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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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).
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 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.
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.
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.)
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!
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'.
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!
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).