On Bullsh*t Jobs | David Graeber | RSA Replay

my name is Benedict Dalitz I'm the head of the new RSA future work center and I'm delighted to welcome you all here today for the RSA Thursday lunchtime event before we begin could I ask you to turn your Mobile's to silent we're filming in live streaming today as always so a very big welcome to all of you who are joining us on twitter the hashtag for the event is RSA work please do join the discussion even if you're in the room and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome today's speaker David Graeber David needs very little introduction so I'll keep this brief David is a professor of anthropology at the LSE his many books include the Autopia of rules the democracy project and the best-selling debt the first 5,000 years a frequent guest on the BBC he writes for among others The Guardian strike the Baffler and new left review his strike essay on the phenomenon of jobs which was published in 2013 such such an herb that was read over a million times and translated into 17 different languages and his new book jobs a theory expands on this concept and outlines how rather ironically meaningless work has become more associated with latter day capitalism profit-making cattle ISM then it has with favoured communist states and David's argument is that not only are these jobs absurd they are also incredibly miserable for those who have them and we'll be looking closely at David's theory as part of our new future work Center so without further ado please give a very warm welcome to David [Applause] all right well thanks so much for that introduction I guess I've already talked a little bit about this very subject here before but we really can't talk about it enough because it's it's it's a strange thing that this is not considered a social problem and I've spent some years one reason I wrote this book is because it's there seems to be this peculiar way in which if you mention this to people no almost no one will deny it but at the same time there's no one quite knows what to do with it it's like this gigantic embarrassment in our society I thought I would I would start by talking a little bit about how I kind of got on to this topic to begin with um some years ago back in 2011 2010 I wrote a book on debt and that book did fairly well it wasn't actually a best-seller but I guess internationally it did pretty well as I said it's an international bestseller which means I think it was like it was number two on German Amazon for about three hours but you know the book did fairly well and [Music] there's a funny thing where if you say something that a number of people consider interesting new sort of unusual and you show you have a capacity to do that it's almost as if the world will conspire to make sure you never do that again they will try to make you give the same talk write the same book do that is based on you for the rest of your life in fact that's what you really get paid for not the original book and going out and lecturing about it and um one reason I'm often not particularly rich is because I decided I wasn't gonna do that I thought what if I do the opposite what if I use this as an opportunity to say things I would never normally get to say and I thought of all those ideas I had for articles that were always rejected or I didn't think to send to people because I knew they would be they thought maybe I can cash in you know so anytime somebody said oh we want you to write something for a new periodical and I would say what about and they'd say anything I would say really anything okay so I'd get out you know some piece that was a drunken party rant I'd been going on about for ten years and no one would conceivably published and and and it'll put that there and some of them you know did what you kind of think they would do but some of them kind of took off and and and this one was just not like anything I'd ever seen it was I say how I got onto it I consider myself something of an anthropologist even in the world of anthropologists because I don't really come from that kind of background that is to say the academic milieu I was brought up in a working-class family and people who actually did stuff and you know up task orientation was a big thing and my father was a work in printing as a offset for the lithography my mother worked in garment factories for a lot of her life so so I'm kind of a stranger in the world the worlds which I traverse and as a result I mean the whole idea that through Paula G is that strangers have a certain insight that natives don't so one thing I kept noticing was a strange phenomena of people who are apologetic of what they do for a living not just because they thought it was evil some of them do but but just because they don't actually do anything you know you run into people at parties and you say well you know I'm an anthropologist and they think that's interesting so what do you do and they say oh nothing really and you think they're just being modest right but but you interrogate them you discovered no they're literally doing nothing a lot of these guys they work for two hours a week and it's like don't tell my boss but you could do the whole thing and there would be two hours and otherwise I basically update my facebook profile and you know I make cat means play minesweeper a lot so actually one of the conclusions of my book has to be skipping ahead but I is that a lot of the these sort of forms of popular culture that have emerged in the last 20 years you know back in the 60s we had a lot of forms of popular culture that took a lot of time you know like the half hour drum solo or beat poetry that goes on forever and and now you know it's all this stuff that like cat memes or YouTube rants or they're all things that you can do while you're pretending to do something else so basically like all these people are not really working at their jobs so this stuff that's circulating is all things that they're doing when people think they're working or at least they have to be decent enough to make some kind of pretense so they're doing something anyway so you need these people and how common is this I seem to run into them a lot so you know these people said a strike magazine it was this new magazine there was a third issue I think and they said oh come just write something interesting something you know we wouldn't normally get does whatever you like so I said okay I'm gonna try it out so I wrote this piece called on the phenomena of jobs and I suggested that this is the reason why we don't have a 15 hour work week and Keynes famously predicted in the 30s that we were almost up on the time that we should be working certainly half what we're doing now probably considerably less and if you look at the kind of jobs that existed in Kansas time well we have eliminated a lot of them he talked about technological unemployment in the 1930s and a lot of people thought well you know wasn't really true and