PDF Summary:Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber

Have you ever held a job that you felt was pointless? You're not alone. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argues that many jobs in contemporary industrial societies provide no value to society at all. According to him, a culture of work for work’s sake and the necessity of jobs for distributing income have created a society of meaningless bureaucratic tedium. In his book, Graeber explains what pointless jobs are, why they are proliferating, and why they make workers so unhappy.

David Graeber was an anthropology professor, activist, and self-identified anarchist. His book began as an op-ed in Strike! magazine that struck a nerve among working-class people, setting off a heated debate on the nature of work under 21st-century capitalism. Our guide will take you through his arguments while exploring opposing points of view and examining evidence for his claims.

(continued)...

Political Reason #2: Keeping People Occupied

Furthermore, Graeber argues that politicians have a vested interest in keeping people occupied to stave off revolutions and maintain their power. Mass unemployment has historically produced major upheavals, including revolutions. Not only does unemployment deprive people of an income and make them desperate, but it also gives them time to organize themselves and devote their energy to political causes. Politicians can therefore maintain stability in society, and their own power, by simply giving everyone something to do—even if the tasks themselves serve no purpose.

(Shortform note: Graeber argues that politicians keep people occupied to stave off revolutions and maintain their power. However, historians differ on the causes of political revolutions. Some argue that they occur when a government fails to respond effectively to a crisis, so the public takes matters into its own hands. Others have maintained revolutions are caused by conflict between elites: While the masses may participate in revolutions, they rarely organize them. Other historians have maintained that revolutions occur when a society has made steady progress and advancement in quality of life, only to experience a sudden reversal. Then the public overthrows the social order to keep from losing what they've gained.)

Cultural Reasons

In addition to economic and political reasons, Graeber argues that cultural reasons contribute to the proliferation of pointless jobs. He asserts that societies put up with pointless jobs because they view work as an inherent good, expect it to be unenjoyable, and undervalue care work.

Cultural Reason #1: Work Is Viewed as an Inherent Good

Graeber argues that Western cultures view work as an inherent good. People are expected to work for the sake of working. Work is understood as transformative—it "builds character." Work is also a means of acquiring dignity and earning your quality of life, which implies that people who don't work don't deserve dignity or quality of life.

Under this view, it makes perfect sense to create jobs purely for the sake of creating jobs. To deprive someone of work is to deprive them of the means of transforming their character, obtaining dignity, and earning their quality of life. Therefore, jobs are considered an inherent good, whether or not they actually achieve anything useful.

It's not surprising, Graeber argues, that a society that holds these values would support the creation and preservation of pointless jobs, as the purpose achieved by the job becomes secondary to the cultural purpose of work itself.

(Shortform note: Some scholars argue that this view of work as an inherent good mostly descends from Protestantism. In Protestantism and the Capitalist Work Ethic, the sociologist Max Weber argues that these ideas specifically have their roots in the theology of John Calvin. This theology suggests a cold, distant, disapproving God. Additionally, most people are damned, and only a small chosen few called “the elect” will enter heaven. This resulted in Protestants striving to prove their membership in the elect by devoting themselves to industrious work in a display of ascetic spiritual seriousness—making work an inherent spiritual good.)

Cultural Reason #2: Work Is Supposed to be Unpleasant

Furthermore, Graeber argues that pointless jobs proliferate because Western cultures traditionally understand work as something that’s supposed to be unpleasant, if not downright miserable.

In these cultures, work is the opposite of play and leisure. Anything that you do for its own sake—recreation, hobbies, spending quality time with others—definitionally cannot be considered work. Work, rather, is something you would never want to do, only something you have to do.

Recall that work is also the means by which workers obtain dignity and their quality of life. This presents a paradox: Workers are supposed to want to work because it provides them with dignity and quality of life, and they are supposed to hate working. Graeber argues that, in this value system, workers earn the right to dignity and quality of life because they are miserable.

This contributes to the tolerance of pointless jobs in two distinct ways. First, if someone is at work but has nothing to do, then they aren't supposed to spend the extra time doing something enjoyable like personal hobbies. They are supposed to pretend to be busy or make up pointless tasks to fill the time. Second, as we will discuss, pointless jobs often leave their workers feeling miserable. However, no one will view this as a problem if they expect work to be miserable.

