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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.

Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.

and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.

The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.

If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.

If memory serves, a big component of Graeber's theory was that a bullshit job is, in part, one in which even the person doing it doesn't think they're doing anything important or contributing anything of value. I don't actually know, but I imagine that describes plenty of Title IX administrators.

That just seems like a function of specialisation though, in a highly specialised world is clearly going to be quite difficult for a lot of workers to see how they fit into the entire economy/organisational bureaucracy.

I'm not here to relitigate the entirety of Graeber's theory, and his estimate of how prevalent the phenomenon is is known to be significantly wide of the mark. I just don't accept the idea that any job in which people work hard necessarily needs to exist or serves a useful function. There are plenty of people who are self-aware enough to suspect that their job does not really need to exist, and in many cases they're right.

I don't dispute that the people hired to pump petrol at petrol stations (because the state forbids people from pumping their own petrol) are actually working hard. That doesn't mean that "full-time petrol station attendant" is a job that actually needs to exist, as plainly evidenced by the fact that this is an exception rather than the norm.

I'm not here to relitigate the entirety of Graeber's theory,

Neither am I of course, but on the face it does seem a little silly to suggest that a worker must know the overall significance of their role to make their job worthwhile. I'm certainly not excluding the possibility of bullshit jobs in general, and I do agree that just because someone works hard that doesn't mean their job is at all important or meaningful.

So we end up with a quadrant:

  1. People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, and they are

  2. People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, but they aren't

  3. People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, but they are

  4. People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, and they aren't

"Bullshit jobs" originally referred to those in Q4, but really ought to encompass those in Q2 as well: if a job is meaningless or pointless, the fact that the person holding it doesn't realise it's meaningless or pointless doesn't change that. It's entirely possible for a person to think that their job is meaningless or unimportant, and for their appraisal to be inaccurate (Q3).

I’d argue that Q2 is actually much more important part of the “bullshit jobs” problem, as many of those people are people with high status and so are the jobs even though they are fundamentally useless or even negative in value.

The status peddling nature of those jobs really muddy the water as to what’s important and should be honored by society at large.

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