Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  Social engineering does happen. The regime of make-work jobs that existed in the Soviet Union or Communist China, for example, was created from above by a self-conscious government policy of full employment. To say this is in no sense controversial. Pretty much everyone accepts that it is the case. Still, it’s hardly as if anyone sitting in the Kremlin or the Great Hall of the People actually sent out a directive saying “I hereby order all officials to invent unnecessary jobs until unemployment is eliminated.”

  The reason no such orders were sent out was because they didn’t have to be. The policy spoke for itself. As long as you don’t say “Aim for full employment, but do not create jobs unless they conform to the following standards”—and make it clear you will be very punctilious about ensuring those standards are met—then one can be sure of the results. Local officials will do what they have to do.

  While no central directives of this kind were ever sent out under capitalist regimes, at least to my knowledge, it is nonetheless true that at least since World War II, all economic policy has been premised on an ideal of full employment. Now, there is every reason to believe that most policy makers don’t actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much “upward pressure on wages.” Marx appears to have been right when he argued that a “reserve army of the unemployed” has to exist in order for capitalism to work the way it’s supposed to.7 But it remains true that “More Jobs” is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on.8 They differ only about the most expedient means to produce the jobs. Banners held aloft at a union march calling for jobs never also specify that those jobs should serve some useful purpose. It’s just assumed that they will—which, of course, means that often they won’t. Similarly, when right-wing politicians call for tax cuts to put more money in the hands of “job creators,” they never specify whether those jobs will be good for anything; it’s simply assumed that if the market produced them, they will be. In this climate, one might say that political pressure is being placed on those managing the economy similar to the directives once coming out of the Kremlin; it’s just that the source is more diffuse, and much of it falls on the private sector.

  Finally, as I’ve emphasized, there is the level of conscious public policy. A Soviet official issuing a planning document, or an American politician calling for job creation, might not be entirely aware of the likely effects of their action. Still, once a situation is created, even as an unintended side effect, politicians can be expected to size up the larger political implications of that situation when they make up their minds what—if anything—to do about it.

  Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America:

  “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “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 [filled 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?”9

  I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.10

  So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.11

  That a political culture where “job creation” is everything might produce such results should not be shocking (though for some reason, it is, in fact, treated as shocking); but it does not in itself explain the economic and social dynamics by which those jobs first come into being. In the remainder of this chapter, we will consider these dynamics and then return briefly to the role of government.

  concerning some false explanations for the rise of bullshit jobs

  Before mapping out what actually happened, it will first be necessary to dispose of certain very common, if ill-conceived, explanations for the rise of apparently pointless employment frequently proposed by market enthusiasts. Since libertarians, “anarcho-capitalists,” enthusiasts for Ayn Rand or Friedrich Hayek and the like are extremely common in pop economic forums, and since such market enthusiasts are committed to the assumption that a market economy could not, by definition, create jobs that serve no purpose,12 one tends to hear these arguments quite a lot. So we might as well address them.13

  Basically such arguments fall into two broad types. Proponents of each are happy to admit that at least some of those who believe they hold pointless jobs in the public sector are correct. However, the first group argues that those who harbor similar suspicions in the private sector are not correct. Since competing firms would never pay workers to do nothing, their jobs must be useful in some way that they simply do not understand.

  The second group admits useless paper-pushing jobs do exist in the private sector, and even that they have proliferated. However, this group insists that private sector bullshit jobs must necessarily be a product of government interference.

  A perfect example of the first kind of argument can be found in a piece in the Economist, published about a day and a half after the appearance of my original “bullshit jobs” essay in 2013.14 It had all the trappings of a rush job,15 but the very fact that this bastion of free market orthodoxy felt the need to respond almost instantly shows that the editors knew how to identify an ideological threat. They summed up their argument as follows:

  Over the past century, the world economy has grown increasingly complex. The goods being provided are more complex; the supply chains used to build them are more complex; the systems to market, sell, and distribute them are more complex; the means to finance it all is more complex; and so on. This complexity is what makes us rich. But it is an enormous pain to manage. I’d say that one way to manage it all would be through teams of generalists—craftsman managers who mind the system from the design stage right through to the customer service calls—but there is no way such complexity would be economically workable in that world (just as cheap, ubiquitous automobiles would have been impossible in a world where teams of generalist mechanics produced cars one at a time).

