BS Jobs

My department is converting its BA degree to a BS. Ostensibly it will help our students in the job market. This is not what today’s post is about.

 

Instead, I will be discussing the anthropologist David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. It’s short, engagingly written, and manages to be both amusing and depressing at the same time. If you aren’t already cynical about Dilbert-esque BS jobs in management and administration, Graeber’s work will convert you. He has testimonial after testimonial from a wide swath of people explaining why they are in BS jobs. But first we have to ask: What is a BS job?

 

Graeber works through some definitions before settling on: “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” His book came about because of a punchy article he wrote back in 2013 which resonated with many people who just needed an outlet to fess up to the despair they felt in their BS jobs. In 2015 someone bought a bunch of ads that ran in subway trains quoting from his article. Graeber lists them.

 

·      Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

·      It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.

·      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.

·      How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist.

 

Graeber names the financial industry, telemarketers, PR consultants, and middle management as being riddled with BS jobs. He also tackles head-on the assumption that BS jobs are mostly found in the bloated government and civil service, and provides many examples where this is simply not true. While you might think that it would be anathema to  the money-making private sector to squash out any such inefficiencies, the reality might even be the opposite. Graeber pulls numbers from Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty to show that middle management has grown much faster in private universities compared to public ones. As an anthropologist, he also provides the intriguing suggestion that what we are seeing today is essentially feudalism dressed in new clothes. A subheading reads: “how managerial feudalism manifests itself in the creative industries through an endless multiplication of intermediary executive ranks”. I find his analogy compelling. When there are monies to disburse, layers of bureaucracy start to develop to siphon off the goods. Extractive measures are everywhere, not just in struggling poor nation-states.

 

Why are BS jobs proliferating and why are they so difficult to get rid of? Graeber suggests three levels of analysis: the individual, the socio-economic, and the culture-political. It’s an iron triangle, and the three parts self-reinforce in an interlocking system. And thanks to globalization, the phenomenon is now global. Honestly, I don’t know how we could transition into a system that is sane. Because humans are prone to greed and doing one’s utmost to maintain one’s advantages (personal, familial, or tribal), it would take a mighty upheaval to dislodge the system. Graeber doesn’t provide solutions although he thinks that Universal Basic Income might go some way to alleviating the problem. What is particularly sad is when Graeber shows one example after another that “caring” professions tend to be valued less: those that do the most useful work to society have the worst wages. Moral and spiritual damage indeed.

 

All this made me reflect on my job. I’m certainly making less than I would have if I had gone into industry (science research) where starting salaries were easily 50% higher than mine. A number of my grad school labmates went into the financial industry – investment banking – where they easily make multiples of what I am earning. Computationally-trained quants were all the rage back then. They still are now, and that proves Graeber’s point even though his book was written before the present rise of A.I.

 

Is the tuition my students are paying to attend my (private) college worth it? Yes, our classes are small (average of 25 students) – but for the amount they are paying per class (over $100 per hour), they could be getting private one-on-one tutoring with a PhD-level expert like myself. Back in my home country, before I went to graduate school (and even before college), I tutored one-on-one for cash. It was relatively easy money, and I had a knack for teaching. If I think about my salary as a professor and divide it by the number of students I teach per year, I’m probably earning less than $20 per hour per student, but since I’m teaching a class of students, I might be earning $500 per hour per class session. That’s not bad, I suppose. I’m getting a relatively good deal, but maybe the students aren’t. But at least they’re not in 400-person G-Chem classes like in the nearby R1 university.

 

My college, like many others, has grown significantly in middle management. Is that what is siphoning much of the students’ tuition? Administration seems to be about keeping the masses happy. It’s a sort of feudalism except that the guild of university professors is no longer run by the professors but by managers. I honestly find many of the administrative staff at my university pleasant to work with and helpful. I don’t know if they feel they are in BS jobs. More likely they think they are doing a helpful service. I sometimes feel I’m partly in a BS job – my students could learn chemistry without me, but they would need substantial self-discipline and spend a whole lot more time struggling over the material to be proficient. People used to learn chemistry through “distance education”. They can still learn through many asynchronous options today.

 

Maybe the teaching part of my job isn’t BS, but many of the “service” tasks could be. And surely the increasing box-checking administrative tasks are BS. Every year it gets more frustrating and I find myself increasingly unconvinced by the administration’s argument that it’s because of government regulations or auditing requirements. Even my research is likely BS. I have the luxury of wanting to know more about the chemical origins of life – which isn’t going to solve the world’s problems. I even feel bad that I have external grant funding to do this. And yes, I was annoyed by all the extra administrative tasks that came with it. All in the name of accountability, so to speak. Through Graeber’s lens, the BS looks more apparent. Perhaps I am in a BS job after all.