I quite liked this review, kept my interest throughout and I'm probably going to keep thinking about it and read some more books as a follow-up since I think your overall point that this idea is important and under-discussed is true. That's pretty much my criterion for a successful piece of writing, so I think you've succeeded.
The humor was good. I didn't laugh at everything, but did laugh out loud at the "any economic theory whatsoever." I think if anything more space between jokes would help, since they fell a little flatter when closely sequenced together.
I'm convinced that the kind of bullshit jobs you talk about are indeed real and very frustrating. I read the first parts of the book years ago and I remember being confused if Graeber thought the jobs were inherently unproductive and could be eliminated or if they are unproductive consequences of a complex system. I thought Graeber was arguing the former and I see you as arguing the latter, which I find to be defensible and compelling, so overall I think I was convinced that you understood Graeber better.
I think sections IV and V are very strong in this format and I was very convinced you were improving on Graeber's ideas. The basic arguments about planned economies having less of this stuff were surprising and gripping and I'm going to keep thinking about them. The section on rickshawing was also excellent, and a great term for something I've wondered about.
I have worked jobs that meet Graeber's definition, and especially what strikes me is just how murky the actual purpose of so many jobs is. Technological development for example can have real effects on people's lives and economic productivity, but can also be used as a tool in zero-sum budget fights within large semi-feudal organizations. But to win budget fights with technology, one needs to pretend that the technology is going to have a real effect. Most people seem fine with it, but I find it to be quite difficult. It seems clear to me that the stated purpose of a job and what the job actually achieves are extremely far apart, but most people weirdly don't seem to mind? The post-2007 trend of large corporations justifying themselves to their employees with social impact buzz words like sustainability and diversity seems to me deeply personally unsatisfying, because clearly these things are not the actual priorities of large corporations, compared to an old school Adam Smith/Wall Street "seeking profit is to the benefit of all" but I may be wrong there. One thing I'd like to look more into after your review is the Marxist and post-Marxist theory of alienated labor which feels relevant and might be due for a rehabilitation away from post-structuralist humanities academia.
I imagine that the political angle would be alienating for some, but I was fine with it and felt this was an inherently political topic. All claims were justified and seemed to be coming from a place of knowledge and openness.
Honestly, if you can find any other books worth reading on this topic let me know.
"Adam Smith/Wall Street "seeking profit is to the benefit of all""
Interestingly Smith seemed to be keenly aware that profit (especially rent) != social utility. That passage about the baker baking not out of the goodness of his heart.... is basically the only time he mentions the idea that selfish ends can track the public good as far as I remember. But Wealth of Nations has hundreds of pages about how landlords only extract value rather than creating it, service jobs also only consume value, Mercantilist governments confuse currency/exchange value for real wealth/use value, and that strange section about musicians.
It seems like mainstream economics has actually regressed, or just forgotten about this subject since the classical economists to me.
Okay, this was a cool review that really changed my perception of the bullshit jobs idea, which I had previously dismissed (I started this review looking forward to you tearing it a new one!) Thank you for knocking down my unearned confidence.
I disagree that your three categories of jobs are BS jobs.
In the fist two cases I think you are undervalueing the extent two which those categories of jobs grease the skids of the economy to keep it going. Maybe the USSR has fewer "changers," but it was also a vastly less efficient system. And using the US's Healthcare system as a point of comparison is aiming at a real outlier of market capitalism. Healthcare is particularly bad at being run through market mechanisms because demand is so inelastic (often the choice us to die) and it is so hard for the customer to evaluate the products. In top of that, we have a dumb system where the consumer generally isn't actually paying - I choose a job, that provides health insurance that pays for my medical care. I don't even get to pick my carrier directly, let alone have a real incentive to shop around for cheaper care.
With respect to rickshaws, I think you are ignoring comparative advantage. Maybe I can clean my house as well or better than a maid, but I can be a lawyer better than a maid, so it's better for both of us for me to make money as a lawyer and then pay some portion of that money to.a maid to free up my time to be a lawyer.
"the USSR has fewer "changers," but it was also a vastly less efficient system."
Think I agree that it was changers that made the West more efficient than the Soviets, except for healthcare like you mentioned, where the central planners do seem to outperform the market.
Changing jobs have hugely expanded within the West since 1980 though and I'm not sure that reflects proportionate real gains in efficiency. Also theoretically, if you could run a Soviet style system as efficiently as a market economy I think it could be done using many fewer planners than the market uses changers.
"With respect to rickshaws, I think you are ignoring comparative advantage."
I think the idea of rickshawing does capture something that comparative advantage doesn't, although there's obviously overlap. A rickshaw pulling a crippled, but otherwise very productive person, is clearly mainly comparative advantage. But if the rickshaw pulls someone who could walk though, yes it's providing convenience, but it still seems economically irrational, the combined productivity of the two people could be higher if the passenger walked themselves and freed up the labour of the rickshaw puller.
I appreciate your take on the matter without Graeber’s token anti-capitalist slant.
Stepping back, I would say that over the last few centuries we have seen the world transform from one where families are pretty much self sufficient yet not very productive, to one where we are extremely productive due to giant complex adaptive networks of specialization and scale. On net, we are about 30X more productive than before, in total.
However, massive networks create the need for bureaucracy and various arms races to work well. Large networks also allow people to discover ways to pretend to add value while actually freeloading some or all of the time. In other words, large networks are the solution, but also create the potential for some of these BS jobs.
Capitalism/freed markets thus are over the long haul both the solution and to a lesser extent the problem. BS jobs are a negative externality of the breakthrough of the modern world.
Graeber concentrates on the negative externality while ignoring the 800 pound gorilla of higher living standards, as well as the idea that it is competition and arms races and creative destruction which sculpt the process into more productive channels over time.
I'm not sure I can explain it more thoroughly than I did in the review, but basically I think of changers as being the jobs that only exist as a by-product of the market system that organises the rest of the economy. Things like banking, insurance, trading, estate agents, accounting etc.
I think it's logical that there would be more BS jobs under less competitive market conditions., and more when market conditions reward rent seeking over productive investment. I think the policy recommendations would be more around reducing monopoly/oligopoly and taxing/discouraging zero-sum type activities.
Even if you strip away a lot of stupidity and bureaucracy, there will probably be need for baseline levels of accounting, facilities management, records management, etc. For any organization. And it's probably better for everyone if those kinds of tasks are handled by "flunkies" who are good at those jobs and like them, vs. the one primary expert (doctor, psychologist, engineer, company owner) doing it all themselves. It's good for them to know how, but it's not just power tripping to have someone else do some of those jobs for them.
I’m sorry I got to this weeks late. My personal life has been a bit hectic lately.
I enjoyed the review a lot, in particular because it’s a question I’ve thought about before. Primarily with two jobs: accountants and lawyers. Taxes are necessary for any functioning government, but here in the US, they are incredibly dense and complex and I’ve thought about how we have people who spend their lives learning made up rules just so that other people can maneuver around those rules.
The same applies to lawyers. Any functioning government needs laws, but again, here in the US, they’re quite complex and require a lot of studying in order to navigate around. They aren’t written to be user friendly. They’re often deliberately opaque.
Imagine I told you I was going to make a deliberately difficult set of rules. And then if you don’t follow the rules I’m going to put you in a cage. But I’m going to make the rules thousands of pages long. They’re open source. But they might take years of study to learn. And if you break the rules…cage. Then if you don’t want to go to the cage, you have to hire people to keep you out of the cage. But they’re effectively in a union because unless they go through an official approval process then you can’t hire them. It would sound crazy, but that’s how our system works.
I also wonder if it partially is coming true. At least among men in the US, we have labor force participation rates comparable to the Great Depression. They aren’t living particularly happy lives, most are addicted to opioids. But the fact that we don’t need them to work, and the economy is still at record highs for GDP shows that productivity is higher.
It kept my interest and I enjoyed the little pieces of humor throughout. That’s not something I’m good at yet, but should try to improve on. I’m also not turned off by the political angle, but rather enjoyed that.
I have two main suggestions to improve this:
1) I do think that it could be trimmed down. A lot of the ACX reviews are 8 - 12k words and this is nowhere near that length, so maybe my personal preference is disjoint from the other ACX readers, but I’d prefer a very strong 2 - 3k words versus a decent 6k words.
2) I would question whether this book was worth reviewing in the first place:
"Graeber also doesn’t have much in the way of evidence to support his central thesis: that a lot of work in the modern world really serves no purpose, which is an incredibly bold claim to make mostly unsupported. " and “I wouldn’t say Graeber really broadened my understanding of why some jobs are BS, and he doesn’t do a good job proving that many jobs are pointless, but he’s certainly opened my mind to the possibility.” - That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement. I guess that you could write an entertaining review of a bad book, but in general, it’s easier to write a good review of a good book.
A lot of reviews make me want to read the book. This was an interesting discussion of a topic I'm curious about, but it convinced me to not read the book. If his book had had more supporting evidence for his case, then that would have given you more meat to discuss.
I'm pretty sure I read this in the initial voting round, but gave up halfway through. My thoughts at the time were something like "this isn't bad, but it feels very scattered and somewhat under-edited. I don't think I'm going to get a good sense of the book's ideas, and I don't have a positive indication that the author's ideas are compelling enough to make it worth the read." I didn’t end up rating it for that reason–after reading, I probably would’ve given it a 4 or 5.
Overall I thought it needed work. The summary of the book is pretty slim, and didn't give me a good sense of why you and others seemed to like it. The main points about the book I took away were: "Graeber doesn't really support his thesis with any data," and "here are some types of bullshit jobs." I assume the book is more complicated and compelling, but I didn’t get a sense of that from your review, which is something that makes me like/dislike a review.
Most of the review seemed to be thoughts inspired by the book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but they felt underdeveloped. Perhaps this is because I'm broadly pro-capitalism--I generally disagree with many of the points you made, and the counterarguments that came to mind didn't feel addressed in the text.
The tone was conversational, which led me to feeling like I'd probably enjoy having a friendly argument with you about this stuff, but without the ability to say "hold on, what about..." I was mostly just frustrated.
On the ideas: I used to be extremely sympathetic to the idea that many jobs were bullshit. I have been a duct-taper and a box-ticker, and have worked for taskmasters. At the time, I thought this was awful. "These sorts of jobs are the problem with the world!" I thought to myself. As I get older, I'm becoming convinced that dysfunctional organizations are simply the default result (I think maybe there's a gwern post to this effect somewhere). Many of the co-workers I've had at the most BS workplaces were intelligent, hard-working people who nevertheless had no desire to change the processes or structures that were causing issues. They had become comfortable and adapted to it, and in their mind, the cost of changing that was too high.
You seem to be a Marxist. It seems to me that flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters could all exist in planned economies. They did in the USSR--I believe that people were paid to do literally useless work in order to fulfill full employment requirements.*
I think the issue is deeper: how do you create societies where people will not accept bullshit jobs, or view them as low-status or immoral?
Are you part of the review group btw? This feels more candid than the other feedback I've had.
"counterarguments that came to mind didn't feel addressed in the text." I'd definitely like to hear them, if you've got the time.
"I think the issue is deeper: how do you create societies where people will not accept bullshit jobs, or view them as low-status or immoral?"
I did wonder if some kind of bottom up approach could work, but a society where your peers were judging the usefulness of your job and shame/praise you for it seems pretty dystopian to me. And I don't trust ordinary people to have a nuanced concept of what constitutes bs, online discussions about useless jobs fairly often devolve into complaining about about artists/philosophers etc., nothing grounded in political economy.
"soviet factory owners would "hoard" workers"
I can believe that. From what I've read, Gosplan did a poor job of estimating things like "how much output should we expect from plant X, given the resources available to them." And just modelled different plants as being interchangeable even if one was bigger/had more workers etc. There are also stories about managers deliberately sabotaging their own older machines in secret, so that the planning office would send them replacements of a newer more powerful model, to make it easier to meet quotas.
