---
product_id: 65928762
title: "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Hardcover – May 15, 2018"
brand: "david graeber"
price: "₨1627"
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region: Seychelles
---

# Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Hardcover – May 15, 2018

**Brand:** david graeber
**Price:** ₨1627
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- **What is this?** Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Hardcover – May 15, 2018 by david graeber
- **How much does it cost?** ₨1627 with free shipping
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Suggestive And Interesting, But We Need to Hear More
  

*by R***Z on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 2, 2019*

This book originated in an article on the phenomenon of meaningless (but proliferating) jobs. Hundreds of thousands of individuals responded to it and their comments were utilized to fashion a taxonomy of what the author terms ‘bullshit’ jobs. For example: 'duct-tape jobs' in which individuals patch together things already available; 'box ticking jobs' in which people are employed to respond to a claimed but fatuous need. The book is fascinating in its anecdotes and examples. These satisfy the terms for success which the author establishes: "The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like" (p. 285).Thinking about what a genuinely free society might be like is a worthy task, one that might well occupy the time of a trapped paper pusher preparing reports that no one will read or ticking boxes on forms that will be audited by reviewers who will then forward them to supervisors who will file them in drawers that no one will ever open again.  The author gives several examples of individuals who spend their days avoiding work that strikes them as worthless and devoting their hours to more wholesome and useful tasks.The very real problem is that these largely meaningless jobs are an omnipresent (and growing) phenomenon and solving the problems they create is a significant desideratum. For example, in universities the number of non-teaching staff has increased by 240% over the last few years. These people contribute very little to the overall effort. If they disappeared the money saved could be used to lower tuition (a true problem) or to hire individuals to teach freshman composition (a real need). Many were hired to palliate university constituencies which senior administrators want to silence or keep at arm's length.While this is interesting to 'think about' it is even more compelling as a problem requiring a solution. The solution: hiring senior administrators with the fortitude to confront aggrieved constituencies and inform them that the purpose of the university is to teach and do research, not create comfort zones. This requires trustees who share the goal of focusing on central functions rather than peripheral ones. The problem grows because these deanlings, deanlets and assistant deputy vice provosts are careerists who seek advancement. Advancement is achieved through the creation of 'programs'; these programs require additional staff, assistants to the additional staff, work space, heat/light/air conditioning and so on. There is no incentive to do anything but proliferate. Solution: hire senior administrators who only solve real problems and recruit underlings with the charge that they are to save money, not spend more, and solve problems, not create new ones by forcing the reallocation of funds from central functions to (their) peripheral ones.The author's perspective is both helpful and challenging. He is a self-professed anarchist. The good thing is that he is skeptical of both large governments and large corporations. The bad thing is that he is skeptical of 'policy' changes; his preference is to find grassroots movements that might be singled out and encouraged. This gives him a unique perspective; he criticizes both the left and the right. Bravo. However, he is unable to suggest solutions to the horrific problem which he has identified. For example, within universities one of the most frequently-recommended solutions (most recently articulated by Richard Vedder) to bureaucratic proliferation, the politicization of student support staff, grade inflation, the gutting of core curricula, and other problems is the closing of all colleges of education. That will require a battle plan and an actual battle, not just the thinking about an ideal world.He offers two major metaphors for our current condition. The first is a neo-feudalization of society in which a hierarchical system of dependency is created within workspaces, one that can ultimately be seen as a morbid desire to control. I think this is imprecise, because there was a reciprocal relationship within feudalism in which the lord would protect his serfs by ceding land to them and by risking his life for them in battle. That is different than having a martinet or power-tripping boss who brutalizes subordinates in order to salve his or her own ego.Another metaphor or, better, point of analysis, is far more interesting. He suggests that we are seeing the ethos of 'finance' extending to all aspects of human work. In other words, instead of having an individual capitalist invest his own money in a business, hiring workers, selling products, and so on, we have (for example) complex organizations created by large company takeovers. A film studio, e.g., once run by an entrepreneur who knew the entertainment industry, loved movies, hired his writing crew and his acting crew, etc. and greenlighted pictures by himself or with one other individual is now taken over by some other large, non-filmmaking organization. Instead of a 'clean' and orderly operation the company is suddenly infested with individuals who want to personally capitalize on a viable operation, rent-seek for themselves within that operation and, often, create ways for making money that are tangential to the original organization. For example, car makers do not make money selling cars; they make money on car loans with high interest rates or infinitely-complex 'insurance deals' that customers succumb to as a result of obfuscation or duplicity.Another way to think about it: I grew up in Cincinnati where there was a great proliferation of Savings and Loans. The notion was that the community pooled its savings and money was then lent to fellow citizens so that they could own homes. The loans were at, let us say, 7%; the investors/savers received 3-4% on their money and the savings and loan took the 3-4% as their profit. Clean. Simple. Compare that with a world in which money is made by selling unintelligible financial derivatives. This is 'capitalism' but it is a betrayal of 'purer' and 'cleaner' forms of capitalism. It is the case, e.g., that business schools are contemptuous of 'manufacturing' as an academic track (if they consider it at all) and tend to privilege 'finance' as their key area. 'Finance' is the top field at the nation's top business school. I think Professor Graeber is onto something here; certainly the modern university has been despoiled by a vast and growing school of lampreys who drain its resources and divert it from its original, central purposes.One last caveat. Professor Graeber tends to make easy generalizations that are highly questionable. For example, in defending the notion of a guaranteed basic income, he writes, "Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable. The compulsive workaholics who insist on doing far more than they really have to would more than compensate for the occasional slackers" (p. 281) Say what? He needs to have a look at the patterns of behavior of contemporary college students enumerated by Professors Arum and Roksa in their book ACADEMICALLY ADRIFT.  “Socializing” has displaced “studying.”Bottom line: the book is very thought-provoking (which is its purpose) but the subject is so important that we need to hear more.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Is Your Job Important?
  

