Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  —Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675

  We have already considered the economic and social forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs, as well as the misery and distress those jobs cause for those who have to do them. Yet despite this evident and widespread distress, the fact that millions of people show up to work every day convinced they are doing absolutely nothing has not, until now, been considered a social problem. We have not seen politicians denouncing bullshit jobs, academic conferences dedicated to understanding the reasons for the rise of bullshit jobs, opinion pieces debating the cultural consequences of bullshit jobs, or protest movements campaigning to abolish them. To the contrary: if politicians, academics, editorialists, or social movements do weigh in on the matter, it’s usually by acting directly or indirectly to make the problem worse.

  The situation seems all the more extraordinary when we consider the larger social consequences of this proliferation. If it’s really true that as much of half the work we do could be eliminated without any significant effect on overall productivity, why not just redistribute the remaining work in such a way that everyone is working four-hour days? Or four-day weeks with four months’ yearly vacation time? Or some similarly easygoing arrangement? Why not start shutting down the global work machine? If nothing else, it would probably be the most effective thing we could do to put a break on global warming. A hundred years ago, many assumed that the steady advance of technology and labor-saving devices would have made this possible by now, and the irony is that they were probably right. We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.

  I think the easiest way to understand how this happened is to consider how difficult it is to imagine an opinion writer for a major newspaper or magazine writing a piece saying that some class of people is working too hard and might do well to cut it out. It’s easy enough to find pieces complaining that certain classes of people (young people, poor people, recipients of various forms of public assistance, those of certain national or ethnic groups1) are work shy, entitled, lacking in drive or motivation, or unwilling to earn a living. The internet is littered with them. As Rachel put it in chapter 4, “I can barely scroll through Facebook without hitting some preachy think piece about my generation’s entitlement and reluctance to just do a bloody day’s work.” Whenever there’s a crisis, even an ecological crisis, there are calls for collective sacrifice. These calls always seem to involve everyone working more—despite the fact that, as noted, in ecological terms, a mass reduction of working hours is probably the quickest and easiest thing that could be done to save the planet.

  Opinion writers are the moralists of our day. They are the secular equivalent of preachers, and when they write about work, their arguments reflect a very long theological tradition of valorizing work as a sacred duty, at once curse and blessing, and seeing humans as inherently sinful, lazy beings who can be expected to shirk that duty if they can. The discipline of economics itself emerged out of moral philosophy (Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy), and moral philosophy, in turn, was originally a branch of theology. Many economic concepts trace back directly to religious ideas. As a result, arguments about value always have something of a theological tinge. Some originally theological notions about work are so universally accepted that they simply can’t be questioned. One cannot assert that hardworking people are not, generally speaking, admirable (regardless of what they might be working hard at), or that those who avoid work are not in any way contemptible, and expect to be taken seriously in public debate. If someone says a policy creates jobs, it is not considered acceptable to reply that some jobs aren’t worth having. (I know this because I have occasionally done so to policy wonks, partly just to observe the shocked confusion that ensues.) Say any of these things, and anything else you might say will be written off as well as the effusions of a provocateur, a comedian, a lunatic—anyway, someone whose further arguments can now be automatically dismissed.

  Still, while the voice of the moralists may be sufficient to convince us not to make a scandal of the proliferation of bullshit jobs (since in public debate, all work must be treated as sacred duty, and therefore any work is always preferable to none at all), when it comes to our own jobs, we tend to apply very different criteria. We expect a job to serve some purpose or have some meaning and are deeply demoralized if we find it does not. But this leads to another question: If work is not simply a value in itself, in what way is it a value to others? After all, when people say their jobs are “worthless” or “no good to anyone,” they are making arguments about value. Of what sort?

  • • •

  The field of value is always contested territory. It seems that whenever there’s a word for something everyone agrees to be desirable—“truth,” “beauty,” “love,” “democracy”—then there will be no consensus as to what it really means. (Oddly enough, this is even true of money: economists are divided over what it is.) But in our own society, arguments about the value of work are particularly important to consider because they have led to what any outside observer would have to describe as weird, topsy-turvy effects. As we’ll see, people do have a notion of the social value of their work; but our society has reached the point where not only is the social value of work usually in inverse proportion to its economic value (the more one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it), but many people have come to accept this situation is morally right—they genuinely believe this is how things ought to be. That we should reward useless or even destructive behavior, and, effectively, punish those whose daily labors make the world a better place.

  This is genuinely perverse. To understand how it happened, though, will require a bit of work on our own part.

  on the impossibility of developing an absolute measure of value

  When someone describes his job as pointless or worthless, he is necessarily operating within some sort of tacit theory of value: an idea of what would be a worthwhile occupation, and therefore what is not. It is notoriously difficult, however, to tease out exactly what that theory is in any given instance, let alone to come up with any reliable system of measurement that would make it possible to say that job X is more valuable or useful to society than job Y.

