Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Kindle Edition

This review was written at the desk of a salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day. I do this until enough executives and managers above me are gone that I can feel comfortable sneaking out. With my income from this sit, I then outsource all my chores to a slew of below living wage 21st Century gig economy employees--Uber drivers, food delivery, meal kits, laundry.Having been one of these low paid wage laborers several years ago, it seems like a cruel joke. The higher paying job I find, the less I actually have to work. The higher ranking the position, the less the job is about doing things and contributing to society.Is this a blessing or immoral sin? Yes. But it turns out, I'm not alone.This is an entertaining book of anecdotes and statistics on what turns out to be a common phenomena. It is one of the most refreshing reads that a college-educated conscious working professional can have in their library. Put down every other garbage business book that supposedly empowers you. You don't need to practice mindfulness, or rules for life, or launch a lean startup. Breathe in and breathe out, your job is unnecessary and so are most of the other jobs!Admitting this is the first step of us all solving the collective problem.

John Maynard Keynes had great confidence that capitalism will improve not only the wealth but also the well-being of all in society. One of the specific predictions he made that, sadly, did not come true, was that by the end of the twentieth century, the major Western societies would have achieved the fifteen-hour work week because technology would have alleviated hitherto long menial hours. Why has that not happened and instead employees are working longer and longer hours? Graeber blames the creation of what he calls ‘BS jobs’ (I had to shortened the word to pass Amazon censorship rules) and the ‘BSization’ of proper jobs. Graeber’s defines a BS 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 the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’. He also says that ‘Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not particularly good at’. He provides plenty of examples, cabinetmakers compelled to fry fish is one of them. There is the story of a corporate lawyer who went on to become a happy singer in an indie rock band when he became disillusioned with his job as a corporate lawyer. He had taken ‘the default choice of many directionless folk: law school’ but has found his job as a lawyer to be ‘utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist’. Some such BS jobs are so pointless that no one notices even if the employee vanishes. One case involved a Spanish civil servant who skipped work for six years to study philosophy and became an expert in Spinoza before he was found out. In another case, an employee had been sitting at his desk, dead for four days before his colleagues realised that he had died. BS jobs can also be defined by the scope of work. People who are employed in jobs that exist primarily to make someone else look or feel important are known as ‘flunkies’. Doormen are examples in this category. There are also ‘goons’ who exist only because people employ them – soldiers, for example; and ‘duct-tapers’ who are employed to help one part of an organisation communicate with another in the same organisation. In addition to financial consultancy, middle management is where one might find BS jobs aplenty. A sign that you have a job like this is when you are designated to provide ‘strategic leadership’. This is what Graeber has to say in middle management in academia:‘Now, those of us toiling in the academic mills who still like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic”. “Strategic statement” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life’. Graeber interviewed employees from various sectors. From one he quoted, ‘in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore BS’. Then there is the Human Resources Department that sets up intranet and instruct employees to make it ‘into a kind of internal “community”, like Facebook. They set it up; nobody uses it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it…Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal blogs” that nobody cared about.’ Graeber argues that the rise of such jobs was not due to economic factors but political and moral ones. He discusses how jobs can truly have value, and how exactly can value be measured. What is clear that we must resist ‘The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing…if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work you’re not living right’. The last part of the book is devoted to answering the question, ‘How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually superior to no work at all?’ From there Graeber discusses the modern culture of managerial feudalism and the resentment it generates, yet is itself oblivious to it. If Graeber is right that this is not an economic problem but a political and moral one, then the solution cannot be economic either. Unfortunately, Graeber is loath to make policy recommendations. That keeps us then, in utter suspense – unless workers revolt.

I love how an obscure magazine asked an internationally recognized scholar to submit what he believed no one else would publish -- and how that essay went instantly viral and eventually became what may be the author's top bestseller.I work in real estate. I'm of the opinion that realtors serve a useful purpose in our society, but only because of how the property laws are written. This book, along with Debt: The First 5000 Years, convinces me that within the constraints of US property law, which are outdated and unnatural, all real estate professionals exist as "duct tapers" (BS job #3) -- performing a job that only needs to get done because the system is set up in a flawed way that requires it. My proof: what other societies need realtors? The ones where American property laws are forced on people. (I recognize that American property law stems from English common law which depended on Roman legal systems.)This book is brilliant. It may literally save hundreds if not thousands of lives from suicide and other forms of self-destruction, especially if employers take much of its message to heart, implementing remedies along the way. I know I will keep several copies on the shelf at work, sharing them with anyone who expresses interest. I can only hope this book fuels a revolution against all kinds of wage labor, and that the dignity of work can be taken back from the people who use work just as a means to further their own exploitative, unexamined, or sadistic ends.

The original essay upon which this is based really said it all, and the book seems like an unnecessary and somewhat forced elaboration. I don't recommend it.

