“Bullshit Jobs” is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept

It's every nonfiction author's dream to stick a name on a concept that's so incisive it literally outlives them. David Graeber died in 2020, but "Bullshit Jobs" still gets thrown around a lot. I was uncomfortable with the concept, but had never read the book so I didn't feel especially comfortable being dismissive. This was a mistake. If you don't own a copy, don't bother buying one. If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others. In fact, reading the book in that light, as an exploration for how someone could come to believe strange things, and what approach they might use to marshal statistical and anecdotal evidence in their favor, is a great exercise. We won't all make the same mistakes, but we're all capable of making the same kinds of mistakes.

The observation the book explores is that there seem to be many jobs that just aren't necessary. Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations[1]: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc. Since the book was written to expand a previous article, he has room to backtrack on at least one of those, conceding that actuaries may do something useful, something he learned through pushback. Here we have our first anthropological datapoint: he didn't learn this by asking himself "Is there, after all, some kind of social utility in knowing how long someone is likely to live? In an advanced economy where people aren't working from the first moment they're capable of it until they're incapacitated or dead, might we expect such a job to exist, to create value, and to be paid accordingly?" No, what happened according to Graeber, is that people who read his claims responded and set him straight.

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