Sunday, 7.02am
Sheffield, U.K.
God in His wisdom made the fly; And then forgot to tell us why. – Ogden Nash
I have seen David Graeber’s book “Bullshit Jobs” on shelves. I’ve picked it up, leafed through it, and put it back. Finally, I’ve read it.
The book is thought-provoking. It needs to be read in layers. It is also shrill. Graeber argues that many jobs are pointless, perhaps half of them or more. Not just pointless, but abhorrent, demeaning and humiliating. Somehow we’ve gone from producing things, farming, factory work and the like, to becoming administrators, paper pushers and form fillers. It’s not about a rise in services – as the jobs we do with our hands have dropped jobs working with information have increased while true services – waiting on tables, hairdressing, pharmacists – have stayed roughly level. We’re somehow so busy doing all this that we’re no longer have a life, this isn’t living. It’s a corruption of existence.
My first reaction reading this was defensive. How could it make sense that a large number of people are being paid to do useless work. Is it possible that we just don’t understand what is going on yet?
Take our own bodies, for example. We have the “doing” portions, our hands and feet and digits. What makes us different is a large brain with multiple layers that takes up a huge amount of energy. In that brain we have an older portion that controls our emotions, deciding whether we fight or run or mate. There are a lot of neurons involved in processing activity, laying down chemical memory trails and activating networks of processing activity to do everything from process what you’re seeing to learning how to do something. And then you have a part of the brain that dreams and thinks about possible futures and makes it possible for us to build tools, study everything and go to space. Would you argue that the brain and its information management function is bullshit and only having arms and legs matters? Is the vast economic activity that makes the world we live in possible a system something like that, where the jobs we do help to make things but also build relationships, process information and build the future? Are these jobs part of a complex system, and if so even if we can’t make sense of each one in isolation, they matter as part of the whole social structure we live in?
Before we can consider this Graeber moves on and says that a job is bullshit if the owner of the job feels that it is. It doesn’t really matter what you think or if the “system” needs those jobs – what really matters is what the holder of the job thinks because that is what affects their physical and mental health. I can see that point of view. Ok. There is no easy answer to that. Can you change your situation? Can you change your mind? Are you stuck?
But why do these jobs get created in the first place? We can try to answer this question with first, second and third thoughts. A first thought is that managers believe that the jobs are necessary and create them for sound, objective reasons in the pursuit of rational goals. A second thought is that managers pander to people in power and create jobs that get what powerful people want done. A third thought is that managers work to advance their own interests and gain power by accumulating resources and control. The third is closest to Graeber’s argument that we live in an age of managerial feudalism where an elaborate system of favours and demonstrations of power make the corporate machine work. Graeber argues that this is a problem – an obvious one open for all to see – and he is just pointing it out not offering solutions.
Is it a problem though? From a systems perspective that’s a difficult conclusion, because one can argue that the purpose of a system is what it does. Systems such as a corporate organization are stable when they can self replicate themselves – when they are autopoietic, from the Greek for self and create. A corporate system, with its hierarchies and controls and ways of getting new people in and old people out, is a system capable of surviving and replicating. Large companies with such structures currently dominate economic activity, with other possible structures like more egalitarian, communal or cooperative organisations, less powerful or visible. Things were different in the past. Perhaps they will be different again in the future.
But does it make sense to talk of these structures as “good” or “bad”. Isn’t that a bit like saying an elephant is good and a fly is bad? Both just are, they’ve evolved to fit into their niches. If, for some reason, you think elephants are bad, can you “solve” them. Let’s say you got rid of the current structure how do you know what you will get isn’t going to be worse? And maybe it will topple over and die all by itself when it gets old or when something fitter comes along. Dinosaurs once ruled the planet. Make your case for the alternative and time will tell whether it takes over or not. After all, we have examples of different structures in different countries around the planet? Given a choice, which system would you like to live in – the developed West? China? Russia?
Graeber also calls out a feature of modern society – an emerging caste system in the West made up of the poor, the rich, the influential and the intellectual. The very poor and the very rich have more in common with each other than with the influential and intellectual. A person from a poor background can, in theory, become very rich. It’s getting harder for that same poor person to break into jobs that influentials and intellectuals control – think of the years of training and the extensive social networks you need to become an internationally renowned art critic. There is a route to wealth, scholarship and fame for everyone but some have more roadblocks than others. Graeber provides more conjecture than evidence around this point but it’s hard not to be reminded of Sir Michael Rutter’s advice to “choose your parents wisely” if you want to be successful. But here’s the thing about being a parent. You want to give your children the best chance in life and that means you want stability and certainty, and the biological need to protect your offspring perhaps trumps any theory that argues that the social architecture you live in is not as good as it could be.
