Do you have a bullshit job?

Do you have a bullshit job?

"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" is a popular 2018 book by David Graeber that proposes that over half of all jobs are pointless and contribute no value to society. Graeber's examples of "bullshit jobs" include receptionists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, in-house magazine journalists, and middle-managers. Graber credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty and proposes a universal basic income as the solution to bullshit jobs.

The theory of "bullshit jobs" is fundamentally wrong, though it contains a kernel of truth.

Like all utopians, Graeber imagines a world that magically solves the need for "bullshit jobs." For example, how could businesses avoid all legal conflicts without corporate lawyers? Graeber has apparently never been in a position where he needed to consult in-house counsel to verify whether a contract is sound or evaluate the legality of a business strategy. Or take the example of in-house publications. Corporate culture is responsible for some companies being consistently successful while others consistently fail. We can't magically instill a great corporate culture without having some employees be responsible for promulgating it.

The theory of "bullshit jobs" is also empirically wrong. The European Working Conditions Surveys show that just 4.8% of EU workers did not think their work was useful, far lower than Graeber's 60% estimate. Furthermore, the pattern of industries whose workers thought themselves useless contradicted Graeber's claims, as few lawyers thought themselves useless, while nearly 10% of "essential" garbage collectors thought so.

So is there any truth to the idea of bullshit jobs?

The existence of modern society depends on a high degree of division of labor. Any one human being is only able to master a tiny sliver of human knowledge, which they can then apply to solve some very specific human need. How can we know whether our job serves a legitimate social purpose? Contrary to Graeber's argument, money is the primary means of accessing the social value of a job.

Take farming for example. Farming fills a basic human need. But even for a farmer, there is a near-infinite set of options. Which crop should he farm? Which cultivar? Who should become a farmer?

Japan bans imports of all non-processed rice and pays young people to become rice farmers to keep its own rice industry alive. Consequently, Japanese rice costs farm more than the rest of the world. Without the subsidies and import bans, hardly any rice would be grown in Japan, and its farmers would have more productive jobs. Is being a rice farmer in Japan a "bullshit job"?

In modern society, salaries are the best mechanism for discovering which jobs are valuable. This is because salaries tend to approximate the prices paid for goods and services, and prices indicate the value people attach to these goods. In a market economy, prices indicate the value attached to all goods that can be transacted in the market.

"Bullshit jobs" are those which only exist because the market is not allowed to perform this role. We can't know exactly what these jobs are because we don't know what jobs would exist in a parallel universe with a free market. But we can guess based on how market-like a particular industry is.

For example, after education and healthcare were effectively nationalized in the US, they grew a very high proportion of administrators to educations and medical professionals. It's likely that all these administrators are bullshit jobs.

NASA had a monopoly on rocket launches for many decades until SpaceX gave it a run for its money. SpaceX jobs openings are mostly for engineers and technicians, while NASA openings are for business analysts and accountants. Can you guess which one has more bullshit jobs?