"dysfunctional organizations are simply the default result"
Yeah, reducing social dysfunction is difficult, I'd say that's the big lesson from the 20th century (for Marxists especially). To some extent it probably is just unavoidable, but one of the main points I tried to make in the review is that bs jobs are much more common now than they were in the past in the West, and much more common in the West than e.g. China, maybe even the USSR. If Graeber's right that it's ~40% of the workforce, that's arguably the most serious economic dysfunction in history. It does seem like this problem has surpassed normal levels of economic irrationality, and the examples form other societies suggest it should be possible to address it.
Yeah, part of the review group. I joined after the initial formation so I missed out on having my review critiqued, but I like reading these reviews and commenting, so I slid in.
I'm sorry if the review wasn't constructive– part of that is I think a lot of others covered some of the good qualities, so I didn't make a point of recapping stuff I thought was good. I think it's clear that you've written something thought provoking that others generally enjoyed.
Counterarguments:
Another commentator pointed out that your critique of rickshawing is in some sense just a critique of comparative advantage, which seems like a flaw in the categorization: if any work that someone could do themselves is a bullshit job, all unskilled labor is a bullshit job. This feels like a questionable conclusion.
The implication that being a waiter and restaurants are bullshit jobs also seems off. I think you've made an interesting point that hiring a maid and going out to eat aren't necessarily categorically different, but I'm not sure what to make of that. Paying to avoid drudgery or have a luxurious experience feels like a pretty fundamental human inclination. It feels questionable to throw shade at that. To me it feels very similar to someone calling an artist or philosopher pointless. It's not strictly necessary for human survival, but it makes life more enjoyable.
In terms of increasing corporate lawyers and similar zero sum jobs: I agree this is probably bad, but the implication that more planned economies would have less of this didn't track for me. There are still dysfunctional zero sum resources competitions in that world, you're just now pleading your case to the distributor of quotas and resources instead of fighting it out in the courtroom.
Soviet economy
Thanks, that was interesting. Do you have a source recommendation for learning more about how the Soviet planned economy functioned? Most of my understanding of it is hazy and it seems fascinating, so I'd like to read more.
Judging bullshit jobs:
I'm not advocating for public shaming or anything. Consider that we already do this already, probably in the wrong direction. Trades are in short supply in the usa partially because they are low prestige and most young people were encouraged to get degrees. I used to work in software development, now I work with my hands. I get *very* different reactions now when I tell people what I do, almost all for the worse. I would wager that many "bullshit jobs" are higher prestige than many trades, which is a problematic incentive structure unrelated to economics.
Bullshit jobs are a big problem:
I got the impression from one of the first sections that the 40% number was just asking people if they thought their jobs were bs. I agree that if 40% think their jobs are bs that is a real issue–but I think there are many explanations that feel plausible for that: bosses are shittier, workplace cultures are more toxic, people are less happy in general, messaging about how important your work should be has changed, etc. I think you're right that some piece is probably increased alienation (in the Marxist sense) as we moved away from manufacturing and towards office work…but I think there are other explanations.
Thanks for the questions and response–like I said above I think you've done a great job of sparking conversation about the topic, and I definitely appreciate what you were doing in the review more after thinking about it in more depth.
No worries. It was constructive, structuring essays and explaining concepts clearly do seem to be things I struggle with. I think because a group like this has repeated interactions people start to consider their relations with the rest of the group, at least more than they would be on more transient comment threads, so there's a bit of a bias in favour of positive comments and against criticism to avoid seeming unfriendly or whatever. Probably having more criticism enabling norms would help people improve their writing faster.
The soviet-machines thing is from "Red Plenty", not sure if I can recommend the book as an efficient way to learn about soviet planning though, it's structured as several fictionalised accounts of mangers/workers/theorists in different position of the system.
Maybe pirate the book and see if the first chapter on Kantorovich captures your interest? Also there's a review of it on SSC, Scott's very positive about the book and gets tantalisingly close to some arguments I think make a strong case for planning.
In general I'd say the best books about the Soviet system are books about the theory of planning (or markets) that only refer to the USSR as an example of whatever general principles they're talking about. Books specifically about the soviet economy don't usually delve much into the economic theory in my experience, or they have an implicit theoretical perspective that's not always the most illuminating or the one the soviets themselves would have held. I'd recommend "Towards a New Socialism" in that category.
I think the idea of rickshawing does capture something that comparative advantage doesn't, although there's obviously overlap. A rickshaw pulling a crippled, but otherwise very productive person, is clearly mainly comparative advantage. But if the rickshaw pulls someone who could walk though, yes it's providing convenience, but it still seems economically irrational, the combined productivity of the two people could be higher if the passenger walked themselves and freed up the labour of the rickshaw puller.
Pretty interesting that you switched from software to manual labour. I've thought about maybe doing something similar (mainly just because desk work is really tedious), especially since AI might soon force a move.
Thanks for the recs--I've added "Red Plenty" to my reading list.
I'd be happy to expand on my experience if you're interested. It was absolutely the right move for me at the time, but as I near my thirties the costs that were easily dismissed at 25 feel more significant.
Well, Citizen Penrose, I should tell you at the outset that I’m probably among the hardest-to-engage readers this review is ever going to get. My whole life I have avoided courses and books about recent history, politics, and economics. I think my aversion has something to do with how these subjects always stir up my indignation and desire to figure out what’s the *right* way to run the world, while at the same time giving me utter clarity about the impossibility of my having any impact on events, politics, policies etc. at the national or world level. So not only do my eyes start trying to glaze over really early on in reading about one of these subjects, but also, even if I can blink away the glaze, I have no mental hooks to hang the new material on. I don’t know much about the 2 world wars, what Marxism is, what transpired in the Soviet Union in the 20th century, etc. It’s embarrassing.
OK, so despite my aversion to your subject, I managed to hang in reasonably well with you for a lot of this review. You write in a very natural, conversational way, and I liked your mini-humor. Overall, it was sort of like having a long, beery conversation at a pub with a friend about bullshit jobs — is there such a thing? Yeah? OK, so wtf is it that makes a job a bullshit job? Like an actual beery conversation, the train of thought wasn’t deeply organized but kind of meandered, knit together by coming back recurrently to certain ideas. It was also knit together by my feeling, especially at the beginning, that you were noticing a lot of the same stuff I was, so I felt like we thought in compatible ways. There were several times when I thought, “yeah, but what about such-and-such? “ and then in the next paragraph you’d make the same point. I can’t remember them all, but the first one was my thinking that people’s feeling that their job was pointless wasn’t a reasonable measure of whether it was actually of no use to society — then right away you pointed that out. Another was Graeber’s 5 categories of bullshit jobs. I was looking at “Duct Tape,” and thinking that in some situations duct-taping the problem for now was a smart solution — whereupon you said the same.
I have to say that about halfway through, though, my interest flagged. But I’m not sure how much of that to attribute to your review itself, and how much to my difficulty taking on this kind of subject. I can tell you the things that would have helped keep me engaged, but bear in mind I’m someone who needs a lot of hand-holding and frequent candy treats to stick with a task of this kind. One thing that would have kept me engaged would have personal anecdotes — from you, from Graeber, from anywhere really —about having a bullshit job: what it’s like, but also what exactly, makes it bullshit. Is it that there’s no real task for you — the point of having you at the job is that your presence makes a certain kind of impression? Are you eye candy (tits, etc.)? Are you snob candy (i.e., Harvard or whatnot degree holder)? Is it that you work hard, but at a company that’s a bullshit-producer, actively contributing to the great mass of meaningless communications like spam, etc? My interest would have especially been held by poignant or hilarious anecdotes about life at a bullshit job. Sort of like watching The Office, you know?
The other thing that would have held my attention would have been a review organized around a taxonomy of different definitions of what constitutes a bullshit job. For instance, early on you point out one category difference: Subjectively bullshit job (worker feels it’s pointless) and objectively bullshit jobs (makes no difference to society, or does actual harm). Then, regarding the second category, there seem to be some thinkers who regard certain kinds of bullshit jobs as an inevitable by-product of capitalism, others who don’t. And then within the inevitable-by-product group, there are subcategories. And, of course, you might have proposed your own definition of what makes a job a bullshit job, or what way of setting up society is guaranteed to generate a certain kind of bullshit job.
Still, even though my attention to the second part of the review was less good, the review as a whole did get me thinking about the subject. You asked whether any of us readers have had bullshit jobs. I think I have 3 that qualify. One was working, as an undergrad, as an assistant to the secretary at the tiny History of Science department. There really wasn’t much for me to do, so mostly I just hung around and chatted with them. One was running an SAT prep course. My actual work day involved lots of real work on curriculum development and teacher training, but in retrospect I think SAT prep companies are bullshit. I doubt that our course raised students’ scores much. And, to the extent that it did, it did harm by giving those kids an unfair advantage. The third was a position at a psychiatric hospital where I had worked for several years as a psychologist, treating patients. I got promoted to a sort of management role where I supervised professional newbies (that was fine, I knew how to do that) but was also supposed to improve our treatment model of eating disorders. I had plenty of ideas about how to do that, but every new idea I came up with made some part of the staff buttsore. It seemed that there was some sort of consensus-building that needed doing first ?— or maybe I just needed to have the head guy announce to people that I was going to make some revisions to how we did things and to please go with them and give them a good try. Anyway, I hated the “management” part of the job, and never accomplished one damn piece of management.
You asked about your writing. I think you write the way people speak — it’s less precise and organized than essays usually are. I think that matters less in conversation, because we have facial expression and gestures to clarify any vagueness in what we say, plus we have the pleasure of each other’s company to make up for the messiness with which we present our ideas. So I think that unless you are very wedded to being a conversational style writer, you should think about tightening up your prose. Here’s an example of what I mean. In your first paragraph the reader gets hit with about 5 ideas, and it’s not really clear how they connect — and what point they’re leading up to:
-you’re fascinated by the old Soviet tractor factories
-some of the fiercest fighting took place at the one in Stalingrad
-tractors made it possible to produce a lot more food with a lot less work
-in the old days people had to dig potatoes by hand and there were famines
-workers at the tractor plants would have known for sure their work was valuable.
So encountering those ideas, I wasn’t exactly confused — just had no idea what the different ideas had to do with each other, and where we were going with all of them. For instance, I didn’t know whether you were saying you were fascinated by the factories because of the fierce fighting at the Stalingrad one, or because they changed agriculture so much, or for some other reason. I didn’t see what the fierce fight at the Stalingrad factory had to do with the way the factory had changed agriculture. Etc. In retrospect, of course, I see that what you were doing was giving the reader a picture of a workplace where the work is the exact *opposite* of a bullshit job. You’re doing that as a lead-in to the your jokey point about some especially bullshitty jobs in modern England.
I think you need, in that first paragraph, to order the 5 ideas you present in a way that makes clearer the connection between them, and that guides the reader through your train of thought. Below I’ve re-ordered them. Added a couple of details that you didn’t mention, but that I surmised were true. Biggest one was that workers at Stalingrad fight fought to protect the factory — assumed that was case since your point about ad agency workers in Britain is clearly that they would not have any interest in fighting to protect their ad agency.
So here’s the re-ordered version of your opening paragraph, and I hope you’re not offended that I did this!
I suppose most people don’t think of factories as interesting places, but the Stalingrad Tractor Plant holds a fascinating place in history, at least for me. (I promise this gets more interesting) These early tractor plants made it possible to mechanize agriculture, resulting in a huge leap in productivity over pre-industrial farming. Then when World War II began the Stalingrad Plant made tanks thought to be among the best in the world. Anyone working there would have had absolutely zero fucking doubts about what an immense contribution their work was making to society. And older workers, especially, who would have remembered harvesting potatoes by hand, or the famines of the Tsarist and earlier Soviet periods, must have had a tangible sense of mankind’s making progress. Some of the fiercest fighting during the Battle of Stalingrad took place in the city's tractor plant, with plant workers among those defending it.
Reading about the Eastern Front, I can’t help imagining the equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad taking place in modern Britain. Afterwards there would be tales of the storming of credit management offices, corporate law firms, or investment banks. And would the employees of these institutions have had a similar sense that of mankind making progress at their workplace? Would they have defended their offices valiantly?
Nice job! I enjoyed the review. I'll start by answering your questions, then add some other thoughts. The overall quality of the writing was good, and it didn't lose my interest at any point. I never felt like you wander off and I wanted you to "just get on with it".