everybody's been saying the robots are gonna take our jobs you know for the last hundred years or so auto employment stays about the same in the long run well you know maybe it's not such a threat but I would make the opposite argument I would say you know the robots have been taking our jobs for the last hundred years or so but instead of replacing that sort of redistributing the labor in a reasonable fashion we've simply made up completely meaningless pointless jobs either industries that just have no purpose to exist um other than their own existence you know it's actually one of the categories of jobs I ended up making up because a lot of people sent in descriptions of things like corporate law or telemarketing you don't need a telemarketer unless you're you're a competitor has one right you don't need a corporate lawyer unless you somebody else has one it's a little like feudal lords you know you need feudal lords to protect you from other feudal lords but so there are these industries that sort of feed off themselves but everybody in it secretly thinks they don't need to exist I mean I've never met a corporate lawyer who really felt that that it's a good thing that there's a corporate lawyers in the world which is interesting I mean obviously as something to do with the kind I would need right but nonetheless I mean it's a considerable number of them that feel this way all right so so I wrote this up I said well maybe that's it maybe it's political or maybe you know the reason nobody does anything about this is because it's actually pretty convenient to a system of Finance based capital where you're not even concentrating on making stuff and and selling stuff as much as extracting rents or create artificially creating debt this is all sort of perfect division of labor for that you have a certain amount of unemployed who you make fun of and then you have the structurally unemployed who you give these these meaningless jobs or you're basically buying their loyalty you know you put them in these mock managerial positions the interesting thing and this is actually part of the argument that I should underline we have a false narrative about what happened which makes it possible for people not to not to perceive what's going on the narrative is the reason we daren't working 20 or 15 hour a week is peace we fell in for consumerism you know we had a choice between more leisure time and more stuff so you know everybody wanted iPhones and designer sushi and you know and we chose that over over more time to hang out with our friends the problem is it doesn't really work first of all up there's not that many people involved in sushi and iPhones and so forth and most of the new jobs that haven't created aren't really related to that in fact if you look at actual the rise of the service economy rhetoric comes with us you look at actual service and I found some people who break down real service as I am you know giving people haircuts serving people coffee laundry things like that if you look at actual service the numbers have been pretty much the same for the last hundred years it's been about 20 percent about 20 percent of the workforce does service and it used to be they were more likely to do it for a private household but other than that you know the sheer numbers are about the same what's gone up just astronomically is the number of clerical administrative and supervisory workers managers there's what I call managerial sub imputation or managerial feudalism we have rank on rank of these new intermediary roles that never used to exist um those are the guys that that seem to complain the most about not doing anything so I wrote this and it was all intuitive I didn't really know how many of these people there were I seem to meet them a lot so I said almost as a joke well maybe that's the reason we don't have a 15 hour a week maybe we're just making up these jobs or so it's as if I mean nobody planned it quite but you know it seems to suit the purposes of those in power where we'll actually it was the first person to argue that he said there's making up jobs to keep people off the street but that's why I said I may have suggested maybe he's right and I had never seen a reaction like this this was a very obscure periodical I'd never heard of it even before I published in it and and you know within a matter of weeks it had been translated I think now it's up to 21 languages I think the first couple weeks we got 12 it just came out in Persian actually and I saw apparently they have a problem with jobs in Iran now but you know it's all over the world there was Korea Estonia Brazil there was a huge Egypt anyway so there's a huge hole of blue and and and the site kept crashing and then newspapers started running it as a column and picking it up and I go looked at the comment sections of the comment sections were just amazing there are all these people like writing these confessionals you know oh my god it's true I'm a corporate lawyer I contribute nothing to society I I suffer I know nobody knows my misery this kind of thing and I realize that there's a social problem that does nobody is paying attention to I got people writing to me to saying yeah I'm in the financial services industry you know I've been passing it around this thing has come across my desk at least 20 times today and I was like god you guys really aren't doing much alright okay so with that came the realization that the problem was worse than I thought but I was still thinking okay 15 percent maybe maximum twenty percent of all jobs would be like this eventually someone did a survey at YouGov and they took stuff actually out of words that I'd used in the piece does your job make a meaningful contribution to society it's covered 37 percent of people in this country believe that it does not we were certain that it does not 13% were insurer only 50% were quite sure their job does do something which actually is pretty amazing if you think about it here's you know think about all the jobs that no one would possibly say that if you're a bus driver you know you're doing something you might hate your job but but you're not gonna say it's useless and pointless and why am i doing this people need to move around if you're in Reverse if Europe you know think of all the jobs that that obviously need to be done so conclusion you know would have to be that anybody who you see sitting there in an office and you're wondering is this person secretly thinking his job doesn't need to exist the answer is yes he's almost certainly thinking about it's really high and then you think about alright these are the people who know it right and just the suit let's forget about that 13% of our insurer let's just drop them and just look at the 30 percent are definitely sure they're their job doesn't contribute anything alright those are the ones who are aware of it it's easy to see how you could not be aware that your job is pointless but it's much harder to