I feel that you are correct there are few "bullshit jobs" in the sense that if you just stopped doing the job, then the system would break down in some bad way.
If the lobbyist stopped lobbying, then needed funds would not come and the company would fail. If middle management did not advocate for a groups resources then it would loose them and the group would fail, etc.
The free market is pretty relentless from top to bottom. Sure for periods of time, bullshit jobs exist, but eventually a exec VP realizes she can save money w/o hurting the org, and then cuts some function.
I see two cases where this does not happen and bullshit jobs live on:
(1) The bullshit of zero sum games. But these are also cases of the system kind of working against itself. Presently our capital system is recursively structured in a very antagonistic way all the way down. The result is some amount of resiliency against stupidity. e.g. if part of the system is less functional, it looses and is removed. Still it is also quite inefficient. Many jobs really push against zero sum games in a way that **IS** bullshit when viewed from at a more macro level.
(2) The bullshit of posture. The incentive of the org is to produce as many widgets per day as possible, and the incentive of the individual is to have an interesting/easy/affluent life. And the individual has MUCH more time to scheme about how they are viewed by the org, and then org has time to view an individual. Thus the optimal strategy in nearly all orgs is to spend a notable amount of ones time in ways that maximize your individual incentive with little or no consideration of the incentive of the org as a whole. thus spending time LOOKING good vs. BEING good. All savvy employees to this do some degree, and of course the extra effort is to not get caught doing it! And doing this feels like (and is) inherently bullshit.
Thus while most big-corp jobs are not bullshit, most jobs do contain a notable amount of bullshit work. Indeed so much so, that like a fish in water, we often are not even fully cognizant of the fraction of our time spent doing this.
(p. s. working in early-stage startups is a great anecdote to this. There is little room for such bullshit, and there is little room to hide if you are engaging in it. of course most all early startups fail... so there is that :-).
Yeah, there's some bullshit in every job, but I think very few jobs are entirely bullshit. Both zero sum games and posture/competition, which is a sort of zero sum or negative sum game, they are bullshit when viewed from the central planner's view. Where I live in Boston there are about 5 franchised Dunkin Donuts all within a 15 minute walk from one another, which is hard to say is "efficient" or a good use of resources.
But, they do keep each other honest, and a 6th Dunkin Donuts (and the second on Cambridge Street), which opened briefly and had terrible customer service, did suffer the brutal hand of the market and was forced to close within 6 months. So, my life as an occasional consumer of Dunkin Donuts (they have good espresso) has been made slightly better by this Darwinian competition for these only slightly differentiated niches.
I would agree with you, and the "bullshit" of many jobs has that nature. it does provide value in stabilizing something.
But it also feels an is bullshit on another level, since with better planning and tracking one could have fewer dunkin donuts and use other measures to keep them honest as you say. The same for the massive redundancy in big corps. But the truth is, that planning and measuring itself is really hard to do well. (hence the "bullshit" remains... and it continues to feel like bullshit too.)
That books was really incredible, in a bad way. The entire political spectrums agrees that capitalism is about profits. No, capitalism is about rich people bragging with how many dependents they have and never mind the costs or lower profit margins. WHAT.
In his defense, a receptionist-free world is hilarious. Imagine the places you could go with a smile and some confidence. You could even meet a few lobbyists.
A few years back, I was in a position where almost all my time went into making pretty Powerpoints for my boss to use in defending himself from attacks from other managers in the company. The graphs were based on real data, and I enjoyed crunching the data, but the amount of real value I generated was questionable. It was certainly useful for my boss and his boss. It let them keep their jobs (and more importantly, budgets). But there was no value to the customers in what I made. So--bullshit job or not?
I think that falls under the competition/zero sum games mentioned by @Dan Oblinger up above. My basic view is that it's bullshit from a central planner's view, but that competition and redundancy is necessary and healthy. Like, if your company had zero people in your position, they would definitely be worse off, as they'd have no idea if anyone was productive.
Was it the absolute best use of your time or talents? Probably not, but that's a high bar.
