Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  7. Civil servants in particular would favor the term “help” over “value,” though its use was by no means limited to civil servants.

  8. See Graeber 2013:84–87.

  9. I’m assuming that there is no genre of music, art, etc., that doesn’t cause more happiness for some than it annoys others. I could be wrong.

  10. Some Belgian friends told me the net effects were extremely beneficial, as almost all major parties were committed to the then European-wide consensus about the need for austerity, but the lack of a government in Belgium at that critical moment meant reforms were not carried out, and the Belgian economy ended up growing substantially faster than its neighbors’. It’s also worth noting that Belgium does have seven different regional governments that were unaffected.

  11. Caitlin Huston, “Uber IPO Prospects May Be Helped by Resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick,” MarketWatch, last modified June 22, 2017, www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-ipo-prospects-may-be-helped-by-resignation-of-ceo-travis-kalanick-2017-06-21.

  12. Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).

  Even police strikes rarely have the anticipated effects. In December 2015 New York police carried out a work stoppage for all but “urgent” police business; there was no effect on crime rate, but city revenues plummeted owing to the lack of fines for traffic violation and similar infractions. The complete disappearance of police in a major city, either owing to a full strike, or in one documented case in Amsterdam during World War II, mass arrest by German occupiers, tends to lead to a rise in property crime like burglary, but leave violent crime unaffected. In rural areas with some tradition of self-governance, like the part of Madagascar where I lived between 1989 and 1991, the withdrawal of police due to IMF austerity measures made almost no difference at all—when I visited again twenty years later people were almost universally convinced that violent crime had increased sharply since the police had returned.

  13. Benjamin B. Lockwood, Charles G. Nathanson, and E. Glen Weyl, “Taxation and the Allocation of Talent,” Journal of Political Economy 125, no. 5 (October 2017): 1635–82, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693393. The reference to Marketers is however taken from an earlier (2012) version of the same paper, with the same title, published at https://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/12/TaxationAndTheAllocationOfTalent_preview.pdf, 16.

  14. Eilis Lawlor, Helen Kersley, and Susan Steed, A Bit Rich: Calculating the Value to Society of Different Professions (London: New Economics Foundation, 2009), http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/8c16eabdbadf83ca79_ojm6b0fzh.pdf. I have standardized and averaged out some of the salaries, which the original report gave sometimes as hourly wages, sometime as yearly salaries, but in the latter case, usually as ranges.

  15. See, for instance, Gordon B. Lindsay, Ray M. Merrill, and Riley J. Hedin, “The Contribution of Public Health and Improved Social Conditions to Increased Life Expectancy: An Analysis of Public Awareness,” Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education 4 (2014): 311–17, which contrasts the received scientific understanding of such matters with popular perception, which assumes improvements are almost entirely due to doctors. https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/the-contribution-of-public-health-and-improved-social-conditions-to-increased-life-expectancy-an-analysis-of-public-awareness-2161-0711-4-311.php?aid=35861.

  16. Another exception would be highly paid athletes or entertainers. Many get paid so much they are often held out as avatars of bullshit, but I would tend to disagree. If such people succeed in bringing happiness or excitement into others’ lives, why not? Obviously, questions could be raised about how much more they are responsible for that happiness and excitement than the teams surrounding them, support staff, and the like, most of whom are paid far less.

  17. If it had anything to do with the dangers of the job, on the other hand, the highest-paid workers in America would be either loggers or fishermen, and in Britain, farmers.

  18. One (in my opinion rather obtuse) economist and blogger named Alex Tabarrok wrote a response to my original bullshit jobs piece that claimed my point about the inverse relation of pay and social benefit was “a great example of faulty economic reasoning,” since, he said, I was simply talking about the diamonds-water paradox (which goes back to the Middle Ages, and Adam Smith famously used to propose a distinction between use value and exchange value), that he said had been “solved” a century ago with the introduction of the concept of marginal utility. Actually, my impression was that it had been “solved” at least as far back as Galileo, but the bizarre thing about his claim is that I hadn’t engaged in economic reasoning at all, since I didn’t propose any explanation for the inverse relation, but just pointed out that it exists (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/bs-jobs-and-bs-economics.html). How can simply pointing out a fact be faulty reasoning? The example of the relative supply of nurses is drawn from Peter Frase’s reply to that piece (www.jacobinmag.com/2013/10/the-ethic-of-marginal-value/); for the glut of lawyers, see, for instance, L. M. Sixel, “A Glut of Lawyers Dims Job Prospects for Many,” Houston Chronicle online, last modified March 25, 2016, http://wtonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-lawyers-dims-job-prospects-for-many-7099998.php.

  I might note that Tabarrok’s ploy—take a simple empirical observation and pretend it’s an economic argument, and then “refute” it—seems to be common among bad economic bloggers; I once saw a simple observation I had made that kindhearted merchants will sometimes give poor customers a discount on necessities characterized as an attempted “refutation” of economic theory, which the blogger then went on to disprove—as if economists really believed no merchant ever did anything out of kindness!