  Economists measure value in terms of what they call “utility”: the degree to which a good or service is useful in satisfying a want or need,2 and many apply something like this to their own jobs. Do I provide something useful to the public? Sometimes the answer to the question is self-evident. If one is building a bridge, one considers it a worthwhile task if one anticipates that other people who wish to get across the river will find it useful. If workers are building a bridge no one is ever likely to use, such as the famous “bridges to nowhere” that local politicians in the United States will occasionally sponsor to direct federal money to their districts, they are likely to conclude they are engaged in a bullshit job.

  Still, there’s an obvious problem with the concept of utility. Saying that something is “useful” is just saying it’s effective as a way of getting something else. If you buy a dress, the “utility” of that dress is partly that it protects you from the elements or ensures you don’t violate laws against walking down the street naked, but it’s largely the degree to which it makes you look or feel nice. So why would one dress achieve that and not another? Economists will usually say this is a matter of taste and therefore not their department. But any utility ultimately ends up in this kind of subjective problem if you push it back far enough, even something so relatively uncomplicated as a bridge. Yes, it can make it easier for people to get to the ot
her side of a river, but why do they want to do that? To visit an aging relative? To go bowling? Even if it’s just to shop for groceries. One does not buy groceries simply to maintain one’s physical health: one also expresses one’s personal taste, maintains an ethnic or family tradition, acquires the means to throw drinking parties with one’s friends or to celebrate religious holidays. We can’t really discuss any of these things in terms of a language of “needs.” For much of human history—and this is still true in much of the world today—when poor people end up in crippling debt to local moneylenders, it’s because they felt they had to borrow money to throw proper funerals for their parents or weddings for their children. Did they “need” to do this? Clearly, they felt strongly that they did. And since there’s no scientific definition of what a “human need” actually is, beyond the body’s minimal caloric and nutritional requirements, and a few other physical factors, such questions must always be subjective. To a large degree, needs are just other people’s expectations. If you don’t throw a proper wedding for your daughter, it would be a family disgrace.

  Most economists conclude therefore that there’s no point in sitting in judgment about what people should want; better to just accept that they do want, and then sit in judgment about how effectively (“rationally”) they set about pursuing their desires. Most workers seem to agree. As I’ve noted, those who felt their jobs were pointless almost never said things such as “I produce selfie sticks. Selfie sticks are stupid. People shouldn’t buy stupid things like that,” or, “Who really needs a two-hundred-dollar pair of socks?” Even the one or two exceptions were revealing. Take Dietrich, who worked for a company that provided party supplies, mostly to local churches:

  Dietrich: I worked for years in the warehouse of a novelty store. I don’t really know what to say other than it was complete and total BS. One doesn’t know true degradation until one has spent a good portion of one’s waking hours schlepping around boxes of clown noses, sneezing powders, plastic champagne flutes, cardboard cutouts of basketball players, and all other manner of other pointless knickknacks and nonsense. Most of the time, we just sat in the back of the warehouse with little to nothing to do, musing on the total irrelevance of what we were doing, year after year, as the business proved more and more unsustainable.

  To add insult to injury, our paychecks were bright red and had clown faces on them, much to the amusement of bank tellers everywhere—as if their jobs were any more meaningful!

  One might speculate at length about why Dietrich found this particular collection of products so offensive. (What’s wrong with a little silly fun?) My guess would be: because it wasn’t Dietrich who decided he was working for purveyors of ephemeral junk; these products never claimed to be anything other than ephemeral junk, anti-utilities destined only to be thrown away, mockeries of “real” objects and “real” values. (Even the money was a joke.) Even more, novelty items do not reject “real” values in the name of anything in particular; they provide no actual challenge to what they claim to be making fun of. So one could say they aren’t even genuine mockery; they’re a mockery of a mockery, reduced to something with so little real subversive content that they can be embraced by even the most boring and stodgy members of society “for the sake of the children.”

  There’s little more depressing than enforced gaiety. Still, even testimonies such as Dietrich’s were rare.

  In most cases, when employees assessed the social value of their work, they appealed to some variant of the position presented by Tom, the special effects artist we met in chapter 2: “I consider a worthwhile job to be one that fulfills a preexisting need, or even that creates a product or service that people hadn’t thought of, that somehow enhances and improves their lives”—as opposed to, in Tom’s case, his “beauty work,” which involved manipulating images of celebrities so as to make audiences feel unattractive and then selling them cures that didn’t really work. Telemarketers sometimes expressed similar concerns, but, again, much of what they were doing was simple fraud; you don’t really need an elaborate theory of social value to tell you why cajoling retirees into buying subscriptions they can’t afford to magazines they’ll never read is problematic. Very few sat in judgment on their customers’ tastes and preferences; it was more the aggressiveness and dishonesty of their own interventions that they felt proved they provided nothing of real value.