Some of the humor I liked, and some of it I didn't. As Scott says, it works well, but if it looks like you're forcing it, it can really fail. I didn't particularly like the parentheticals in the beginning. In the first paragraph, you promise that you're going somewhere - I trusted you were going somewhere, so I would just take that out. And the third paragraph about being too sentimental about Stalinist USSR - I would have taken that out too. But other humor I really liked. The image about buying tractors is great. "If Bullshit Jobs had been written by an economist it might have mentioned any economic theory whatsoever" is great [I lost the formatting, but you know what I mean.] This is a great and humorous (microhumorous?) paragraph:
Building on Smith, Marx defines “unproductive labour” as [insert 3000 word definition about social relations, surplus-value, class society, modes of production, constant and variable capital, accumulation, dialectics, commodity production, M-C-M, exchange and use values, superstructures, materialism, and detailing all 12 possible interpretations]. The key insight though is that capitalism has transaction costs.
I think the case for BS cases was only so-so, but I thought you were suggesting that the book only made a so-so case, too, right? I went into it believing it and Graeber’s survey didn't convince me of anything. I believe the concept because of my experience; there's no way simply pointing to a couple surveys with undefined terms would have convinced me if I wasn't already convinced.
The political angle didn't seem alienating at all.
Some other comments:
I know how much work these are and that you probably went through it many times, but definitely run it through grammarly one last time before submitting. There were a decent number of typos that could be easily avoided, and that detracts for me.
You should link to Scott's post that you mentioned.
Overall, this made me less inclined to read the book. If he doesn't prove his case any more than you say he does, it doesn't seem worth reading to me. I also didn't agree with his framing and definitions of BS jobs. Throwing all of education into "BS jobs" seems wrong to me. As I understand it, the signaling theory applies to post-secondary education. I don't see how someone could think teaching kids the three Rs is a BS job. And I don't think you (or Graeber) defended that notion well enough. Graeber uses broader definitions than I would, but then that's a definition game, and not something particularly interesting. Btw, none of this is to say your review isn't accurate or good, just that after reading it I don't feel a desire to read the book myself.
I liked that you really engaged with the topic. You seemed really interested in it (maybe more so than the author) and really wanting to dig into it. Maybe that's where your political angle came it? I don't know, but it didn't bother me. It just made you seem interested and therefore interesting to read.
You used a bit of jargon. Probably many readers will know most of it, but certainly, some won't. It's always a balance of how to handle this. It didn't strike me as too much but I wouldn't be surprised if someone who didn't know much about economics got lost a couple times.
Another thought: I like the informal style of many ACX reviews, but I felt yours was a tad too informal for me. For example, I didn't think dropping the f-bomb added enough value to be worth it. Formality in writing is a spectrum, and, fwiw, to my tastes I would prefer to nudge you slightly to the "more formal" side.
Some background first: I had bought Bullshit Jobs a couple of years ago. I had started by reading a chapter in the middle, because friends were organizing a chapter-by-chapter discussion group. I found it interesting, the examples were compelling, and I did think, that bs jobs certainly existed. But then I couldn't really get myself to read much more ... I found the examples got weaker rather than better, and I got the impression I didn't learn much more in addition when trying other parts. Also, I found in public discourse bs jobs were an overused concept – a lot of jobs were termed bs jobs that I wouldn't perceive as such.
So when I realized you had a review on the book, I was happy I'd have a chance to get a better insight into the book, and I was curious to get to know more about the content I had missed out on. I was also slightly sceptical if bs jobs were as common as the book suggested. I mostly thought about bs jobs probably in terms of the effects of bad incentives.
Here my comments to your questions:
The overall quality of the writing, did the review lose your interest at any point?
At the beginning the text captured and kept my attention, because you clearly had a strong opinion, and were not shy to voice it. In other words, I felt you had something to say about the topic, which I liked.
Later, I was sometimes lost in the text. In several places I didn't feel sure, what argument you were currently presenting to me at a specific moment. I enjoy Scott's texts A LOT, for one reason because he gives me the opportunity to read in 'leisure time mode' and still learn a lot at the same time. That means I can stop anytime if I want to ponder a thought, but otherwise I basically never have to stop to wonder what is meant, how this connects to what has been said before and such. I must admit that I didn't fully get that kind of experience from your text.
For one, I'm not an economist, and even though I could quickly present an intro to all of the theories you mention towards the end, several times I would have to concentrate more than I did, or e.g. have a second look at the sentence, to really know what you were talking about … and why.
I selected a bit I stumbled upon: „The portion of the stock market not devoted to speculation aggregates knowledge to direct investment. Investment banks connect venture capital to entrepreneurs.“ This is a lot of economic jargon.
One slightly different case: when you added something like 'the whole of education' for the first time, I honestly expected a joke. One, which I didn't really get. When you mentioned 'if you accept the signalling theory of education' I began to suspect that it wasn't a joke … but I don't know the signalling theory of education, and hence this whole thing about education showing up there was mostly confusing to me. At least until you provided a bit more background in the last chapter.
Also, important ideas that were build upon later were introduced in passing-by, like your very important definition of 'changers' or initially the five different types of bs jobs. If there are important concepts which I shall remember, I would appreciate a bit more 'meat' and emphasis in their introduction.
Some smaller points in the same direction:
I think more 'automatic' clarity on where a thought starts and where it ends, would have also been useful to me. I'm not thinking of the content of what you're saying, I'm mostly thinking of language-related and other stylistic devices that make this self-evident, including maybe using paragraphs more towards this goal in mind.
Last bit: when I had to write stuff for publication I was advised to describe the main bit of any graph or figure also in in the text. Maybe you did this, but if so probably much shorter than I'm used to.
Other things were working well, like the chapters with clear headlines, some diversity via pictures and graphs, and so on. Overall, I think I should have taken a bit more time to read the review in the first place. As it is, I feel I needed to read it a second time to be able to really get full value out of what you're presenting.
I hope this didn't come across as too direct. Sorry, I'm German, we still believe we do others a favour by doing this. (Please everybody, if any of this sounded harsh or very critical, which was clearly not the intention, please let me know.) If I had one wish for this review: read it over three times with three different personas in mind, e.g. a 22 year old anthropologist from Sri Lanca, and check, if those personas would easily get all of your ideas … and then adjust accordingly. Yes, you're writing for ACX readership, but maybe it's a bit more diverse than you had in mind?
One of Scott's writing suggestions is to use "micro-humour", which I did, I'm wondering if I over did it.
The pic with 'Psst …' put a smile on my face, and I also really liked this one „but even if corporate law was nationalised and corporate lawyers all pursued a common goal (justice you’d hope)“.
The following was too long for me … three first terms in the brackets would have been fine. I don't want a joke to disturb my reading flow and getting through 4 lines of weird terms (even if deliberately weird) did that. Sth. like this would have had a more positive effect on me: „Building on Smith, Marx defines “unproductive labour” as [insert 3000 word definition about social relations, surplus-value and class society]. The same principle goes for other places … to me the humour worked fine, if it didn't take from my reading flow. As I indicated above, I'm not sure I did recognize the humour as such in every single instance.
Was the political angle too blatant/alienating for anyone?
No, I liked the angle. As stated initially, I found your personal thoughts on this very interesting. It's a strong point, and one that is not easily 'learned', so I hope you'll continue to make use of it in all kinds of texts.
Bs jobs ?
I will still try to say a bit more on your bs jobs related questions later. For now: one thing that stuck with me was the thought that 'if bs jobs are so prevalent, it's really a problem'. I guess I used to read the examples by Graber initially as horrible, sometimes amusing outliers, and less so as a 'persistent problem we should think about more'.
Not at all. Reflecting on it I think you're completely right that there are some problems with clarity I hadn't considered, and it's useful feedback. That sentence about the stock market is especially unlike something Scott would write.
I'm surprised that so far everyone who's commented already seems to have given bs jobs a fair amount of thought. I think I've only seen the subject discussed a handful of times in online political discussions, virtually never in the media, and Scott himself has barely touched on it. It's super under-discussed in my experience, given how potentially important it is.
I'm really interest to know whether you've experienced bs jobs living in Germany, or if they're a prominent part of life there. My understanding is that Germany has taken the opposite approach to how-to-be-a-21st-century-European-economy to Britain, and is much more manufacturing orientated, and I very strongly feel it's the "service" sector in Britain that's made bs jobs such a salient fact of life here. If anywhere in the Westerern world was immunised from bs jobs I'd expect it to be Germany.
Yes, Germany and the bs jobs, that's an interesting question. I've hoped for the past 3 days to find some calm moment to write a response ... but for the moment, I'm very busy. But I still intend to add some thoughts on this later. Cheers
"It's super under-discussed in my experience, given how potentially important it is."
Agreed.
To me it's like... imagine you're in a sharehouse and someone has a moment of clarity where they point out that like 10%-50% of your regular household chores achieve literally nothing. One housemates job is to move boxes from one cupboard to another once each week, while anothers job is to move them back.
And then the other housemates reactions are "eh, maybe, but what can we do? There needs to be work for everyone".
Politicians are elected by promising to add more jobs, people are worried about AI taking jobs, and I worry that those sorts of attitudes are what will continue to generate bullshit jobs right up until we're all just moving boxes back and forth instead of enjoying a fully automated utopia.
We need people talking about what work is useful and not, with an eye on a future off-ramp for the concept of work as we know it.
I had the same sort of reaction as you to the bullshit jobs concept - it rang true to me but I felt Greabers definitions didn't quite nail it. Your contribution is good, but I would draw the circle a little different to you too. It makes me wonder if Bullshit Jobs is a concept that everyone nods their heads to but no-one is actually talking about quite the same thing.
My definition of a bullshit job would be something like "a job that could disappear with negligible loss to utility". I would include a lot of industries that produce luxury products. Eg. if the concept of luxury watches disappeared from the world there would be almost no utility lost. Same with billion dollar luxury yachts. I don't think these products even make their owners measurably happier.
I think your addition of rickshaws is a good one, but I wouldn't necessarily put housecleaners and restaurants in that category. Consider that a 40hr work week is really more like 60hrs if you include domestic chores. From that perspective house cleaners do shrink people's work week. Only those who can afford it, unfortunately, but it's still adding value.
I do wonder if my work is bullshit. I've made games that have received lots of positive reviews, with some being especially effusive. I wonder if it's a zero sum game though - would those people have been just as happy to play a different game if mine didn't exist? Or to watch TV if there were no games? I'm not really sure. It's certainly more bullshit than my partners job as a nurse. I've since started doing more educational work which feels more impactful to me.
Assorted feedback (including responses to your questions):
- it could use a proof read, there were a few typos
- I liked your extra research and discussion other sources. I would like to do more of that next time
- the humour worked well for the most part, but try to not force it. There were one or two early lines that didn't come across as natural to me
- there were a few claims presented without justification
- I didn't lose interest at any point
- I wasn't bothered by any political slant. If anything I would have liked to see it come through stronger
- I had read Greabers original essay before this review. I feel a bit more enlightened after reading your thoughts but I still feel like I want to read something that concretely defines the problem and offers some solutions (even pie-in-the-sky ones).
For what it's worth I wouldn't consider game dev to be bs (or any other kind of entertainment production). Broadly speaking people do enjoy their preferred form of entertainment at least slightly more than the next best alternative, so I'd assume markets do a decent job of ensuring the marginal gains in enjoyment balance out the extra resources expended.
Education on the other hand seems very bs heavy as a sector to me. I don't t know if you hold the typical ACX reader views that it's mostly signalling, environmental interventions generally can't achieve much over the long term, etc.
I'd also really like to have a solid theoretical definitions of bs jobs, and one that's backed up with a whole book's worth of date + loads of clever statistical inference to quantify what portion of different jobs should be considered bs, similar to what Caplan managed for the education sector, but covering the entire economy.
Demian Pacheco's main problem with the review in his comment also seemed to be that it didn't provide that.
Probably that's just way to ambitious for a 6k word essay though, I'd expect a book like that to be more like 1k pages. The Case Against Education is 400 pages covering just one sector of the economy.
