Bullshit Jobs Notes

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Notes

• T his was the structural level. In the next two chapters, I will turn to the cultural and political level.
• . 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 from 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, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist 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 directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it
• It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes—that is, the upperechelons of thevarious corporate bureaucracies—effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options,moving backandforthbetweenutterlyunrelatedcompanies,priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.
• despite a popular misconception that all this is somehow tied to the rise of the service sector, this proliferation appears to have everything to do with the growing importance of finance
• managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it’s like to actually do the work they are supposed to be managing
• the multiplication of levels of managers whosebasicjobistosellthingstooneanotherhascometodominatealmostall “creative industries”—from books, where editors at academic presses in manycasesdon’t even read half the books they are supposed to have edited, because they are expected to spend mostoftheir time marketing things to other editors; to the visual arts, where recent decades have seen the rise of a whole new stratum of managerial intermediaries called curators, whose work assembling the work of artists is now often considered of equal value and importance to the art itself; to even journalism, where the relationship between editors and reporters has been complicated by an additional level of “producers.”
• In other words, the feudal analogy is not even really an analogy. Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered “economic” and what is “political.”
• But the managers were hired anyway. What this suggests is that what we are really dealing with here has nothing to do with efficiency but everything to do with changing understandings of the moral responsibilities of corporations. From roughly 1945 to 1975, there was what is sometimes referred to as a “Keynesian bargain” between workers, employers, and government—and part of the tacit understanding was that increases in worker productivity would indeed be matched by increases in worker compensation. A glance at the diagram on the next page confirms that this was exactly what happened. In the 1970s, the two began to part ways, with compensation remaining largely flat, and productivity taking off like a rocket (see figure 7).
• Efficiency” has cometomeanvestingmoreandmorepowertomanagers, supervisors, and other presumed “efficiency experts,” so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.27 At the same time, the ranks and orders of managers seem to reproduce themselves endlessly.
• If all of this very much resembles the inner workings of a large corporation, I would suggest that this is no coincidence: such corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing, and allocating money and resources
• lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions (“direct juro-political extraction” is the technical phrase I learned in college
• Theseverysameexecutivespridedthemselvesontheirownbloated staffs. In fact, if Simon is also correct, they did so because that’s what a large bank really was: it was made up of a series of feudal retinues, each answerable to some lordly executive.
• Simon: In my conservative estimation, eighty percent of the bank’s sixty thousand staff were not needed. Their jobs could either completely be performed by a program or were not needed at all because the programs were designed to enable or replicate some bullshit process to begin with.
• It seems to me that those creating, playing around with, and destroying large amounts of money in the FIRE sector provide the perfect place to begin to ask this question—in part because many who work in this sector are convinced that almost everything done in it is basically a scam.22
• 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 meanstofinanceitallis morecomplex; 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)....
• Both these arguments are wrong, and I think a single example can refute both of them. Let us considerthecaseofprivateuniversitiesintheUnitedStates.Herearetwotables,bothdrawnfrom BenjaminGinsberg’s bookTheFalloftheFaculty, abouttheadministrative take-over of American universities, which give us pretty much all we need to know
• 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.
• 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
• 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 the case of bullshit jobs, this means we can ask three questions: 1. Ontheindividual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their ownbullshit jobs? 2. Onsocial and economic levels, what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs? 3. On the cultural and political levels, why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it
• In a way, one could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that. The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt
• As we can see, even in 1990, the proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks, and the like was really quite small. It also remained remarkably steady over time, holding for more than a century at roughly 20 percent
• Fig 4 on p109 shows the 3 and 4 sector models.
• But the situation is more dire still. There is every reason to believe that the overall number of bullshit jobs, and, even more, the overall percentage of jobs considered bullshit by those who hold them, has been increasing rapidly in recent years—alongside the ever-increasing bullshitization of useful forms of employment. In other words, this is not just a book about a hitherto neglected aspect of the world of work. It’s a book about a real social problem. Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.
• In a truly bullshit job, it’s often entirely unclear what one is really supposed to be doing, what one can say about what one is and isn’t doing, who one can ask and what one can askthem, howmuchandwithinwhatparameters one is expected to pretend to be working, and what sorts of things it is or is not permissible to do instead. This is a miserable situation. The effects on health and self-esteem are often devastating. Creativity and imagination crumble.
• It’s always a good idea to end a bleak chapter on a note of redemption, and these stories demonstrate that it is possible to find purpose and meaning despite even the worst of bullshit jobs. It also makes clear that this takes a great deal of doing. The “art of skiving,” as it’s sometimes called in England, maybehighlydevelopedandevenhonoredincertainworking-classtraditions,
• He can even see himself as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood in a world where, as he put it, merely “doing something worthwhile is subversive.”
• He’s aware, too, that in the professional world, playing the part is everything: form is always valued over content,
• Hestill manages to keep up a political life as an anarchist determined to destroy the economic system that does not allow himtopursuehis life’s true calling.
• The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile. One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all humanknowledgeandculturalachievement—mightsparksomesortofRenaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs.
• T hereareamillion waystomakeahumanfeelunworthy.TheUnitedStates,sooftenapioneer in such areas, has, among other things, perfected a quintessentially American mode of political discourse that consists in lecturing others about what jerks they are to think they have a right to something. Call it “rights-scolding
• Performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit, explaining, “Everyone already knows who the slackers are
• 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 conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
• Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
• Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.
• is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap.
• I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself
• How do bullshit jobs actually happen? It will also mean asking deep historical questions, like, When and how did we come to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful, or, how did we ever come up with the notion that it would be possible to sell one’s time? And finally, it will mean asking fundamental questions about human nature.