(Shortform note: To understand the view that work is the opposite of enjoyment, we can again turn to Weber's analysis of Calvinism in Protestantism and the Capitalist Work Ethic. Recall that Calvinism compelled Protestants to prove their membership in a spiritual elect by demonstrating their industriousness and spiritual seriousness. This need to display seriousness also led Protestants to shun leisure activities considered frivolous, including drinking, feasting, and idle talk. Any “instinctive" pleasure was considered suspect. This created a dichotomy with serious, ascetic industriousness on one side and frivolous self-indulgence on the other. Therefore, if you enjoy something, it can't be work.)

Cultural Reason #3: Care Work Is Undervalued

Lastly, Graeber argues that industrial societies enable pointless jobs because they undervalue care work. He contends that care work provides real value to society by making sure people's needs are met. However, he maintains that care work is undervalued because people view it as less important than work that produces goods. Care work includes tasks such as raising children, looking after the elderly, or watching over the sick. There are also many jobs with care work components, such as when nurses try to manage a patient's emotions by putting them at ease before a risky surgery. This provides value to society because it improves clients’ quality of life, unlike a desk job where the worker has no real responsibilities.

Graeber argues that the undervaluing of care work has two cultural causes: sexism and capitalism.

Sexism: Care work has traditionally been done by women and is therefore seen as less valuable in societies with a history of sexism. Graeber contends that these societies presume that women are less valuable and therefore their work must be less valuable too.

Capitalism: Secondly, Graeber argues that in market-based economies, the value of all work must be quantified and exchanged. If you want to trade one good for another, both of their values need to be translated into quantities of currency. The value of care work is harder to measure, which makes it more difficult to exchange with other commodities. For example, could you put a price on the value your parents provided by raising you? Probably not. Because you can't place a number on this value, your culture might not consider it “work” in the conventional sense.

The Difference Between Paid and Unpaid Care Work

In addressing the economic problems caused by undervaluing care work, it helps to distinguish between paid and unpaid care work. Paid care work includes looking after others such as children in daycare, but it can also include domestic work such as cleaning someone else's house. Unpaid care work typically involves looking after one's own children, taking care of household chores, or caring for an ailing or elderly family member. This distinction matters because undervaluing leads to different economic consequences in each case.

Many economists would agree with Graeber that paid care workers are underpaid in proportion to the value they provide. In the US, domestic workers are three times as likely to live in poverty as all other classes of workers. Racial and gender disparities also play an important role in the US, as care workers are disproportionately women of color.

Unpaid care work also puts a strain on economies because it falls disproportionately on women. This prevents women from participating equally in the workforce, potentially lowering a country's prosperity. Illustrating this, economists have found a positive correlation between a society's wealth and the proportion of unpaid care work done by men.

How Undervaluing Care Work Creates Pointless Jobs

Graeber argues that undervaluing care work contributes to the proliferation of pointless jobs in two distinct ways. First, in trying to address the unemployment caused by automation, industrial societies have opted to fund purposeless managerial work instead of valuable care work.

Second, the need to quantify the value provided by professional care workers—such as social workers—has created extra administrative jobs whose role it is to try to measure and document the value of the work done by these care workers. Trying to quantify that which is not easily quantifiable creates extra and unnecessary bureaucratic work, producing new pointless jobs.

Can You Measure the Total Value of Unpaid Care Work?

While trying to attach an exchange value to care work can create extra unnecessary tasks, some economists have argued that trying to estimate the total value of unpaid care work in an economy can have important policy implications. They argue that if policy makers truly understand the economic importance of this work, they would be more likely to invest in it.

Therefore, a number of economists have tried to put a monetary value on the total care work done in a country. Some have focused on the cost of hiring a nanny or house cleaner to do all the work an unpaid care worker does. Others focus on how care work supports those already in the work force and enables other forms of production. Economists have launched studies in India, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and several other nations. They’ve estimated the total value of unpaid care work at anywhere from 15% to 60% of the total GDP, depending on the country.

Part 3: Why Are Pointless Jobs a Problem?