  No, the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialization. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same.

  In other words, the author claims that when we speak of “bullshit jobs,”16 we’re really just talking about the postindustrial equivalent of factory-line workers, those with the unenviable fate of having to carry out the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring but still very necessary tasks required to manage increasingly complicate
d processes of production. As robots replace the factory workers, these are increasingly the only jobs left. (This position is sometimes combined with a rather condescending argument about self-importance: if so many people feel their jobs are useless, it’s really because today’s educated workforce is full of philosophy or Renaissance literature majors who believe they are cut out for better things. They consider being a mere cog in administrative machinery beneath their dignity.)

  I don’t think I really need to dwell too much on the second argument, since the reader is likely to have encountered variations of it a thousand times before. Anyone who truly believes in the magic of the marketplace will always insist that any problem, any injustice, any absurdity that might seem to be produced by the market is really caused by government interference with same. This must be true because the market is freedom, and freedom is always good. Putting it this way might sound like a caricature, but I have met libertarians willing to say exactly that, in almost exactly those words.17 Of course, the problem with any such argument is that it’s circular; it can’t be disproved. Since all actually existing market systems are to some degree state regulated, it’s easy enough to insist that any results one likes (say, high levels of overall wealth) are the result of the workings of the market, and that any features one doesn’t like (say, high levels of overall poverty) are really due to government interference in the workings of the market—and then insist that the burden of proof is on anyone who would argue otherwise. No real evidence in favor of the position is required because it is basically a profession of faith.18

  Now, this being said, I should hasten to point out I am not saying government regulation plays no role in the creation of bullshit jobs (particularly of the box-ticker variety). Clearly, it does. As we’ve already seen, whole industries, such as corporate compliance, would not exist at all were it not for government regulations. But the argument here is not that such regulations are one reason for the rise of bullshit jobs, it’s that they are the primary or, even, the only reason.

  To sum up, then, we have two arguments: first, that globalization has rendered the process of production so complicated that we need ever more office workers to administer it, so these are not bullshit jobs; second, that while many of them are indeed bullshit jobs, they only exist because increases in government regulation have not only created an ever-burgeoning number of useless bureaucrats but also forced corporations to employ armies of box tickers to keep them at bay.

  Both these arguments are wrong, and I think a single example can refute both of them. Let us consider the case of private universities in the United States. Here are two tables, both drawn from Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fall of the Faculty, about the administrative take-over of American universities, which give us pretty much all we need to know. The first shows the growth in the proportion of administrators and their staff in American universities overall. During the thirty years in question, a time during which tuition skyrocketed, the overall number of teachers per student remained largely constant (in fact, the period ended with slightly fewer teachers per student than before). At the same time, the number of administrators and, above all, administrative staff ballooned to an unprecedented degree (see figure 5).

  Figure 5 Changes in the Supply of and Demand for Administrative Services, 1985–2005

  Staff

  +240%

  Administrators

  +85%

  Student Enrollments

  +56%

  Faculty

  +50%

  No. of Degree-Granting Institutions

  +50%

  No. of BA Degrees Granted

  +47%

  Source: Calculated from NCES, “Digest,” 2006

  Is this because the process of “production”—in this case, this would presumably mean teaching, reading, writing, and research—had become two or three times more complicated between 1985 and 2005, so that it now requires a small army of office staff to administer it?19 Obviously not. Here I can speak from personal experience. Certainly, things have changed a bit since I was in college in the 1980s—lecturers are now expected to provide PowerPoint displays instead of writing on blackboards; there’s greater use of class blogs, Moodle pages, and the like. But all this is pretty minor stuff. It’s nothing even remotely comparable to, say, the containerization of shipping, Japanese-style “just in time” production regimes, or the globalization of supply chains. For the most part, teachers continue to do what they have always done: give lectures, lead seminars, meet students during office hours, and grade papers and exams.20

  What about the heavy hand of government, then? Ginsberg provides us with a refutation to that claim, too, again in one easy table (see figure 6).