Perhaps what I relate to least about the book is the conceit that jobs are created purely for show as a result of a feudal favours structure. There are all these jobs that pay you a lot and where you have to do very little. Pity these poor people. The immigrant experience, which I have gone through, is very different. I remember how hard it was to get that first job. The hundreds of applications I sent out. The silence that followed. The few responses and the unfailing rejections. What I lacked was a right to work. I didn’t hold the “right” that would have allowed me to benefit from being paid a lot for not doing much. Eventually I had a chance and got that first job but my experience has been that I’ve had to create each job I’ve had, and along the way I’ve created many jobs that were then filled by others.
The reality of organisational life is that people with power and money have things they want to achieve. They are happy to pay money to talented and hardworking people that get those tasks done economically and quickly. Sure, some bosses are exploitative but others are not. The power balance decides how you get treated. It’s rare to find someone that’s exceptional from the start of their career. Even the basics – how many people do you know that can competently read, write and do arithmetic? You can develop people if they have the passion and determination to work. The people in Graeber’s book complaining about their jobs presumably found it easy enough to get them in the first place. The reward for working hard and doing good work, as anyone with real experience knows, is not a prize or big bonus. It’s more work. And being given more work is associated with more responsibility, more trust, more authority and eventually more money. It’s a compounding machine – the more you do the more you get to do – and eventually you become good enough that the power balance starts to shift and you can get what you’re worth from those who need what you can provide.
And really, are these bullshit jobs the really bad ones? Take a job that you probably wouldn’t consider a bullshit one. I had my eyes checked by an optician recently. As I sat in the uncomfortable barber’s style chair, thinking about the book, I looked around at the windowless room, a small air-conditioner, oddly painted walls and wondered about the nature of the job. Hour after hour sitting in a small, surely uncomfortable swivel chair, working at a cramped desk, going through an unchanging procedure with patient after patient, asking the same questions again and again, typing the results into an ancient Windows application. Surely looking after your eyes is a job of great importance. And yet it’s an assembly line working on people. “Look up please. Now to your right.” The job has little flexibility, you can’t avoid it or think about something else because you might miss that small sign of glaucoma. Like doctoring and nursing, the stream of patients never stops and you end your shift physically and mentally drained. And you probably don’t get paid enough. But we don’t know the history of that optician. Maybe his parents are proud that he has a safe professional role. Maybe he’s better off than they were.
For those of us who weren’t born with the right to the luxury of a meaningless but well paid job, the most important model that underpins life is that of cash flow. It marks the change from being a child to an adult. First you pay out cash (or your parents do) for your childhood and education. Then you start getting a return on that education, perhaps hourly work, an internship, that first job. At some time t you reach a critical point, one where you make enough money to meet all your expenses and have a penny left over. That’s the point where you shift into adulthood. You are now in control. Free. Responsible. From that point you’re ready to live your life as long as you stay above that line. If you get there you’re luckier than many. More than that may mean your life is nice, indulgent, even extravagant. But once you shift from negative to positive cash flow you’re finally on solid ground. Everything else is a bonus.
As we reach the closing pages of the book Graeber says he is an anarchist. That means he wants no government, no system of order, no institutions. Nothing. Perhaps that is a position that someone sitting in a world defined by institutions and with easy access to fresh air, clean water and safe food, can dream of as utopian. But I’ve seen what that utopia looks like. I flew into Haiti a few months after a coup. There were no police on the road. No evidence of visible government. It didn’t feel better. It didn’t feel safe. And I can tell you that the person with the better gun had a better change of staying alive. Hernando de Soto argued that democracy wasn’t about votes, it was having institutions and checks and balances like the separation between politics, the military and the judiciary. A society where you can say what you think and criticise what you see as wrong. Anarchy might work in the natural world where predators and prey seem to live in balance without the need for representative parliamentary procedure. But modern society works because of these balanced institutions and, however flawed they are, they produce better outcomes than countries that don’t have them, or that have dominant institutions like a single party state or a dictatorship. If part of that is that we produce what Graeber calls bullshit jobs, well then, it is what it is.
It is what it is.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 