A Chinese edition of anthropologist David Kleiber's Meaningless Work is finally available. For most readers, Kreiber's work is full of insight and an alternative "profoundness": we always want work to give short lives and meaning, but most work is destined to be dispensable and can be replaced at any time when it is designed. We seem to be working hard, but in fact it is tantamount to a self-touching that has long known the end. In Kreiber's angry narrative, the nature of capitalism seems clear: under the promise of a free market "bigger cake," everyone's expectations for life and the future are exhausted, while the promises of hard work, work ethics, and profession are the consumption of everyone's self-worth.
Meaningless Work, by David Graeber, translated by Lu Yujun, CITIC Press, July 2022.
However, when we put Kreb's work under the microscope of economics and look at each of his arguments and analyses, we will find that Meaningless Work is sufficient as a propaganda work and a pamphlet critical of capitalism. By the standard of professional, serious social science works, Kreb's anger and criticism stop at the output of emotions, but it is difficult to measure by more serious standards. Perhaps to some extent, Kreiber's anger and criticism hit precisely the foci of capitalism and modern society, but if this critique is only wrapped in anti-capitalist discourse, it cannot be supported by more detailed data and survey samples, let alone with the methods and logic of social science. In addition to the passionate emotional output, this criticism does not seem to be able to bear people's expectations of it, let alone show that reality is moving in the direction that Kreiber envisioned.
Written | Han Mingrui
The late anthropologist David Graeber's Meaningless Work, like his previous book, Debt: A 5,000-Year History of Debt, and his co-authored posthumous book, The Dawn of Everything, is a difficult book to take seriously. The latter two are riddled with countless fallacies. Bradford Delon, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who served in the Clinton administration's Treasury Department, read just one chapter of "Debt" and found dozens of factual problems, including the spouting common-sense mistake that the Fed chairman is not subject to public scrutiny. "Dawn of Everything"'s grand narrative about the history of early human civilization and the vast number of historical materials piled up behind it, in the words of the current content industry, is to "completely subvert readers' cognition". However, even if the factual errors in the book are ignored, many scholars from archaeology, history and other disciplines have also found that when the book involves the subdivisions they study, there are serious fallacies such as far-fetched logic, misinterpretation of predecessors' discussions and attacks on scarecrows, deliberate selection and tailoring of materials that are conducive to the ideas in the book while avoiding more evidence and literature contrary to them, and hardly providing any meaningful measurement indicators but still making bold assertions about the progress of human society. Historian David Bell commented that the two authors had "dangerously come close to academic misconduct".
Compared to the two books before and after, the above errors are rare in Meaningless Work. This is because although the book is more than 300,000 words long, there are very few facts that can be publicly verified, and the main body is composed of anecdotes from hearsay and out-of-control reflections. Graeber argues that there are meaningless or even extremely harmful professions for which practitioners themselves cannot find a reason for their existence, and can only pretend that the job is completely reasonable in order to bite the bullet and suffer the mental violence brought about by hypocrisy and a sense of aimlessness. He called this type of work "bullshit work" and tried to give an explanation for its existence.
Forty percent of work is meaningless?
If this book were just such a theoretical work on strange phenomena, it would be less problematic to do so, and perhaps it would be a little interesting. But Graeber's ambitions don't stop there. He felt that he was studying a major phenomenon that pervades contemporary society. He believes that a staggering number of white-collar jobs, such as consultants, publicists, corporate lawyers, human resources department employees, and university administrators, can be included in this list. The title of the book's preface is "40% Work Is Meaningless" and gives the source of this huge number. In 2015, YouGov, an online market research company, conducted a survey of British netizens about their work experience. Of the 849 people who participated in the survey, half said their work made a meaningful contribution to the world, 37 percent said their work did not contribute so much, and 13 percent said they didn't know. A Dutch survey later showed that "40 percent of people felt that their job had no reason to exist." Graeber makes the 37 percent figure the cornerstone of the book. He later patted his head and assumed that 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent of nonsenseless jobs would serve in meaningless work, calling it secondary meaningless work. As a result, the overall meaningless work will be more than half.