I think many bs jobs fit quite neatly in to neoclassical econ categories, like externalities, public choice failures etc. which roughly align with some of Graeber's categories, and can be defined quite precisely.
Luxury goods also strike me as strongly bs. But a definition of bs that included them would need to be very broad. A definition that depended on claims like "we should give people what's best for them not what they want.", and "resources should be distributed to maximise utility (i.e. very equally)". I think those claims are true, but accepting them would have really sweeping implications for economics as a whole, and moves away from a more value free kind of scientific theories.
Maybe I could have pushed this angle more strongly/more convincingly, since it doesn't seem to have much of an impression so far, but I very much feel that something like Marx's concept of unproductive labour (maybe the "changing" idea I proposed) is the right framework here. It's broad enough to captures a lot of what intuitively feels bs, but can still be defined fairly narrowly and objectively, and is the key insight for understanding modern "service" economies imo.
Yeah, I'm not sure how far you could/should have gone with solidifying the problem or solution given the topic and the medium. I would just say that the reviews that I feel are the absolute strongest are ones that leave me with a really clarified and coherent understanding of one or more of:
1. what the problem is
2. why the problem exists
3. what a potential solution is or might look like in theory
To the degree that I feel like I could (and am excited to) explain it to a friend.
Maybe with a 6k essay you could tackle one of these, while a 20k essay could tackle them all (which is what past winners have done, though I personally generally prefer the reviews on the shorter side).
You did a great job of covering the content of the book and in adding your own thoughts and research, and making it an enjoyable read. It just didn't crystalize any concepts for me a way that left me bursting to blurt them back out to anyone who will listen. To get it across that high bar I think might have taken either:
1. some clever restructuring of the content you had
2. focusing on getting a really strong thesis on one of the points I listed above
3. a different book, if it proves impossible with this particular topic
I'm not sure which.
But anyway, this is just me brainstorming my best guesses as to what could improve it, I doubt I could have done better myself.
I was being vague saying eduction, it's more like training simulations. It's a bit niche, which is why it feels more impactful to me. I'm not sure I do agree with that take on education anyway. Certainly there's signalling at the higher levels, but kids need to learn to read and do basic math and other things to function in the world, and I've seen and felt the impact of good teachers in my life. To me "environmental interventions generally can't achieve much over the long term" is so contrary to my observations that I wonder if there's a similar effect going on as with Scott's recent post on the significance of SSRI effects.
Bringing it back to BS jobs though, it seems to me that education is similar to entertainment in that any individual entering into the sector is unlikely to be impactful, but there is value in finding good teachers and matching them with compatible students. Not that existing current systems are suited to that, but sometimes it happens by luck.
I think it just shows that "BS jobs" is only ever going to be an arbitrary cut-off point on a scale of low to high impact jobs.
This was an enjoyable read! I already find the theme important by itself, and your writing kept my interest and made me want to read/discuss the theme further.
There are a few points I noticed that could be improved in the general structure / writing. Rolaran already mentioned some typos, that could be fixed with some proofreading (I'm guilty of that myself). Some ideas presented are split into single-sentence paragraphs, and would flow more if merged into longer paragraphs. And like Rolaran, I felt a bit confused on the section on Smith and Marx, as I didn't know whether you had finished reviewing the content of the title book. Those are minor points that don't really detract so much from my reading, but could be improved on.
The micro-humor (and images etc.) didn't feel overdone to me, and I'm happy you included it, as many of the other reviews in the contest felt quite dry without such variety. I didn't get a few jokes, which I believe would be better with context (
I felt that the review provided a great critique of the book, and its main flaws (such as the lack of an economic approach and a better-founded proof of their existence). This made me crave for a book that's better in this aspect, and made me wish for your review itself to include this kind of analysis. You do provide a bit of this through the cross-textual references and the analysis of the healthcare and housing markets, which is a welcome addition.
Regarding your case for the existence of BS jobs, I already believed they existed, so your review didn't change my mind in that aspect. The way you present the concept seems effective to bring to attention and describe the concept of BS jobs, but I felt it was (just like the book) lacking on more quantitative proof of their existence and a more concrete definition of what they are. I see you acknowledge this at the end (mentioning that there is a big opportunity for someone to write a book about this). It would be golden if you had managed to provide this in the review itself, as we sometimes see Scott (for example) doing. But it's a start and works well to bring the topic to attention as having potential for discussion and exploration.
Some arguments you make would also be better founded by data, and the lack of it might make them a bit grating in the eyes of the reader. For example, when you claim domestic cleaners, private cooks (and restaurants themselves) provide little net-gain to society due to being "rickshaw-ish", but don't account for the ways this might not be true. More data-based arguments would be key here, considering the audience and the economic nature of the topic (which makes it ripe for this kind of analysis).
The political angle didn't feel too alienating for me, but I can't speak for the rest of the audience. The focus on Marx and the Soviet Union did feel a bit outdated though, in the sense that the labor market has changed a lot since then (as you mention, the service industry has grown a lot since then, for example). Here, I believe the references would be richer if they gave more focus to more recent authors and the modern situation. I'm really curious how modern states such as China deal with these issues, and what authors on management, cybernetics, advertising, etc. (as well as modern Marxist authors) have to say about it. Also comes to my mind the Toyota Production System and its seven forms of muda (waste).
Overall, I found it a good review, but it did leave me craving for a more in-depth and data-based analysis of the subject.
Well written, and mostly kept my interest throughout, although I was beginning to worry during the section on Marx's "unproductive labor" that it was going to be about that for the rest of the review instead of the book, but it did circle back there and tie everything together, so it was all fine.
Your use of humor didn't strike me as overbearing, and I enjoyed your "Wanna make some tractors?" picture enough that I sent it to a friend of mine with the type of sense of humor to appreciate it. (His reply: "I'm not supposed to take revolutionary ideo-economic systems from strangers!")
(Do you have a link to Scott talking about microhumor? It's a concept I use in my own writing, though I learned it from a different source, and I'd be curious to read his advice on it (Edit: found it in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/))
The political content didn't particularly throw me out of it. By most rubrics, I am leftist but not Marxist,, but I thought the content from that perspective was well-argued. I think both Smith and Marx focus too much on physical objects for either thinker to be able to account for modern economic activities especially in a "service economy", but you recognized this as well.
"Changers" is probably too generic a term, and it made things a little unclear when also talking about changes in the distribution of the workforce. Perhaps "exchangers" might work better (I also thought of "greasers", for the ones greasing the wheels of corporate machinery?)
A few typos here and there that could be cleaned up, and the classes of BS jobs are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not? Capitalizing them consistently would probably make them stand out.
I may be conflating unrelated things, but would "corporate feudalism" be akin to what corporations try to produce when they pull the "oh no, we're more like a family"? An attempt to ground employee loyalty in a nebulous feeling of social belonging, rather than "I exchange my labor/expertise/what-have-you for a salary, and that's the extent of our relationship".
It seems self-evident to me how UBI would disincent BS jobs at a higher rate than non-BS ones: at present, all jobs, BS or not, can attract employees with, if nothing else, the pressure of "you have to do *something* to get money, or you'll starve and freeze". In theory, UBI takes away that stick, removing one of the main reasons to grit your teeth and tolerate a BS job ("Doing nothing and meeting my needs with UBI vs. BS job that I hate and UBI-plus-wages" is a very different calculus from "Doing nothing and dying from unmet needs vs. BS job that I hate and meeting my needs with wages"). Intrinsically fulfilling jobs, on the other hand, still have the carrot of being intrinsically fulfilling.
My own recent (~5 years) employment history includes both periods of unemployment for three different reasons (which gives me an acute familiarity with how "work ethic" affects societal views of jobs and the people who have them), and a stint of a job that absolutely fits in your "rickshawing" category but that I very adamantly don't think was BS. More on that in its own post later as I need to get some rest (recovering from a medical appointment).
I'll be interested to hear about your rickshawing job.
The corporate family thing probably could fall under Greaber's "corporate feudalism" idea if the higher ups in the corporation genuinely did want to foster family-like relations for their own emotional/status needs and it wasn't just an empty rhetorical device to extract more (useful) work from people.
With regard to UBI, a lot of bs jobs are actually high status/well paid. I couldn't imagine many investment bankers/accountants/corporate lawyers wanting to quit their jobs for UBI (incidentally, another issue I didn't cover is that bs jobs suck up so much talent.) Graeber even claims that useful work is usually less well paid/more unpleasant than bs ones (although he doesn't present any data backing that up), he jokes that you either have a bullshit job or just a shit job. So it might be that UBI would actually disincentives useful work disproportionately.
I avoided emphasising this point too much because I was worried it might alienate the more free-market leaning ACX readers, but bs jobs seem to have have absolutely exploded in numbers since 1980.
Looking at less market orientated economies like contemporary China, the West during the post war soc-dem period, even the USSR, directing work towards useful goals was a problem to some extent, but bs never consumed such a large portion of the economy as it has in modern Britain for example. To my mind, if you accept that bs jobs really are a major issue, that's a strong argument in favour of more conscious planning of the economy beyond redistribution.
I may yet post on the rest of my employment history, but as I was writing it up, the comments on my "rickshaw job" got longer and more fully fleshed-out than I expected, so that'll be its own post now.
For a time, I was working for a food delivery company very similar to Uber Eats. I didn't do any cooking or anything else that required what you'd typically think of as "job-specific skills"; all I did was drive my ordinary car on ordinary public roads to a restaurant, pick up a bag of food, and drive it to an address. Some actual orders I delivered:
1. A burrito the size of my head, to a college guy too stoned to put on a shirt before answering his door
2. A sushi tray, to a woman watching talk shows alone in a living room that was larger than my entire home
3. Three pancakes with fruit, to a senior home resident unable to get out of his bed
4. Two chicken donairs, to an immigrant still living out of his suitcase who spoke very little English
5. Three large assorted pizzas, to a business meeting at our local government office
6. An entire pound of BBQ ribs, to an exotic dancer who had just finished her set
7. A noodle bowl, to an on-shift nurse who could not leave her station for more than thirty seconds
8. McDonalds, to a single mother of three
A lot of the public perception of this job, even among people who were polite to me about it, was that it was a BS job, and I suspect that they thought mostly of customers like 1 and 2 as the bulk of my work (which, to be fair and frank, it was). Here's what I noticed instead.
Sometimes I am simply more able to go to the restaurant and get the food than the people I deliver it to. Customer 3 lacks physical ability to drive to a restaurant; customer 4 lacks means of transport and familiarity with the local language.
Sometimes having me get the food lets someone else do a thing that I absolutely would not be able to do in their place. Customer 5 is running a meeting on a topic I know absolutely nothing about. As for customer 6, I have neither the physical attractiveness to be an appealing poledancer nor the physical co-ordination to avoid injuring someone in the attempt.
In some cases, I'm both more capable of getting the food, and less capable of doing the thing that would otherwise be interrupted to get the food. Customer 7 clearly falls into this, but so does customer 8. I can get to the restaurant alone in my car where she'd have to pack her kids into a van, but odds are that her childcare will be better than the equivalent I would provide.
This is comparative advantage in a *very* direct form. I may be rickshawing, but it's not a BS job: I am very obviously producing utils, and removing me from the system would make things noticeably worse for nearly everyone involved! Even 1 and 2 I think of as, at worst, people using my service who don't strictly need it. But that's an issue, not of the service being BS, but of the only qualification for using it being "do you have money that you want less than you want food brought to you by someone?" That is a critique (I'd even go so far as to say an indictment) of capitalism as a whole, but hardly unique to this job.
Honestly, framing things in this way, I begin to suspect that not just this job, but a lot of jobs that are similarly dismissed as "unnecessary" - including by the people who do them! - are creating an unexpectedly high amount of value, through allowing for specialization in narrower sets of responsibilities. More on that later, I think.
I quite liked this review, kept my interest throughout and I'm probably going to keep thinking about it and read some more books as a follow-up since I think your overall point that this idea is important and under-discussed is true. That's pretty much my criterion for a successful piece of writing, so I think you've succeeded.
The humor was good. I didn't laugh at everything, but did laugh out loud at the "any economic theory whatsoever." I think if anything more space between jokes would help, since they fell a little flatter when closely sequenced together.
