> I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend.
I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting.
That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.
People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.
There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something.
There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.
Sad to see you downvoted here because I completely agree. Graeber's book is among if not the worst I've ever read. It saddens me that people here take the idea seriously.
But the main evidence for this is that he's an anarchist. Graeber is not around to defend this position seeing as he's not alive, but anarchists are all very happy to talk about their philosophy, they will answer any question you give them, and their answers instantly disprove it and show they shouldn't be trusted to implement any of it. Like if you ask where insulin comes from they'll just say doctors will make it in their backyards as a hobby.
Recent example of this is Seattle's CHAZ where the police went away for a few weeks, they posted some anarchist guards, and they instantly shot and killed a black teenager because they thought he was a criminal.
That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.
You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist without the powerful hand of authority making them exist. Governments can help all of these things, but they can also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent any of them.
The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a landlocked and largely residential area and call it a government free zone while being completely dependent on the government-controlled area around you.
> That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.
You'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.
Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".
Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.
> The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen.
But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!
Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)
I'm personally a big fan of his books, but I've read on various internet sources that some people will accuse him of not being academically rigorous enough. I honestly don't have enough expertise or energy to really judge.
I’ve yet to see a comprehensive critique of either Debt or Bullshit Jobs that was both damning taken at face value, and demonstrated good reading comprehension.
That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.