Bullshit Jobs

Anthropologist David Graeber starts from a simple test: a job that would leave the world no worse off if it disappeared, held by someone who privately knows it. He argues that far more work meets that test than most economies admit, and that people stuck in such roles often suffer for it.

The book grew out of his 2013 essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" and draws on testimony from workers in many fields. From those accounts he sorts pointless jobs into five types.

Flunkies exist to make a superior feel important. Goons hurt or deceive other people for their employer. Duct tapers keep patching a fault that someone could repair for good. Box tickers let an organisation look as if it is doing something useful. Taskmasters assign busywork to people who need none.

The second half asks why these jobs persist. Graeber traces the belief that labour measures a person's worth, and argues that it makes shorter hours and unconditional support hard to imagine, even after Keynes predicted a fifteen-hour week in 1930.

He ends by proposing universal basic income as a way out. The argument is witty and polemical, and some reviewers found the categories loose and the case overstated.