Now that we've discussed the causes of pointless jobs, we can turn to their effects. Graeber doesn't just argue that these pointless jobs are inefficient, but that they are actually harmful to society. He highlights two major problems: They make workers chronically miserable, and they create deep social divisions. In this section, we'll explore Graeber's arguments about the destructive consequences of pointless jobs.

Pointless Jobs Make Workers Unhappy

Graeber’s research found that those who work pointless jobs often feel miserable. You might assume that people would be happy getting paid to do nothing, but that's actually not the case. Instead, Graeber maintains, deep down, most people genuinely want to contribute to society and feel frustrated and depressed when they can't. In this section, we'll cover the four psychological reasons pointless jobs make workers miserable: lack of agency, dishonesty, ambiguity, and indignity.

Pointless Jobs and Rational Choice Theory

The assumption that people would be happy getting paid to do nothing is based on a set of influential economic ideas called "rational choice theory." This theory maintains that people would naturally seek to get the greatest reward for themselves in exchange for the lowest cost to themselves. This theory gained traction because it made it easier to create mathematical models of markets and economies—if you can accurately predict how most people in a given situation would behave, then you scale that up to model an entire society.

The problem with this is that people are complex, and therefore prone to making “irrational” decisions that throw off the accuracy of these models. Workers have a variety of motivations, goals, and needs that don't equate perfectly with monetary terms—for example, a desire to feel that you're making a valuable contribution or helping others. All of these motives would undermine a model that presumes people are simply looking to gain personal wealth in every situation.

Psychological Problem #1: Lack of Agency

Graeber argues that pointless jobs make workers miserable because when nothing you do seems to matter, it can make it feel like you don't matter either. When people have a sense of agency—the ability to make things happen through their actions—this affirms their sense of value and existence. After all, would you rather see yourself as someone who is capable of directing their own life and impacting the world around them, or someone who just helplessly reacts to scenarios outside your control? When people feel like nothing they do makes a difference, this creates a sense of erasure, a feeling that they don't really matter.

(Shortform note: Psychologists define agency as a person's perception of control over their actions and their consequences. Agency plays an important role in regulating behavior. Gamblers frequently experience a distorted perception of agency when they believe they can influence random outcomes such as dice rolls. Schizophrenics can experience the opposite distortion—a perception that something other than themselves is in control of their actions. Psychologists find that humans need to believe that they can exercise some control over the outcomes of their actions in order to feel motivated. After all, if nothing you do has consequences, positive or negative, why do anything at all?)

Psychological Problem #2: Dishonesty

Graeber argues that pointless jobs also make workers miserable because they often feel like they’re living a lie. Recall that in most pointless jobs, workers are expected to keep up the pretense that they are busily doing something important. This dishonesty causes three distinct problems:

1. Workers will feel a sense of anxiety at being found out. If you believe that everyone expects you to be working, when actually you're scrolling through social media all day because there's nothing for you to do, this can create a fear of getting fired, or being seen as less valuable by others.

(Shortform note: Health researchers have also found that chronic dishonesty can have consequences on your physical as well as mental health. Lying and the anxiety of being caught increases your levels of stress. Chronic stress has been linked to cardiovascular problems, increased risk of obesity and addiction, and even increased risk of cancer. Therefore, staying in a situation where you have to keep a lie may be taking years off of your life.)

2. Workers will feel alienated from their coworkers because they feel that they can't truly be honest around them. If they have to keep up a lie all the time, then they can't really let their guard down and talk authentically about their work with others. This makes their position much lonelier.

(Shortform note: Management experts agree that a sense of belonging and authenticity is important to an employee's overall well-being. Research has shown that being your authentic self helps build larger personal networks, which leads to higher job performance, a greater sense of personal fulfillment, and even a longer life. However, they also caution that you don't need to sacrifice personal boundaries or create a deep connection with all of your coworkers to enjoy these benefits.)

3. Being dishonest forces workers to act against their own values. Most people believe honesty to be a virtue. But to maintain the false pretense that a pointless job is purposeful, the worker must act against their own sense of virtue. This can undermine a worker's sense of integrity, and with it, a key part of their self-esteem.

(Shortform note: When workers are asked to behave against their own personal ethics, this can result in what psychologists call "moral injury." This was originally theorized to describe psychological effects on soldiers carrying out orders they considered unethical in war. However, employment experts caution this can take place in the workplace as well. Moral injury can lead to depression, grief, suicide, and a loss of trust in oneself or others.)

