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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century's end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. 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. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
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.
[...] 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."
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Ed Note: Link to John Maynard Keynes was NOT in the original article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @12:40PM
Yes all of you idiots saying "But capitalism is the reverse of making bullshit jobs. You want less employees!!"
From the article:
The article is about administrative creep more than anything.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 03 2016, @01:26PM
The pointless jobs aren't pointless to the people who are profiting from them; not so much the employees, but follow the money trail, you'll find decision makers getting richer because they created these pointless jobs. And, no, this isn't capitalism at work, it's various incentive structures, especially including regulatory compliance.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @06:26PM
it is capitalism at work, those regulations are rent-seeking capitalism at it's height
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Monday October 03 2016, @01:31PM
The article is about administrative creep more than anything.
And that, my friend, is caused by excessive government regulation, where we have unelected bureaucrats who spend 40 hours per week writing rules for everyone else. They have to keep creating those rules, even if they are causing a worse problem than anything they are purported to solve.
Now, you can argue that some of those regulations are needed, but this is not the 1930's where canning factories are including rat parts in the food. Without considering the source, at least consider this analysis of the size and burden of all those regulations [cei.org]. You need a lot of paper pushers to deal with that.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday October 03 2016, @03:26PM
And that, my friend, is caused by excessive government regulation, where we have unelected bureaucrats who spend 40 hours per week writing rules for everyone else.
Yet, surprisingly, big, powerful industry lobby groups - who are generally very good at brib^H^H^H^H dissuading governments from giving us nice things that might erode their bottom line - don't use their power and influence to put a stop to this.
Could it be because all of those regulations put, proportionately, a far higher burden on small businesses than on large corporations who can afford a whole building full of box-tickers, and help prevent competition from small, agile upstarts? Not to mention all the job-creation advantages in the adminisphere.
Don't fall for the simplistic "government bad, business good" dogma: government and business are joined at the hip. If big government didn't exist, big business would have to invent it.
(Score: 1) by Moof123 on Monday October 03 2016, @02:40PM
Old saying: "I know I am wasting half of my marketing money, I just don't know which half."
A lot of work is reactionary to previous calamity. You add audits and procedures every time a problem comes up, no matter if the "fix" was a fluke or if the "fix" costs more than the problem ever did. Soon corporate bureaucracy bloats and becomes and entity upon itself. Most corporations are internally structured closer to that of a communist government than anything else. Replace "comrad" with "share holder" and most mission statements become indistinguishable from soviet era literature.
I know I spend tons of time writing documentation that will never be read again after it is put into the system. But I still am required to do it, and to make it flow, look pretty, etc. Bullshit job for sure.