What does one typically hear from fresh American graduates, or, for that matter, any graduate about the workforce they’re entering? The optimism of yesteryear has given way to concerns about paying back student loan debts and finding a series of jobs – notwithstanding personal fit – that pay well enough for said graduate to get by and hopefully also provide for a current and future family.

Finding a fulfilling and well-remunerated job, one infused with meaning and purpose aligned with the values and interests of said graduate, is a dream that has been shattered by the realities of the modern-day economy and modern-day work. The cause? According to the Anthropologist David Graeber, whose 2018 book on meaningless work has made waves in the public consciousness, it has to do with the proliferation of BS jobs.

Graeber argues that ‘we have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.’ As a result, BS jobs, or BS duties within those jobs that by his definition are pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious, have multiplied in the private sector, and have, among other things, made it relatively difficult for today’s graduates to secure work that is both meaningful and well-remunerated.

The idea that there could be BS jobs in the private sector, where presumably, capitalist pressures could be counted on to “trim the fat,” originated in Graeber’s 2013 book on the Occupy Movement. But the idea entered into the popular consciousness with the publication of his short article titled ‘On the Phenomenon of BS Jobs,’ in STRIKE! magazine in that same year.

In the article, Graeber opines that Keynes’ 1930 prediction of a future with far less work, aided by technology, has yet to arrive:  

Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

In the article and elsewhere, Graeber elaborated on some of the pernicious effects of this phenomenon, such as the belief that folk who do not work hard at jobs that aren’t meaningful, that they don’t like or aren’t good at, are terrible people undeserving of help from society. These must have struck a chord in the general readership, because the article was shared so many times online that the website that hosted it crashed. It was then translated into twelve languages and became the subject of a YouGov survey which reported that 37 percent of those polled (913 total) agreed that their jobs ‘did not contribute meaningfully to the world.’       

The unexpected popularity of his article led Graeber to solicit testimonies from the public about their working experience as fuel for a full-length book he would write to flesh out the concept of BS jobs more fully. Some of these testimonies offered their own anecdotal explanations for the rise of BS jobs, such as it being ‘greed propped up by inflated prices of necessities’ (Graeber himself places the blame on what he calls “managerial feudalism,” among other things). The result is BS Jobs: A Theory published in 2018, and the subject of this post.

I first heard of Graeber from his book Debt: The First 5000 Years some time back. His commentary on BS jobs on a YouTube news channel The Real News Network came out soon after and piqued my interest. But I only got around to reading his full-length book recently, and, I was slightly disappointed with the accessibility of his analysis. Having been supervised by professional analytic philosophers when I was in graduate school, it was difficult for me to dislodge my mental schemas to fully appreciate the style and complexity of his argumentation, characteristic of the kind of “cultural analysis” certain species of academics prefer.  

Yet, his book contains myriad juicy nuggets of ideas worth exploring and critiquing, if only to suggest to myself and to the reader answers to the question that confronts us: How can we find meaningful work that benefits others, doesn’t harm people (as far as we know), and can still enable us to provide for our loved ones? Perhaps more presciently, how can the players involved – the ones who have their hands on the levers of power, like policy makers – initiate these changes?

The Phenomenon

Graeber spends a chapter refining his definition of a BS job, acknowledging that it necessarily involves subjective components, given the scope he intends. He concludes by defining a BS job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.’

This definition allows Graeber to exclude those who are self-employed or engaged in their own criminal activity. These kinds of “jobs” are not meaningless to the individuals performing them and therefore cannot really be considered BS jobs. But there remain issues with Graeber’s definition. Why should the employee be the best or even final authority on what’s ‘pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious’? Graeber concedes that the social value of a job is impossible to measure objectively – social value being the standard by which job meaningfulness is judged – but goes on to write that the closest one can get would be the workers’ perspective.    

