Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

• In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. 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.
• It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. * In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient Socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But of course, this is the very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

  Chapter 1: What Is a Bullshit Job?

• Spanish Civil Servant Skips Work for Six Years to Study Spinoza - Jewish Times, February 26, 2016 A Spanish civil servant who collected a salary for at least six years without working used the time to become an expert on the writings of Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Spanish media reported. A court in Cadiz in sourthern Spain last month ordered Joaquin Garcia, sixty-nine, to pay approximately $30,000 in fines for failing to show up for work at the water board, Agua de Cadiz, where Garcia was employed as an engineer since 1996, the news site euronews.com reported last week.
• Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is 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 condition of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. My note - I’m not sure I agree with the definition. Maybe it should be based on prodviding a product/services.
• My note - what does he mean by “corporate lawyer”? There are 2 different things, not tax ligitagor (Also how is that a b.s. job?)

  Chapter 2: What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?

• Five categories of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
• Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct - tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has gotten around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible.
• My note - Maybe there is value in convincing self that job has purpose. I meet lots of people who are passionate about their job/industry, but seemingly don’t do much. Maybe the rol eof a boss?

  Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?

• He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, asn this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. Eric, who had not been trained to act and think this way, couldn’t bring himself to do it. As a result, he ended up, for a time, at least, in a squat growing tomatoes.
• I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success…such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything. - Nikola Tesla
• Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from teh world around them, largely by coming to understand that “they” are th thing which just caused something to happen - the proof of which is the fact that they can make it happen again. Crucially, too, this realization is, form the very beginning, marked with a species of delight that remains the fundamental background of all subsequent human experience. It is hard perhaps to think of our sense of self as grounded in action because when we are truly engrossed in doing something - especially something we know how to do very well, from running a race to solving a complicated logical problem - we tend to forget that we exist. But even as we dissolve into what we do, the foundational “pleasure at being the cause” remains, as it were, the unstated ground of our being.
• Schiller argued that the desire to create art is simply a manifestation of the urge to play as the exercise of freedom for its own sake as well.
• If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom.
• One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.
• By this moral logick, it’s not that idleness is dangerous. Idleness is theft.
• This is important to underline because the idea that one person’s time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar. Most human societies tha have ever existed would never have conceived of such a thing. As teh great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Gree or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buyin g hte potter - slavery was a familiar instiution in the ancient worl.d But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might uby hte potter’s time.
• Time is not a grid against which work can be measured, because the work is the measure itself.
• My note - On needing to have an impact - still some people who could, choose not to in order to do less/make job easier.

  Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?

• At least flight attendants know exactly what’s expected of them. What is expected of bullshit jobholders is usually far less onerous, but it is complicated by the fact that they are never sure exactly what it is.
• This kind of polite, coded, mutual consideration is perhaps about as close to honesty in such situations as one is likely to get. But even in such maximally benevolent circumstances, there is a taboo on being too explicit. The one thing that could never, apparently, happen, is for anyone to actually say, “Basiclaly you’re just here in case of meregencies. Otherwise, feels obliged to pretend to be overworked, just as a reciprocal gesture of appreciation and respect.
• As noted in chapter 3, much of our sense of being a self, a being discrete from its surrounding environment, comes from the joyful realization that we can have predictable effects on that environment.
• Obviously, the ability to affect one’s environment cannot be taken away completely - rearranging objects in one’s backpack or playing Fruit Mahjong is still acting on the world in some way - but most people in the world today, certainly in wealthy countries, are now taught to see their work as their principal way of having an impact on the world, and the fact that they are paid to do it as proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect.

  Chapter 5: Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?

• In the case of bullshit jobs, this means we can ask three questions:
  1. On the individual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?
  2. On social and economic levels, what are the large forces that hae led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?
  3. On the cultural and political levels, why is this bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why ahs no one done anything about it?
• 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. (My note - more jobs = better (though maybe not full employment).
• If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism - or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman. It is increasingly a system of rent extraction where the internal logic - the system’s “laws of motion,” as the Marxists like to say - are profoundly different form capitalism, since economic and political imperatives have come to largely merge. In many ways, it resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassalars, and retainers. In other ways - notably in its mangerialist ethos - it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directy in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.