  19. I first encountered the argument in G. A. Cohen, “Back to Socialist Basics,” New Left Review, no. 207 (1994): 2–16, his critique of the Labour Party manifesto. Various versions of it can be found in his other work, notably in “Incentives, Inequality, and Community: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values” (lecture, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, May 21 and 23, 1991, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/cohen92.pdf).

  20. Back in the 1990s, when I still used to argue with libertarians, I found they would almost invariably justify inequality in terms of work. If I would observe, say, that some disproportionate share of social wealth was being distributed upward, a typical response would be along the lines of “to me this just shows that some people are working harder, or working smarter, than others.” This particular formulation always stuck in my head because of the telltale slipperiness. One cannot, of course, really argue that a CEO who makes a thousand times more than a bus driver is working a thousand times harder, so you slip in “smarter”—which implies “more productive” but, in fact, here just seems to be “in a way for which you’re paid much more.” All that saves this statement from absolutely meaningless circularity (they’re smart because they’re rich because they’re smart, and on and on) is that it emphasizes that (most of) the very rich do have jobs.

  21. This is why the books they produce become ever shorter, more simplistic, and less well researched.

  22. Geoff Shullenberger, “The Rise of the Voluntariat,” Jacobin online, last modified May 5, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-rise-of-the-voluntariat.

  23. Bertrand Russell puts it nicely in his essay “In Praise of Idleness”: “What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” (1935:13).

  24. Genesis 3.16. Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958:107n53) makes the argument that nowhere in the Bible is it suggested that work itself is punishment for disobedience; God simply makes the labor more harsh; others are simply reading Genesis through Hesiod. This might be true, but it doesn’t really affect my argument; espe
cially since Christians writing and thinking on the subject have assumed that was the meaning of the biblical passage for centuries. For instance, in 1664 Margaret Cavendish argued “neither can tennis be a pastime, for . . . there can be no recreation in sweaty labor; for it is laid as a curse upon man, that they shall live by the sweat of their brows” (in Thomas 1999: 9). For the best discussion of the early Christian debates on Adam and Eve, which argues that it was Saint Augustine who was really responsible for the notion that all humans are tainted, and, hence, cursed, because of original sin, see Pagels (1988).

  25. Much of the next section is a summary of an earlier essay of mine, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property” (1997), itself an abbreviated version of my master’s thesis, The Generalization of Avoidance: Manners and Possessive Individualism in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1987). Some of the classic works on traditional Northern European marriage patterns and life-cycle service include Hajnal (1965, 1982), Laslett (1972, 1977, 1983, 1984), Stone (1977), Kassmaul (1981), and Wall (1983); for a more recent survey of the state of the literature, see Cooper (2005). The primary difference between Northern European and Mediterranean marriage patterns from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period is that in the latter, while men also would often marry late, women married much earlier, and life-cycle service was limited to certain social and professional groups but in no sense a norm.

  26. Nowadays, of course, the word “waiter” is used only for those who “wait” tables at restaurants, a mainstay of the “service economy,” but the term was still being used primarily for domestic servants—ranking one step below the butler—in Victorian households. The word “dumbwaiter,” for example, originally referred to the fact that servants who brought food to the master’s table would often gossip about what they overheard people saying around it; mechanical dumbwaiters performed the same function but could not speak.

  27. This is inaccurate. Most were apprenticed in early adolescence.

  28. I have quoted it myself in the Manners paper (1997:716–17). The translation goes back to: Charlotte A. Sneyd, A relation, or rather A true account, of the island of England; with sundry particulars of the customs of these people, and of the royal revenues under King Henry the Seventh, about the year 1500, by an Italian, Camden Society volume xxxvi, 1847, 14–15.

  29. Susan Brigden, “Youth and the English Reformation,” Past & Present 95 (1982): 37–38.

  30. In Renaissance England, for example, one frequent representative of the king was a noble servant entitled the “Groom of the Stool,” because he was in charge of emptying the king’s chamber pot (Starkey 1977).

  31. My father, for example, was for most of his life a plate stripper in offset photo lithography shops. At one point, while first learning my medieval history, I was telling him about the guild system. “Yes,” he said, “I served an apprenticeship, too. I retired as a ‘journeyman printer.’ ” When I asked if there were any master printers, he said, “No, we don’t have masters anymore. Well, unless you want to say that’s the boss.”

  32. Phillip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1562. This line of objection, of course, reached its peak with Malthus, who came to argue that the working classes would thus tend to breed everyone into poverty, and famously advocated fostering unsanitary conditions to kill them off. Cazenove, who is cited later, was a disciple of Malthus.

  33. K. Thomas 1976:221.

  34. Max Weber’s (1905) arguments about the relation of Calvinism and the origins of capitalism, I believe, should be understood in this light. That there was some connection between Protestantism, an ethic of self-disciplined work, and economic growth was considered self-evident by many at the time (Tawney 1924) but few examine the confluence of the three factors: Northern European life-cycle service, Protestantism, and emerging capitalism, even though they appear to broadly coincide.