  Other objections appealed to much older traditions of social critique. Take Rupert, the bank employee, who asserted that “the entire [banking] sector adds no value and is therefore bullshit,” since finance was really just a matter of “appropriating labor through usury.” The labor theory of value he’s referencing here, which traces back at least to the European Middle Ages, starts from the assumption that the real value of a commodity is the work that has been invested in making its existence possible. So when we give money in exchange for a loaf of bread, what we are really paying for is the human effort that went into growing the wheat, baking the bread, and packing and transporting the loaves. If some loaves of bread are more expensive than others, it’s either because it took more work to produce and transport them, or, alternately, because we consider some of that work to itself be of higher quality—to involve more skill, more artistry, more effort—than others, and therefore are willing to pay more for the resulting product. Similarly, if you’re defrauding others of their wealth, as Rupert felt he was doing working for an international investment bank, you’re really stealing the real, productive work that went into creating that wealth.

  Now, of course, there’s a long history of using arguments like this to challenge arrangements where some are—or at least can be said to be—living off the backs of others; but the very existence of bullshit jobs raises certain problems for any labor theory of value. True, saying all value comes from work3 is obviously not the same thing as saying that all work produces value. Rupert felt that most bank employees were in no sense idling about; actually, he felt most worked quite hard; only all their labor was ultimately accomplishing, in his estimation, was to come up with clever ways to appropriate the fruits of the real labor done by others. But that still leaves us with the same problem of how to distinguish “real” value-creating work from its opposite. If giving someone a haircut is providing a valuable service, why is providing advice on their investment portfolio not?

  Yet Rupert’s feelings were not unusual. He might have been unusual in framing them explicitly in terms of the labor theory of value, but he was expressing an uneasiness that many of those working in finance and related fields clearly do feel. Presumably, he had to turn to such theories because mainstream economics just didn’t give him much to work with. According to the prevailing view among contemporary economists, since value is ultimately subjective, there’s simply no way to justify such feelings. Everyone should therefore withhold judgment and operate on the assumption that, if there’s a market for a given good or service (and in this, they would include financial services), then it’s clearly valuable to someone, and that’s all one needs to know. Up to a point, as we’ve seen, most workers would really appear to agree with the economists on principle, at least when it comes to the tastes and proclivities of the general public; but when it comes to their own jobs, their experience often glaringly contradicts the idea that the market can always be trusted in such matters. After all, there’s a market in labor as well. If the market were always right, then someone being paid $40,000 to play computer games and gossip with old friends on WhatsApp all day would have to accept that the service he provides for the company by playing computer games and gossiping was actually worth $40,000. It clearly is not. So markets can’t always be right. It follows that, if the market can get things so wrong in the one area the worker knows best, then surely she cannot just blandly assume the market can be trusted to assess the true value of goods and services in those areas where she lacks firsthand information.

  Anyone who has a bullshit job, or knows someone who has a bullshit job, is aware, the
n, that the market is not an infallible arbiter of value. The problem is that nothing else is, either. Questions of value are always at least a little murky. Most people would agree that some companies might just as well not exist, but it’s more likely to be based on some kind of gut instinct than anything they can articulate precisely. If I had to tease out the prevailing, unstated common sense, for a first pass, anyway, I would say that most people seem to operate with a combination of Tom’s and Rupert’s positions: that when a good or service answers a demand or otherwise improves people’s lives, then it can be considered genuinely valuable, but when it merely serves to create demand, either by making people feel they are fat and ugly, or luring them into debt and then charging interest, it is not. This seems reasonable enough. But it still doesn’t answer the question of what it means to “improve people’s lives,” and on that, of course, rests everything.

  how most people in contemporary society do accept the notion of a social value that can be distinguished from economic value, even if it is very difficult to pin down what it is

  So we are back, again, to theories of value. What can actually be said to improve people’s lives?

  In economics, theories of value have largely served as a way to explain commodity prices: the price of a loaf of bread will fluctuate according to the contingencies of supply and demand, but that price will always gravitate around some kind of center that seems the natural price a loaf of bread should have. In the Middle Ages, this was seen explicitly as a moral question: How can one determine the “just price” of a commodity? If a merchant raised prices during wartime, at what point was he paying himself legitimate hazard pay, and at what point was he just gouging? One popular example invoked by jurists at the time was a prisoner living on bread and water who traded his fortune to another prisoner for a boiled egg. Could this really be considered a free choice? Should such a contract be considered enforceable once both prisoners were released?