  Figure 6 Administrative Growth at Public and Private Institutions, 1975–2005

  1975

  1995

  2005

  change

  Administrators and Managers at Public Colleges

  60,733

  82,396

  101,011

  +66%

  Administrators and Managers at Public Colleges

  40,530

  65,049

  65,049

  +135%

  Source: Calculated from NCES, “Digest,” 2006

  In reality, the number of administrators and managers at private institutions increased at more than twice the rate as it did at public ones. It seems extremely unlikely that government regulation caused private sector administrative jobs to be created at twice the rate as it did within the government bureaucracy itself. In fact, the only reasonable interpretation of these numbers is precisely the opposite: public universities are ultimately answerable to the public, and hence, under constant political pressure to cut costs and not engage in wasteful expenditures. This may lead to some peculiar priorities (in most US states, the highest-paid public servant is a football or basketball coach at a state university), but it does tend to limit the degree to which a newly appointed dean can simply decide that, since he is obviously a very important person, it is only natural that he should have five or six additional administrative staff working under him—and only then begin trying to figure out what said staff are actually going to do. Administrators at private universities are answerable only to their board of trustees. Trustees are usually extremely rich. If they are not themselves creatures of the corporate world, they are at the very least used to moving in environments shaped by its mores and sensibilities—and as a result, they tend to view such a dean’s behavior as entirely normal and unobjectionable.

  Ginsberg himself sees the increase in the numbers and power of university administrators as a simple power grab—one which, he says, has resulted in a profound shift in assumptions about the very nature of universities and the reasons for their existence. Back in the 1950s or 1960s, one could still say that universities were one of the few European institutions that had survived more or less intact from the Middle Ages. Crucially, they were still run on the old medieval principle that only those involved in a certain form of production—whether this be the production of stonework or leather gloves or mathematical equations—had the right to organize their own affairs; indeed that they were also the only people qualified to do so. Universities were basically craft guilds run for and by scholars, and their most important business was considered to be producing scholarship, their second-most, training new generations of scholars. True, since the nineteenth century, universities had maintained a kind of gentleman’s pact with government, that they would also train civil servants (and later, corporate bureaucrats) in exchange for otherwise being largely left alone. But since the eighties, Ginsberg argues, university administrators have effectively staged a coup. They wrested control of the university from the faculty and oriented the institution itself toward entirely different purposes. It is now commonplace for major universities to put out “strategic vision documents” that barely mention scholarship or teaching but go on at length about “the student experience,” “research excellence” (gett
ing grants), collaboration with business or government, and so forth.

  All this rings very true for anyone familiar with the university scene, but the question remains: If this was a coup, how did the administrators manage to get away with it? One has to assume that even in the 1880s, there were university administrators who would have been delighted to seize power in this way and each hire themselves a retinue of minions. What happened in the intervening century that put them in a position to actually do so? And whatever it was, how is it connected to the rise of the total proportion of managers, administrators, and meaningless paper pushers outside the academy that occurred during the same period of time?

  Since this is the period that also saw the rise of finance capitalism, it might be best to return to the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) to seek insight into what overall dynamic in the economy sparked such changes. If those whom the Economist believes to be administering complex global supply chains are not, in fact, administering complex global supply chains, then what exactly are they doing? And does what is happening in those offices provide any sort of window on what is happening elsewhere?

  why the financial industry might be considered a paradigm for bullshit job creation

  • expedited frictionless convergences

  • coordinated interactive market institutions

  • contracted virtual clearinghouses

  • directed margin adjustments 21

  On a superficial level, of course, the immediate mechanisms that create bullshit jobs in the FIRE sector are the same ones that produce them anywhere else. I listed some of these in chapter 2, when I described the five basic types of bullshit jobs and how they came about. Flunky positions are created because those in powerful positions in an organization see underlings as badges of prestige; goons are hired due to a dynamic of one-upmanship (if our rivals employ a top law firm, then so, too, must we); duct-taper positions are created because sometimes organizations find it more difficult to fix a problem than to deal with its consequences; box-ticker positions exist because, within large organizations, paperwork attesting to the fact that certain actions have been taken often comes to be seen as more important than the actions themselves; taskmasters exist largely as side effects of various forms of impersonal authority. If large organizations are conceived as a complex play of gravitational forces, pulling in many contradictory directions, one could say there will always be a certain pull in any of these five. Even so, one must ask: Why is there not a greater pressure pulling in the opposite direction? Why is this not seen as more of a problem? Firms like to represent themselves as lean and mean.