I'm convinced that the kind of bullshit jobs you talk about are indeed real and very frustrating. I read the first parts of the book years ago and I remember being confused if Graeber thought the jobs were inherently unproductive and could be eliminated or if they are unproductive consequences of a complex system. I thought Graeber was arguing the former and I see you as arguing the latter, which I find to be defensible and compelling, so overall I think I was convinced that you understood Graeber better.
I think sections IV and V are very strong in this format and I was very convinced you were improving on Graeber's ideas. The basic arguments about planned economies having less of this stuff were surprising and gripping and I'm going to keep thinking about them. The section on rickshawing was also excellent, and a great term for something I've wondered about.
I have worked jobs that meet Graeber's definition, and especially what strikes me is just how murky the actual purpose of so many jobs is. Technological development for example can have real effects on people's lives and economic productivity, but can also be used as a tool in zero-sum budget fights within large semi-feudal organizations. But to win budget fights with technology, one needs to pretend that the technology is going to have a real effect. Most people seem fine with it, but I find it to be quite difficult. It seems clear to me that the stated purpose of a job and what the job actually achieves are extremely far apart, but most people weirdly don't seem to mind? The post-2007 trend of large corporations justifying themselves to their employees with social impact buzz words like sustainability and diversity seems to me deeply personally unsatisfying, because clearly these things are not the actual priorities of large corporations, compared to an old school Adam Smith/Wall Street "seeking profit is to the benefit of all" but I may be wrong there. One thing I'd like to look more into after your review is the Marxist and post-Marxist theory of alienated labor which feels relevant and might be due for a rehabilitation away from post-structuralist humanities academia.
I imagine that the political angle would be alienating for some, but I was fine with it and felt this was an inherently political topic. All claims were justified and seemed to be coming from a place of knowledge and openness.
Hope this helps, great stuff.
Honestly, if you can find any other books worth reading on this topic let me know.
"Adam Smith/Wall Street "seeking profit is to the benefit of all""
Interestingly Smith seemed to be keenly aware that profit (especially rent) != social utility. That passage about the baker baking not out of the goodness of his heart.... is basically the only time he mentions the idea that selfish ends can track the public good as far as I remember. But Wealth of Nations has hundreds of pages about how landlords only extract value rather than creating it, service jobs also only consume value, Mercantilist governments confuse currency/exchange value for real wealth/use value, and that strange section about musicians.
It seems like mainstream economics has actually regressed, or just forgotten about this subject since the classical economists to me.
Okay, this was a cool review that really changed my perception of the bullshit jobs idea, which I had previously dismissed (I started this review looking forward to you tearing it a new one!) Thank you for knocking down my unearned confidence.
I disagree that your three categories of jobs are BS jobs.
In the fist two cases I think you are undervalueing the extent two which those categories of jobs grease the skids of the economy to keep it going. Maybe the USSR has fewer "changers," but it was also a vastly less efficient system. And using the US's Healthcare system as a point of comparison is aiming at a real outlier of market capitalism. Healthcare is particularly bad at being run through market mechanisms because demand is so inelastic (often the choice us to die) and it is so hard for the customer to evaluate the products. In top of that, we have a dumb system where the consumer generally isn't actually paying - I choose a job, that provides health insurance that pays for my medical care. I don't even get to pick my carrier directly, let alone have a real incentive to shop around for cheaper care.
With respect to rickshaws, I think you are ignoring comparative advantage. Maybe I can clean my house as well or better than a maid, but I can be a lawyer better than a maid, so it's better for both of us for me to make money as a lawyer and then pay some portion of that money to.a maid to free up my time to be a lawyer.
"the USSR has fewer "changers," but it was also a vastly less efficient system."
Think I agree that it was changers that made the West more efficient than the Soviets, except for healthcare like you mentioned, where the central planners do seem to outperform the market.
Changing jobs have hugely expanded within the West since 1980 though and I'm not sure that reflects proportionate real gains in efficiency. Also theoretically, if you could run a Soviet style system as efficiently as a market economy I think it could be done using many fewer planners than the market uses changers.
"With respect to rickshaws, I think you are ignoring comparative advantage."
I think the idea of rickshawing does capture something that comparative advantage doesn't, although there's obviously overlap. A rickshaw pulling a crippled, but otherwise very productive person, is clearly mainly comparative advantage. But if the rickshaw pulls someone who could walk though, yes it's providing convenience, but it still seems economically irrational, the combined productivity of the two people could be higher if the passenger walked themselves and freed up the labour of the rickshaw puller.
I appreciate your take on the matter without Graeber’s token anti-capitalist slant.
Stepping back, I would say that over the last few centuries we have seen the world transform from one where families are pretty much self sufficient yet not very productive, to one where we are extremely productive due to giant complex adaptive networks of specialization and scale. On net, we are about 30X more productive than before, in total.
However, massive networks create the need for bureaucracy and various arms races to work well. Large networks also allow people to discover ways to pretend to add value while actually freeloading some or all of the time. In other words, large networks are the solution, but also create the potential for some of these BS jobs.
Capitalism/freed markets thus are over the long haul both the solution and to a lesser extent the problem. BS jobs are a negative externality of the breakthrough of the modern world.
Graeber concentrates on the negative externality while ignoring the 800 pound gorilla of higher living standards, as well as the idea that it is competition and arms races and creative destruction which sculpt the process into more productive channels over time.
What do you mean by “changers” and “changing jobs”? Is that like middlemen?
Besides being confused about that, I enjoyed this review.
I'm not sure I can explain it more thoroughly than I did in the review, but basically I think of changers as being the jobs that only exist as a by-product of the market system that organises the rest of the economy. Things like banking, insurance, trading, estate agents, accounting etc.
Did you come here from Noahpinon btw?
I think it's logical that there would be more BS jobs under less competitive market conditions., and more when market conditions reward rent seeking over productive investment. I think the policy recommendations would be more around reducing monopoly/oligopoly and taxing/discouraging zero-sum type activities.
So, regarding "flunkies":
Even if you strip away a lot of stupidity and bureaucracy, there will probably be need for baseline levels of accounting, facilities management, records management, etc. For any organization. And it's probably better for everyone if those kinds of tasks are handled by "flunkies" who are good at those jobs and like them, vs. the one primary expert (doctor, psychologist, engineer, company owner) doing it all themselves. It's good for them to know how, but it's not just power tripping to have someone else do some of those jobs for them.
I’m sorry I got to this weeks late. My personal life has been a bit hectic lately.
I enjoyed the review a lot, in particular because it’s a question I’ve thought about before. Primarily with two jobs: accountants and lawyers. Taxes are necessary for any functioning government, but here in the US, they are incredibly dense and complex and I’ve thought about how we have people who spend their lives learning made up rules just so that other people can maneuver around those rules.
The same applies to lawyers. Any functioning government needs laws, but again, here in the US, they’re quite complex and require a lot of studying in order to navigate around. They aren’t written to be user friendly. They’re often deliberately opaque.
Imagine I told you I was going to make a deliberately difficult set of rules. And then if you don’t follow the rules I’m going to put you in a cage. But I’m going to make the rules thousands of pages long. They’re open source. But they might take years of study to learn. And if you break the rules…cage. Then if you don’t want to go to the cage, you have to hire people to keep you out of the cage. But they’re effectively in a union because unless they go through an official approval process then you can’t hire them. It would sound crazy, but that’s how our system works.
I also wonder if it partially is coming true. At least among men in the US, we have labor force participation rates comparable to the Great Depression. They aren’t living particularly happy lives, most are addicted to opioids. But the fact that we don’t need them to work, and the economy is still at record highs for GDP shows that productivity is higher.
It kept my interest and I enjoyed the little pieces of humor throughout. That’s not something I’m good at yet, but should try to improve on. I’m also not turned off by the political angle, but rather enjoyed that.
I have two main suggestions to improve this:
1) I do think that it could be trimmed down. A lot of the ACX reviews are 8 - 12k words and this is nowhere near that length, so maybe my personal preference is disjoint from the other ACX readers, but I’d prefer a very strong 2 - 3k words versus a decent 6k words.
2) I would question whether this book was worth reviewing in the first place:
"Graeber also doesn’t have much in the way of evidence to support his central thesis: that a lot of work in the modern world really serves no purpose, which is an incredibly bold claim to make mostly unsupported. " and “I wouldn’t say Graeber really broadened my understanding of why some jobs are BS, and he doesn’t do a good job proving that many jobs are pointless, but he’s certainly opened my mind to the possibility.” - That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement. I guess that you could write an entertaining review of a bad book, but in general, it’s easier to write a good review of a good book.
A lot of reviews make me want to read the book. This was an interesting discussion of a topic I'm curious about, but it convinced me to not read the book. If his book had had more supporting evidence for his case, then that would have given you more meat to discuss.
I'm pretty sure I read this in the initial voting round, but gave up halfway through. My thoughts at the time were something like "this isn't bad, but it feels very scattered and somewhat under-edited. I don't think I'm going to get a good sense of the book's ideas, and I don't have a positive indication that the author's ideas are compelling enough to make it worth the read." I didn’t end up rating it for that reason–after reading, I probably would’ve given it a 4 or 5.
Overall I thought it needed work. The summary of the book is pretty slim, and didn't give me a good sense of why you and others seemed to like it. The main points about the book I took away were: "Graeber doesn't really support his thesis with any data," and "here are some types of bullshit jobs." I assume the book is more complicated and compelling, but I didn’t get a sense of that from your review, which is something that makes me like/dislike a review.
Most of the review seemed to be thoughts inspired by the book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but they felt underdeveloped. Perhaps this is because I'm broadly pro-capitalism--I generally disagree with many of the points you made, and the counterarguments that came to mind didn't feel addressed in the text.
The tone was conversational, which led me to feeling like I'd probably enjoy having a friendly argument with you about this stuff, but without the ability to say "hold on, what about..." I was mostly just frustrated.
On the ideas: I used to be extremely sympathetic to the idea that many jobs were bullshit. I have been a duct-taper and a box-ticker, and have worked for taskmasters. At the time, I thought this was awful. "These sorts of jobs are the problem with the world!" I thought to myself. As I get older, I'm becoming convinced that dysfunctional organizations are simply the default result (I think maybe there's a gwern post to this effect somewhere). Many of the co-workers I've had at the most BS workplaces were intelligent, hard-working people who nevertheless had no desire to change the processes or structures that were causing issues. They had become comfortable and adapted to it, and in their mind, the cost of changing that was too high.
You seem to be a Marxist. It seems to me that flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters could all exist in planned economies. They did in the USSR--I believe that people were paid to do literally useless work in order to fulfill full employment requirements.*
I think the issue is deeper: how do you create societies where people will not accept bullshit jobs, or view them as low-status or immoral?
*https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment/https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment/ (I have no idea who this is or if this information is reliable, but this article quotes a book saying soviet factory owners would "hoard" workers they didn't need in case they became useful later.)
Are you part of the review group btw? This feels more candid than the other feedback I've had.
"counterarguments that came to mind didn't feel addressed in the text." I'd definitely like to hear them, if you've got the time.
"I think the issue is deeper: how do you create societies where people will not accept bullshit jobs, or view them as low-status or immoral?"
I did wonder if some kind of bottom up approach could work, but a society where your peers were judging the usefulness of your job and shame/praise you for it seems pretty dystopian to me. And I don't trust ordinary people to have a nuanced concept of what constitutes bs, online discussions about useless jobs fairly often devolve into complaining about about artists/philosophers etc., nothing grounded in political economy.
"soviet factory owners would "hoard" workers"
I can believe that. From what I've read, Gosplan did a poor job of estimating things like "how much output should we expect from plant X, given the resources available to them." And just modelled different plants as being interchangeable even if one was bigger/had more workers etc. There are also stories about managers deliberately sabotaging their own older machines in secret, so that the planning office would send them replacements of a newer more powerful model, to make it easier to meet quotas.