Psychological Problem #3: Ambiguity

Graeber contends that workers also feel miserable in pointless jobs because there's a sense of confusion and ambiguity about how they’re supposed to behave. Our social scripts—learned sets of expectations for how to behave in a given situation—tell us that we are supposed to work hard at our jobs and that our jobs are supposed to add value to the world.

What do you do when you realize your job is pointless? Do you tell your supervisor? Do you make up tasks? Do you pretend to be busy? Because pointless jobs aren't "supposed" to exist, there is no social script for how to behave in a pointless job. This leaves workers feeling scriptless, or confused and unsure of how to act.

(Shortform note: The concept of “scriptlessness” comes from the field of relationship psychology. Psychologists compared stories of heartbroken suitors who had been rejected to stories told by those who had done the opposite: rejected an unwanted suitor. They found that the rejected were able to console themselves with narratives of heartbreak from popular culture such as songs, movies, and novels. However, rejectors found themselves cast in an "unscripted role." There aren’t as many stories from the opposite perspective, and those in this position were left unclear on how to feel. This points us toward a possible solution: If more people came out and told stories about working in pointless jobs, then others caught in the same situation could have more scripts to rely on.)

Psychological Problem #4: Indignity

Lastly, Graeber argues that working a pointless job often makes workers miserable because they may feel degraded and insulted by their employers. If there is genuinely nothing useful for them to do with their time, and their employer keeps giving them meaningless tasks just to keep them busy, employees may experience this as a form of bullying or coercion. They may feel this way because it calls attention to power inequities in the workplace in a demeaning way, reminding workers that their time is not their own.

For example, let's say you wait tables at a restaurant, and there aren't any customers, so your supervisor makes you wipe down tables that have already been wiped down. You're putting forth effort to achieve nothing simply because your employer feels they own your time and want to make sure you aren't using it for yourself.

(Shortform note: Management experts explain that managers often assign "busywork" when they feel they feel they can't trust their employees. This distrust leads the managers to feel that they need to assert control of their workers’ time to maintain control of the office. This affirms why workers may experience "busywork" as an indignity. They are being made to put forth effort just so their bosses can feel in control.)

Pointless Jobs Create Social Problems

Graeber argues that in addition to making people unhappy, pointless jobs also create deep social divisions by fostering resentment between classes of workers. Recall that, according to Graeber, purposeful jobs tend to offer lower pay compared with pointless jobs. This situation creates two specific cross currents of resentment.

The workers making very little but doing something useful are angry and resentful toward those who get paid more to do less. However, also recall that pointless jobs make workers miserable. This creates a second form of class resentment, in which those with purposeless work envy and resent those with purposeful work, despite the former group being paid more. These cross-currents of resentment lead to mutual hostility and antagonism.

Graeber argues this explains a lot of the virulent partisanship currently afflicting Western industrial nations. Throughout the USA and Europe, the bases of political parties are realigning by their level of education, in which college-educated "white-collar" workers tend to be aligned against non-college-educated "blue-collar" workers. Furthermore, these political divisions are becoming more virulent and entrenched. Graeber maintains that the proliferation of pointless jobs plays an important role in creating and perpetuating hostility between classes of workers.

What's Driving the Education Divide Between American Voters?

Graeber describes a process of voters realigning behind political parties by level of education and type of work. Many analysts consider this a major factor driving politics in the USA, the country where Graeber focuses much of his discussion regarding this trend. Political commentators have put forward several theories as to why this realignment is taking place.

Some argue that education is a liberalizing force. Educated people tend to be more skeptical of religion, more likely to consider morality relative, and more likely to prioritize environmental concerns. Research has found that college professors in the US are far more likely to be registered as Democrats than Republicans, which has led conservative critics to argue that higher education is taught with a liberal bias.

However, others have argued that the education divide among workers may have more to do with racial politics. They highlight the fact that college-educated voters are more likely to favor social justice for historically marginalized groups. They also point out that the education divide is much larger among white voters than among any other bloc.

