On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

The way I understand it, these pointless 'arms-race' jobs are jobs tend to also produce little to no value to society. They may produce value for their bosses in the form of making the boss look good to the uber-bosses, or they may provide value to their company as a means of maintaining competitive advantage in the market place.

These is less a direct function of the skills of the workers than a function of the roles in which those workers are placed. Some corporate lawyers clearly do provide non 'arms-race' value, some IT professionals only provide 'arms-race' value.

I don't think the existence of these jobs is a direct effort to "keep-the-masses-down", but it has the effect of mostly wasting worker's time in roles where the main value is how they help maintain the wealth of that 1%.

Of course, this an all or nothing proposition. Many jobs produce some mix of actual value vs 'arms-race' value. Separating these is not necessarily straight forward.

> Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2]

I... don't think those statistics show what you want them to show. Does that number of "musicians" only include those for whom it is their only/main source of income? I also don't see any breakdown in those statistics on lawyers for "area of specialization" but based on where they are employed. I don't know if Graeber's specific claim is true, but there do appear to be 5-10 times more lawyers than musicians in our country.

This is the robots-are-coming-for-us fallacy rearing its head again. Once again, the premise is that we only need certain things -- food, shelter, electricity, internet, health care. Once robots make these things, well dang, there won't be anything else for the rest of us to do, will there?

No, no, a thousand times no. Humans value not only things to keep them alive, but scarcity and novelty. As the basic needs become automated, huge industries will continue to explode devoted to creating scarce and novel things for other humans to collect and consume. Most of these "bullshit jobs" are in this sector.

I find these essays always have some kind of value statement, either implied or outright -- "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialist in corporate law?"

It says that if you had a magic wand, we'd have more poets. If I had one, we probably would, too. But it tells us absolutely nothing about why there are jobs that folks don't like, or jobs that you or I might find useless.

IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.

And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.

But yet we still try to maximize for 40. If we automate the pointless bits, we don't scale back Bob's hours to 20 and pay him the same. We expect 40 again (never happened in the first place) or reduce his 'hours' (read: pay) to 20.

Maximizing for 40 is arbitrary for many jobs.