When I think of jobs that are bullshit I think of a paper I read some years ago, I don't recall where in which they noted that the fraction of the workforce engaged in finance around 1900 was half the fraction involved in the modern era. And this despite the advancement of information processing technology since then.
The reason for this is that finance workers do all sorts of things that weren't done back then. New financial products have been invented and so forth. All of this is to extract a greater share of output for the financial operators as an economic rent that would otherwise be extracted. The jobs are bullshit in that the economy can function without them and may even function better. But they do make money and so the workers are providing value to their employers and so the jobs aren't bullshit in that sense.
A similar argument could be made for street gangs selling illicit drugs. The dealers do provide a service to the addicts they serve and income to their masters, but if they ceased to exist society would not be any worse off.
A third example would be certain kinds of regulatory workers. I worked for a major drug company. Now our drug products (the medicines you buy at the drug store) have always been regulated for safety as called for the law, which makes perfect sense. The law explicitly excluded the active ingredients used in those products from regulatory oversight. All that was required was that each lot be tested to show it met specifications filed with the regulatory agencies. But then in the early 90's the FDA decided to extend the sort of regulatory oversight of the manufacturing process that was normal in drug product to the active ingredients.
So now any time anything atypical happens in a lot we need to write a report. At our plant this amounted to about 25000 reports every year. We had around 100 quality professionals and production engineers/professionals who did this work, whereas when I started with the company in 1988 (before this happened) there were 3. One of my products we have been making for 70 years. For the first 40 years if it met specs, it was good to go. For the next 30, the lots are still released as before, but dozens of reports are written, one for each lot that experienced some event.
These report writing jobs are bullshit jobs in the first sense of the in that we did fine before them, but they are not bullshit in the sense that we absolutely need all these people to operate in a legal and ethical manner.
So, I'd classify your two types of bullshit jobs into these categories:
1. Bullshit because you think the products are harmful to society.
2. Bullshit because you think the work is unnecessary.
For the first, I'm not sure if that's bullshit so much as harmful. As a society, I think we have the right and the duty to decide certain activities are harmful and should be punished (robbery being an obvious example). But, that's different from them being bullshit.
For the second, I'd say that's a natural consequence of the tradeoff between safety and speed/cost. The reports probably make the product your drugs safer, but certainly slow down the production and make it more costly. Is that worth it? Hard to say, but I think there is a debate to be had.
My sense of what Graeber meant by bullshit was “provides no utility”. Something that accomplishes nothing positive to even harmful is providing no utility.
I see your point about harm (example 2). But the unnecessary work (i.e. utility argument) is different. Ans example of what such rules are tying to achieve is given by this incident.
However, nobody would have died had their bought OUR Medrol or that made by any other legitimate US pharmaceutical company. Why because the problem here was in the drug product (DP) portion of the manufacturing process, which has ALWAYS been under regulatory control. In other word this would never have happened back in the day BEFORE we were writing reports because we don’t do the shit these guys did (I heard there was mold on the walls in their sterile filling room). How did they get away with it? As a compounding pharmacy (i.e. small business) they are not covered by the same rules as big companies are. So, our product is safe, but more expensive that their unsafe product. To save money the hospital bought the shitty product and people died. Now this is a big political mess, and the regulators are going to have to do something. I don’t know what they did, as I said it doesn’t apply to us.
My understanding is something like this happened in the early 1990’s which involved bad batches of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) made by some sketchy foreign outfit. And the result of that is now we have to write all these reports. They don’t do anything,
It was a political response, but now it's part of the culture. The jobs are bullshit in the sense that things were fine before, for US makers of APIs whose companies already had regulatory oversight in their DP units, and so had the necessary quality culture. But this was not the case for small foreign chemical companies who made APIs along with other chemicals.
Suppose regulators just banned buying stuff from small foreign outfits who aren't pharma majors. That might get libertarians' shorts all in a bundle, I'd think (and maybe rightly so). I don’t know what the actual details were, but it is my understanding there was politics.
So, we do the unnecessary reports. Yes it's bullshit, but we live in a complex world where there necessarily will be lots of politics. Cest la vie.
Trevor,
I feel that you are correct there are few "bullshit jobs" in the sense that if you just stopped doing the job, then the system would break down in some bad way.
