Bullshit jobs: a theory Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Quotes of Book: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? {Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the market" reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.}
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people {very familiar in academic contexts} who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it?
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Almost all of those making the key decisions had attended college in the 1960s, when campuses were at the very epicenter of political ferment, and they felt strongly that such things must never happen again. As a result, while they might have been concerned with declining economic indicators, they were also quite delighted to note that the combination of globalization, gutting the power of unions, and creating an insecure and overworked workforce-along with aggressively paying lip service to sixties calls to hedonistic personal liberation {what came to be known as "lifestyle liberalism, fiscal conservativism"}-had the effect of simultaneously shifting more and more wealth and power to the wealthy and almost completely destroying the basis for organized challenges to their power. It might not have worked very well economically, but politically it worked like a dream. If nothing else, they had little incentive to abandon such policies.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of thought into a science. According to classical economic theory, homo oeconomicus, or "economic man"-that is, the model human being that lies behind every prediction made by the discipline-is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations by which economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that makes the equations possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated motivations, there would be too many factors to take into account, it would be impossible to properly weight them, and predictions could not be made. Therefore, while an economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that human beings are not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are makes it possible to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this proportion-and only this-is the subject matter of economic science.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
it would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good-and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. -Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanics wrong. We're not working harder because we're spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving each other sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of--as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it--"a life," and that, in turns means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was
book-quote
David Graeber _ Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect-even, on the organization itself.
book-quote