Back in the early-1930s, renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that technical innovations and rising productivity would mean that advanced country workers would be able to work only 15 hours and still enjoy rising living standards.
Earlier this year, anthropologist and anarchist, David Graeber, asked why Keynes’ prophecy had not come true and instead we find ourselves working a range of meaningless “bullshit jobs” that many of us hate:
There’s every reason to believe he [Keynes] was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Graeber went on to describe how these so-called “bullshit jobs” are concentrated in “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers”:
Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away…
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations…
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
As for the reasons behind these “bullshit jobs”, according to Graeber:
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger…
Today, Noah Smith has a slightly different take on Graeber’s thesis, instead arguing that many Americans no longer understand how their work creates value, with many inadvertently deriving income from the rent-seeking activities of their employers:
In ages past, most Americans could easily see that at the end of the day they had produced something real. If you worked on a wheat farm or a car factory, you would see wheat and cars appear as a result of your labor. And if the market was relatively free and fair, economics would assure you that the wheat or cars were worth what people were willing to pay for them. But in the modern economy, a lot of what we produce comes in the form of intangible services, and — more importantly — there are lingering doubts as to whether the markets for those services are either free or fair…
Smith then cites three examples to highlight his point: the finance industry; the health industry; and the education industry, which together make up roughly one-third of the US economy.
The finance industry in the US has grown from roughly 3% of GDP in 1950 to around 8% currently, yet few people would consider that it is adding more value (many in fact would argue that it has destroyed value). A big problem, according to Smith, is that too much trading is going on, which necessarily occupies “a vast number of Americans… but we have no idea how it creates value.”
The health industry has similar problems. It takes up nearly one-fifth of the US economy, but despite the huge amount of spending, Americans have little to show in the way of actual health outcomes. Again, too many people are employed in administration, such as fighting over paying claims, and few actually add value.
Finally, college education is an ever growing part of the US economy. Yet, the benefits of higher learning seem to be experiencing the law of diminishing returns, and is often no more than “a hideously expensive way of proving to potential employers that you’re smart and hard-working”, rather than actually being productivity enhancing.
Smith then concludes that America’s jobs are increasingly “an elaborate kind of wealth redistribution system, masquerading as value-creating economic activity, sustained and powered by all the economy’s loopholes and flaws”. And “if that’s the case, then we really ought to ask ourselves: Why are we working so hard, instead of collecting checks to sit on a beach?”
My view is that there is some light at the end of the tunnel in all of this. Many of the manual jobs that have been replaced by technology and robots were downright tedious and often dangerous, and arguably the administration jobs that have replaced them – the 21st century equivalent of last century’s production lines – are safer and easier. Real wages and living standards are arguably higher for lower paid workers today than were 70 years ago, even if inequality has risen.
At the same time, I strongly believe that most people work longer hours than they should and consume too much, and many would benefit from increased free time to spend with family or relaxing. It is also a reason why I am such a strong advocate for more affordable housing, principally through freeing-up the supply-side. It would be a lot easier for people to cut back on work if they weren’t burdened paying-off some of the world’s biggest mortgages or paying high rents.