Worst book I've read in 2018 - should know better than trust an academic anthropologist to teach me anything about the industry. The subject is interesting, but the author has little idea what he's talking about and lots of ideology.Evidence is anecdotal at best: individual emails or, unbelievably, posts from internet fora where anyone can pose as anything. The BS-job-definition underpinning the book - it's BS if the person having the job believes it to be - is pure strategic genius, as it deflects all critique. Unfortunately, it's methodologically ridiculous in all its naive relativism. The obvious ramifications are left entirely unaddressed: CEOs, bankers, military (BS-job examples the author uses) do not acknowledge their job as such; engineers and SW developers, instead, often fall over each other to do that. (Annoyingly, I'm also a hands-on engineer; so are my half a dozen colleagues who read the book.) The figures (all two of them) are a joke: still unsure what Figure 1 supposedly shows, but it's neither trend (two datapoints, one year apart) nor that >50% of work is BS (unless emails, good and bad meetings, admin tasks and more are BS; anyone with teamwork experience can disprove that). Equally annoying are the straw men the authors insists on knocking down (Douglas Adams's hairdressers), as well as his abysmal ignorance of e.g. SW (industrial SW means duct-taping together open-source SW? for real?!). Again, should know better than have an anthropologist lecture me about SW.All in all, a waste of time and money if you're a trained scientist/engineer or simply partial about substantiated claims. If you insist on wasting the former, I'll save you the latter by sending you my copy (lightly annotated before giving up). Even better, just read Graeber's original essay; the book adds nothing to it anyhow.

John Maynard Keynes had great confidence that capitalism will improve not only the wealth but also the well-being of all in society. One of the specific predictions he made that, sadly, did not come true, was that by the end of the twentieth century, the major Western societies would have achieved the fifteen-hour work week because technology would have alleviated hitherto long menial hours. Why has that not happened and instead employees are working longer and longer hours? Graeber blames the creation of what he calls ‘BS jobs’ (I had to shortened the word to pass Amazon censorship rules) and the ‘BSization’ of proper jobs. Graeber’s defines a BS 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 the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’. He also says that ‘Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not particularly good at’. He provides plenty of examples, cabinetmakers compelled to fry fish is one of them. There is the story of a corporate lawyer who went on to become a happy singer in an indie rock band when he became disillusioned with his job as a corporate lawyer. He had taken ‘the default choice of many directionless folk: law school’ but has found his job as a lawyer to be ‘utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist’. Some such BS jobs are so pointless that no one notices even if the employee vanishes. One case involved a Spanish civil servant who skipped work for six years to study philosophy and became an expert in Spinoza before he was found out. In another case, an employee had been sitting at his desk, dead for four days before his colleagues realised that he had died. BS jobs can also be defined by the scope of work. People who are employed in jobs that exist primarily to make someone else look or feel important are known as ‘flunkies’. Doormen are examples in this category. There are also ‘goons’ who exist only because people employ them – soldiers, for example; and ‘duct-tapers’ who are employed to help one part of an organisation communicate with another in the same organisation. In addition to financial consultancy, middle management is where one might find BS jobs aplenty. A sign that you have a job like this is when you are designated to provide ‘strategic leadership’. This is what Graeber has to say in middle management in academia:‘Now, those of us toiling in the academic mills who still like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic”. “Strategic statement” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life’. Graeber interviewed employees from various sectors. From one he quoted, ‘in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore BS’. Then there is the Human Resources Department that sets up intranet and instruct employees to make it ‘into a kind of internal “community”, like Facebook. They set it up; nobody uses it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it…Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal blogs” that nobody cared about.’ Graeber argues that the rise of such jobs was not due to economic factors but political and moral ones. He discusses how jobs can truly have value, and how exactly can value be measured. What is clear that we must resist ‘The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing…if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work you’re not living right’. The last part of the book is devoted to answering the question, ‘How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually superior to no work at all?’ From there Graeber discusses the modern culture of managerial feudalism and the resentment it generates, yet is itself oblivious to it. If Graeber is right that this is not an economic problem but a political and moral one, then the solution cannot be economic either. Unfortunately, Graeber is loath to make policy recommendations. That keeps us then, in utter suspense – unless workers revolt.

The author wrote a blog post about unnecessary jobs which gained a bit of traction. He then received a relatively small number of anecdotal storied for people describing their unnecessary jobs. He collated those stories, with seemingly little verification of their accuracy, onto a book. And that's about it.He tries to put up a convincing case that most jobs are not needed but fails to give any even remotely convincing evidence so you really have no idea how many unnecessarily jobs actually exists. This undermines the rest of the book when he tries to answer why so many people are paid to do jobs that aren't needed and why they get created in the first place.If this book was just a bunch of amusing anecdotes that would been fine but it tries to go way beyond that and ends up becoming a long, boring, pointless rant.

I know little about the academic discipline of anthropology but if it's possible for someone like Graeber to be Professor of Anthr. at a world-leading university (LSE) then I am genuinely concerned for the subject and those who study it. BS jobs is a promising concept and worthy of analysis and interrogation. But Graeber's evidence is anecdotal at best, his arguments childish and his writing repetitive. Worst of all, the book is full of circular justifications and truisms and lacks intellectual rigour. Best avoided by all except true believers in revolution.

I really liked this book, its very funny in places while stating the truth, i feel everyone should read it, my husband and i have been saying for years that there are an awful lot of people doing or producing nothing while getting a good wage for it, there was talk about having to pay people not to work as the job market is drying up due to automation, some say we can't afford it and it would never happen, i have news for them, its already happening as this book will testify.