For those of you unfamiliar with his work, David Graeber (1961-2020) was an anthropologist who wrote BS Jobs: A Theory in 2018. It provides some useful ideas and vernacular. He categorized BS employment as follows:
flunkies
- goons
- duct tapers
- box tickers
- taskmasters
I agree with 4 out of these 5. I've been all of them except for goons. I'm not convinced being a guard is an unnecessary or BS job. I can be, if you are guarding something that doesn't need protection, for example, a celebrity that has to have a body guard as part of the entourage. That's more a form of ornamental employment, hence the term funky or lackey is more appropriate.
If the need for a job is based on a necessary evil, is it BS? No. In a world where conflict is often resolved through the courts, the halls of Congress or the battlefield, jobs like lobbyists, corporate lawyers, or sailors are needed.
Graeber doesn't dive too deeply into what causes BS employment. Aside from his anecdotes and polling data, he doesn't get too far into the weeds as to how BS jobs are created in the first place. I can think of a few:
- Nepotism
- Favoritism
- Careerism
- Corruption
- How appearances can be more important than actual productivity.
He doesn't offer any practical solutions. Without providing any real insight as to how BS jobs happen in the first place, he has little to offer in the way of solutions. He makes the case for universal basic income, but that is irrelevant idealism.
With this book, Graeber had an opportunity to make people rethink employment. Instead, he took advantage of real-world suffering, the squandering of human potential, and used it as an opportunity to push his BS anarchist activism. This was as pointless as Occupy Wall Street.
He doesn't seriously consider the idea that his job, an anthropologist was BS. With a cushy academic job, he's able to lob slings and arrows down upon the peasantry producing tangible goods and services from an ivory tower. He had the luxury of exempting himself from capitalism without getting his hands dirty. His book talked about people who labored on reports that were never acted upon without realizing that applied to him as well. If he had ever really looked hard in the mirror, he'd have realized that he was peddling his own brand of BS.