unprofitable food-powered make-work

pbs |  Editor’s Note: If you’re reading this at work, you’re probably not all that busy. Don’t you ever wish you could just fit your “work” into fewer hours, then go home to do your own thing instead of being paid to look busy all day?

John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technological advancement would make that possible by the turn of the century. He foresaw a 15-hour workweek. Instead, Americans are now working more and more hours. But what are they actually doing, asks American anthropologist David Graeber? “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” Graeber wrote in a summer 2013 essay in Strike Magazine that we’ll call “BS Jobs.”

For one thing, he writes, we’ve created entirely new jobs to accommodate the workaday world. Administrators (think telemarketing and financial services) and the growing number of human resources and public relations professionals can’t pick up their own pizzas or walk their dogs. That’s why, Graeber says, we have all-night pizza delivery men and dog-walkers.

Graeber’s (rather rank) vision of hell captures the cycle of meaningless work he’s criticizing:

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. [...]There’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

Graeber is a professor at the London School of Economics. So isn’t that a classic example of frying fish (i.e., meaningless work)? He welcomes that question, but quickly dismisses it, saying he wouldn’t dare tell anyone who truly believes in their work that it’s not meaningful. It’s those workers who are already cognizant of the futility of their day that he’s after — like his friend, the poet-musician-turned-corporate lawyer, whom he told us about in his previous Making Sen$e post on the guaranteed basic income. Those are his fish-fryers, resenting the cabinet-makers for doing “real” work.

Paul Solman interviewed Graeber for our broadcast segment on the basic income (watch below). That conversation led to a discussion of Graeber’s theory that many jobs shouldn’t exist.