My friend Chris sent me a link to this provocative essay by David Graeber, “On the topic of bullshit jobs.” David raises the question of why we have so many paper-pushing service jobs that produce nothing tangible, and why we seemingly revile physical jobs that have clear benefits to society.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he 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.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). 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 (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
My own thoughts on why we work so much relate to the innate competition for social status, which has not diminished despite our material advancement and a leveling of differences in the standard of living between classes. The differences between the lifestyle of a first-world billionaire and hourly worker are small compared to the difference between a 17th century king and peasant. Bentley vs. Honda is not the same as carriage vs. walking. Anyone can eat meat and imported fruit every day.
Those of us who work to live, rather than the other way around, might view the corporate rat race as a collective action problem. I remember when one of my law school professors (at workaholic UChicago) asked our first-year class: “Wouldn’t all of you, or at least most of you, be better off if you could make an enforceable agreement that none of you will study on the weekends?”
I think that is valid more generally — that most of us would be better off if we could find a mutually binding way to tone down hyper-competition. Especially given that in today’s world (a) we have the resources to still enjoy a high standard of living, in absolute terms, even if we do a lot less work, and (b) much of the extra work and competition, especially that of highly paid ‘go-getters’, goes into activities that are socially useless, zero-sum and sometimes even negative-sum.
Perhaps the Europeans are on to something with their ‘Sunday trading’ laws that force most stores to be closed on the weekends. It is inconvenient for customers, but it helps to enforce a system where leisure time is more respected. Having the right culture seems to play a big role as well — my impression is that Europeans (a) do not place quite as much emphasis on money as a factor in social status, and (b) are generally more accepting of their lot in life and their social status, and less likely to constantly strive for an increase in their status.
Rob – You make some excellent points, and I agree that Europeans are on the right track here, at least culturally. When your family has lived in a certain area and been a part of a certain social class for ages, and you have an extensive network in that place, you know who you are and tend to be ok with that. Stepping up to another income bracket, assuming you can even do it (such as in Switzerland), doesn’t redefine you to the same extent as in newer cultures (US, post-communist Russia & China).