Created at: 2025-08-01
It took me so long to finish this book as I was reading other books at the same time, which is surprising for such a short book! Fair to say it fell into the category of books that I read but didn't really pay full attention to. Nonetheless, the ideas are simple and appealing, so the book was easy to follow even though I was reading it between many days of interruptions in between.
It seems like some of the statistics presented by the author have been disputed, mainly:
Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F09500170211015067
But also defended, mainly:
Quantitative research on Europe, however, finds little support for Graeber’s theory and claims that alienation may be better suited to explain why people consider their jobs socially useless. This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilized dataset and provides new evidence for the United States specifically. Contrary to previous studies, it thus finds robust support for Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. At the same time, it also confirms existing evidence on the effects of various other factors, including alienation.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F09500170231175771
Statistics apart, some ideas provide food for thought. The central points are abut 5 different types of bullshit jobs:
And the book ends with a recommendation that UBI (universal basic income) could help out alleviate the number of bullshit jobs in society.
Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.
As Socrates teaches us, when this happens—when our own definitions produce results that seem intuitively wrong to us—it’s because we’re not aware of what we really think.
I don’t think I know anyone who has had the same job for thirty years or more who doesn’t feel that the bullshit quotient has increased over the time he or she has been doing it. I might add that this is certainly true of my own work as a professor.
Sigmund Freud even spoke of “housewife’s neurosis”: a condition that he believed affected women forced to limit their life horizons to tidying up after others, and who therefore became fanatical about domestic hygiene as a form of revenge. This is often the moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organize one’s working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) precisely because more important people could not care less.
Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
Clarence: I worked as a museum guard for a major global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused more or less permanently. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the … well, nothing in the room, and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc Since nobody was ever there, in practice I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.
The field of value is always contested territory. It seems that whenever there’s a word for something everyone agrees to be desirable—“truth,” “beauty,” “love,” “democracy”—then there will be no consensus as to what it really means. (Oddly enough, this is even true of money: economists are divided over what it is.)
software engineering work was divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of “applying duct tape” to allow different core technologies to work together, because the designers had never bothered to think about their compatibility. His main point, though, was that, increasingly, open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free:
Pablo: Where two decades ago, companies dismissed open source software and developed core technologies in-house, nowadays companies rely heavily on open source and employ software developers almost entirely to apply duct tape on core technologies they get for free. In the end, you can see people doing the nongratifying duct-taping work during office hours and then doing gratifying work on core technologies during the night. This leads to an interesting vicious circle: given that people choose to work on core technologies for free, no company is investing in those technologies. The underinvestment means that the core technologies are often unfinished, lacking quality, have a lot of rough edges, bugs, etc. That, in turn, creates need for duct tape and thus proliferation of duct-taping jobs.
the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it. Like Annie, they are faced with the choice between doing useful and important work like taking care of children but being effectively told that the gratification of helping others should be its own reward
Candi: Let me give an example. Recently I was thinking maybe I’d foster a kid. So I looked into the package. It’s quite generous. You get a council flat, and on top of that you get £250 a week to look after the child. But then I realized: wait a minute. They’re talking about £13,000 a year and an apartment, for one child. Which the child’s parents in probably most cases didn’t have. If we’d just given the same thing to the parents so they didn’t get into so many problems they’d never have had to foster the child to begin with.