see how you could think your job is pointless and be wrong now it's possible that you're fulfilling some function that your boss understands that you don't and people keep saying that's possible to me but I keep asking what would be an example of that did you know someone in that situation and no one can really come up with one so it's possible but there really aren't very many on the other hand it's really easy to see how you could think you're doing something and and you're not and there are people some people wrote to me and I got amazing stories like there's one person who worked for a Travel Magazine and she'd worked for there for about six months until she realized a Travel Magazine doesn't really exist well there was some sort of dad scam you know they're all they're writing copy and putting photographs and laying things out but I think was never produced you know suddenly I fly a lot and I've never seen this magazine not really so that's an extreme example but the equivalent can happen and probably does happen quite a bit and then you have to think about all the people who actually do real work in support of that kind of pointless meaningless employment you know here's somebody with a law firm that's doing some sort of fraudulent tax scam or something like that well they got an office somebody's got to water the plants right that's a real job somebody's got to clean the place somebody's got to do security and canoe perception so they're doing real work but they're doing real work in support of so you know I've started thinking like God like you know for all I know half the work being done in our society is completely unnecessary that they got rid of it it would make no difference whatsoever yeah so I ended up saying all right this obviously deserves to be picked up on a need to do some research and see what kind of jobs these are and and who these people are what they're really doing so I ended up I have a lot of followers on Twitter so I figured all right it's a biased sample but you know it'll give me some good stories so I said all right have you ever had a really pointless job a job that you know if it were to vanish either it would make no difference or the world would be a slightly better place all right so tell me all about it you know I set up a gmail account do I have ABS job or what Gmail doesn't allow you to use in the title right and I sat that up and sure enough I got hundreds and hundreds of replies some of which were pointless and kind of missed the point a little bit and some of them were short and you know at some of the sentence or two some of them were 13 pages long and we will write these long work history as a detailed psychological sociological analysis yeah they have a lot of time on their hands or how did this happen really useful the book kind of wrote itself in that way so I ended up you know I I put them all in a gigantic Word file and then I color-coded them for content which was really fun you know I Green was for like what I do when people think I'm working and orange was for does my boss know and what is my supervisor yeah so I'd code it that way and I use that as my database and I ended up writing this book but I think we're gonna do a dialogue format maybe I've been talking too long already okay I'll just I'll just I mean there's a lot of things I could say I could go through the typology but I think the political implications of all this or something that I would like to emphasize um one reason that I wrote this book you know I'm aim a anti-capitalist anarchist personally I've been involved in direct action movements for a long time and and it always seems to me that capitalism is being held together more by moral arguments than anything else at this point because most of the old practical arguments don't really apply you know for the last 50 years you just said well you know capitalism creates great inequality but at least you know it lifts all boats and even poor people know their children will be doing better off in the next generation and nobody believes that anymore that's not obviously not true the other argument was it creates a big strong middle class and that leads to political stability and that's clearly not the case the other one was technological you know well yeah we're all going to be on Jupiter and a few years there's me and endless inventions capitals was huge engine for creativity and you know instead we just get like iPhone 7 iPhone 8 but um you know all the sci-fi stuff just it used to happen but capitalism seem to stop producing that stuff all of a sudden so none of those things are true so in a large way I think the only two arguments left are well anything else would be worse you know it's us or North Korea basically and the other argument is well it's basically moral is this like people really do believe that if you don't pay your debts you're a bad person I mean unless you're rich in which case it doesn't matter somehow but you know if you're Donald Trump and you go bankrupt they elect you president but if you're an ordinary person you're a deadbeat and a bad person and so that one really works people feel that you know you really have to pay your debts it doesn't matter if you've been maneuvered into it which is a really really convenient thing for the guys who were running a financialized system right Michael Hudson actually made the argument that you know thirty years ago rich people discovered that poor people actually feel they should pay their debts which had never occurred to them because they don't right that's true I mean III people ask me why I'm a professor you know they said well maybe I'm a writer you know it'd be more fun you'd set your own hours you would have to do all this admin work I always say well you know there's there's one thing about academia which isn't true being a musician being an artist being a writer any of those things which is they never ever pretend they just forgot to pay you every month there it is it's a glog word yeah anything like you know where they have any excuse not to pay their debt to you they won't do it um I mean it's just amazing that's why we have agents you know I could tell you stories but all right so dad is one thing and the other one is is is work oh they really seem to have convinced people that if you aren't working harder than you want to be working at something you don't particularly enjoy preferably under the orders of somebody you don't like then you're just a bad person you know you don't deserve help you don't deserve relief there no one should love you and and how that happened is one of the things I've tried to investigate over the course of the book um you know how it is that we see work as this kind of a active self-abnegation it's a secular hairshirt it's supposed to be suffering to the point where you know if you get anything out of work it lowers the value rather than making it better to the even the knowledge that you are helping other people so