If the lobbyist stopped lobbying, then needed funds would not come and the company would fail. If middle management did not advocate for a groups resources then it would loose them and the group would fail, etc.
The free market is pretty relentless from top to bottom. Sure for periods of time, bullshit jobs exist, but eventually a exec VP realizes she can save money w/o hurting the org, and then cuts some function.
I see two cases where this does not happen and bullshit jobs live on:
(1) The bullshit of zero sum games. But these are also cases of the system kind of working against itself. Presently our capital system is recursively structured in a very antagonistic way all the way down. The result is some amount of resiliency against stupidity. e.g. if part of the system is less functional, it looses and is removed. Still it is also quite inefficient. Many jobs really push against zero sum games in a way that **IS** bullshit when viewed from at a more macro level.
(2) The bullshit of posture. The incentive of the org is to produce as many widgets per day as possible, and the incentive of the individual is to have an interesting/easy/affluent life. And the individual has MUCH more time to scheme about how they are viewed by the org, and then org has time to view an individual. Thus the optimal strategy in nearly all orgs is to spend a notable amount of ones time in ways that maximize your individual incentive with little or no consideration of the incentive of the org as a whole. thus spending time LOOKING good vs. BEING good. All savvy employees to this do some degree, and of course the extra effort is to not get caught doing it! And doing this feels like (and is) inherently bullshit.
Thus while most big-corp jobs are not bullshit, most jobs do contain a notable amount of bullshit work. Indeed so much so, that like a fish in water, we often are not even fully cognizant of the fraction of our time spent doing this.
(p. s. working in early-stage startups is a great anecdote to this. There is little room for such bullshit, and there is little room to hide if you are engaging in it. of course most all early startups fail... so there is that :-).
Yeah, there's some bullshit in every job, but I think very few jobs are entirely bullshit. Both zero sum games and posture/competition, which is a sort of zero sum or negative sum game, they are bullshit when viewed from the central planner's view. Where I live in Boston there are about 5 franchised Dunkin Donuts all within a 15 minute walk from one another, which is hard to say is "efficient" or a good use of resources.
But, they do keep each other honest, and a 6th Dunkin Donuts (and the second on Cambridge Street), which opened briefly and had terrible customer service, did suffer the brutal hand of the market and was forced to close within 6 months. So, my life as an occasional consumer of Dunkin Donuts (they have good espresso) has been made slightly better by this Darwinian competition for these only slightly differentiated niches.
I would agree with you, and the "bullshit" of many jobs has that nature. it does provide value in stabilizing something.
But it also feels an is bullshit on another level, since with better planning and tracking one could have fewer dunkin donuts and use other measures to keep them honest as you say. The same for the massive redundancy in big corps. But the truth is, that planning and measuring itself is really hard to do well. (hence the "bullshit" remains... and it continues to feel like bullshit too.)
That books was really incredible, in a bad way. The entire political spectrums agrees that capitalism is about profits. No, capitalism is about rich people bragging with how many dependents they have and never mind the costs or lower profit margins. WHAT.
In his defense, a receptionist-free world is hilarious. Imagine the places you could go with a smile and some confidence. You could even meet a few lobbyists.
A few years back, I was in a position where almost all my time went into making pretty Powerpoints for my boss to use in defending himself from attacks from other managers in the company. The graphs were based on real data, and I enjoyed crunching the data, but the amount of real value I generated was questionable. It was certainly useful for my boss and his boss. It let them keep their jobs (and more importantly, budgets). But there was no value to the customers in what I made. So--bullshit job or not?
I think that falls under the competition/zero sum games mentioned by @Dan Oblinger up above. My basic view is that it's bullshit from a central planner's view, but that competition and redundancy is necessary and healthy. Like, if your company had zero people in your position, they would definitely be worse off, as they'd have no idea if anyone was productive.
Was it the absolute best use of your time or talents? Probably not, but that's a high bar.
I don’t know man. I think maybe you just haven’t worked some of the jobs like this.
eh, I've had probably 5 or 6 jobs, and been fired from... 4? It's been a good sampling of capitalism.