"dysfunctional organizations are simply the default result"
Yeah, reducing social dysfunction is difficult, I'd say that's the big lesson from the 20th century (for Marxists especially). To some extent it probably is just unavoidable, but one of the main points I tried to make in the review is that bs jobs are much more common now than they were in the past in the West, and much more common in the West than e.g. China, maybe even the USSR. If Graeber's right that it's ~40% of the workforce, that's arguably the most serious economic dysfunction in history. It does seem like this problem has surpassed normal levels of economic irrationality, and the examples form other societies suggest it should be possible to address it.
Yeah, part of the review group. I joined after the initial formation so I missed out on having my review critiqued, but I like reading these reviews and commenting, so I slid in.
I'm sorry if the review wasn't constructive– part of that is I think a lot of others covered some of the good qualities, so I didn't make a point of recapping stuff I thought was good. I think it's clear that you've written something thought provoking that others generally enjoyed.
Counterarguments:
Another commentator pointed out that your critique of rickshawing is in some sense just a critique of comparative advantage, which seems like a flaw in the categorization: if any work that someone could do themselves is a bullshit job, all unskilled labor is a bullshit job. This feels like a questionable conclusion.
The implication that being a waiter and restaurants are bullshit jobs also seems off. I think you've made an interesting point that hiring a maid and going out to eat aren't necessarily categorically different, but I'm not sure what to make of that. Paying to avoid drudgery or have a luxurious experience feels like a pretty fundamental human inclination. It feels questionable to throw shade at that. To me it feels very similar to someone calling an artist or philosopher pointless. It's not strictly necessary for human survival, but it makes life more enjoyable.
In terms of increasing corporate lawyers and similar zero sum jobs: I agree this is probably bad, but the implication that more planned economies would have less of this didn't track for me. There are still dysfunctional zero sum resources competitions in that world, you're just now pleading your case to the distributor of quotas and resources instead of fighting it out in the courtroom.
Soviet economy
Thanks, that was interesting. Do you have a source recommendation for learning more about how the Soviet planned economy functioned? Most of my understanding of it is hazy and it seems fascinating, so I'd like to read more.
Judging bullshit jobs:
I'm not advocating for public shaming or anything. Consider that we already do this already, probably in the wrong direction. Trades are in short supply in the usa partially because they are low prestige and most young people were encouraged to get degrees. I used to work in software development, now I work with my hands. I get *very* different reactions now when I tell people what I do, almost all for the worse. I would wager that many "bullshit jobs" are higher prestige than many trades, which is a problematic incentive structure unrelated to economics.
Bullshit jobs are a big problem:
I got the impression from one of the first sections that the 40% number was just asking people if they thought their jobs were bs. I agree that if 40% think their jobs are bs that is a real issue–but I think there are many explanations that feel plausible for that: bosses are shittier, workplace cultures are more toxic, people are less happy in general, messaging about how important your work should be has changed, etc. I think you're right that some piece is probably increased alienation (in the Marxist sense) as we moved away from manufacturing and towards office work…but I think there are other explanations.
Thanks for the questions and response–like I said above I think you've done a great job of sparking conversation about the topic, and I definitely appreciate what you were doing in the review more after thinking about it in more depth.
"I'm sorry if the review wasn't constructive"
No worries. It was constructive, structuring essays and explaining concepts clearly do seem to be things I struggle with. I think because a group like this has repeated interactions people start to consider their relations with the rest of the group, at least more than they would be on more transient comment threads, so there's a bit of a bias in favour of positive comments and against criticism to avoid seeming unfriendly or whatever. Probably having more criticism enabling norms would help people improve their writing faster.
The soviet-machines thing is from "Red Plenty", not sure if I can recommend the book as an efficient way to learn about soviet planning though, it's structured as several fictionalised accounts of mangers/workers/theorists in different position of the system.
Maybe pirate the book and see if the first chapter on Kantorovich captures your interest? Also there's a review of it on SSC, Scott's very positive about the book and gets tantalisingly close to some arguments I think make a strong case for planning.
In general I'd say the best books about the Soviet system are books about the theory of planning (or markets) that only refer to the USSR as an example of whatever general principles they're talking about. Books specifically about the soviet economy don't usually delve much into the economic theory in my experience, or they have an implicit theoretical perspective that's not always the most illuminating or the one the soviets themselves would have held. I'd recommend "Towards a New Socialism" in that category.
I think the idea of rickshawing does capture something that comparative advantage doesn't, although there's obviously overlap. A rickshaw pulling a crippled, but otherwise very productive person, is clearly mainly comparative advantage. But if the rickshaw pulls someone who could walk though, yes it's providing convenience, but it still seems economically irrational, the combined productivity of the two people could be higher if the passenger walked themselves and freed up the labour of the rickshaw puller.
Pretty interesting that you switched from software to manual labour. I've thought about maybe doing something similar (mainly just because desk work is really tedious), especially since AI might soon force a move.
Thanks for the recs--I've added "Red Plenty" to my reading list.
I'd be happy to expand on my experience if you're interested. It was absolutely the right move for me at the time, but as I near my thirties the costs that were easily dismissed at 25 feel more significant.
yeah, I'd be interested to hear about that.
Well, Citizen Penrose, I should tell you at the outset that I’m probably among the hardest-to-engage readers this review is ever going to get. My whole life I have avoided courses and books about recent history, politics, and economics. I think my aversion has something to do with how these subjects always stir up my indignation and desire to figure out what’s the *right* way to run the world, while at the same time giving me utter clarity about the impossibility of my having any impact on events, politics, policies etc. at the national or world level. So not only do my eyes start trying to glaze over really early on in reading about one of these subjects, but also, even if I can blink away the glaze, I have no mental hooks to hang the new material on. I don’t know much about the 2 world wars, what Marxism is, what transpired in the Soviet Union in the 20th century, etc. It’s embarrassing.
OK, so despite my aversion to your subject, I managed to hang in reasonably well with you for a lot of this review. You write in a very natural, conversational way, and I liked your mini-humor. Overall, it was sort of like having a long, beery conversation at a pub with a friend about bullshit jobs — is there such a thing? Yeah? OK, so wtf is it that makes a job a bullshit job? Like an actual beery conversation, the train of thought wasn’t deeply organized but kind of meandered, knit together by coming back recurrently to certain ideas. It was also knit together by my feeling, especially at the beginning, that you were noticing a lot of the same stuff I was, so I felt like we thought in compatible ways. There were several times when I thought, “yeah, but what about such-and-such? “ and then in the next paragraph you’d make the same point. I can’t remember them all, but the first one was my thinking that people’s feeling that their job was pointless wasn’t a reasonable measure of whether it was actually of no use to society — then right away you pointed that out. Another was Graeber’s 5 categories of bullshit jobs. I was looking at “Duct Tape,” and thinking that in some situations duct-taping the problem for now was a smart solution — whereupon you said the same.
I have to say that about halfway through, though, my interest flagged. But I’m not sure how much of that to attribute to your review itself, and how much to my difficulty taking on this kind of subject. I can tell you the things that would have helped keep me engaged, but bear in mind I’m someone who needs a lot of hand-holding and frequent candy treats to stick with a task of this kind. One thing that would have kept me engaged would have personal anecdotes — from you, from Graeber, from anywhere really —about having a bullshit job: what it’s like, but also what exactly, makes it bullshit. Is it that there’s no real task for you — the point of having you at the job is that your presence makes a certain kind of impression? Are you eye candy (tits, etc.)? Are you snob candy (i.e., Harvard or whatnot degree holder)? Is it that you work hard, but at a company that’s a bullshit-producer, actively contributing to the great mass of meaningless communications like spam, etc? My interest would have especially been held by poignant or hilarious anecdotes about life at a bullshit job. Sort of like watching The Office, you know?
The other thing that would have held my attention would have been a review organized around a taxonomy of different definitions of what constitutes a bullshit job. For instance, early on you point out one category difference: Subjectively bullshit job (worker feels it’s pointless) and objectively bullshit jobs (makes no difference to society, or does actual harm). Then, regarding the second category, there seem to be some thinkers who regard certain kinds of bullshit jobs as an inevitable by-product of capitalism, others who don’t. And then within the inevitable-by-product group, there are subcategories. And, of course, you might have proposed your own definition of what makes a job a bullshit job, or what way of setting up society is guaranteed to generate a certain kind of bullshit job.
Still, even though my attention to the second part of the review was less good, the review as a whole did get me thinking about the subject. You asked whether any of us readers have had bullshit jobs. I think I have 3 that qualify. One was working, as an undergrad, as an assistant to the secretary at the tiny History of Science department. There really wasn’t much for me to do, so mostly I just hung around and chatted with them. One was running an SAT prep course. My actual work day involved lots of real work on curriculum development and teacher training, but in retrospect I think SAT prep companies are bullshit. I doubt that our course raised students’ scores much. And, to the extent that it did, it did harm by giving those kids an unfair advantage. The third was a position at a psychiatric hospital where I had worked for several years as a psychologist, treating patients. I got promoted to a sort of management role where I supervised professional newbies (that was fine, I knew how to do that) but was also supposed to improve our treatment model of eating disorders. I had plenty of ideas about how to do that, but every new idea I came up with made some part of the staff buttsore. It seemed that there was some sort of consensus-building that needed doing first ?— or maybe I just needed to have the head guy announce to people that I was going to make some revisions to how we did things and to please go with them and give them a good try. Anyway, I hated the “management” part of the job, and never accomplished one damn piece of management.
You asked about your writing. I think you write the way people speak — it’s less precise and organized than essays usually are. I think that matters less in conversation, because we have facial expression and gestures to clarify any vagueness in what we say, plus we have the pleasure of each other’s company to make up for the messiness with which we present our ideas. So I think that unless you are very wedded to being a conversational style writer, you should think about tightening up your prose. Here’s an example of what I mean. In your first paragraph the reader gets hit with about 5 ideas, and it’s not really clear how they connect — and what point they’re leading up to:
-you’re fascinated by the old Soviet tractor factories
-some of the fiercest fighting took place at the one in Stalingrad
-tractors made it possible to produce a lot more food with a lot less work
-in the old days people had to dig potatoes by hand and there were famines
-workers at the tractor plants would have known for sure their work was valuable.
So encountering those ideas, I wasn’t exactly confused — just had no idea what the different ideas had to do with each other, and where we were going with all of them. For instance, I didn’t know whether you were saying you were fascinated by the factories because of the fierce fighting at the Stalingrad one, or because they changed agriculture so much, or for some other reason. I didn’t see what the fierce fight at the Stalingrad factory had to do with the way the factory had changed agriculture. Etc. In retrospect, of course, I see that what you were doing was giving the reader a picture of a workplace where the work is the exact *opposite* of a bullshit job. You’re doing that as a lead-in to the your jokey point about some especially bullshitty jobs in modern England.
I think you need, in that first paragraph, to order the 5 ideas you present in a way that makes clearer the connection between them, and that guides the reader through your train of thought. Below I’ve re-ordered them. Added a couple of details that you didn’t mention, but that I surmised were true. Biggest one was that workers at Stalingrad fight fought to protect the factory — assumed that was case since your point about ad agency workers in Britain is clearly that they would not have any interest in fighting to protect their ad agency.
So here’s the re-ordered version of your opening paragraph, and I hope you’re not offended that I did this!
I suppose most people don’t think of factories as interesting places, but the Stalingrad Tractor Plant holds a fascinating place in history, at least for me. (I promise this gets more interesting) These early tractor plants made it possible to mechanize agriculture, resulting in a huge leap in productivity over pre-industrial farming. Then when World War II began the Stalingrad Plant made tanks thought to be among the best in the world. Anyone working there would have had absolutely zero fucking doubts about what an immense contribution their work was making to society. And older workers, especially, who would have remembered harvesting potatoes by hand, or the famines of the Tsarist and earlier Soviet periods, must have had a tangible sense of mankind’s making progress. Some of the fiercest fighting during the Battle of Stalingrad took place in the city's tractor plant, with plant workers among those defending it.
Reading about the Eastern Front, I can’t help imagining the equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad taking place in modern Britain. Afterwards there would be tales of the storming of credit management offices, corporate law firms, or investment banks. And would the employees of these institutions have had a similar sense that of mankind making progress at their workplace? Would they have defended their offices valiantly?
Nice job! I enjoyed the review. I'll start by answering your questions, then add some other thoughts. The overall quality of the writing was good, and it didn't lose my interest at any point. I never felt like you wander off and I wanted you to "just get on with it".