there's this perverse idea that not only is it generally true I'm exception to every rule but it is generally true that the more your work benefits others the less you're likely to get paid for it but people think that's okay you know in fact a lot of people think that's right well we shouldn't pay teachers too much so you don't want people who are greedy teaching our children that sort of thing and you know that comes out of this idea that work should be suffering yourself anything you get out of it mitigates that's it's it's it's self sacrifice value and that is the flip side of a serious system of consumerism so you know we deserve our furtive consumer pleasures because we spend most of the day suffering and and therefore the uselessness of work actually adds to its value and some in some perverse way unconscious way rather rather than enhancing it something like that must be going on you know why is it that it's considered acceptable that you know nurses and you know the guy who gives you trade information or people actually help you in some way should pay the cost of austerity and bankers shouldn't you know how does that make any kind of moral sense to anyone it's it's can only be through some sort of logic well you guys are self-sacrifice and goes home sacrifice yeah and so what I was trying to do is do take aim at that kind of moral argument I wrote one book about that yeah that seemed to work fairly well so this is my contribution to the debate about work thank you thanks very much David and I thought we might begin by maybe teasing out this distinction between jobs that are and jobs that are just highly specialized because I think when you when you first publish or 2013's say you had a a reply from The Economist magazine value which pointed out that okay our economy is becoming more complex with a more complex economy you have specialized jobs and in those specialized jobs it's harder to see where you fit as a small cog in a big machine leaving people to think that their job may be isn't that worth while Germany thoughts on on that notion of writing xD yeah I I could contextualize this the piece came out and I think two days later maybe it was three The Economist's already had a reply out which is pretty amazing considering you know I don't think the Economist normally reads strike magazine feels obliged to like write instant replies to their arguments but you know they sense something was a threat but what they made the argument the argument they made was that this is the digital equivalent of assembly line labor you know our wealth and the period of industrialization was based on these assembly line jobs where people were just you know doing one thing all day long and it was horrible and alienating but you know that it meant we had cars and planes and things and and nowadays they said this is the same thing you know they've robotized a lot of the production but you have these complex supply chains and just-in-time production and-and-and containerized shipping all you know all this globalized stuff it's really hard to coordinate so even though the actual production has been increasingly digitized you need these people sort of toiling in the communicative Mills so these are and and their jobs are all chopped up into tiny pieces like the assembly line was so they might think oh I'm not doing anything but you know in the big picture this is the basis of our wealth and prosperity I think the best counter argument of is my own experience in universities where I think the I don't have the figures for the UK but I know in the u.s. number of professors general lecturers and teaching staff has gone up by 50 percent students have gone up about the same slightly more administrators in terms of bigshot administrators 85 percent administrative staff have gone up by 240 percent this is exploded it's actually much more in private universities - than public ones so alright to take the Economist argument this has teaching become twice or three times as complicated as it was 30 years ago I mean what is the academic equivalent of supply global supply chains I mean we're just basically doing the same thing we're just sitting there were movie have PowerPoint set of a blackboard I don't know I'm a lot like but everyone else does you know yeah we get a Moodle page yeah but basically it's the same thing we go to seminars we teach we lecture we we talk to people we grade papers so it's clearly something else is going on you know and in fact what you see in academia is is the opposite rather than having this huge apparatus of people so as to make us super efficient and and in our teaching actually now these guys are supposed to be saving lost labor because they're doing our administrative work so we don't have to so in theory you can go off and think great thoughts are doing exactly the opposite they're making up administrative stuff for us to do so we have more of admin - so my interpretation is exactly the opposite that you know essentially you have a corporatized model you know managerialism means that it's no longer the guild model which universities used to be one of the few remaining examples of the old medieval system where people self organize if in a very hierarchical fashion um it was no longer the idea of people producing something in this case knowledge we were training new new scholars you have managers running it but managers feel they're like they deserve to be something like what they would get get something like what they would get in the corporate world in the corporate world it's just assumed that you know you need to have five or six flunkies you're not the important person so so you know they hire these guys as like Dean Lutz or vice provost or whatever and and they immediately assign them three or four minions and they figure out what those minions are going to do so what do they do they end up making up work for us to do so suddenly I have to do time allocation the studies all the time about what I'm doing with my time rather than spending my time actually teaching or learning anything just turning the attention to solutions and in the last chapter of the book you actually land on ubi yeah as a potential solution to rid us of jobs and especially something the RSA is an advocate of but there's slightly different reasons I would say but if you had the second intervention you're in a second way of addressing jobs what would it be and the reason why I asked that is because ubi for all of its merits is something which it will take time for it to become politically palatable take time for it to be implemented so what can we do in the here and now well I mean I think a lot of jobs really has to do with supply-side economics I had a sort of one of those moments of exceptional clarity where somebody says something so simple and obvious that you're like oh right you know I can just flip that on his head and it's someone pointed out that all these tax cuts in America they always ask