I beg to differ. The social value of a for-profit company, let alone a job within that company, cannot be measured with any differential accuracy. A job’s value should be judged according to its alignment with its explicit role and duties (R&D), and the R&D’s alignment with other roles in the company, which, together, contribute to their overall goals, regardless of whether such summative goals bear any social value. Constructing a measure of social value alien to corporate realities, and then claiming that such realities fail to measure up, seems wrongheaded. And thinking that an individual worker would be in a position to know, in an epistemologically robust way, that her job is indeed BS, according to any measure of social value, seems equally untenable.      

Graeber counters a variation of the above observation that ‘if an office worker is really spending 80 percent of her time designing cat memes […] there’s no way that she is going to be under any illusions about what she’s doing. But even in more complicated cases, where it’s a question of how much the worker really contributes to an organization, I think it’s safe to assume the worker knows best.’ This comment, which offers no justification for its inductive application elsewhere, suggests that the R&D alignment of that particular job is off kilter, and so, that role in particular does not seem to contribute effectively to the proximate or ultimate goals of the organization. Granted, but where does social value enter the picture?

The second half of the definition offers a promising correction: that the employee is obliged to pretend that her job isn’t ‘completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious’ relative to social value. In other words, it’s the pretence that makes the job BS. Again, some clarification is needed. Certainly, in the for-profit world, the line between profit making for its own sake, and for the sake of whatever social value some company is working toward is blurred. But what if a job isn’t pretending to have any social value, but doesn’t contribute to the goals of the organization either? Is that considered a BS job too? Whichever the answer, the definition has been shown to need reworking.     

A look at the five categories of jobs Graeber identifies as BS could help us work through the above conundrum. The first are what he calls flunkies. Flunkies are minions hired to make someone or something look good. He offers an example of a Dutch publishing company that hired a receptionist even though it didn’t need one so that it could claim to have three levels of command and thereby be perceived as a “real” company. First, the idea that a company would be motivated to create a chain of command for the sole reason of looking a certain way is suspect. There might be other reasons for the three levels of command, but no other hypotheses are offered.  

What some might consider useless, others consider useful. Some people might not think a receptionist is necessary while others do. Since it is a matter of preference, there seems to be no objective way to decide who is right. Even if the receptionist isn’t needed, and people working at the publishing company are willing to put in the effort to answer calls and refer them to their relevant colleague, a job might still be opened up to give someone working experience or something to occupy their time and fill their pockets (i.e., students, part-timers, etc.). I would hardly consider that a BS job.

Graeber likens the above example to something he observed doing fieldwork as an anthropologist. In Madagascar, he uncovered tombs of famous noblemen and noticed that they were usually accompanied by token slaves. Having people to order around seems to have been a privilege of the elite in that culture. By analogous logic, he argues that this must also be the motivation for the creation of “flunky” jobs like the receptionist position, i.e. people of a certain social status require the existence of people to order around just because.

While the analogy itself is problematic – superiors don’t (usually) order receptionists around to the degree and intensity that aristocrats would do slaves – even if we grant that this might be true in some cases, the problem becomes one of potential abuses of power rather than the loss or lack of social value (if there was any in the first place) or the lack of the flunky’s contribution toward the goals of the firm.

Second are the goons. These people are hired to be aggressive and deceptive in their strategies to fleece money from potential customers. From personal experience doing temporary jobs, Graeber recalls the less than pleasant feeling of ‘being forced against [his] better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense.’ Here are some quotes from the solicited descriptions of this category of BS jobs.

“I called people up to hock them useless shit they didn’t need: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering (with some mindless add-ons) for £6.99 a month.”

“Most of the support covered basic computer operations the customer could easily google. They were geared toward old people or those that didn’t know better, I think.”

“Our call center’s resources are almost wholly devoted to coaching agents on how to talk people into things they don’t need as opposed to solving the real problems they are calling about.”