David Kleiber, a famous American anthropologist and sociologist, a major participant in "Occupy Wall Street", has successively served as an associate professor at Yale University and a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, under the tutelage of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. He is the author of Debt: A 5,000-Year History of Debt, highly praised by Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century.
The results of other questions in the public opinion survey were not so bad. Only 10% felt that their work was not at all fulfilling; Only 8% of people feel embarrassed when introducing their work to others in social situations. It seems that a lack of meaningful contribution to the world can also be a legitimate job. In any case, it is important to note that YouGov is a market research company that relies on the Internet and is known for speed rather than accuracy, and survey respondents are actively registered online users who fill out surveys and earn points that can eventually be exchanged for a small amount of cash. In addition, the time window for this survey is only two working days. These factors make the sample representation of surveys problematic. One possibility that is obviously impossible to rule out is that those who are busy making the world a better place have the time and mind to register public opinion and join the survey do not reach the actual proportion of the population; And people who are bored and idle at work are disproportionately actively involved.
Graeb's flippant approach to quantity does not stop there. Chapters five and six of the book devote more than a hundred pages to the proliferation of meaningless work in recent years. The first paragraph of chapter five, entitled Why Meaningless Work Explodes, declares, "We have every reason to believe that the overall number of meaningless work, and indeed the share of all jobs that are considered meaningless by those who are engaged, has risen rapidly in recent years." Readers naturally expect to see what the reasons are next, but those reasons don't come up. Graeber begins the discussion of "how it all happened" from the second paragraph, and explores "why society is indifferent to the proliferation of meaningless work" in the sixth chapter. This makes one wonder whether these two chapters, which are more than 1/3 of the book's main text, are meaningless in themselves, based on an unfounded assertion, and whether the book's editors have failed to perform their review duties conscientiously because of their workload, despite the fact that there are as many as four editors listed in the Acknowledgements.
The movie "Modern Times".
In fact, this thick book seems to be a huge mistake as a whole. A study published in 2019 by two Dutch scholars used a representative dataset of 100,000 workers from 47 countries around the world and found that only about 8% of people believe that their work is useless to society, and there is no obvious trend in time. A paper published in 2021 by three British scholars used a survey dataset of more than 20,000 people in the 28 EU countries, and also found that the percentage of people who thought their work was useless was only in single digits, and this proportion gradually decreased over the three time points covered by the dataset, from 7.8% in 2005 to 5.5% in 2010, and further to 4.8% in 2015; By industry, the proportion of legal, business and administrative workers who consider their work to be useless is below average, while the proportion of blue-collar workers in cleaning, sanitation, construction, manufacturing, transportation and agriculture is above average, some reaching 15%. Graeber argues that "the subjective judgment of the person doing the work itself is almost the best assessment we can get." In this way, the concentration of valuelessness in blue-collar jobs is significantly higher than in white-collar occupations, contrary to the judgment in this book.
In order to "research" meaningless work, Graeber publicly collected more than 300 self-statements of self-proclaimed meaningless workers through Twitter and dedicated mailboxes, and his own intuition about industries where no feedback was received, such as lobbying, that many occupations were worthless work. But as can be seen from previous peer-reviewed papers, meaningless work is a small percentage of all walks of life, and no profession should be labeled worthless work in itself.
The movie "Intern".
We can even say that even if the work of most people in an industry is useless, the industry does not necessarily mean that it should not exist. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said in response to the criticism that "90% of science fiction is garbage" in the 50s of the 20th century, this is true, but 90% of everything is garbage. This statement came to be known as Sturkin's Law, and philosopher Daniel Dennett reintroduced it to contemporary readers as one of the seven critical thinking tools. "Whether you're talking about physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, medicine — whatever you name you say — rock and roll, western country music, 90 percent of everything is rubbish," he said. Considering the fact that most of the papers in many academic fields are almost or completely uncited, and most literary and artistic works are not noticed, this expression should be said to be unreasonable. But obviously this should not mean that these disciplines and literary genres are worthless in themselves and are better to die. The hundreds of ridiculous and odious cases Graeber collected don't tell much about it. Even if these are scarce and almost entirely anonymous, anecdotes that are essentially "someone told me so online" are not half false or add to the vinegar, and there is no reason to assume that they are representative. Just as we can't assume that the entire discipline of anthropology has broken down hopelessly just because of Graeber's books.