*by B***Y on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 12, 2023*

Does your job seem fulfilling? Or, to put it more clearly, do you feel your job has a net positive value to society as opposed to just a way to make money? If your answer is no, or if you think a larger percentage of the world’s jobs fall under the low- value umbrella, then you might like this bookWhat this book proposes is that far too many jobs are of this variety. The individual working the job could quit tomorrow and nothing significantly negative would happen to the company he/she works for, or society at large. Far too many people are engaged in pointless employment, or so this book suggests, which raises the important question: Why is this happening in a capitalistic society, one that is supposed to strive toward efficiency with very few exceptions? The book attempts to answer that question, and others related to it, as it rambles on for nearly 300 pages.As I read this book, I started to think about jobs I have held and others have held that fit the definition of this type of job. I can think one job of my own, from the past, that came close, but it still wouldn’t qualify. However, I can think of positions others have held that do, indeed, fit the definition. And it does make me wonder why the folks in charge allowed such a situation to occur.This book does raise some interesting questions and it does get you thinking about the usefulness of employment. It makes you wonder why the workweek hasn’t been shortened and remains at 40 hours, at least here in the United States. It makes you wonder about the push for job creation by politicians of most every stripe and whether or not this push has, in some way, encouraged the proliferation of so many useless job positions. And it makes you wonder why someone with a do- nothing job wouldn’t enjoy it at least for the easy money, since we are so often told that most anyone will slack if given the opportunity.I like any book that brings up thought- provoking questions and this book accomplishes exactly that. But it is not without its flaws, chief among them the fact that the book presents an idea without any formal research. It’s an idea that, while intriguing, has no official research to back it up. Another issue I have is the books repetition. It continues to repeat similar thoughts over and over. The book could have been reduced about one hundred pages and easily gotten its message across. And then, there are the estimations that book makes about b.s. jobs and their occurrence. I find it hard to believe that roughly one- third of all jobs qualify as useless. I can agree that most any job has its moments of uselessness and that most of us could finish our necessary tasks in fewer hours at work each day. But based on my own observation, I cannot see how so many jobs fall under the b.s designation.Our free- market economy thrives on competition and the efficiency that is supposed to result. Capitalism is still the best system around for wealth creation and opportunity, but it is not without its flaws, and the same could be said for any other economic system. There are certainly useless jobs all around the world, and this book is a good way to at least get you thinking about these jobs, why they exist, and what it means for society. I have issues with this book, but it is still an interesting enough read to recommend.

### ⭐ 







  
  
    BS book
  

*by P***E on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 2, 2018*

Worst book I've read in 2018 - should know better than trust an academic anthropologist to teach me anything about the industry. The subject is interesting, but the author has little idea what he's talking about and lots of ideology.Evidence is anecdotal at best: individual emails or, unbelievably, posts from internet fora where anyone can pose as anything. The BS-job-definition underpinning the book - it's BS if the person having the job believes it to be - is pure strategic genius, as it deflects all critique. Unfortunately, it's methodologically ridiculous in all its naive relativism. The obvious ramifications are left entirely unaddressed: CEOs, bankers, military (BS-job examples the author uses) do not acknowledge their job as such; engineers and SW developers, instead, often fall over each other to do that. (Annoyingly, I'm also a hands-on engineer; so are my half a dozen colleagues who read the book.) The figures (all two of them) are a joke: still unsure what Figure 1 supposedly shows, but it's neither trend (two datapoints, one year apart) nor that >50% of work is BS (unless emails, good and bad meetings, admin tasks and more are BS; anyone with teamwork experience can disprove that). Equally annoying are the straw men the authors insists on knocking down (Douglas Adams's hairdressers), as well as his abysmal ignorance of e.g. SW (industrial SW means duct-taping together open-source SW? for real?!). Again, should know better than have an anthropologist lecture me about SW.All in all, a waste of time and money if you're a trained scientist/engineer or simply partial about substantiated claims. If you insist on wasting the former, I'll save you the latter by sending you my copy (lightly annotated before giving up). Even better, just read Graeber's original essay; the book adds nothing to it anyhow.

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