Some of the humor I liked, and some of it I didn't. As Scott says, it works well, but if it looks like you're forcing it, it can really fail. I didn't particularly like the parentheticals in the beginning. In the first paragraph, you promise that you're going somewhere - I trusted you were going somewhere, so I would just take that out. And the third paragraph about being too sentimental about Stalinist USSR - I would have taken that out too. But other humor I really liked. The image about buying tractors is great. "If Bullshit Jobs had been written by an economist it might have mentioned any economic theory whatsoever" is great [I lost the formatting, but you know what I mean.] This is a great and humorous (microhumorous?) paragraph:
Building on Smith, Marx defines “unproductive labour” as [insert 3000 word definition about social relations, surplus-value, class society, modes of production, constant and variable capital, accumulation, dialectics, commodity production, M-C-M, exchange and use values, superstructures, materialism, and detailing all 12 possible interpretations]. The key insight though is that capitalism has transaction costs.
I think the case for BS cases was only so-so, but I thought you were suggesting that the book only made a so-so case, too, right? I went into it believing it and Graeber’s survey didn't convince me of anything. I believe the concept because of my experience; there's no way simply pointing to a couple surveys with undefined terms would have convinced me if I wasn't already convinced.
The political angle didn't seem alienating at all.
Some other comments:
I know how much work these are and that you probably went through it many times, but definitely run it through grammarly one last time before submitting. There were a decent number of typos that could be easily avoided, and that detracts for me.
You should link to Scott's post that you mentioned.
Overall, this made me less inclined to read the book. If he doesn't prove his case any more than you say he does, it doesn't seem worth reading to me. I also didn't agree with his framing and definitions of BS jobs. Throwing all of education into "BS jobs" seems wrong to me. As I understand it, the signaling theory applies to post-secondary education. I don't see how someone could think teaching kids the three Rs is a BS job. And I don't think you (or Graeber) defended that notion well enough. Graeber uses broader definitions than I would, but then that's a definition game, and not something particularly interesting. Btw, none of this is to say your review isn't accurate or good, just that after reading it I don't feel a desire to read the book myself.
I liked that you really engaged with the topic. You seemed really interested in it (maybe more so than the author) and really wanting to dig into it. Maybe that's where your political angle came it? I don't know, but it didn't bother me. It just made you seem interested and therefore interesting to read.
You used a bit of jargon. Probably many readers will know most of it, but certainly, some won't. It's always a balance of how to handle this. It didn't strike me as too much but I wouldn't be surprised if someone who didn't know much about economics got lost a couple times.
Overall, nice job!
Another thought: I like the informal style of many ACX reviews, but I felt yours was a tad too informal for me. For example, I didn't think dropping the f-bomb added enough value to be worth it. Formality in writing is a spectrum, and, fwiw, to my tastes I would prefer to nudge you slightly to the "more formal" side.
Hi Citizen Penrose! Thanks for the review!
Some background first: I had bought Bullshit Jobs a couple of years ago. I had started by reading a chapter in the middle, because friends were organizing a chapter-by-chapter discussion group. I found it interesting, the examples were compelling, and I did think, that bs jobs certainly existed. But then I couldn't really get myself to read much more ... I found the examples got weaker rather than better, and I got the impression I didn't learn much more in addition when trying other parts. Also, I found in public discourse bs jobs were an overused concept – a lot of jobs were termed bs jobs that I wouldn't perceive as such.
So when I realized you had a review on the book, I was happy I'd have a chance to get a better insight into the book, and I was curious to get to know more about the content I had missed out on. I was also slightly sceptical if bs jobs were as common as the book suggested. I mostly thought about bs jobs probably in terms of the effects of bad incentives.
Here my comments to your questions:
The overall quality of the writing, did the review lose your interest at any point?
At the beginning the text captured and kept my attention, because you clearly had a strong opinion, and were not shy to voice it. In other words, I felt you had something to say about the topic, which I liked.
Later, I was sometimes lost in the text. In several places I didn't feel sure, what argument you were currently presenting to me at a specific moment. I enjoy Scott's texts A LOT, for one reason because he gives me the opportunity to read in 'leisure time mode' and still learn a lot at the same time. That means I can stop anytime if I want to ponder a thought, but otherwise I basically never have to stop to wonder what is meant, how this connects to what has been said before and such. I must admit that I didn't fully get that kind of experience from your text.
For one, I'm not an economist, and even though I could quickly present an intro to all of the theories you mention towards the end, several times I would have to concentrate more than I did, or e.g. have a second look at the sentence, to really know what you were talking about … and why.
I selected a bit I stumbled upon: „The portion of the stock market not devoted to speculation aggregates knowledge to direct investment. Investment banks connect venture capital to entrepreneurs.“ This is a lot of economic jargon.
One slightly different case: when you added something like 'the whole of education' for the first time, I honestly expected a joke. One, which I didn't really get. When you mentioned 'if you accept the signalling theory of education' I began to suspect that it wasn't a joke … but I don't know the signalling theory of education, and hence this whole thing about education showing up there was mostly confusing to me. At least until you provided a bit more background in the last chapter.
Also, important ideas that were build upon later were introduced in passing-by, like your very important definition of 'changers' or initially the five different types of bs jobs. If there are important concepts which I shall remember, I would appreciate a bit more 'meat' and emphasis in their introduction.
Some smaller points in the same direction:
I think more 'automatic' clarity on where a thought starts and where it ends, would have also been useful to me. I'm not thinking of the content of what you're saying, I'm mostly thinking of language-related and other stylistic devices that make this self-evident, including maybe using paragraphs more towards this goal in mind.
Last bit: when I had to write stuff for publication I was advised to describe the main bit of any graph or figure also in in the text. Maybe you did this, but if so probably much shorter than I'm used to.
Other things were working well, like the chapters with clear headlines, some diversity via pictures and graphs, and so on. Overall, I think I should have taken a bit more time to read the review in the first place. As it is, I feel I needed to read it a second time to be able to really get full value out of what you're presenting.
I hope this didn't come across as too direct. Sorry, I'm German, we still believe we do others a favour by doing this. (Please everybody, if any of this sounded harsh or very critical, which was clearly not the intention, please let me know.) If I had one wish for this review: read it over three times with three different personas in mind, e.g. a 22 year old anthropologist from Sri Lanca, and check, if those personas would easily get all of your ideas … and then adjust accordingly. Yes, you're writing for ACX readership, but maybe it's a bit more diverse than you had in mind?
One of Scott's writing suggestions is to use "micro-humour", which I did, I'm wondering if I over did it.
The pic with 'Psst …' put a smile on my face, and I also really liked this one „but even if corporate law was nationalised and corporate lawyers all pursued a common goal (justice you’d hope)“.
The following was too long for me … three first terms in the brackets would have been fine. I don't want a joke to disturb my reading flow and getting through 4 lines of weird terms (even if deliberately weird) did that. Sth. like this would have had a more positive effect on me: „Building on Smith, Marx defines “unproductive labour” as [insert 3000 word definition about social relations, surplus-value and class society]. The same principle goes for other places … to me the humour worked fine, if it didn't take from my reading flow. As I indicated above, I'm not sure I did recognize the humour as such in every single instance.
Was the political angle too blatant/alienating for anyone?
No, I liked the angle. As stated initially, I found your personal thoughts on this very interesting. It's a strong point, and one that is not easily 'learned', so I hope you'll continue to make use of it in all kinds of texts.
Bs jobs ?
I will still try to say a bit more on your bs jobs related questions later. For now: one thing that stuck with me was the thought that 'if bs jobs are so prevalent, it's really a problem'. I guess I used to read the examples by Graber initially as horrible, sometimes amusing outliers, and less so as a 'persistent problem we should think about more'.
"I hope this didn't come across as too direct."
Not at all. Reflecting on it I think you're completely right that there are some problems with clarity I hadn't considered, and it's useful feedback. That sentence about the stock market is especially unlike something Scott would write.
I'm surprised that so far everyone who's commented already seems to have given bs jobs a fair amount of thought. I think I've only seen the subject discussed a handful of times in online political discussions, virtually never in the media, and Scott himself has barely touched on it. It's super under-discussed in my experience, given how potentially important it is.
I'm really interest to know whether you've experienced bs jobs living in Germany, or if they're a prominent part of life there. My understanding is that Germany has taken the opposite approach to how-to-be-a-21st-century-European-economy to Britain, and is much more manufacturing orientated, and I very strongly feel it's the "service" sector in Britain that's made bs jobs such a salient fact of life here. If anywhere in the Westerern world was immunised from bs jobs I'd expect it to be Germany.
'Not at all.' Uff, I'm glad to hear that!
Yes, Germany and the bs jobs, that's an interesting question. I've hoped for the past 3 days to find some calm moment to write a response ... but for the moment, I'm very busy. But I still intend to add some thoughts on this later. Cheers
"It's super under-discussed in my experience, given how potentially important it is."
Agreed.
To me it's like... imagine you're in a sharehouse and someone has a moment of clarity where they point out that like 10%-50% of your regular household chores achieve literally nothing. One housemates job is to move boxes from one cupboard to another once each week, while anothers job is to move them back.
And then the other housemates reactions are "eh, maybe, but what can we do? There needs to be work for everyone".
Politicians are elected by promising to add more jobs, people are worried about AI taking jobs, and I worry that those sorts of attitudes are what will continue to generate bullshit jobs right up until we're all just moving boxes back and forth instead of enjoying a fully automated utopia.
We need people talking about what work is useful and not, with an eye on a future off-ramp for the concept of work as we know it.
Sorry, it looks like the format ate not only my italics, but also my double space in between your original questions. Apropos readability ...
Great review, a very enjoyable read.
I had the same sort of reaction as you to the bullshit jobs concept - it rang true to me but I felt Greabers definitions didn't quite nail it. Your contribution is good, but I would draw the circle a little different to you too. It makes me wonder if Bullshit Jobs is a concept that everyone nods their heads to but no-one is actually talking about quite the same thing.
My definition of a bullshit job would be something like "a job that could disappear with negligible loss to utility". I would include a lot of industries that produce luxury products. Eg. if the concept of luxury watches disappeared from the world there would be almost no utility lost. Same with billion dollar luxury yachts. I don't think these products even make their owners measurably happier.
I think your addition of rickshaws is a good one, but I wouldn't necessarily put housecleaners and restaurants in that category. Consider that a 40hr work week is really more like 60hrs if you include domestic chores. From that perspective house cleaners do shrink people's work week. Only those who can afford it, unfortunately, but it's still adding value.
I do wonder if my work is bullshit. I've made games that have received lots of positive reviews, with some being especially effusive. I wonder if it's a zero sum game though - would those people have been just as happy to play a different game if mine didn't exist? Or to watch TV if there were no games? I'm not really sure. It's certainly more bullshit than my partners job as a nurse. I've since started doing more educational work which feels more impactful to me.
Assorted feedback (including responses to your questions):
- it could use a proof read, there were a few typos
- I liked your extra research and discussion other sources. I would like to do more of that next time
- the humour worked well for the most part, but try to not force it. There were one or two early lines that didn't come across as natural to me
- there were a few claims presented without justification
- I didn't lose interest at any point
- I wasn't bothered by any political slant. If anything I would have liked to see it come through stronger
- I had read Greabers original essay before this review. I feel a bit more enlightened after reading your thoughts but I still feel like I want to read something that concretely defines the problem and offers some solutions (even pie-in-the-sky ones).
Thanks for the thought provoking read!
For what it's worth I wouldn't consider game dev to be bs (or any other kind of entertainment production). Broadly speaking people do enjoy their preferred form of entertainment at least slightly more than the next best alternative, so I'd assume markets do a decent job of ensuring the marginal gains in enjoyment balance out the extra resources expended.
Education on the other hand seems very bs heavy as a sector to me. I don't t know if you hold the typical ACX reader views that it's mostly signalling, environmental interventions generally can't achieve much over the long term, etc.
I'd also really like to have a solid theoretical definitions of bs jobs, and one that's backed up with a whole book's worth of date + loads of clever statistical inference to quantify what portion of different jobs should be considered bs, similar to what Caplan managed for the education sector, but covering the entire economy.
