Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

37% of Britons say they work a “bullshit job”, one that has no clear purpose, does not appear to contribute to society, and where it looks like the world would be no worse off if the job was not performed. The sentiment is common among white-collar administrative workers, especially in sectors like government, finance, banking, public relations, corporate law, real estate, academia, healthcare, consulting, and advertising.

Bullshit jobs often involve working with horribly useless, broken, outdated, redundant, or needlessly-complicated bureaucratic and business processes. Bullshit job responsibilities often involve keeping up professional appearances, shamelessly telling lies, fixing self-created problems, or playing office politics. It is common for bullshit workers to have too little responsibility to fill their days, leaving them to spend much of their days idle but obligated to act busy.

Why do bullshit jobs exist, especially in the private sector?

Perverse incentives: In some jobs, especially those paid by the hour or those involving the redistribution of an existing resource, there is no incentive for businesses to be efficient (eg lawyers squabbling over an estate). Middle managers take egotistical political pride in the size of the organizations they lead, meaning that they will hire more underlings than they actually need and push back against attempts to reduce their headcount. Workers, even useless ones, quickly become skilled at exaggerating their usefulness and making their bosses timid about laying them off.

Scientific managerialism: Many organizations are undertaking reforms to increase productivity and apply a scientific approach to managerialism. In practice, this usually means hiring lots of new middle managers, increasing their power at the expense of workers’ autonomy, monitoring rank-and-file workers intensely, giving them lots of paperwork, trying to tell workers exactly how to do their jobs, and dealing with the fallout when worker productivity inevitably falls. Lots of administrative jobs get created in the process.

Economic development: The world economy has been transitioning from a patchwork of small-scale self-employment to a network of large, specialized corporations interwoven in complex supply chains. Specialization means that workers are increasingly removed from the end results of their organizations’ work. Employment without ownership reduces the incentive for workers to enforce and promote efficiency. Corporate partnerships and contracting create lots of psychologically unfulfilling jobs maintaining business relationships, duct-taping partners’ generic solutions to fit your company’s specific needs, and dealing with the fallout of partner failures.

Politics: Bureaucratic bloat is a weapon that organizations can use against their enemies. For example, corporations might lobby for government regulations that would increase compliance costs for their rivals, or governments might add more paperwork hurdles to stop “welfare queens” from gaming the system. There is little cultural or political will to crack down on bullshit jobs and their causes because all mainstream ideologies want to keep unemployment low.