Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id541991426
defined a bullshit job as the following:
“[A] form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
id541991460
This bullshit jobs category includes white-collar jobs like professional and managerial work, sectors that have tripled in size in the last century. This expanding balloon of bullshit comprises lobbyists, middle managers, corporate lawyers, and IT professionals. More broadly, at the center of this maelstrom of meaninglessness lies the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate. Graeber explained: “[the FIRE sector] creates money (by making loans) and then moves it around in often extremely complicated ways, extracting another small cut with every transaction.”
id541991554
“Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.”
id541991922
bullshit jobs held by the upper crust are defined by their exclusivity and prestige.
id541993085
Graeber posited that bullshit jobs play a societal role in keeping the masses too diverted to organize against the ruling classes.
id541993262
Yet, their upper echelon bullshit jobs play another role in propping up our capitalist society. These particular bullshit jobs help maintain the signifiers of status and class that preserve our illusion of societal meritocracy.
id541994282
Just as manufactured prestige lures graduates of esteemed institutions toward these fields, the same narrative sells the bullshit services of these companies to their clients for hundreds of millions of dollars. The number of Ivy League suits you can have running around your office has become far more important than any real metric of efficacy.
id541994377
The glaring problem with our love of educational meritocracy and the prestige and riches we confer to those at the top is, of course, the fact that our sorting system is not actually fair. In both higher education and the broader job market, we don’t actually select the “best and brightest,” but rather the “prosperous and privileged.”
id541995442
These elite bullshit jobs are ultimately sending a dangerous message: they tell us that while there may be class hierarchies in society, those at the top deserve to be where they are. Perversely, the more outrageous the evidence we see of this inequality, the more it seems to affirm the staggering skill and talent of the elite. A teenager can lock down a lifetime of six- to eight-figure salaries based on two hour-long interviews? “Wow, I guess he really must be the best of the best.”
id541995575
Sandel argues that, even amongst the elite:
“It is impossible to view success as anything other than the result of individual effort and achievement. This is the standpoint that generates the conviction among the winners that they have earned their success, that they have made it on their own. This belief can be criticized as a form of meritocratic hubris; it attributes more than it should to individual striving and forgets the advantages that convert effort into success.”
✏️ The fable of meritocracy and how it pits individuals against each other, instead of showcasing how privilege and systems are what sort people where they are. 🔗 View Highlight
id541995773
our society incorrectly views the misfortune and livelihood of those at the bottom as products of their own doing, and therefore less worthy of reparation or respect:
“The meritocratic age has also inflicted a more insidious injury on working people: eroding the dignity of work. By valorizing the “brains” it takes to score well on college admission tests, the sorting machine disparages those without meritocratic credentials. It tells them that the work they do, less valued by the market than the work of well-paid professionals, is a lesser contribution to the common good, and so less worthy of social recognition and esteem. It legitimates the lavish rewards the market bestows on the winners and the meager pay it offers workers without a college degree.”
id541996003
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?”
id541996410
As Martin Luther King, Jr., asserted:
“Whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”