you know they've redefined rich people as job creators when people ask why are there are so many jobs one thing I always point out is the only thing that left and right seem to agree on is that more jobs is always good right they have disagree on how you create them but they never say more jobs that actually do something right they assume that jobs will necessarily be good or else they wouldn't exist which is obviously untrue but it's particularly true in the case of just handing money to rich people because these think their job creators someone pointed out and this was this is my sort of Eureka moment they were saying well you know they asked a bunch of manufacturers and other other employers you know if you get this tax cut you're about to be handed are you going to hire more workers very few of them put up their hands and and one reason for that is they ask manufacturers because if you had money to poor people no they will buy food and other necessities maybe they'll buy shoes if you if you give money to middle-class people they might put in a swimming pool but you're still employing people to put in swimming pools but you know you it will create jobs it will create demand for actual stuff or services that a lot of people want if you just give money to rich people and say okay you're job creators here's a lot of money go off and create some jobs well they're unlikely to create shoes and swimming pools that they can't sell to anybody but if they feel pressure to hire somebody what are they gonna do they're gonna hire a bunch of flunkies to make them feel good about themselves I mean the obvious thing to do and and I realize that that's another little formula I put together that about half of the people who work as civil servants now or basically in you know bureaucrats are basically there to make poor people feel bad about themselves in the same way about half the bureaucrats and private companies are there to make rich people feel good about themselves feel important you know have their little empires and you know the importance of an executive is often measured by how many people they have working under them often their pay is directly related to that what do you expect any thoughts on the growing growing demands for a four day working week is that a way of solving this or is this just saying four days of a job and in three days escaping that yeah well that is the problem I mean that I used to embrace cutting down the working week as the primary way of addressing these kind of problems or just as a good thing in general you know it's it shows something about the cult of work that you have to embrace cutting down work time not because it would be nice not to work so much but for some other reason you can't just say everybody's working too hard let's take a day off no that's just a boo so you have to say it'll reduce unemployment or you know it'll have some other beneficial effect but it can't be good in itself but I yeah I used to embrace cutting down the working week and I do think that would be a good thing the problem to me is how to it's not so much the people will do jobs but there's a blast it's not y'all need to create a whole bureaucracy to enforce it and a lot of my anarchist friends way talked about this waiver themselves and casual lies or contract work and they say well you know back when everybody was working 9:00 to 5:00 or a very large proportion of people were it makes sense you can just pass a legislation say okay now it's 9:00 to 3:00 but now you can't do that I mean look at me I'm paid by the monstah to like work all the time basically and and there's just no way the government could regulate how much I work without creating a vast bureaucracy of surveillance and and and and employ people and what would basically turn into jobs so I think that that it might compound the problem in that way just figure out how to enforce it I mean if you didn't think that maybe there are ways to enforce that I don't know about I beg be very interested in hearing and discussing it but I'm suspicious and that's why I think basically income would do the same thing better so we've got a little bit more time for discussion what do we hope open up to a Q&A but before we do I just want to do a very quick straw poll I think you know the question that's coming which is if have you ever including currently works in the job and you're willing to admit it if we could maybe take in with questions in batches of three if that's okay I mean if you could keep them very very concise and just say your name along with your question so this lady here this gentleman here and the lady at the back just in the yep hi my name is Louise potpourri did you notice the difference in the people who are sending their emails in in terms of the difference between men and women in terms of what women just my theory would be less likely to say that they have a PS job versus men being refusing to give up their identities this is what I do Who I am is something like zero up is building zero based budgeting where at the end of the everyone's out of the job and you figure out on January the 1st of all jobs are real and how many folks you need to do them because if what you're saying is true there's a lot of folks that need flushing out really I think my experience must be very limited can you give me some more examples of what these people what you mean by jobs apart from the very obvious ones there must be lots of this so will we take those that's three differences well that's really interesting because that's one of the few things that the surveys actually asked they didn't ask a lot of things that you really wish they'd asked like what kind of job do you have but they did ask they did break it down by gender and sure enough there was a 10% spread women were much less likely to say they had jobs I think that's because women are much less likely to have jobs actually which is interesting because a lot of people when they first hear the concept especially men obviously assume that they're mainly talking about women's jobs they'll say oh you know they made up all these like meaningless office jobs so give a woman job it's not that way at all in but but partly it's also because of the dynamics I mean a lot of traditional jobs you have women and what looked like a job but they're the one who's actually doing the work further there's the person they're working for you know so a classic secretary you know it's like the boss who has the job I gave the example in the book of a friend of mine who was an anthropology major went to answer Afghanistan to study belly dancing and ended up the administrative assistants and finally wrote than that NATO withdrawal plan you know wild theory of plate as a secretary somebody just threw it said oh there's five of them they're all contradictory here he synthesized them sometimes so she ended up doing the military strategy so yeah so so often in engendered cases you know no who's the