Lastly, some argue that globalization has led to a realignment of economic interests between classes of workers. College-educated workers tend to have benefited from global free trade, while many non-college-educated workers have seen their jobs outsourced overseas. Proponents of this explanation maintain that now these classes of workers have very different interests in a way they hadn't before.

Part 4: What Should We Do About Pointless Jobs?

Now that we have defined pointless jobs, identified their causes, and explored their consequences, we can turn our attention to how we can solve this problem. Graeber stresses that his goal in this book is to identify a problem rather than offer a solution. However, he still highlights one policy that he believes may offer a chance at solving the problem: universal basic income. In this section, we'll explain this idea and how it would impact the problem of pointless jobs.

What Is Universal Basic Income and How Would It Change Pointless Jobs?

Graeber explains that universal basic income would provide every member of society with an equal flat wage, paid by the government and funded through taxation. This is meant to provide a supplemental income that could be combined with other conventional forms of income. However, it is intended to be enough to support someone who is unemployed, giving them the chance to opt out of undesirable employment. Graeber argues this policy would address the problem of pointless jobs in three distinct ways: Workers could decline pointless jobs, care work would receive funding, and politicians would have no need to support work for work’s sake.

The Debate Over Universal Basic Income

Graeber's possible solution of a universal basic income (UBI) has inspired widespread economic debate. So far, it's been tested in small trial runs throughout the world, but no country has attempted the program at scale. Since the program is still hypothetical, several different versions have been debated. Some argue that UBI would replace existing social welfare programs, while others propose that it could supplement them.

Proponents of UBI argue that it will alleviate poverty and grant people a higher quality of life. They also argue that the growth of artificial intelligence will eliminate so many jobs that UBI will eventually become necessary to avoid mass unemployment. It could also simplify existing welfare programs and reduce the incentive to stay on unemployment, since you would get the same benefits regardless of whether you had a job.

Critics of the idea worry that it will lower incentives to work, increasing unemployment and decreasing productivity. They also maintain that UBI is unaffordable and would create an enormous burden on the tax base. Lastly, they worry that increasing everyone's income would lead to inflation, as it would increase overall demand, without increasing supply—allowing retailers to raise prices.

Workers Could Decline Pointless Jobs

Graeber argues that if workers could afford to opt out of pointless jobs, they probably would. He maintains that people mainly stay in pointless jobs because they feel like they couldn't afford to be between jobs. But if workers could live without working, they would probably not take a job that contributed nothing, as these jobs make people miserable, for all the reasons we’ve explored. Therefore, pointless jobs would mostly disappear.

(Shortform note: The possibility of workers opting out of employment after receiving a universal basic income is both feared by critics of universal basic income and touted by supporters as a potential benefit. It's worth asking then, have workers opted out of jobs in pilot programs? A study of cash payments in Alaska found no significant impact on total rates of employment. However, it did find that some people moved from full-time to part-time work, and that this effect was not even across all sectors of the economy.)

Universal Basic Income Would Fund Care Work

This flat wage would support people who add value by caring for others. Recall that in an economy based on market exchange, work that's difficult to quantify is undervalued. Graeber argues that universal basic income would correct this problem. If people could support themselves while performing meaningful forms of care such as raising children or caring for elderly family members, then societies could fund work that added more value than, say, an office job where the worker spends half their time on social media.

(Shortform note: The pilot program in Alaska (mentioned above) also found that married women were the most likely to move from full-time to part-time employment. Since family care is disproportionately carried out by women, this would support Graeber's thesis that universal basic income would allow people more time to invest in care work.)

Politicians Would Cease Supporting Jobs for the Sake of Jobs

With a universal basic income, there'd be less incentive for politicians to provide work for work's sake. Recall that when people need employment to survive, governments are incentivized to create jobs for the sake of jobs, regardless of whether these jobs fulfill an actual need. If workers could survive without a job, there would be less reason to do this, resulting in the creation of fewer pointless jobs.

(Shortform note: While universal basic income may hypothetically alleviate the incentives to support policies that create work, recall that Graeber argues that the belief in "work for work's sake" is cultural as well as political. Many opponents of universal basic income argue that work is an important institution that provides meaning, identity, stability, and purchasing power to ordinary people. As long as their constituents believe in the cultural value of work, politicians will most likely follow suit and continue to support job-centered policies.)