  35. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 173–74. It is interesting to contrast Carlyle’s praise of work for freeing the soul from cares to Nietzsche, who condemned it for that very reason: “In the glorification of ‘work’ and the never-ceasing talk about the ‘blessing of labor’ I see . . . fear of everything individual. For at the sight of work—that is to say, severe toil from morning till night—we have the feeling that it is the best police, viz., that it holds everyone in check and effectively hinders the development of reason, of greed, and of desire for independence. For work uses up an extraordinary proportion of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, meditation, dreams, cares, love, and hatred” (Daybreak, 1881 [1911:176–77]). One wonders if this is a direct response to Carlyle.

  36. Carlyle, Past and Present, 175. Much of the essay is a condemnation of capitalism, as “Mammonism,” and like so many nineteenth-century works sounds vaguely Marxist to the modern ear, even when it comes to conservative conclusions: “Labor is not a devil, even while encased in Mammonism; Labor is ever an imprisoned god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of Mammonism!” (257).

  37. John Cazenove, Outlines of Political Economy; Being a Plain and Short View of the Laws Relating to the Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wealth (London: P. Richardson, 1832), 21–22. As far as I know, the first use of the labor theory of value to argue that workers are exploited by their employers is found in a pamphlet called The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments, written by the British Jacobin John Thelwall in 1796.

  38. From Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1967), 174: Faler’s (1981) study of the town of Lynn in Massachusetts from 1780 to 1860 documents at length the degree to which the labor theory of value formed the framework of public debate for almost a century after the Revolution.

  39. Marx’s own works, for example, were little known in the US at the time, though not completely unknown, since Marx himself was working as a freelance newspaper opinion writer and would often publish columns in US papers. Marx, in his capacity as head of the Workingmen’s Association, also wrote directly to Lincoln with his own analysis of the American situation a few years later, in 1865, and while Lincoln seems to have read the letter, he had one of his adjuncts respond.

  40. Already in 1845, New York state assemblyman Mike Walsh was arguing along explicitly anticapitalist lines: “What is capital, but that all-grasping power which has been wrung, by fraud, avarice, and malice from the labor of this and all ages past.” In Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008), 149.

  41. E. P. Goodwin, Home Missionary Sermon, 1880, in Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1891), 159. Denis Kearney was a California labor leader of the time, now remembered largely for his campaigning against Chinese immigration, and Robert Ingersoll, the author of well-known refutations of the Bible, is now mainly known secondhand through Clarence Darrow’s arguments against the literal interpretation of Genesis in the play Inherit the Wind, which appear to be taken directly from Ingersoll’s writings. I can add a personal testimony here: my own grandfather Gustavus Adolphus (“Dolly”) Graeber, who, owing to my family’s peculiarly long generations, was born before the US Civil War and worked as a musician for many years along the Western frontier at exactly the time Goodwin was writing—he is reputed to be the man who introduced the mandolin into American music—was, my father once told me, “an Ingersoll man” and, hence, a fervent atheist. He was never a Marxist, but my father became one later.

  42. The movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre is based on a novel of the same name by B. Traven, the pseudonym for a German anarchist novelist who fled his own country and lived most of the years of his life in southern Mexico. His real identity remains the object of speculation to this day.

  43. Thus, for instance, when in 1837 the group of businessmen from Amherst, Massachusetts, proposed to create a limited-liability carriage company, the proposal was opposed by a petition by journeymen on the grounds that “a
s journeymen, they looked forward to being their own masters when they would not have to relinquish to others the value they created,” stating “ ‘incorporations put means into the hands of inexperienced capitalists, to take from us the profits of our art, which has cost us years of labor to obtain, and which we consider to be our exclusive privilege to enjoy’ ” (Hanlon 2016:57). Ordinarily such requests were only approved if the company was dedicated to creating and maintaining public works of an obviously useful nature such as a railroad or canal.

  44. Durrenberger and Doukas 2008:216–17.

  45. 1974:246.

  46. There is some debate over the relative weight, in medieval Christian theology, of the degree to which work was seen as an imitation of divine creation, and as a means of perfecting the self (see the discussion in Ehmer and Lis 2009:10–15), but both principles appear to have been present from the very beginning.

  47. Classic studies include Kraus, Côté, and Keltner 2010, and Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, and Keltner 2011.

  48. As a result underlings will also tend to care more about their superiors than their superiors will care about them, and this extends to almost any relation of structural inequality: men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and so on. It has always seemed to me this is one of the main forces that allows such inequalities to continue. (I’ve discussed this in various places, but the curious reader might consult the second chapter of Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 68–72.)

  49. From this perspective, for instance, money, markets, finance are just ways of strangers alerting us to what they care about, because we care that caring is directed appropriately; which implies, in turn, that contemporary banking is simply a bad form of caring labor, insofar as it aims it in the wrong direction.