Why Do Bullshit Jobs Exist?
A large fraction of jobs are in modern society are pointless. But how can that be? Why would the wonders of free-market economics not trim away useless jobs?
In a survey 37% of British workers acknowledge that their job wasn’t really needed. From personal observation and talking to people about their work, it is clear that many jobs either are not needed, or while needed, it doesn’t require many hours of real work per week.
Anthropologist David Graeber labeled these kinds of jobs bullshit jobs. He even categorized them into various categories. I don’t think it is without reason we have much comedy today about tasks and work that is completely pointless.
Dilbert is a good example. The comedy revolves around the mostly pointless and counterproductive activities the characters engage in. It is funny because so many of us who have worked in an office recognize all too well what is going on.
In Norway, we have a popular comic called Lunch, which is about an office worker, much like Dilbert. The creator had no initially decided what the company was actually doing. However, as the series progressed, the creator realized there was actually no need to ever define what the company was doing. It was entirely unproblematic to create page after page of strategy meetings, advertisement campaigns, status meetings and inspirational workshops every week. All the fluff drowned whatever actual core activity the company was supposed to do.
One of my favorite comedies of all time, Office Space, is about a software company, Initech, and all the meaningless types of work the employees have to engage in and how soul crushing it is.
If you look around, it is pretty obvious what is going on. Until David Graeber highlighted it, it had never occurred to me that perhaps a bulk of our modern jobs and tasks today are pointless.
This fact begs the question: Why on earth do all these jobs or tasks even exist?
I want to address this question as I don’t think Graeber addressed it successfully. He is an anarchist and this trait naturally colors his explanations even if there is a lot of truth to them.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Bullshit Jobs
In game theory we have a thought experiment called the prisoner’s dilemma: Two prisoners are interrogated separately and have to decide whether to cooperate, by keeping their mouth shut or betray each other by snitching. Many situations in the market mimics this situation.
Already back in the time of Entry Ford, it was observed that workers in factories often had a lot of knowledge about how to make production more efficient, yet never chose to tell management. Why?
Because they had no incentive to do so. By telling management how to improve efficiency they risked reducing the need for workers and either getting fired themselves or see friends get fired. Secondly the worker’s insight allowed him to make his own job less taxing and stressful. By informing management the productivity expectations would increase without necessarily seeing any wage increase.
A more recent example of this was a company where lots of employees manually looked over Excel spreadsheet to find discrepancies. It was a straightforward, boring and simple job. In fact it was so boring that management had devised a bonus scheme to make people keep up a certain level of productivity. One employee realized that the whole job could be automated with a few lines of code. That was enough to remove the need for any workers doing the job. The guy didn’t want to make himself redundant, so he pretended to work but actually slacked off the whole week playing games, while the computer program checked the excel spreadsheets.
A computer is naturally much faster than a human at this task, so the guy had something like 1000 times the productivity of everybody else and got all the bonus of for his whole department. He kept at it for a long time before feeling bad about it, and informed management. He was promptly fired. Thus proving that there is no incentive to suggest productivity improvements.
There are countless examples of this. On Reddit there are many discussions about these sorts of jobs. Several of the commentators remark on how they have had to keep their work automation a secret to keep their job. Many simply chose to never automate out of fear of losing their job. Clearly a common problem, even today, is that workers simply have no incentive to make their job more efficient or redundant.
Why Bullshit Jobs Are Intrinsic To Capitalism
Many have argued that in a free market, bullshit jobs simply cannot exist because:
Somebody will create a company without bullshit jobs and outcompete companies with bullshit jobs.
The flaw in the assumption is that identifying bullshit jobs is easy or can be formalized. Management is never all seeing and informed of every little detail of the operation. Hence, management depend on employees telling them if their job is no longer needed or they only have work to fill a couple of hours per week. But employees have no incentive to inform management of this.
Quite the contrary, employees have every reason to spent time and energy to make sure their job looks important and needed. Employees also have good reason to no snitch on each other but rather cover for each other.
It is, probably, not without reason why the movie Office Space contains a scene where efficiency consultants interview every employee about what they do. They are trying to determine if the job is actually needed or not. Something like this would never have been needed if management actually knew whether a job was bullshit or not.
Perhaps the most ironic story of this predicament was mentioned by David Graeber. Graeber describes a guy who’s sole job was to make the company operations more efficient. 15 years passed and none of his suggestions ever got implemented. Usually the suggestions got scrapped once they realized it meant scrapping jobs which served to make management look important. So in essence, this guy had spent 15 years doing nothing that had ever mattered to anybody.
The fundamental problem is as in the prisoners dilemma, that employees and employers don’t trust each other, so they can not agree to do the thing that would benefit both of them the most. Incentives of employees and management are not aligned. The idea that companies seek maximum profit is a half-truth. A company is not a single person, but many people. Every single one of those people are seeking what benefits them. They may or may not be what is beneficial to the company. Neither management nor other employees are going to make choices that benefit the company if those choices get themselves fired.
Japanese Life Time Employment as a Case Study
This is probably one of the reasons why the old Japanese system of life time employment was not as inefficient as text book economics would predict. With no threat of getting fired the orthodoxy suggests people would slack off and get unproductive. However that has never been the experience of Japanese manufacturing.
Instead there has existed a loyalty bond between employee and employers, where an employee would stay with the same company through their life despite possible better opportunities. The company in return would keep the employee and train him or her. In lean manufacturing employees are encouraged to suggest improvements to the manufacturing process, which they can do given that improving efficiency does not risk their job.
What Are the Solutions?
Mutual trust and loyalty are in other ways possible ways to circumvent the problem of bullshit jobs. However the fundamental problem is that in a free market capitalist system, there will never be a strong incentives to get rid of rubbish tasks and bullshit jobs among employees.
The bullshit job problem is not a unique trait of capitalism. The Soviet Union produced similar problems but for different reasons. In the Soviet Union there was never any incentive to reduce the number of employees at a company, as companies were not profit driven. Since everybody was guaranteed and required to have a job, one simply invented a lot of useless jobs to keep everybody busy. In fact, full employment was a requirement.
The Soviet Union had the same problem as our capitalist economies today, in that one did not really trust workers to do the right thing. They would not let them go home to their own devices if there was nothing to do.
The public sector, which has much higher job security, also doesn’t really solve the problem. It is likely worse there. In the public sector it is perhaps not so much the employee, which lacks incentive but the organization itself. It is not in competition with anybody else and does not risk looking bad in comparison to a comparable organization. Reducing costs, risks reducing budgets. I remember from my time serving in the military that they would start having a lot of shooting exercises towards the end of the year to use up as much of their budget as possible. If they did not waste their ammunition, they risked budget reductions next year.
A possible solution to the problem of bullshit jobs and low efficiency is a universal basic income scheme, where everybody gets a minimum income from the government whatever they do. This means unlike welfare today, there is no disincentive to get a poorly paid job, if you are unemployed because of risking losing welfare payments.
However, such a system relies on trusting people to actually work when they don’t have to. Something even the socialist system of the Soviets didn’t. Hence they preferred inventing pointless jobs instead. Also it would not have helped in the Soviet Union since there was no opportunity to create a private company.
In a free market economy with universal basic income, people could in principle quit their job and found a company, do freelance or any number of things which could produce useful goods and services.
However it is not given that this is the solution, since a universal basic income cannot be too large unless risking taxing us to death. That means it does not present an opportunity to do away with high paid bullshit jobs. Some people might prefer lower pay and doing something useful, but others might still prefer getting paid a fat salary to do nothing of value.