Taken at face value, here is a category of people, who, one could argue, deceive for a living. Of course, if we consider the context and nuances of the above statements, those jobs can be interpreted more charitably than the solicitees intended: (1) mindless add-ons might not be that mindless to others; (2) some people don’t know how to google or don’t want to and are willing to pay for a human voice to guide them; (3) some people actually like being advertised to,

and almost everything we have we don’t “need.”

Regardless, if we grant that they contain some truth, their work does contribute to the goals of their for-profit organization, even if they also pretend to offer social value when in fact they don’t. These statements, therefore, highlight the “pretending to have social value” aspect of the definition, not the “pointless, unnecessary, and pernicious” part or the part that identifies the individual as the chief barometer for sniffing out BS jobs. This might be the key to understanding what Graeber is really getting at, or at least how we can better understand where the real issues lie and how best to solve them.

The third are called duct tapers. These are roles designed to ‘undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.’ Graeber only offers anecdotal examples of these and concludes inductively, that there are a slew of jobs that chiefly revolve around mitigating or righting the damage of someone else in the company who isn’t doing their job properly but who cannot be fired or moved for some reason or other. I have no doubt that, when the conditions are right, these circumstances do manifest, but the extent to which these “duct tapers” are doing a job with some pretence toward social value when there isn’t any, or aren’t contributing toward the goals of the organization – duct taping is a kind of contribution isn’t it? – aren’t clear or convincing.

If there isn’t any other way around dealing with an incompetent superior who’s well-embedded in the organization, having fact-checkers and quality assurance people, who can otherwise operate as safety nets, seems a good compromise, if one thinks that job creation in general is desirable (more on this later). This does not seem to contradict Graeber’s definition, or, at least, our refinement of that definition.   

The fourth are box tickers. These are jobs that allow private companies that employ them to create an illusion that they are doing things – potentially things of social value – they are not, in fact, doing. Graeber provides the example of in-house magazine and television channels that act like feedback loops for their companies, producing material that tell executives what they want to hear about themselves and their impact in the world while omitting contrary information.

The example provided, however, only fits the agreed definition of a BS job if the pretence has got to do with social value, and the executives are being outright lied to, rather than simply given flattering interpretations of some pertinent data. Furthermore, if the company in question doesn’t care about social impact, then the example provided doesn’t conform to the definition of a BS job, even if we concede that there are box ticking jobs that are BS.

The fifth and final job type are the ones Graeber calls taskmasters. Taskmasters do and force others to do things that seem useless. He offers an emotive and disgruntled description from the halls of academia, which is worth quoting in full:

Chloe: My very brief stint as Head of Department reminded me that at the very minimum, ninety percent of the role is bullshit: Filling out the forms that the Faculty Dean sends so that she can write her strategy documents that get sent up the chain of command. Producing a confetti of paperwork as part of the auditing and monitoring of research activities and teaching activities. Producing plan after plan after five-year plan justifying why departments need to have the money and staff they already have. Doing bloody annual appraisals that go into a drawer never to be looked at again. And, in order to get these tasks done, as HoD, you ask your staff to help out.

Again, the example provided is anecdotal. We do not know how indicative this pattern of meaningless work is to larger academia, or contexts beyond academia, and whether the work is really as meaningless or as impervious to change as the person who did it assumes. Certainly, the extent to which these activities directly contribute to the quality of teaching and research is questionable, insofar as it’s hard to measure, given the sheer number of variables. However, to say that these HoD duties are BS implies that they’re pretending to have social value when they do not. While they may not bring value toward their intended goals – which in academia, may include the social values that trickle from teaching and research – I don’t think anyone is under the impression that they do indeed bring value when the evidence shows that the current strategies aren’t working.

It is possible that the whole managerialist “ideology” of creating cycles of reviews, appraisals and reform strategies don’t translate well to domains like academia. Then the issue – and it indeed may be a big issue – here is really the mismatch between management practices and the intended outcomes.  

