Socially Useless Jobs

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12227
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Max Lent,Robert Dur

Socially Useless Jobs*

ROBERT DUR and MAX VAN LENT

Recent research suggests that many workers in modern economies think that their job

is socially useless, i.e., that it makes no ora negative contribution to society.However,

the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising

100,000 workers from forty-seven countries at four points in time. We find that

approximately 8 percent of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while

another 17 percent are doubtful about the usefulness of their job. There are sizeable

differences among countries, sectors, occupations, and age groups, but no trend over

time. A vast majority of workers cares about holdinga socially useful job and we find

that they suffer when they consider their job useless. We also explore possible causes

of socially useless jobs, including bad management, strict job protection legislation,

harmful economicactivities, labor hoarding, and division of labor.

Introduction

In a widely read essay, anthropologist David Graeber (2013: n.p.) has claimed

on the basis of anecdotal evidence that “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”(see also Graeber

2018). This claim, if true, is worrisome for at least three reasons. First, inasfar as

workers’beliefs reflect the true usefulness of their job, it would mean a huge

waste of resources. Second, experimental studies (Ariely, Kamenica, and Prelec

2008; Carpenter and Gong 2016; Grant 2008; Kosfeld, Neckerman, and Yang

2017) have shown that motivation and, hence, productivity, deteriorate when

workers consider their job to be useless or harmful, which is problematic when

jobs are actually useful. Third, and independent of the true usefulness of the job,

JEL: J2, J3, J4, J8, M5.

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and

Tinbergen Institute, CESifo, and IZA. E-mail: dur@ese.eur.nl; and Leiden University, Leiden, the Nether-

lands. E-mail: m.van.lent@law.leidenuniv.nl. The authors are grateful to Anne Boring, Josse Delfgaauw,

Sacha Kapoor, Arjan Non, Sandra Phlippen, Joeri Sol, Bauke Visser, Olaf van Vliet, and the editor and a

reviewer of this journal for useful comments. They also thank seminar participants at the LSE, Erasmus

University Rotterdam, and Leiden University as well as participants of the Reinhard Selten Institute Work-

shop “New Challenges, New Objectives and New Tools for Public Policy”in Cologne.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, DOI: 10.1111/irel.12227. Vol. 58, No. 1 (January 2019). ©2018 The Regents of

the Univers ity of Califo rnia Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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