How to explain the meaninglessness of work?
It is reassuring that meaningless work is not a systemic problem. But there may still be curious people wondering why so few people are doing worthless work. Graeber's "theory" was "managerial feudalism." This statement is similar to Parkinson's Law, which is somehow not quoted in the book, to the effect that in the bureaucracy, middle and senior managers are happy to increase their subordinates to expand and assert their power. More subordinates will produce more work, perhaps because more people need to coordinate things, or simply because of the extra manpower and man-hours that need to be filled.
Ignoring the suspicion of reinventing the wheel, this hypothesis is indeed possible. Readers with economic thinking will instinctively think of a response: companies that allow Parkinson's Law to occur unchecked, their labor costs will quickly expand and become obsolete by the market. Graeber cursoviously dismissed this rebuttal, saying that there is no real market competition and that companies make money mainly by political fat.
The unemployed male protagonist in the movie "Tokyo Sonata".
Judging from the two journal papers mentioned above, at least in the white-collar industry, the hypothesis that "Parkinson's law is subject to market discipline" is more in line with real-world data than the theory that "Parkinson's law makes the bureaucratic system expand endlessly". Of course, competition is a process. At any given point, there will be inefficient companies that are struggling or not realizing that they are swollen. There is a concept of "frictional unemployment" in economics. No labor market, no matter how well it works, cannot achieve zero unemployment. The fact that the unemployed leave their last job and go to work in a new workplace is unlikely to be the norm in a booming economy. Similarly, if there is a few percentage points of "frictional work" in a market economy, it is entirely possible.
Parkinson's Law may not be the only cause of "frictional work." Another obvious possibility is that seemingly meaningless work belongs to an organization that is really poorly managed. Organizational management is hard, really, really hard. Managing oneself is no longer an easy task. Generally speaking, ordinary people only need to follow authoritative dietary guidelines to eat a balanced diet and ensure enough exercise, and most people in modern society have the corresponding conditions. But life experience tells us that not everyone can do this, even simple admonitions like "don't sit." As a manager in an organization, it is several orders of magnitude more difficult to effectively manage subordinates than it is for individuals to manage themselves. Goal setting, distribution of affairs, information communication, dispute handling, performance appraisal, salary adjustment, personnel rewards and punishments, and job transfer are all management problems. And, different organizations need different ways of managing. Universities and law firms are not the same, manufacturing companies are not the same as airlines, software giants with tens of thousands of people and start-up teams of just a dozen people are not the same. Versions of the Dietary Guidelines are similar, but there is no one-size-fits-all, out-of-the-box management manual that allows managers of all types of organizations to check a list of twenty points and do it well.
The film "The Social Network".
For various difficult problems, managers either set rules, have discretion, or mix the two approaches. In large, complex organizations, it is impossible to keep a set of rules without ridiculous edge cases under any circumstances. Readers may have heard complaints like this in more everyday situations: "I just have a broken mouse and want to change one, dozens of dollars of things, why go through such a formal process, after five or six people, let the boss of our department and your IT department sign off?" "Of course, grumbling is complaining, normal people understand that if you can get a new mouse from the IT administrator without going through the process, the company's IT equipment management will have a much bigger problem than this.
One of the cases mentioned in Chapter 2 of this book is interesting. The caller said that one of her employees is currently very poor at work, but he has a 25-year record of excellent performance evaluation and has signed a long-term employment contract with the company, so it is difficult to fire, and for various reasons, he cannot be promoted and transferred to an idle position. As a result, a new person could only be hired to take on most of the actual work of the old employee. But since the original position is still occupied by the old employee, the recruitment has to make up a new position with a different description of the job and is not actually needed, in other words, a meaningless position. The problem is that no worker wants to suffer a middle-aged job loss after 25 years of excellent resumes just because their current boss is not satisfied with their job performance. The company's existing personnel management regulations clearly take care of this, whether it's because of the importance of employee loyalty or avoiding legal trouble. This is certainly not perfect, but it is not so easy to amend the rules so that there is no need to create worthless jobs while avoiding any new adverse effects (such as the 35-year-old phenomenon).
