Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber
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Bullshit Book
This book is such a missed opportunity. The bullshit jobs phenomenon is real (I've had one for 20 years). There *are* bullshit jobs, they are endemic, but in his polemic, David Graeber totally mischaracterises them, for large parts of his book confuses them with other phenomena which, while odious enough, have a markedly different character (namely good jobs in unscrupulous businesses, and survivors: the piss-takers and grifters who hide in plain sight, without doing any work at all, in every large corporate organisation.
Unscrupulous businesses have been around since Dickens’ time, as any old school Leftie should know. They go with the capitalist running dog territory: Graeber’s not found anything new there.
Survivors are harder to rationalise, except as the small group "defectors" that get away with free-riding in any large scale game of prisoner’s dilemma.
But neither are owners of bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are real jobs, that require acuity, dedication, patience, expertise and elbow-grease, only to achieve an end which, in the wider scheme of things, cannot be just not justified by resources they have consumed in carrying it out.
Internal audit: that is a bullshit job: these people must turn stones, analyse data, write PowerPoints, require the compilation of MIS against which they must measure formal, but never substantive deliverables, in doing so consuming not only their own resources, external resources, but those of (usually) productive people whose functions they are employed to audit. That is bullshit squared, especially if they're auditing other people who themselves are carrying out bullshit roles: ISDA negotiators or netting compliance personnel.
Nor is it any part of the bullshittery of a bullshit job that the owner of that job knows or suspects it to be so: most financial services lawyers believe sincerely that theirs is a critical contribution to the organisations’s bottom line and continued prosperity. They believe their contribution to be self-evident, if ineffable, but in any case beyond question — possibly beyond the descriptive capability of a question; certainly beyond any question that a management consultant or an internal auditor could confect. Only a knave would put a price on legal services[1]
Most disappointingly of all, having stated it, Graeber totally fails to address the central, throbbing question: how can bullshit jobs be so prevalent in our lean, sleek, uncompromising capitalistic market economy? This is an important question and an anthropologist ought to be as well suited as anyone to answering it. But he doesn't even try, preferring instead to trot out cod old left platitudes and trotting out self-serving (and self-selected) anecdotes from people who think their true calling is performance art, or learning about ethno-cultural distributions of melody in world music, and are outraged that the free world is disinclined to fund their burning ambition.
- ↑ Of course one can very easily evaluate the cost of legal services; evaluating the risks and costs one’s legal team headed off is harder: it is after all the dog that did not bark in the night-time.