got the job and who doesn't but I'm assuming that people who do the jobs are the ones who really know okay so in terms of yeah how to find out who's really useful I mean it's a real problem because even if you do this who's gonna enforce it the fascinating thing is they're constantly doing you know cutting the fat doing speed ups on salaried and blue-collar workers so you know if you're working for UPS if you're a driver if you're a delivery guy if you're you know those guys are being tailor eyes and you know put it on huge pressure there's no at all there right but but at the same time the same guys who are doing that are just hiring flunkies to sit around the office making them look good or do nothing and and so there's a question of power I don't think it's as hard to identify them I there's one guy it always sticks in my head he's a bank security and efficiency guy and he says you know I I don't have a job I identify other people's jobs but then I realize they do have a job because they never actually act on any of my suggestions I'm here to like make it seem like they're doing something they're not actually doing for 15 years I've gone through said here's how you stream the fat here and somebody says what but my empire would contract you know and people block it and they say no we can't computer eyes that fire 15 people you know so there's all this stuff done by hand even in large corporations it doesn't need to be for these reasons so it's a really interesting thing to look at the power dynamics and how they worked themselves out and uh in terms of examples well in terms of the kind of people who wrote things in to me the interesting thing was the absence of service jobs you really see people being judgmental and saying like why are people buying this it's stupid you know or like you know I serve coffee I hate the people you know maybe they do hate them but they don't actually see it as useless so wasn't that it was much more people in kind of clerical administrative jobs who just don't have any assignments I trained it up with a typology of five I can just go over quickly to give you a sense so there's flunkies we've talked about that so that would be like a receptionist at a company that doesn't need a receptionist you know some companies obviously do but some you know you'll have a small publishing firm where they get two calls a day it's not like they couldn't take it themselves right but if you don't have a receptionist you're not a real company so they have hire someone just sits there all day you know and so there's a lot of that sort of thing then there's um duct tape duct tape whirs are basically there's a problem but instead of fixing that they hire someone to clean up the damage so example I always like to give of that was it was one point the shelves collapsed in my office when I was working at Goldsmith's and it took ages for the carpenter to show up and realize then we had one carpenter but they had another guy whose entire job was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter was too busy to come it's like you couldn't fire him and hire like another carpenter so that would be a duct tape er um I always say it's like you know you you there's a hole in the roof and instead of actually fixing it you just get a bucket and hire somebody to empty it every go all right so that's a duct tape and then you have box stickers who are basically there so that you can say you're doing something that you're not doing like the guy who is the efficiency expert whose recommendations were never taken up but but a lot of there's one person who example of that who works in a care home and her job she's in the entertainment branch so her job is to give people elaborate surveys about what sort of entertainment they would like to have and she has to spend so much time gathering this information tabulating at feeding the computer taking another manual copy that has to be put in a binder of the right color and you know she doesn't have any time to actually entertain anybody so that's a kind of classic example she got a sneak Soph on her own it's a little away like us academics so if you read a book that's considered our special leisure activity you know we're getting away live on the sly so there's box-ticking and there's goons I had to make this category up because I wouldn't have occurred to me normally they're basically what I was saying about industries that don't really need to exist according to people who work in them except you need them these other people have them so a lot of PR of marketing you know a lot of total callow marketers like I never ran into a single telemarketer who didn't think their job shouldn't exist you know and so there's a whole industries that kind of feed off themselves so there's a lot of that and finally there are task masters and task masters are their own to various categories but mainly they're people who supervise people who don't need supervision and I got a lot from that I mean people who are middle managers were saying you know I total job you know I used to do this job so that I did it well they kicked me upstairs to management and now I'm supposed to you know supervise these guys doing what I know perfectly well they would do if I wasn't here you know so and then they have a dilemma because like I want to do something so some of them actually say well I tried allocating myself work when no one was looking but then my boss caught me so I can't do that so you know the obvious thing to do would be to like make up box-ticking rituals for them to do like you know make up some sort of performance figures and make sure they meet their targets but know they they're they're close enough to the work that they know that that would make them spend time doing that instead of their job so it would have a negative effect so they're kind of in a bind you know so that would be a taskmaster so those are examples of what a job might be like we'll get three more in maybe more so this gentleman here toward the back and this gentleman here I wonder about if you've quantified how much money the society is spending on these jobs and is that money enough to answer the usual criticism of ubi is unaffordable because you have to tax people more so rather than taxing people more if we could just persuade these companies somehow to pay people for not doing anything at all wouldn't that be a better a better solution that's a very nice idea not to mention government there's like those guys I'm Laura partridge and my questions about the non jobs and so you mentioned jobs like being a corporate lawyer and that actually you have in many respects quite a lot of social status and I was wondering how we preserve the social status of non jobs like being a nurse or a teacher yeah the previous one what would be the impact on GDP because PS jobs value that cost go into GDP with the same logic that people have power how many BS employees so do we need to do basic income and