Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit jobs is a concept developed by anthropologist David Graeber in his 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” (expanded into the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory). A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the person doing it cannot justify its existence — though they must pretend otherwise. Graeber stresses the pretence element: the job isn’t merely useless, the employee is contractually obliged to act as if it isn’t.¹

The five types

Graeber categorized bullshit jobs into five types (the book-era taxonomy splits taskmasters into “unnecessary superiors” and “bullshit generators” — people whose job is to invent bullshit work for others):²

1. Flunkies: Jobs that exist primarily to make their superiors feel important (receptionists who answer phones that never ring, assistants whose real job is to validate status, doormen, elevator operators)
2. Goons: Jobs that exist only because other organizations employ them (lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, PR specialists — national armies are the limiting case)
3. Duct tapers: Jobs that exist to fix problems that should not exist (programmers patching badly designed systems, subordinates cleaning up after incompetent star performers, airline staff soothing passengers for lost bags)
4. Box tickers: Jobs that exist to allow organizations to claim they are doing something they are not (compliance officers, performance reviewers, fact-finding commissions, in-house corporate magazines)
5. Taskmasters: Jobs that exist to supervise people who do not need supervision — or, worse, to generate new bullshit tasks and roles (middle managers, strategic-vision document authors)

The paradox

Graeber’s central observation is a paradox of modern capitalism: technological advances that should have reduced working hours have instead been accompanied by the proliferation of pointless employment. Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek by 2030; instead, we have seen the rise of what Graeber calls “managerial feudalism” — the creation of entire layers of bullshit jobs to keep people employed and disciplined.³

The phenomenon is not explained by economic necessity. Many bullshit jobs are highly paid, and their elimination would not reduce output or efficiency — in many cases it would improve them. Their persistence suggests that employment serves social and political functions (discipline, status hierarchy, consumption stimulation) beyond production. Graeber quotes Obama on single-payer healthcare — “that represents one million, two million, three million jobs” — as a “smoking gun”: even the most powerful politician treated job preservation, not job value, as the constraint on policy.⁴

The empirical hook is a 2015 YouGov poll: 37% of British workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world (13% unsure); in the Netherlands the figure was 40%. Graeber’s book adds 250+ solicited testimonies — the museum guard forbidden any mental stimulation while guarding an empty room, the temp whose whole job was looking busy (and who installed the text-only Lynx browser so his web browsing looked like a terminal), the worker copy-pasting a form that used to be automated until a management dispute de-automated it.⁵⁶

Critical reception (Heller, New Yorker 2018)

Nathan Heller’s review of the book is the sharpest mainstream critique, and worth keeping alongside Graeber’s claims:⁷

• Disaggregation objection: bullshit jobs may only look bullshitty — white-collar equivalents of the factory worker making one rivet, unable to see the whole. Graeber’s rebuttal is academia: staffing exploded while teaching and research didn’t scale up, so the new staff must be doing something else.
• The disguised dole: the realization Heller says Graeber “circles but never articulates” — bullshit employment functions in the US/UK as a half-baked welfare state for the credentialed middle class. Instead of a government check, you get a healthcare-company desk, useless morning reports, and an afternoon of solitaire. “Not a life well-lived, but not the terror of penury either.”
• Bullshit as patronage: George Saunders wrote CivilWarLand in Bad Decline at a technical-writing job; Eugenides wrote much of The Virgin Suicides as a secretary. The bullshit paycheck as “practically a Guggenheim.”
• Tempering: some make-work is acculturation, not conspiracy — medieval youth service (pages, ladies-in-waiting) was mostly bullshit too, and arguably useful. “The bullshit that destroys us is the bullshit that endures.”

Relation to post-scarcity and UBI

The bullshit jobs phenomenon is directly relevant to post-scarcity-economics:

• If much employment is already pointless, then automation does not destroy “real” jobs so much as it reveals the artificiality of existing ones
• The resistance to UBI and reduced working hours may be less about economic necessity than about the political function of employment as a mechanism of social control
• A post-scarcity transition requires not just material redistribution but a cultural revaluation of what constitutes meaningful activity

Graeber’s argument is that the barrier to post-scarcity is not technological but political and moral: we have the capacity to reduce work dramatically, but choose not to because our societies are organized around the moral imperative of employment. Heller’s “disguised dole” reading cuts both ways here: it strengthens the case that UBI would formalize an arrangement that already exists de facto — while explaining the political attachment to the current form, since a bullshit job delivers the transfer with status and hierarchy intact, which a bare check does not.⁸

Cross-domain connections

• post-scarcity-economics: Bullshit jobs are evidence that post-scarcity is already here for some — the problem is distribution and politics, not production
• universal-basic-income: UBI would allow people to exit bullshit jobs, forcing a reckoning with what work is actually necessary; Heller’s disguised-dole reading says bullshit jobs are the politically viable incumbent version of the same transfer
• degrowth: Degrowth’s reduced working hours would eliminate many bullshit jobs; the resistance to degrowth may be partly resistance to losing the status hierarchies these jobs sustain
• division-of-labor: Smith saw the mechanism’s human cost in 1776 (the “stupid and ignorant” passage) and prescribed public education; Graeber documents what happens when the economy, having solved production, generates make-work instead — the same condition arriving through demand-side pathology rather than overspecialization
• impartial-spectator: Graeber’s “pretence” element is Smith’s conscience conscripted against itself — the man without enforcing what the man within cannot ratify
• suffering-axioms: Graeber’s “spiritual violence” presupposes that meaning in work matters; the atonement imperative generalizes it — the question is never whether your work causes suffering (it does) but whether it contributes enough to atone

See Also

• post-scarcity-economics
• universal-basic-income
• degrowth
• logotherapy
• division-of-labor
• suffering-axioms

Sources

• STRIKE! Magazine — On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2013)
• 2018
• 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom

Footnotes

1. 2018 ↩

2. 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom ↩

3. STRIKE! Magazine — On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2013) ↩

4. 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom ↩

5. 2018 ↩

6. 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom ↩

7. 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom ↩

8. 2018 — The Bullshit-Job Boom ↩