Summing up what has been established so far: Graebers’ definition of a BS job involves the pretence of social value in paid employment when there is, in fact, none. However, his typology of BS jobs includes roles that are meaningless in the more mundane sense: they don’t contribute to the goals of organization because they’re badly designed, because of incompetence, or because of some internal political issue. Social value does not enter the picture here. In both cases, however, it is the individual performing the job who is in the best position to decide whether it’s BS.

The second and third points are problematic. The second point only appears in his examples of BS jobs, not in his definition, and the third point is simply indefensible given what we know about the complexity of work today, e.g., long supply chains, etc. But while individuals may not have an objective grasp of how their role fits into the larger scheme of things, if they are convinced that their job is BS – relative to social value or something else – they suffer psychologically.

People derive pleasure at being “the cause” of something. This is a reliable finding from developmental and cognitive psychology. Healthy babies are born with an insatiable desire to discover and influence their environment. Very young children who are at speaking age are often very curious about their environment and seek to manipulate it. They ask ‘why’ more times than a parent or pre-school teacher would care to count. My own parents have remarked that I too hounded them with never-ending ‘why’ questions when I was a child. Consequently, when our actions don’t produce their intended outcome, we feel anxious and can become depressed.

Graeber therefore argues that ‘make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom,’ and often leads to misery. An even worse kind of misery involves jobs that actively harm the people they are supposed to help. Graeber offers the example of a social service provider working for a government wherein employees would send intentionally obfuscating letters to pensioners so that they could bill them for late payment. If true, then this kind of work fits the definition of a BS job to a T, and the person who described the job did the right thing: When she realized that the higher-ups didn’t care (they probably saw it as a relatively harmless way to manage their finances – e.g., they believed these pensioners to be wealthy – or, they saw it as a necessary evil, given other constraints), she found another job, one that did not grate on her conscience.  

In such occupations, where there’s negative social value relative to its explicit goals, there are the additional feelings of guilt that one must hurt others in order to receive a salary, and fear of what will happen to whistle-blowers. This much seems agreeable, but Graeber continues to write that

When everyone knows that are doing something useful, they treat each other with respect. There’s comradery and cooperation. As soon as you’re doing bullshit, everybody is screaming at each other and freaking out and doing all these sadomasochistic rituals and deadlines. People abuse each other incredibly, and the more they know it doesn’t matter at all, the more they get stressed out over the deadlines, etc. 

What evidence is there to back up these claims? Since we’re working without evidence, let me offer my two cents. I think that if people are paid well to do harmless BS jobs, the last thing they would do is rock the boat by screaming at each other and jeopardizing their own positions. By contrast, people can get fiercely territorial when it comes to doing truly impactful work (e.g., work done in non-profits, etc.) and may in fact erect sadomasochistic rituals and deadlines to stop bright and idealistic new-comers from usurping their position of influence.     

Therefore, the concept of BS jobs is problematic, it denotes a set of problems that may not relate to each other, and may be overstated, and would therefore stem from diverse causes and require similarly varied solutions to tackle. But Graeber is identifying something that many others have also noted to be a malaise on modern work. What are the causes? Let us explore and evaluate some of them before turning to potential solutions.

The Causes

Some argue that BS jobs are not supposed to proliferate under capitalism because jobs are not considered a right or a duty like in socialist states of the past. Market competition should ensure that useless jobs are dropped. Graeber therefore argues that the real reasons for the proliferation of BS jobs are moral and political rather than economic. He argues that one of the reasons is because the 1% who control most of the wealth in the Western world have the power to inject their values and priorities into the market. This can explain why corporate jobs are so well-remunerated even though they do not positively impact the world (according to Graeber), while jobs that are actually useful, like working for the London tube, teaching in schools, and repairing cars, are almost expected, by definition, to be poorly paid.

