No One Has a Bullshit Job - Only Bad Job (and bad book)

I just contributed to his bull shit job by reading the book. I had an excitement when I held the book only to have it end in disappointment.

The book idea can be divided into two: from the individual perspective and economic perspective. This book would have been perfect with the title "why many people ". In fact, his biggest datapoint was his personal survey if you feel your job is useless and analyzing comments to his blog. That part was good. About half the people now feel useless at work. That's an important fact to be aware of. People do suffer when they cant find meaning at work. My solution is simple. Suggest people save, and switch jobs more frequently. Maybe enhancing the role of the recruiter in our society can help too. That's much more productive than getting whiny about it as "managerial feudalism", "corporate capitalism", or whatever fancy terms Graeber likes to throw. From the second chapter onwards, my reading experience was as if listening to my nephew whining about his school because of one witted YouTuber.

Still, I do agree with his ending suggestion of Basic Income. That should make the job transition easy for many people.

Then he goes wild into his analysis. From the economic perspective, he says the growth of bullshit jobs like admins, finance, or corporate lawyers is because of brah brah brah. That section was more like an undergrad essay. I happened to read The Rise and Fall of American Growth right before where Robert Gordon tackles our economic productivity heads on numerically with angles such as technology, lifestyle change, globalization, and immigration. Compared to that, Graeber's analysis was childish. Data he showed: 3 primitive charts of service sector growth, the productivity-wage ratio by one thinktank, a number of admin positions at his university, and a quote from Obama. He must have spent 5 minutes googling to use the top results as reference. At the end, his job categorizations are little objective. Oh well, it's amazing what narrative smart people can write with a few data points (cough, conspiracist).

What we can objectively speak of is there are bad jobs for you. I think this ares is well researched. He has nothing he's added. They are well analyzed by many: how much decision freedom you have, how much money you get, how much skill you are gaining, how healthy is your workplace is. They should be your only concern as an individual.

Going back to my first statement, I need to make a direct criticism against Graeber. He spends a lot of time discussing other people's jobs especially the admins at university. But in the time where anthropology graduates cant find a job, he is in a position to be questioned as holding a bullshit job.