I saw and borrowed this book based solely on its title. And surprisingly (or am I the one only surprised?), the book turned out to be a more serious than I expected. But first, what is a bullshit job? The book defines it as:

“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.” 

In other words, these are jobs that wouldn’t affect the world negatively even if they suddenly vanished. And contrary to popular belief, these jobs aren’t confined to the public sector. According to the first section of the book, these jobs tend to fulfil one of the following roles: flunkies, goons, duck-tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.

Sparked by an essay that went viral, Bullshit Jobs looks at the phenomenon of deeply unsatisfying jobs that affect a large proportion of white-collared workers. According to a YouGov poll taken in the UK after his essay was published, 37% of respondents didn’t think their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. A different poll carried out in Holland put the number as high as 40%.

You may be thinking that such bullshit jobs – where you get paid for doing little to nothing – are great because then you don’t actually have to work. But people in these jobs report that they are unhappy; so unhappy that in some cases, their mental health starts to interfere with their physical health. This is partly because they have to look busy (and hence can’t just relax on the job) but also because a job without a sense of purpose is not a fulfiling one.

Bullshit Jobs looks at the definition and history of such jobs, but the part that I found most interesting was on our attitudes towards work, fulfilment, and monetary compensation. Graeber writes about how “the more your work helps and benefits others, and the more social value you create, the less you are likely to be paid for it.” This is because there’s resentment against people with fulfiling jobs and because we mix up the monetary value of work with the social value of certain jobs, we end up thinking: “oh, being a teacher is so fulfiling, they make a difference. How dare they demand to have better pay when they have meaningful work” while also thinking “poor guy, he’s working so hard and he hates his job (because it’s bullshit, in quite a few cases). We need to pay him more.” It’s an utterly ridiculous concept but it works so well as an explanation of why people have an aversion to paying artists and other creatives money for their work.

Graeber argues that large swaths of jobs have been essentially made redundant through automation and hence, the economy is keeping many jobs that it doesn’t need to. To solve this, he proposes to divorce monetary compensation from the notion of work (which makes sense given that people mix up the two “values” in work) by implementing a Universal Basic Income. This is the first time I’ve thought that that UBI makes sense – in most cases, I would think that it would just lead to a lack of workers in lower-paying jobs that are actually essential. But it makes sense that if we all have enough to live on, then the bullshit jobs could just vanish (or no one would take them) and the wages of those in essential but underpaid jobs have to go up in order to attract workers.

That said, this is all theory and I suspect the effective implementation of UBI would be a completely different matter; for instance, I don’t really think that government would be cut down, like Graeber claims. I think the same people that aren’t doing any work would just be funnelled towards something about UBI. And of course, if the problem with jobs is that the people who want them don’t have the right skills (given that there are certain sectors that need more workers), and are instead going into bullshit jobs, then a UBI would not be solving the problem – we’d need something for skills training and retraining instead.

The only section on Bullshit Jobs that I don’t totally agree with was the section tying gender job history and Christianity together. I think Graeber was trying to tie it to caring jobs, which are harder to value in monetary terms, but I didn’t find that part to be very convincing. This is mainly because the same devaluation of ‘caring job’s or ‘invisible work’ happens in other economies which do not have a Christian past – for example, Japan. So if the phenomenon is universal, like Graeber briefly mentioned at the beginning of the book, then relying on Christianity as a main reason for this would only work in certain parts of the world and doesn’t explain the rise of bullshit jobs in other countries. Besides, from what I understand of Methodism, the “celebration of work” mentioned in the book isn’t one of its defining tenets*.

Overall, I thought this was a very interesting book. I don’t agree with everything inside – especially on the feasibility of the UBI, although this is one of the most convincing arguments for it that I’ve heard – but it gives plenty of food for thought and brings up some pretty interesting ideas about how we view work**.

*This was just a one-liner but it stuck out because as a Methodist, I do my best to understand and remember what distinguishes us from other denominations and the celebration of work was something that I haven’t heard before.

**Apart from the “people who create more value are paid less” part, I thought the idea that we’ve moved from owning works and people (given that slavery was something that existed) to owning someone’s time interesting – Graeber uses this to argue that this is why people in bullshit jobs are compelled to pretend to be busy as their time is technically their employers and idleness itself is seen as bad.