When I think of jobs that are bullshit I think of a paper I read some years ago, I don't recall where in which they noted that the fraction of the workforce engaged in finance around 1900 was half the fraction involved in the modern era. And this despite the advancement of information processing technology since then.
The reason for this is that finance workers do all sorts of things that weren't done back then. New financial products have been invented and so forth. All of this is to extract a greater share of output for the financial operators as an economic rent that would otherwise be extracted. The jobs are bullshit in that the economy can function without them and may even function better. But they do make money and so the workers are providing value to their employers and so the jobs aren't bullshit in that sense.
A similar argument could be made for street gangs selling illicit drugs. The dealers do provide a service to the addicts they serve and income to their masters, but if they ceased to exist society would not be any worse off.
A third example would be certain kinds of regulatory workers. I worked for a major drug company. Now our drug products (the medicines you buy at the drug store) have always been regulated for safety as called for the law, which makes perfect sense. The law explicitly excluded the active ingredients used in those products from regulatory oversight. All that was required was that each lot be tested to show it met specifications filed with the regulatory agencies. But then in the early 90's the FDA decided to extend the sort of regulatory oversight of the manufacturing process that was normal in drug product to the active ingredients.
So now any time anything atypical happens in a lot we need to write a report. At our plant this amounted to about 25000 reports every year. We had around 100 quality professionals and production engineers/professionals who did this work, whereas when I started with the company in 1988 (before this happened) there were 3. One of my products we have been making for 70 years. For the first 40 years if it met specs, it was good to go. For the next 30, the lots are still released as before, but dozens of reports are written, one for each lot that experienced some event.
These report writing jobs are bullshit jobs in the first sense of the in that we did fine before them, but they are not bullshit in the sense that we absolutely need all these people to operate in a legal and ethical manner.
So, I'd classify your two types of bullshit jobs into these categories:
1. Bullshit because you think the products are harmful to society.
2. Bullshit because you think the work is unnecessary.
For the first, I'm not sure if that's bullshit so much as harmful. As a society, I think we have the right and the duty to decide certain activities are harmful and should be punished (robbery being an obvious example). But, that's different from them being bullshit.
For the second, I'd say that's a natural consequence of the tradeoff between safety and speed/cost. The reports probably make the product your drugs safer, but certainly slow down the production and make it more costly. Is that worth it? Hard to say, but I think there is a debate to be had.
My sense of what Graeber meant by bullshit was “provides no utility”. Something that accomplishes nothing positive to even harmful is providing no utility.
I see your point about harm (example 2). But the unnecessary work (i.e. utility argument) is different. Ans example of what such rules are tying to achieve is given by this incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center_meningitis_outbreak
However, nobody would have died had their bought OUR Medrol or that made by any other legitimate US pharmaceutical company. Why because the problem here was in the drug product (DP) portion of the manufacturing process, which has ALWAYS been under regulatory control. In other word this would never have happened back in the day BEFORE we were writing reports because we don’t do the shit these guys did (I heard there was mold on the walls in their sterile filling room). How did they get away with it? As a compounding pharmacy (i.e. small business) they are not covered by the same rules as big companies are. So, our product is safe, but more expensive that their unsafe product. To save money the hospital bought the shitty product and people died. Now this is a big political mess, and the regulators are going to have to do something. I don’t know what they did, as I said it doesn’t apply to us.
My understanding is something like this happened in the early 1990’s which involved bad batches of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) made by some sketchy foreign outfit. And the result of that is now we have to write all these reports. They don’t do anything,
It was a political response, but now it's part of the culture. The jobs are bullshit in the sense that things were fine before, for US makers of APIs whose companies already had regulatory oversight in their DP units, and so had the necessary quality culture. But this was not the case for small foreign chemical companies who made APIs along with other chemicals.
Suppose regulators just banned buying stuff from small foreign outfits who aren't pharma majors. That might get libertarians' shorts all in a bundle, I'd think (and maybe rightly so). I don’t know what the actual details were, but it is my understanding there was politics.
So, we do the unnecessary reports. Yes it's bullshit, but we live in a complex world where there necessarily will be lots of politics. Cest la vie.