It’s as if they are being told “But you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

Graeber attributes feelings of moral envy directed at those who choose to do work that has social value as justifications for underpaying them. He also points out the common belief that jobs that do have social value, like teaching and counselling, should not be well-paid precisely because that might attract the wrong kind of people (i.e., greedy people) who may not have the best interests of others at heart.

If your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.

David Graeber

There are indeed issues with the way capitalism is set up now that other thinkers, like Ray Dalio in his recent article on why capitalism needs to be reformed, have identified and that have caused increasingly large disparities between the haves and have-nots in Western societies. Large and visible disparities in wealth always create tensions and unrest. And this will only exacerbate the political situation should there be a debt crisis.

Dalio points to other factors that have led to growing wealth disparities, including the failures of education toward those living in low income areas across America. He is not the only commentator who has written about education. A fascinating essay on the subject of low performing schools by Mary Hudson titled ‘Public Education’s Dirty Secret’ is worth a read.

The effect of poor education, Dalio argues, encumbers the economy with higher rates of unproductive and criminal members of society. Dalio holds to the orthodox view that with greater efficiencies in technology, companies will continue replacing dispensable workers with machines and indispensable workers with cost-effective foreigners. And it is for these reasons that more revenues have gone to profits rather than to the majority of employees, especially those in the bottom 60% of the income bracket, who, as the Federal Reserve survey reports, would have trouble scrounging 400 USD for a rainy day.   

• Since the 1980s, there has been little to no inflation adjusted income growth for most.
• In 1970, the number of children who out-earn their parents dropped from 90% to 50%.   
• The top 1% owns more than the bottom 90% combined.
• Childhood poverty rate is at 17.5%.

Dalio argues that the way capitalism is set up now sustains an undesirable feedback loop, where those who are richer have greater buying power to produce what they, as opposed to the have-nots, want, like a good education for their children (e.g., the college admissions cheating scandal) to secure their future prospects, which in turn makes the rich richer and poor poorer.

Most capitalists don’t know how to divide the economic pie well and most socialists don’t know how to grow it well, yet we are now at a juncture in which either a) people of different ideological inclinations will work together to skillfully re-engineer the system so that the pie is both divided and grown well or b) we will have great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt most everyone and will shrink the pie.

Ray Dalio

Contra to Graeber, who is focused on one of the symptoms of the widening income gap, i.e., the proliferation of BS jobs, Dalio’s attention is on the entire wealth disparity in general.  This distinction will affect what solutions to consider.

The second reason he offers has to do with changing conceptions of time from the middle ages. Time was not always uniformly conceived as discrete moments corresponding to an objective measure of hours, minutes and seconds. Work was episodic, aligned with seasons and times of sowing and harvest, or hunting and gathering if we go further back. And time was measured by work rather than the other way around. For instance, rural Madagascans would use rice cooking to describe how long it would take to walk from one village to another, e.g., ‘two cookings of a pot of rice.’

For thousands of years, work revolved round agricultural yield, and workers alternated between intensive periods of work divided by long rest times. Graeber comments, half-jokingly, that this pattern is caricatured sometimes to the extreme by students who slack for most of the year and then cram like crazy for their exams.  

With technological advances and the invention of the clock, episodic work came to be seen as unproductive and indicative of moral decay. As the masses coagulated into the city at the industrial revolution to work in factories, they began to rebel against inhumane conditions by demanding fixed-hour contracts and free time to rest and recreate. Soon, the idea that a worker’s time belonged to his paying employer became entrenched. Any moment of slack when “on the clock,” even if all the work had already been done, was considered stealing from the employer.   

And so, employees had to make up work, or intentionally work inefficiently so that the expected deliverables and the time clocked in could match. As most of us today can relate, time and money became intertwined.

Boss: How come you’re not working?

Worker: There’s nothing to do.

Boss: Well, you’re supposed to pretend like you’re working.

Worker: Hey, I got a better idea. Why don’t you pretend like I’m working? You get paid more than me.   