  Chapter 6: Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?

• How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear that they should be employed and set to work - Antoine le Grance, c. 1675
• Many economic concepts trace back directly to religious ideas. As a result, arguments about value always have something of a theological tinge. Some originally theological notions about work are so universally accepted that they simply can’t be questioned. One cannot assert that hardworking people are not, generally speaking, admirable (regardless of what they might be working hard at), or that those who avoid work are not in any way contemptible, and expect to be taken seriously in public debate.
• In most cases, when employees assessed the social value of their work, they appealed to some variant of the position presented by Tom, the special effects artist we met in chapter 2: “I consider a worthwhile job to be one that fulfills a preexisting need, or even that creates a product or service that people hadn’t thought of, that somehow enhances and improves their lives.”
• This is why I would insist our concept of “production,” and our assumption that work is defined by its “productivity,” is essentially theological. The Judeo-Christin God created the universe out of nothing. (This in itself is slightly unusual: most Gods work with existing materials). His latter-day worshippers, and their descendants, have come to think of themselves as cursed to imitate God in this regard. * The sleight of hand involved, the way that most human labor, which cannot in any sense be considered “production,” is thus made to disappear, is largely effected through gender.
• The labor theory of value he’s referencing here, which traces back at least to the European Middle Ages, starts from the assumption that the real value of a commodity is the work that has been invested in making its existence possible. So when we give money in exchange for a loaf of bread, what we are really paying ofr is the human effort that went into growing the wheat, aking the bread, and packing and transporting hte loaves. If some loaves of bread are more expensive than others, it’s either because it took more work to produce and transport them, or, alternately, because we consider some of that work to itself be of higher quality - to involve more skill, more artistry, more effort - than others, and therefore, are willing to pay more for ther resulting product. Similarly, if you’re defrauding others of their wealth, as Rupert felt he was doing working for an international investment bank, you’re really stealing the real, productive work that went into creating that wealth.
• True, people in Europe or America have not historically seen their avocation as what should mark them in the eyes of eternity. Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,’ “park ranger” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was “What do you do for a living?”
• Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies - but to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the ???; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it. Like Annie, they are faced with the choice between doing useful and important work like taking care of children but being effectively told that the gratification of helping others should be its own reward, and it’s up tothem to figure out how to pay their bills, or accepting pointless and degrading work that destroys their mind and body for no particular reason, other than a widespread feeling that if one does not engage in labor that destroys the mind and body, whether or not there is a reason to be doing it on, one does not deserve to live.

  Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and is There Anythng that Can Be Done About This Situation?

• But what does all this have to do with supporting the troops? Well if that truck driver’s daugher was absolutely determined to find a job that would allow her to pursue something unselfish and high-minded, but still paid the rent and guaranteed access to adequate dental care, what options does she really have? If she’s of a religious temperament there might be some possibility in her local church. But such jobs are hard to come by. Mainly, she can join the army.
• What this means is that work, as we know it, will less and less resemble what we think of as “productive” labor, and more and more resemble “caring” labor - since, after all, caring consists mainly of the sort of things most of us would least like to see done by a machine.
• There’s a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when discussing such matters. My note - except when it hurst you, you have no choice but to care.
• I’ve only been able to identify one solution currently being promoted by social movements, that would reduce rather than increase the size and intrusiveness of government. That’s Universal Basic Income.
• What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work. Its immediate effect would be to massively reduce the amount of bureaucracy in any country that implemented it.
• A full Basic Income would eliminate the compulsion to work, by offering a reasonable standard of living to all, and then either leaving it up to each individual to decide whether they wished to pursue further wealth, by doing a paying job, or selling something, or whether they wished to do something else with their time. Alternately, it might open the way to developing better ways of distributing goods entirely. My note - What about inflation? Would the amount become insufficient.
• All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one’s inability to say “I quit” and feel no economic consequences. If Annie’s boss knew Annie’s income would be unaffected even if she did walk off in disgust at being called out yet again for a problem she’d fixed months ago, she would know better than to call her into the office to begin with. Basic Income in this sense would, indeed, give workers the power to say “orange” to their box.
• My note - Might not want to do necessary, but dirty work. But maybe those who do would get appreciation enough to incentivize doing it.