Demian Pacheco's main problem with the review in his comment also seemed to be that it didn't provide that.
Probably that's just way to ambitious for a 6k word essay though, I'd expect a book like that to be more like 1k pages. The Case Against Education is 400 pages covering just one sector of the economy.
I think many bs jobs fit quite neatly in to neoclassical econ categories, like externalities, public choice failures etc. which roughly align with some of Graeber's categories, and can be defined quite precisely.
Luxury goods also strike me as strongly bs. But a definition of bs that included them would need to be very broad. A definition that depended on claims like "we should give people what's best for them not what they want.", and "resources should be distributed to maximise utility (i.e. very equally)". I think those claims are true, but accepting them would have really sweeping implications for economics as a whole, and moves away from a more value free kind of scientific theories.
Maybe I could have pushed this angle more strongly/more convincingly, since it doesn't seem to have much of an impression so far, but I very much feel that something like Marx's concept of unproductive labour (maybe the "changing" idea I proposed) is the right framework here. It's broad enough to captures a lot of what intuitively feels bs, but can still be defined fairly narrowly and objectively, and is the key insight for understanding modern "service" economies imo.
Yeah, I'm not sure how far you could/should have gone with solidifying the problem or solution given the topic and the medium. I would just say that the reviews that I feel are the absolute strongest are ones that leave me with a really clarified and coherent understanding of one or more of:
1. what the problem is
2. why the problem exists
3. what a potential solution is or might look like in theory
To the degree that I feel like I could (and am excited to) explain it to a friend.
Maybe with a 6k essay you could tackle one of these, while a 20k essay could tackle them all (which is what past winners have done, though I personally generally prefer the reviews on the shorter side).
You did a great job of covering the content of the book and in adding your own thoughts and research, and making it an enjoyable read. It just didn't crystalize any concepts for me a way that left me bursting to blurt them back out to anyone who will listen. To get it across that high bar I think might have taken either:
1. some clever restructuring of the content you had
2. focusing on getting a really strong thesis on one of the points I listed above
3. a different book, if it proves impossible with this particular topic
I'm not sure which.
But anyway, this is just me brainstorming my best guesses as to what could improve it, I doubt I could have done better myself.
I was being vague saying eduction, it's more like training simulations. It's a bit niche, which is why it feels more impactful to me. I'm not sure I do agree with that take on education anyway. Certainly there's signalling at the higher levels, but kids need to learn to read and do basic math and other things to function in the world, and I've seen and felt the impact of good teachers in my life. To me "environmental interventions generally can't achieve much over the long term" is so contrary to my observations that I wonder if there's a similar effect going on as with Scott's recent post on the significance of SSRI effects.
Bringing it back to BS jobs though, it seems to me that education is similar to entertainment in that any individual entering into the sector is unlikely to be impactful, but there is value in finding good teachers and matching them with compatible students. Not that existing current systems are suited to that, but sometimes it happens by luck.
I think it just shows that "BS jobs" is only ever going to be an arbitrary cut-off point on a scale of low to high impact jobs.
This was an enjoyable read! I already find the theme important by itself, and your writing kept my interest and made me want to read/discuss the theme further.
There are a few points I noticed that could be improved in the general structure / writing. Rolaran already mentioned some typos, that could be fixed with some proofreading (I'm guilty of that myself). Some ideas presented are split into single-sentence paragraphs, and would flow more if merged into longer paragraphs. And like Rolaran, I felt a bit confused on the section on Smith and Marx, as I didn't know whether you had finished reviewing the content of the title book. Those are minor points that don't really detract so much from my reading, but could be improved on.
The micro-humor (and images etc.) didn't feel overdone to me, and I'm happy you included it, as many of the other reviews in the contest felt quite dry without such variety. I didn't get a few jokes, which I believe would be better with context (
I felt that the review provided a great critique of the book, and its main flaws (such as the lack of an economic approach and a better-founded proof of their existence). This made me crave for a book that's better in this aspect, and made me wish for your review itself to include this kind of analysis. You do provide a bit of this through the cross-textual references and the analysis of the healthcare and housing markets, which is a welcome addition.
Regarding your case for the existence of BS jobs, I already believed they existed, so your review didn't change my mind in that aspect. The way you present the concept seems effective to bring to attention and describe the concept of BS jobs, but I felt it was (just like the book) lacking on more quantitative proof of their existence and a more concrete definition of what they are. I see you acknowledge this at the end (mentioning that there is a big opportunity for someone to write a book about this). It would be golden if you had managed to provide this in the review itself, as we sometimes see Scott (for example) doing. But it's a start and works well to bring the topic to attention as having potential for discussion and exploration.
Some arguments you make would also be better founded by data, and the lack of it might make them a bit grating in the eyes of the reader. For example, when you claim domestic cleaners, private cooks (and restaurants themselves) provide little net-gain to society due to being "rickshaw-ish", but don't account for the ways this might not be true. More data-based arguments would be key here, considering the audience and the economic nature of the topic (which makes it ripe for this kind of analysis).
The political angle didn't feel too alienating for me, but I can't speak for the rest of the audience. The focus on Marx and the Soviet Union did feel a bit outdated though, in the sense that the labor market has changed a lot since then (as you mention, the service industry has grown a lot since then, for example). Here, I believe the references would be richer if they gave more focus to more recent authors and the modern situation. I'm really curious how modern states such as China deal with these issues, and what authors on management, cybernetics, advertising, etc. (as well as modern Marxist authors) have to say about it. Also comes to my mind the Toyota Production System and its seven forms of muda (waste).
Overall, I found it a good review, but it did leave me craving for a more in-depth and data-based analysis of the subject.
Well written, and mostly kept my interest throughout, although I was beginning to worry during the section on Marx's "unproductive labor" that it was going to be about that for the rest of the review instead of the book, but it did circle back there and tie everything together, so it was all fine.
Your use of humor didn't strike me as overbearing, and I enjoyed your "Wanna make some tractors?" picture enough that I sent it to a friend of mine with the type of sense of humor to appreciate it. (His reply: "I'm not supposed to take revolutionary ideo-economic systems from strangers!")
(Do you have a link to Scott talking about microhumor? It's a concept I use in my own writing, though I learned it from a different source, and I'd be curious to read his advice on it (Edit: found it in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/))
The political content didn't particularly throw me out of it. By most rubrics, I am leftist but not Marxist,, but I thought the content from that perspective was well-argued. I think both Smith and Marx focus too much on physical objects for either thinker to be able to account for modern economic activities especially in a "service economy", but you recognized this as well.
"Changers" is probably too generic a term, and it made things a little unclear when also talking about changes in the distribution of the workforce. Perhaps "exchangers" might work better (I also thought of "greasers", for the ones greasing the wheels of corporate machinery?)
A few typos here and there that could be cleaned up, and the classes of BS jobs are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not? Capitalizing them consistently would probably make them stand out.
I may be conflating unrelated things, but would "corporate feudalism" be akin to what corporations try to produce when they pull the "oh no, we're more like a family"? An attempt to ground employee loyalty in a nebulous feeling of social belonging, rather than "I exchange my labor/expertise/what-have-you for a salary, and that's the extent of our relationship".
It seems self-evident to me how UBI would disincent BS jobs at a higher rate than non-BS ones: at present, all jobs, BS or not, can attract employees with, if nothing else, the pressure of "you have to do *something* to get money, or you'll starve and freeze". In theory, UBI takes away that stick, removing one of the main reasons to grit your teeth and tolerate a BS job ("Doing nothing and meeting my needs with UBI vs. BS job that I hate and UBI-plus-wages" is a very different calculus from "Doing nothing and dying from unmet needs vs. BS job that I hate and meeting my needs with wages"). Intrinsically fulfilling jobs, on the other hand, still have the carrot of being intrinsically fulfilling.
My own recent (~5 years) employment history includes both periods of unemployment for three different reasons (which gives me an acute familiarity with how "work ethic" affects societal views of jobs and the people who have them), and a stint of a job that absolutely fits in your "rickshawing" category but that I very adamantly don't think was BS. More on that in its own post later as I need to get some rest (recovering from a medical appointment).
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
I'll be interested to hear about your rickshawing job.
The corporate family thing probably could fall under Greaber's "corporate feudalism" idea if the higher ups in the corporation genuinely did want to foster family-like relations for their own emotional/status needs and it wasn't just an empty rhetorical device to extract more (useful) work from people.
With regard to UBI, a lot of bs jobs are actually high status/well paid. I couldn't imagine many investment bankers/accountants/corporate lawyers wanting to quit their jobs for UBI (incidentally, another issue I didn't cover is that bs jobs suck up so much talent.) Graeber even claims that useful work is usually less well paid/more unpleasant than bs ones (although he doesn't present any data backing that up), he jokes that you either have a bullshit job or just a shit job. So it might be that UBI would actually disincentives useful work disproportionately.
I avoided emphasising this point too much because I was worried it might alienate the more free-market leaning ACX readers, but bs jobs seem to have have absolutely exploded in numbers since 1980.
Looking at less market orientated economies like contemporary China, the West during the post war soc-dem period, even the USSR, directing work towards useful goals was a problem to some extent, but bs never consumed such a large portion of the economy as it has in modern Britain for example. To my mind, if you accept that bs jobs really are a major issue, that's a strong argument in favour of more conscious planning of the economy beyond redistribution.
I may yet post on the rest of my employment history, but as I was writing it up, the comments on my "rickshaw job" got longer and more fully fleshed-out than I expected, so that'll be its own post now.
For a time, I was working for a food delivery company very similar to Uber Eats. I didn't do any cooking or anything else that required what you'd typically think of as "job-specific skills"; all I did was drive my ordinary car on ordinary public roads to a restaurant, pick up a bag of food, and drive it to an address. Some actual orders I delivered:
1. A burrito the size of my head, to a college guy too stoned to put on a shirt before answering his door
2. A sushi tray, to a woman watching talk shows alone in a living room that was larger than my entire home
3. Three pancakes with fruit, to a senior home resident unable to get out of his bed
4. Two chicken donairs, to an immigrant still living out of his suitcase who spoke very little English
5. Three large assorted pizzas, to a business meeting at our local government office
6. An entire pound of BBQ ribs, to an exotic dancer who had just finished her set
7. A noodle bowl, to an on-shift nurse who could not leave her station for more than thirty seconds
8. McDonalds, to a single mother of three
A lot of the public perception of this job, even among people who were polite to me about it, was that it was a BS job, and I suspect that they thought mostly of customers like 1 and 2 as the bulk of my work (which, to be fair and frank, it was). Here's what I noticed instead.
Sometimes I am simply more able to go to the restaurant and get the food than the people I deliver it to. Customer 3 lacks physical ability to drive to a restaurant; customer 4 lacks means of transport and familiarity with the local language.
Sometimes having me get the food lets someone else do a thing that I absolutely would not be able to do in their place. Customer 5 is running a meeting on a topic I know absolutely nothing about. As for customer 6, I have neither the physical attractiveness to be an appealing poledancer nor the physical co-ordination to avoid injuring someone in the attempt.
In some cases, I'm both more capable of getting the food, and less capable of doing the thing that would otherwise be interrupted to get the food. Customer 7 clearly falls into this, but so does customer 8. I can get to the restaurant alone in my car where she'd have to pack her kids into a van, but odds are that her childcare will be better than the equivalent I would provide.
This is comparative advantage in a *very* direct form. I may be rickshawing, but it's not a BS job: I am very obviously producing utils, and removing me from the system would make things noticeably worse for nearly everyone involved! Even 1 and 2 I think of as, at worst, people using my service who don't strictly need it. But that's an issue, not of the service being BS, but of the only qualification for using it being "do you have money that you want less than you want food brought to you by someone?" That is a critique (I'd even go so far as to say an indictment) of capitalism as a whole, but hardly unique to this job.
Honestly, framing things in this way, I begin to suspect that not just this job, but a lot of jobs that are similarly dismissed as "unnecessary" - including by the people who do them! - are creating an unexpectedly high amount of value, through allowing for specialization in narrower sets of responsibilities. More on that later, I think.