostly about ad delivery, ad infrastructure and SaaS pseudo-products that operate on shitty business models.
Pouring tons of hours of one's life into one project after another with goals you're apathetic about at best and which are probably doomed to failure before they even start definitely makes dev work feel rather nihilistic at times. The percentage of the time I've worked as a dev that has created real, lasting value for anyone is depressingly small. Yet my career is going fairly well. It's hard to complain about that since the money's still coming in, but that's not very satisfying, certainly.
All big companies are larger than "some tribalism number". All big companies eventually devolve into fighting tribes. Forcing procedures to make other departments look bad, automating or faking results to make our department look good, etc. Obviously that's BS work which contributes nothing to society.
Meanwhile on the other side I've worked for companies as small as three people where we were basically a team of equal contractors with no management required (non-IT outsourced labor, more or less, long story)
I would wager that only a very small number of people in between in size provide any value that couldn't be replaced by say, a mailing list and a small shell script or two. I've worked for some good managers. Of course half were below the median by definition and they mostly produced BS work.
The grad student analogy is inaccurate, that's more of a mentorship or apprenticeship model.
>The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life
What's ironic about it? Where does he argue the merits of managing grad students?
>He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group
What are you "most famous for" so we can determine if we can dismiss your opinions on the basis of those achievements.
>had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment
Yeah, I'm gonna have to disagree with you, and side with the guy calling him a nutter, on this one.
He sounds like a left-wing Donald Trump in that Striker Mag article. He's frighteningly quick to make sweeping generalizations based on anecdotes - e.g. all corporate lawyers think corporate law is pointless, let's get rid of them.
He seems to have a very limited, simplistic understanding of the world - capital owners have brainwashed an army of paper-pushing white collar drones (the ones who work in "bullshit jobs") in order to systematically devalue the noble people who do "real" work, like teachers and car mechanics.
There is no consideration of the interpersonal and organizational dynamics at a small scale that actually drive the creation of low-value-add jobs and worker discontent. There is no consideration of the fact that corporate law firms are actually successful worker-owned collectives. There is no understanding of the labor market dynamics behind how teaching, nursing and administrative labor is bought and sold.
To be fair, that article is the only thing of his that I've read. Maybe his other stuff is better - more insightful, more action-oriented?
In that Striker piece though he seems more interested in ranting against the demon of capitalism than doing anything to improve people's lives. Ironically, he seems more like a hustler pumping out marketing copy to convince people to buy his books (isn't writing ad copy one of those "bullshit jobs"?) than he does a thoughtful academic.
It's too bad, because there are probably a lot of social and political changes that he and I would both like to see happen - for one, I'm a huge fan of a reduced work week.
On the contrary: we have, and for some time have had, an economy capable of providing for all the needs and likely at least most of the wants of every human now living, without requiring 40-hour (or longer!) work weeks from most of them, and the number of required actual workers declines with every passing year.
Yet we have an inherited notion that it is deeply sinful to survive without working hard for it, and equally sinful for many to prosper while few labor. As a result we must endlessly invent placeholder positions for people to fill (all of those second assistant deputy administrative oversight whatever jobs that let people show up and pretend to be useful), lest they have no "work" to do anymore and thus no claim to a share of the production capacity.
We could just as easily switch to some sort of rota for performing the necessary work, and have everyone provided for with a minimum of required labor, but this is seen as an affront to the religiously-held beliefs of people who haven't adjusted to what we're actually capable of nowadays.
> Yet we have an inherited notion that it is deeply sinful to survive without working hard for it, and equally sinful for many to prosper while few labor. As a result we must endlessly invent placeholder positions for people to fill (all of those second assistant deputy administrative oversight whatever jobs that let people show up and pretend to be useful), lest they have no "work" to do anymore and thus no claim to a share of the production capacity.
I agree that the US has a widespread cultural belief in the virtue of work and the sinfulness of laziness.
That said, I don't think it's quite as simple, or as centrally planned, as you're making it out to be.
When a company hires a lot of people into vague roles that don't really add much value it more often than not seems to be driven by ego and power struggles among existing employees. For example, a VP who is anxious about seeming important and also eager for a promotion might hire a big team of lower level managers whose work adds dubious value because overseeing a team of 100, including several layers of management, is often seen as more impressive (and a better qualification for senior leadership) than overseeing a team of 10 - even if that small team is super efficient and gets just as much work done. And while the efficient 10-person team leader is probably a better manager and better-suited for executive leadership overall, there is some logic behind promoting the person who built out an unnecessarily large team. Leading a larger group of people with lots of layers is a distinct skill, and one that is pretty hard to practice. The person with the big team at least has done it before. Hiring a lot of useless roles is kind of like dressing for the job you want, on the company's dime.
In any case, I think these kinds of personal and organizational dynamics are a much bigger driver of fluffy, low-value-add jobs than any kind of feeling of cultural obligation to provide employment to middle managers.
Not if the barriers to entry are high. I worked (as a coder) in Ericsson in the late 90s, and very few of my peers were doing anything much at all. Similar in a web agency during the dotcom boom (which the agency survived, in fact it's still one of the dominant ones in my home market)
Call it nutty all you want, it's far more insightful than your original suggestion that the reason we work such long hours is because of an endless appetite for luxuries and trivialities. As Graeber points out, it may sound good and just to you, but it's actually quite unfounded.
> Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.
Marketing did the choice for us. And instead of using all the available communication tools, like FB Messanger, WhatsApp for our benefit, we post cats and meals.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”