Why Do So Many Modern Jobs Seem Pointless? An investigation into why people are working more without accomplishing more.

• Author: Long, Roderick T.
• Position: BOOKS - David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" - Book review

URING THE LAST century, everyone from John Maynard Keynes to The Jetsons predicted that in the future, technological advances would drastically cut down the number of hours the average person would need to work to keep the economy going. Why didn't that happen?

In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it did happen. Not that people are working fewer hours, but that fewer of those hours are actually needed.

Graeber argues that much, perhaps most, of the waged labor in the world's industrialized nations consists of "bullshit jobs": jobs that are "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify [their] existence." These are not to be confused with "shit jobs," which are unpleasant and poorly paid but often produce some obviously useful good or service. On the contrary, bullshit jobs may be well-paid and fairly easy, yet people nevertheless tend to find them extremely demoralizing, as evidenced by testimonials Graeber has collected from workers around the world. Contrary to the widespread presumption that people seek maximum financial return for minimum effort, Graeber finds that people will often quit a bullshit job for a lower-paying and more labor-intensive one if the latter offers greater scope for meaningful personal agency.

Many bullshit jobs exist "only or primarily to make someone else look important" or to solve problems arising from a "fault in the organization" or "the damage done by a superior." Graeber points to polls in which 37 to 40 percent of respondents felt their jobs made no "meaningful contribution to the world." Add the unneeded aspects of needed jobs, and Graeber estimates the total "bullshitization" of the job market at "slightly over 50%."

While it's a commonplace that the "service" sector has dramatically increased at the expense of traditional industry and agriculture, Graeber points out that this does not mean we are seeing an explosion of "waiters, barbers, salesclerks, and the like." The proportion of such jobs has remained small and steady. The growth in the service sector consists primarily of such positions as "administrators, consultants, clerical and accounting staff, IT professionals, and the like." While not all such jobs are bullshit, this is the place where "bullshit jobs proliferate," he says. (As an academic, I can testify to the relentless increase, within the academy, in both the numbers of administrative...