[anm89]

The whole premise is broken to me so the more he tries to dig in it just feels like deeper and deeper bs to me.

Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's perception of their contribution has essentially 0 importance in this interaction. A better definition of a bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.

So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your job.

So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally broken premise.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee.

This is a handwaving assertion. It happens to be strongly correlated with the way our society(ies) allocates labor, but is not something inherent to the labor/wage relationship. It's not hard to imagine a world in which people do things because those things matter to them, or are interesting to them, or both.

Graeber didn't call them "Bullshit Jobs" because the jobs required dealing with bullshit, he called them "Bullshift Jobs" because the actual stated purpose of the job was at best deeply suspect and at worst, well, bullshit.

There is a better fundamental critique of "Bullshit Jobs" which is a little more sophisticated, I think. That critique says that the reason people get confused about the meaning and importance of their job is that our economic system has grown too complex for them to really understand the role they play. The division of labor has reached such extreme levels that it is very difficult for many individuals to grasp how their "apparently meaningless aka bullshit" jobs could be contributing anything at all to the world. But their inability to understand or visualize this does not mean that their work is, in fact, meaningless or without value.

[biomcgary]

Unfortunately, in some cases, the "value" is things like: keeping headcount up, not dealing with a problem employee.

[anm89]

Sure but if both parties freely decide to engage in this time money trad what do you propose to do?

Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.

It turns out the Nash equilibrium of the world is that some people have jobs that seem silly on the surface but end up being the optimal move for everyone involved. Out of all the problems in the world this seems like a weird one to fixate on.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Graeber didn't fixate on this. He saw it as a sad reflection of what the supposedly "best economic system in the history of man" had ended up creating in terms of meaningful work for actual human beings.

[anm89]

I'm not sure what activity involves fixating on a point more than writing a feature length book on the topic.

[eightysixfour]

Graeber believes that our current state is a local minima (or maxima depending on your perspective) and there are social, political, and economic options that result in systems without these "bullshit" outcomes. His underlying beliefs are anarchist, he believes people can self-organize without many of the concerns we have in modern society.

The reason he is interesting is that his underlying views of society are of those from way outside of the Overton Window, so he sees some things more clearly than those with more "normal" viewpoints. While I do not agree with him on many things, all his books are critiques of the entirety of the modern socioeconomic system.

> Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.

The suggestion that he thought the government should decide which jobs are real and which are bullshit is antithetical to everything he believed. He would argue that the fact that you can only see it as a question of either "free market" or "government managed" is a part of the oppressive system itself.

[yodelshady]

I'm a little surprised at that reading, but fair enough.

I admit I only skimmed it, but I thought the point was "the employer" is not a homogeneous entity. "The employer" therefore doesn't make the wage decision. Managers with some extreme perverse incentives do.

What's bullshit is the idea that as soon as an enterprise does something inefficient, boom, they'll be outcompeted. They might, eventually, if no market failures or regulatory capture exists. So in reality, large and even small/medium organization with a successful pattern can tolerate a lot of bullshit.

[anm89]

I will also admit I gave up on it and frustration and didn't make it in the end. Maybe there was some magical nugget of wisdom on the last page.

Your evaluation seems fair to me but it's still not clear to me what he's saying should be done or even why this is a problem.

My suspicion is that people find it exciting to read a book with a curse word in the title that tells them they are right for hating their job