Book review: Bullshit Jobs

I just finished reading David Graeber's new book, Bullshit Jobs. I was quite looking forward to the book, because I am very sympathetic to the suggestion that an increasing number of jobs are essentially bullshit, and an increasing proportion of the remaining 'non-bullshit' jobs are filled with meaningless bullshit. And that is essentially the thesis of Graeber's book, or as he puts it in the preface:

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed...

...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 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.

Graeber defines a bullshit job as:

...a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of their conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Much of the book is taken up with examples of bullshit jobs, which are categorised into five types:

1. Flunkies - "those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important", which are jobs that were "created because those in powerful positions in an organization see underlings as badges of prestige";
2. Goons - "people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them", and are "hired due to a dynamic of one-upmanship (if our rivals employ a top law firm, then so, too, must we)";
3. Duct tapers - "employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organisation; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist", created because "sometimes organizations find it more difficult to fix a problem than to deal with its consequences";
4. Box tickers - "employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing", which exist because "within large organizations, paperwork attesting to the fact that certain actions have been taken often comes to be seen as more important than the actions themselves"; and
5. Taskmasters - who are either "those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others" or those where "all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others", whose jobs exist "largely as side effects of various forms of impersonal authority".

Box-ticking, in particular, is a pet hate of mine; hence, my sympathy to Graeber's argument. And as if to highlight this, Graeber does single out academia as a particular example of an increasingly box-ticking culture. The personal quotes from people working in bullshit jobs are a highlight of the book, and demonstrate the perniciousness of these jobs and their negative personal impact on the people employed in them.

The second half of the book is devoted to advancing theories as to why bullshit jobs have become more prevalent in recent decades. In this section, Graeber distinguishes between a classic market-based capitalist approach, where you would not expect jobs to exist that didn't add value to the firm, and a 'feudalist' approach, where creating large empires of flunkies, goons, and taskmasters, in particular, makes perfect sense. This section was good, but I think it lacked a consideration of transaction costs (as I discussed yesterday in relation to this blog post by Taylor Pearson) - it may make sense to keep some people on staff even if they have nothing to do for much of their time, so that they are available when they are needed for non-bullshit tasks. However, transaction costs would not explain the massive proliferation of these types of jobs.

The book is short on policy prescription, and Graeber makes clear that this is intentional. The conclusion does discuss a universal basic income, which would seem an obvious way of under-cutting bullshit jobs. After all, why work in a bullshit job if you could earn nearly as much from a UBI while sitting at home, or doing something you consider more worthwhile?

I do recommend this as an excellent book to read, especially if you are interested in understanding the realities of work. However, if you need some further convincing, I recommend reading Graeber's essay that started it all, which you can find here. The book essentially builds on that essay, adding in a lot more detail and examples.