Bill Hicks’ Comedy Routine

The third reason expands on the idea of moral decay. From the 16^th century, English Calvinists saw work as a form of discipline, something that could offer moral reformation for unruly youths and the poor. They, and other pious employers taught that work was a form of punishment and redemption that had self-mortificatory value outside of the wages it could provide. This idea soon bled into non-religious discourse and became mainstream.   

Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves.

Thomas Carlyle

According to Graeber, this factor helped solidify the perception that work isn’t necessarily about doing something useful, as it had to be when work was tied to agriculture, but that it was a form of self-denial, a sacrifice of the pleasures of free time drinking, dancing, and gossiping for character-building at the furnace of sustained – and therefore meaningless – labour.  

Echoes of this sentiment appear in contemporary religious ruminations about work. For example, the noted Evangelical mathematician John Lennox, in an article titled ‘God watches the way you work,’ argues that work is primarily about ‘seeking God’s rule and his righteousness,’ and only secondarily about making ends meet and seeking possessions. To Lennox, work is a vital aspect of character building, but not in the same way Graeber and the English Calvinists understood it.

According to Lennox, and I suspect, some contemporary Evangelicals, doing good work is not about submitting oneself to meaningless labour, it’s about doing the right thing in all circumstances, even when it’s costly:

Another vivid example I came across is that of a young man in his twenties who had trained as an electrician. After just a few weeks in his first job doing the electrical wiring in new houses, he was summoned to see his boss, who angrily accused him of laziness in that he had wired fewer houses than his workmates. He replied that he could not work any faster, since the wiring under the floors had to be done especially carefully to fulfill the regulations regarding fire hazards. The boss angrily retorted: “Who sees under the floorboards?” “My Lord does,” answered the young man without hesitation. He was fired on the spot but got a new job soon afterward.

John Lennox

One could imagine therefore, this refined religious understanding of the value of work to be at odds with BS jobs, since many of these jobs exist because of dishonesty, corruption, or incompetence, and, in some cases, actively harm others.

The fourth reason has to do with policy. Over the past several decades, there was a push for the creation of more jobs in America through economic policy, without specifying or regulating the quality of jobs that were being produced. Graeber observes that the one thing the Left and Right agree on is ‘more jobs.’

“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [occupied by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”

Barack Obama

The above quote comes from the President himself, who, in his tenure, argued for the protection of for-profit health insurance in America against alternatives like socialised healthcare, evidently because it legitimates millions of office jobs, that unfortunately, also produces a mountain of unnecessary paperwork and claiming processes.  

That more jobs are always good has become embedded as a core value in the American political discourse. Not working is seen as stigma. When someone mentions in casual conversation that they’re not working – and have no good reason not to be – people assume that they are lazy, entitled, and undeserving of financial aid.    

The fifth reason Graeber offers is the rise of the financial sector, which holds a good share of corporate jobs. Here are his comments on the matter:

It represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that. The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt.

He also points out that the financial crisis of ’08 revealed that the many complex financial instruments that nobody seemed or were told not to be presumptuous enough to try to understand but promised to create value from nothing could not deliver. This reminds me of a comment made by Steven Pinker when asked what advice he would give to a smart college student about to enter the workforce: ‘Think about what you will add to the world. Some lucrative professions (e.g., ultra-high-tech finance) are dubious applications of human brainpower.’

Corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things, and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing and allocating money and resources.

David Graeber

By way of response, it can be said that how the financial sector makes money isn’t really a well-kept secret. Their goal is simply to make money, whether through investments or by other means. The real problem isn’t how it makes its money, but how money gets stuck at the top. When central banks buy financial assets to stimulate the economy, the sellers get richer. These sellers in turn are more likely to buy more financial assets than goods and services because it makes them richer faster. Money then gets stuck at the top because those who are relatively poorer will not be lent money or invested in. This leaves the clear majority of people unable to obtain any remotely equitable share of wealth.

