(2024-07-08) Hobart Bullshit Jobs Is A Terrible Curiosity Killing Concept

Byrne Hobart: Bullshit Jobss is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept. David Graeber died in 2020, but "Bullshit Jobs" still gets thrown around a lot. I was uncomfortable with the concept, but had never read the book so I didn't feel especially comfortable being dismissive. This was a mistake. If you don't own a copy, don't bother buying one. If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others.

The observation the book explores is that there seem to be many jobs that just aren't necessary. Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc

Since the book was written to expand a previous article, he has room to backtrack on at least one of those, conceding that actuaries may do something useful, something he learned through pushback. Here we have our first anthropological datapoint: he didn't learn this by asking himself "Is there, after all, some kind of social utility in knowing how long someone is likely to live? In an advanced economy where people aren't working from the first moment they're capable of it until they're incapacitated or dead, might we expect such a job to exist, to create value, and to be paid accordingly?" No, what happened according to Graeber, is that people who read his claims responded and set him straight.

That drives a lot of the empirical research in the book. He cites some surveys, which show that many workers feel alienated from their jobs, don't believe those jobs are worth doing, don't like their jobs

It's possible that there's a large cohort of people who define themselves by what they do with their time, but who also have interests that aren't very lucrative. Of course these people will feel alienated!

That doesn't make their jobs fake. It just makes them jobs,

it's about these jobs being utterly meaningless. He presents an economic theory for how this happens, connecting it to the medieval practice of creating face-saving make-work jobs for talentless aristocrats

the modern rich are much richer than medieval rulers, while human vanity is a constant. So of course they hire a lot more such lackeys, right? No! Of course not, because economic growth makes stuff cheap and time precious. And unstable political institutions also make safety precious.

The anecdotes that Graeber cites can be divided into two categories: people whose jobs illustrate why a particular field is not known for its efficiency, and jobs that are executed ruthlessly but that Graeber believes add negative value to society

The reasoning isn't just wonky for fake jobs. Graeber also plays a bit fast and loose with his discussion of what he considers real jobs

Graeber points out, correctly, that the person who cooks your food makes a lot less money than the person who decides which appetizer will get a limited-time discount; the person driving your Uber makes less than the person who designed the frontend for the app. There is a rough correlation between how real-world a job is and how little it pays, or, more kindly, a correlation between how abstract a job is and how well it pays.

Those old jobs are more prone to partial or complete automation—if it's something people did in a pre-literate society, you don't need college or even high school to do that kind of work today.

Tax lawyers, distributed computing experts, and exotic derivatives traders are newer professions. They're also jobs that require substantial training

But do we actually need those jobs? At one level, the answer is no: we got along fine for most of human history with zero people doing this work.

But "we," collectively, do not seem especially interested in merely getting along—we generally want to get more

That process produces specialists whose work has a highly tangential relationship to the finished product; you can't point to any specific feature of an iPhone that can be credited to anyone in Apple's HR, marketing, or finance departments

And: some of these jobs may be fake, or fake-ish. Some may be the result of corporate empire-building, or might exist to help create and sell products that customers would be better-off not buying. That's always a valid suspicion! But it's also valid to ask: when you encounter other people's behavior, and find it surprising, is it more likely that you noticed something, with only a few moments of thought, they've missed for their entire career?

It’s just sad to go through life dismissing everything you can’t immediately explain as some sort of emperor’s new clothes phenomenon that everyone else is too oversocialized to call out. Some fraction of the time, that’s true

Subjecting Bullshit Jobs to any serious intellectual scrutiny, whether asking if the broad theory makes sense or if the evidence for it is reliable, reveals that there isn't much substance there. It's a book that would read better if more declarative sentences were turned into question marks, and if it spent at least a little time asking employers "what is this person's job for?"