give people money so that they stop wasting overhead and what the effect on the GDP is okay well the first question wasn't a question so I'll just say yeah oh quantify yeah well that would be a very interesting question um I mean you also have to think about government there because I mean you'd what I mean people say this is my ubi in general right it would massively reduce the number of bureaucrats which who you wouldn't have to pay but you know you would have to pay them you pay them basically income like everybody else but you know they'd be much happier because one of the thing I found from these studies is I got a lot of people who work in government who I guess the way I always put it is you know when you have somebody who you kind of wonder how they live with themselves you know I'm the guy who demands that homeless people show three forms of ID or we kick you back on the street again you know that sort of person often they can't actually they really feel terrible they know just how bad it is or what they're doing and they're in this terrible quandary you know and the system is set up so they can't act ethically you know if they try they get in trouble so those guys you know they can all move you bi they can all go off and you know form a klezmer band or decide to restore antique furniture you know or whatever it is they decide they want to do it they'll be happier and and and we'll all be happier to see the end of them so so which relates to another rescue about you be I do in terms of quantification I mean we and this goes back to the that question about gross domestic product is essentially we would just have to change our way of measuring this stuff I think all our indicators are clearly way out of kilter and and one of the things that shows is that you know these market efficiencies people talk about you know are a myth it's it's it's a story we tell ourselves almost everything about these indicators is just fantastical and has no relation to actual value heed I I actually make some suggestions in the book and and I've developed it elsewhere you know recent talk in France where I think that we need to just change our basic terminology about value and how we think about it I think production and consumption you know are terms that we just need to get rid of first of all most work doesn't produce anything you know I say always say this as like you you make a cup once right but you wash it a thousand times you know most most labor is not about making stuff it's about keeping things the same maintaining things taking care of people didn't give animals a plan taking care uh even tube workers you know I mean there's a huge debate about whether tube workers have jobs which I got involved with because people drew me into it as a Marxist actually we're saying well they're not producing value for capitalism that's why they're trying to fire them all this is during a tube strike and you know and obviously in a communist society the we would need to ticket takers because you know or ticket booths so because we wouldn't have tickets because wouldn't be charged people with transportation will be free so these are both their jobs right and and the two ticket office workers and put up a very nice response basically not directly to these guys but but to the idea that they're doing useless labor where they pointed out like okay fine you know don't have any technical officers like let's just hope you don't lose your kids you know let's just hope there isn't an accident you don't need to deal with annoying drunk and they sort of like went into all of the things you know didn't leave your computer on the table you know all the things these guys actually do and it's all caregiving labor you know I mean they're don't do no even these sort of classic proletarian jobs they're really you know much more like nurses or you know it's like what we think of as women's work is what they're actually doing it's a you don't count it as work so we don't imagine they're doing anything how do we strengthen that social status of jobs that really are worthwhile yeah I think we just need to look at why people say their jobs are I mean what is the tacit theory of value they've got in their heads because it's clearly not market you know Here I am being paid a lot of money to do something I don't think it's worthwhile there must be some notion of social value here I think caregiving labour is a great example that that's not sort of you know I think even if you build a bridge you build a bridge because you care that people who got across the river I mean all value producing labour is an extension of care so I think we do need to go back to courts classically been women's work as the paradigm for value producing labor so I actually tried to develop this in theory of the revolt of the caring classes that'll have social unrest is of you know the proletariat is essentially it's become clearer now that factories are no longer is important rotors always mainly involved in carrying labor like the blue tube workers and much more than we thought that's the sort of center of it and any they need to organize around that conception of value so I suggested that instead of production and consumption we substitute care and freedom perhaps caregiving and care is really that work we do which maintains and increases other people's freedom of which the paradigm would be play right because play is action done for itself because like what does caregiving labor you take care of kids so they can play right I mean that's that so we need to rethink production and consumption and get rid of those terms and think about care and Freedoms I think we've got time for one maybe even two for very quick there's this lady here and this gentleman here you have to be super quick with this I think what do you think the psychological health impact is on people who have these BS jobs and know that they have these BS jobs because essentially they're aware of the fact that every day of their lives they're living a lie so I just take that one directly or should we do I just wonder if you if anything came out in the research from people who actually love their BS jobs because yeah it's a very a you get paid B you've got a social construct to work in you're probably dealing with people that you like I mean I deal with a lot of companies and I look around and I see a lot of happy people doing nothing I mean if the boss really wanted to be ruthless he could get rid of them but they're actually very happy and and leading pretty fulfilled lives okay all right well the second one is easy because some of the there was another one in Holland where they actually did the numbers and it seems like six percent of jobs are our jobs where the person doesn't think there's a point but as the finds are fulfilling anyway I think you know some of those people hate their families [Laughter] learning new skills like the people who work with what does it matter that's but