Regardless, according to Graeber, all his reasons come together to create the situation the Western world find themselves in. Capitalism, in reality, has given way to what he calls “managerial feudalism,” wherein corporate profits are no longer about making and selling things, a la capitalism, but about manipulating peoples’ debts. Graeber thinks that this is what causes the rise of BS jobs: money is hoarded by the ‘ruling elite’ of Occupy Movement fame, who have the power to decide what jobs should have the greatest earning power – through the creation of useless bureaucracies – and which for this reason may offer prestige but are also least valuable to society.

Gratifying as this might sound, there are issues with the diagnosis. In Britain at least, the average workweek has decreased over the last century. This should not be the case if BS jobs are indeed proliferating. Furthermore, the YouGov survey cited above hardly indicative of what the larger working population thinks, given that it polled fewer than a thousand individuals. In addition, while 37% of them said that their jobs do not contribute meaningfully to the world, they didn’t also say they hated their jobs. In fact, most of them were not intending to look for alternative employment. This hardly supports the thesis that huge swathes of people are suffering greatly because of BS employment.

It seems that many people in BS jobs choose not to mind because of the money those jobs can bring. Given the choice between collecting a government check and working a harmless BS job, some people would prefer the BS job: it occupies their time, introduces them to new people, gives them an identity and a ready topic for conversation, and it helps them escape the stigma of telling people that they’re essentially jobless or “freelancing.”

Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury, either.

Nathan Heller, ‘The BS Job Boom,’ The New Yorker

Many, in fact, make rather productive use of their free time. This seems to be a conscious strategy among some people I’ve met. A fellow graduate student from Cambridge confided in me that he was looking for a job that could pay the bills and yet give him enough free time to write novels and already had a few ideas about which ones to apply for. Imagine being able to pursue your passion while earning a living wage. For those unmotivated by the accumulation of wealth or career prestige, this sounds like the deal of the century.

One could also note that great works of fiction were written by people employed in jobs that afforded them free time. George Saunders wrote ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’ while serving as a technical writer in an engineering company. And Jeffrey Eugenides composed ‘The Virgin Suicides’ while working as a secretary. I have no doubt that some will languish in BS employment. But many will also make it work.

Coming back to Graeber’s analysis, he points out that the kind of work that has the most social value are those that involve ‘cleaning and polishing, watching and tending to helping and nurturing and fixing and otherwise taking care of things.’ These are, in a nutshell, working class jobs. Graeber argues that the more this kind of work is valued, more of the financial pie can be sliced for those who do the un-automated bits of them (few would want jobs in the service or caring industries to be fully automated; imagine a robot tending to you as a patient in a hospital or facilitating an Alcoholics Anonymous group) and, consequently, the number of BS jobs will go down.

Graeber offers one potential solution: Universal Basic Income (UBI) to the problems surrounding BS jobs. The next section will explore this solution. Given the evaluations of his ideas above, additional solutions will also be surfaced.   

Solutions

Since Rutger Bregman’s book on the topic, UBI has become a mainstay in the intellectual discourse concerning how to deal with automation taking away jobs and livelihoods, and how to deal with poverty more generally. UBI is an unconditional and regular cash payment to all individuals, regardless of their employment status.

Graeber himself admits that he did not write about BS jobs to offer solutions, but to highlight a problem, since he may not be equipped to offer a meaningful response given his credentials as an anthropologist and not an economist or policy maker. He has commented in written interviews, however, that for a world were basic needs for all are provided regardless of choice of profession, especially professions that have artistic and social value for which many are not incentivised to pursue in the current working environment, UBI seems the best option given that it also does not require heavy-handed bureaucratic government intervention to implement.    

It is not within the scope of this article to assess the merits of UBI. Some interesting experimental data have emerged with mostly positive results in Finland and elsewhere. However, whether UBI is feasible in the long term, and what unforeseen long-term effects it might have on creating a more equitable society and alleviating BS jobs remains unknown.

