The D. Graeber’s Book About Bullshit Jobs, Provoking Discussion and Awakening the Mind

David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”. Trans. from English. Moscow: Marginem Press, 2020, 243 p.

Abstract

In this book D. Graeber reminded us about a projection made in 1930 by John Keynes who expected that until the 20th century the level of technological development in the industrial production in developed countries would be as high as to allow for all the people to work only 15 hours a day. But why it has not happened? About this D. Graeber had earlier observed that one reason of this failure had been many people in the present-day economy receiving a salary but not making a real product, imitating, in fact, a productive work, and he had proposed to brand their activity “bullshit jobs”. But what businessman in a market economy will decide to hire an employee who will do nothing? The author explored the causes behind the bullshit jobs and proposed their classification, although he admitted that it was far from complete, because these causes were a great many. According to the author, a mass-scale occurrence of the bullshit job in many countries over the latest decade was provoked by bureaucratic approaches and administrative methods penetrating in the business sector. The author argued that the increasing share of bullshit jobs in the latest years became a grave social problem, turning the global economy into a vast machine for the production of absurdity. The author took dozens of examples to demonstrate a pattern entrenched in the modern economic system: the more useful is one’s work for the people, the lesser is a probability that one will be paid for it. D. Graeber came to the conclusion that the present-day world had fostered an economic system very distinct from the classical capitalism which schemes were explored and explicated by the classical scientists when creating the economic theory.