the ones who actually send in testimonies about it which there weren't that many but there are a few were the the two things they had in common were they knew what they were getting into so there were things like substitute teacher nobody expects that's gonna be real job right or a French civil servant you know something like that and and relatively unsupervised either you're the boss or you don't have anybody breathing of your shoulder so you know in its search room sounds like that you know you could say okay I'm a substitute teacher kids don't expect me to do anything nobody expects well I'll learn Chinese you know I'll become an artist yeah so people if you could repurpose the time to something useful yes but the surprising thing is that you know that's what we think people should think and mostly they don't and that gets to the second or the first question which is we have this assumption about human nature that people want something for nothing that you know economists make it into a science you know we're trying to put out the least amount of effort and resources to get the most back from it in if economists were right like most people with jobs would be delighted you know I'm getting paid to do nothing this is great you know but they're not the the astounding thing is just how miserable so many people are and the misery is compounded by the fact that they don't feel justified in being miserable for that very reason I should be happy if I told people why I'm miserable they would say what are you complaining about you but but in fact it shows that there's something about our assumptions about human nature that just profoundly misconceived I go back in the book - it's gonna increase the German psychologist came up the idea of the pleasure at being the cause you first infants first become aware of themselves as discrete entities independent of the world when they realize they can have predictable effects you know if I move that way again the pencil will move again you know when you first figure that out you're just totally happy apparently the kid says there's incredible joy we're realizing they can have predictable effects for the world the argument is that sort of sense of delight in being able to cause things to happen is the sort of foundation of our sense of autonomy of being an autonomous thing and right yeah the spiritual violence is when you take that away and and and you know psychologists being cruel mmm sadistic creatures they they you know just say all right let's see what happens if you like have it and figure that out and then immediately take it away again and of course the kids just go catatonic you know they freak out they got really upset and then they just become incredibly depressed have no motivation to do anything and curl up into a ball and essentially the argument is that's what's happening to people in jobs your basic sense of being people you ask somebody what do you do you know they usually assume you mean for a living right they don't say like I make model boats for my kids you know they even if that's the thing that's most important to them so so if you you know that sense of I am contributing to the world in some ways really important to people's sense of being a self so in a we were just taking away there something fundamental about their being and and the fact that you don't understand why this is upsetting you so much seems to compound it so yeah you hear about depression and in a way what is depression a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness and lack of motivation well that's what a job is it's objectively mimicking depression so not surprising rates of depression go up as these things become more common stress and anxiety becomes really big a lot of people said who had both kinds of jobs or who had both simultaneously there was one guy I thought was really interesting I call him Hannibal in the book he's a guy who works most of the week on diagnostic technology for TB which is basically you can't get anybody to pay you for but it's really useful as a team of people who are volunteers to work on this and then one sort one or two days a week he writes what he describes as business reports or marketing strategy for pharmaceutical corporations so you know executives can wave things and in front of each other that nobody even reads them he gets you know 10,000 pounds a pop for these things and he says that you know like it's a totally different world when everybody knows they're doing something useful they treat each other with respect there's camaraderie there's cooperation as soon as you're doing you know no matter how much you're paid everybody's like screaming each other and freaking out and like all these weird sadomasochistic rituals and deadlines and you know it's just as totally people just amuse each other than credibly when they and the more they all secretly know it doesn't matter at all whether we really got this done the more they get stressed out of the lines and the worse they treat each other well a lovely note to end on yeah we do have to cool time unfortunately thank you very much David for a really excellent talk and QA I think yeah it was really good I think the book is is genuinely a breath of fresh air for this debate because I think most people walk into the room when they hear the terms future work and good work they think about automation the lack of jobs in the future partially what you're saying is we're going to continue to have a lot of jobs they're just going to be that's the big issue so before we should off please give David a big round of applause [Applause] you

Channel: RSA

Views: 556,722

Keywords: anthropology, Bullshit Jobs, meaningless jobs, capitalism, modern society, sociology, work, productivity, technology, David Graeber, royal society of arts, rsa, rsa events, rsa shorts, talk, debate, lecture, event, the rsa

Id: kikzjTfos0s

Length: 57min 8sec (3428 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Iustinianus_I]

I've never really given this topic much thought, but I think he's right--a lot of jobs just don't need to be done, or don't need anywhere near as much time to do.

On the other hand, many jobs ABSOLUTELY need to be done and don't have nearly enough hands on deck to get everything done in time. And like he said, those latter jobs tend to not pay terribly well. I'm not really sure how to change this though, outside of government direction, and like he said that would create another bureaucracy.

My one criticism of his presentation would be the dismissal of the progress made by capitalism. I agree that capitalism isn't good by definition and that there have been many dark sides of the economic system, but we can pretty conclusively show that a LOT of good things have come out of capitalism.

Also, we may not be living on Saturn, but the phones we carry in our pockets would all have been straight up science fiction just ten years ago. I mean, the iPhone 1 came out in 2007.