Others have offered more incisive and comprehensive solutions to the problems surrounding BS jobs, i.e., the wealth gap, managerial feudalism, and so on. For example, some point to block-chain technologies and cryptocurrencies as promisers of a state-and-bank-free forms of value exchange. These could potentially return value exchange back to capitalist ideals, where money could be directed at truly productive ventures and be grown and distributed quicker and more equitably than it is currently able.

Ray Dalio of Bridgewater fame offers similar sentiments, though his focus isn’t so much taking down the “system,” as it is re-engineering it so that it benefits the majority of people. For Dalio, solutions will not come from dismantling capitalism per se, as might occur in a political tug-of-war between the Left and Right, but about bipartisan efforts to reform capitalism through effective policies and other kinds of interventions.

As such, his solutions aren’t bottom up but somewhat top down: it’s the leaders of the nation who have the power to kickstart this reformation. Some specific interventions he offers are governments partnering with philanthropists and the relevant companies to invest in ‘socially and economically productive projects that offer a solid, measurable return on investment.’ This might include taxes on products (or by-products) that cause poor health, which is costly to society. It also includes effective educational interventions, since a poorly educated populace is also very costly to the country.  

Dalio notes that while the fiscal liberals might be good and borrowing and spending money, they often don’t spend the money wisely. On the flip-side, fiscal conservatives might be good at securing the budget, but they won’t spend enough on double-bottom-line investments (DBLI) to produce both economically and socially valuable returns that could secure America against a future debt crisis. Therefore, accountable leaders from both camps must come together to iteratively engineer and measure such DBLIs. 

Dalio also argues that there should be incentives to give money and credit to people who spend rather than people who merely save, and to find ways to raise money from the top income brackets and distribute them to middle-and-bottom earners without stifling innovation. These must involve better coordination between the government’s fiscal policies and the central banks’ monetary policies. If done right, he argues that the consequent redistribution of resources has the potential to improve ‘the well-beings and the productivies of the vast majority of people.’ The UBI experiment in Finland suggests as much, since those who received the unconditional payment did not work less than before or any less than the control group who were not given the unconditional payment. Furthermore, they reported higher levels of happiness and lowered stress.

Whether these macro interventions can succeed vis-à-vis the malaise of BS jobs remain to be seen. But one problem with BS jobs that has not been touched is their subjective component. While we have shown that Graeber’s thesis is overstated, as long as some people believe that their jobs are BS, they will continue to suffer. Therefore, beyond trying to slice the economic pie more equitably, which will admittedly take time and gumption to pull off, what can individual people do now to find meaning in their work, given that the job market works the way it does now?

Since we have established that meaning in work is tied to social value, then promising options at the individual level have already been spelled out by the Effective Altruism movement (EA). For the uninitiated, EA is a cluster of philosophical ideas, movements and non-profit organizations united by a common purpose: to determine and act on how people can use their time, talents, and money to help others the most.

80000 Hours, a non-profit that’s part of the EA movement, is a careers advice organisation that uses research and evidence to determine how graduates can pursue career paths that have the most positive social impact. There is enough material for a book length treatment on EA, but the bits of their advice that are germane to the present discussion has to do with how graduates can successfully find careers that are meaningful in precisely the way Graeber desires: careers that are adequately remunerated AND designed to positively impact in the lives of others.

The problem of BS jobs is symptomatic of a larger problem with “capitalism,” as Dalio would put it. Its causes are varied and, by extension, so will its solutions. At the macro level, if and when the economy functions to distribute resources more equitably in society, people will be freed up to pursue careers that they find meaningful. The cultural, artistic, and social capital of humanity will be greatly enriched. At the micro level, individuals should also take pains to seek careers that have social impact, or mould their current jobs to become stepping stones, skills and experience wise, to attain those careers. With concerted effort, BS may no longer be an odious blight on modern work. Until then, good luck.