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.