The movie "Evil Boss".
For a completely reasonable exception, if the manager makes an exception, there may be several slightly less reasonable cases coming to the door next month, and the party's statement is, of course, "Wasn't Zhang San's matter an exception last time, this time my problem is not serious after all, the rules are dead, people are alive..."
A common solution to this is to patch the rules. If they choose this path, managers are embarking on a different kind of slippery slope. A simple set of rules, patched for a decade, can also become red tape and require accompanying write, train, enforcement and monitoring personnel. This has been a cliché among sociologists for more than a hundred years. In addition to affecting efficiency and consuming manpower, there is also a danger that a patch that responds to rare situations will no longer be remembered after many years due to personnel turnover, but it will be a hindrance to the actions of those who come after. At this point, there may be those who advocate a quick cut through the mess and the repeal of these seemingly meaningless regulations. Cleaning up stale rules is sometimes the right thing to do, sometimes not. British writer and philosopher G. Chesterton K. Chesterton proposed a principle that later came to be called "Chesterton's Fence." In one of his books, he asks readers to imagine a fence erected on a road. Some people see that the fence is obstructing passage and rush to remove it. And the more intelligent people, although they also want to improve the situation, will advise the former to understand the usefulness of the fence here. Of course, in theory, the reason for the fence may have been foolish or sensible, but it only applied to earlier times, but perhaps it was used to guard against negative situations that still occur today. The point is that without research, there is no way to know which scenario it is, and useful provisions may be eliminated with bad unintended consequences.
Another source of meaningless work mentioned in the book is regulatory compliance jobs that have been created in response to government regulatory requirements. The note provides an unsurprisingly unrepresentative but eye-catching figure: A 2014 news report said Citigroup planned to increase compliance positions to 30,000, or about 13 percent of its workforce, that year. According to a November 2022 working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the annual compliance hours of U.S. companies are about 3 billion hours, which is equivalent to more than one million people, or almost 1% of the national employed population, if converted according to the working hours of full-time employees. It's really hard to say how much of this is purely formalist paperwork. But with the exception of extreme laissez-faire, no one should think it would be a good idea to dismiss the 1% indiscriminately.
Another conjecture that could add to this book is that a lot of meaningless work is needed by companies to release virtue signals. The economist Friedman's idea that corporate social responsibility is the pursuit of profit while following the rules is increasingly dismissed. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investment is hot. There is hardly a large company that does not make a statement on ESG and take a pass. Listed companies have added ESG content to their annual reports, either due to the regulatory requirements of the place of listing or out of their own voluntariness, and some have issued separate ESG annual reports. However, as industrial organization economics and even common sense show, multiple goals are much more difficult than a single goal, and it is easy to lose sight of one in practice. In 2019, CEOs of 181 major U.S. companies signed a Statement of Corporate Purpose at the Business Roundtable, pledging to deliver value to all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which they operate. Later, there was criticism that some of the co-signatories did not really deliver on their promises. What should I do if I find myself criticized for paying lip service, or that the company is running as usual but it's time to show ESG results? Of course, let a few worthless workers save up a garbage report full of meaningless text and data, and pictures with the main color of green.
The short film "Inside".
In recent years, every once in a while on social networks, a hot topic of "awakening" to a certain social issue has been raised. There are even good actors who will stare at which brand has not spoken out on it. Many large companies are hampered by this and have to use their own social accounts to follow up and speak. A short play from American comedian Bo Burnham's 2021 special, Inside, has a poignant satire on the phenomenon. He plays the role of a brand consultant who teaches big companies how to stand firm in this wave and maintain their brand image: "One of the questions I ask the brands I work with is: Are you going to be on the right side of history? The question is not what you sell or what service you provide, but what you stand for! Tell your clients that JPMorgan Chase is against racism; The question is no longer 'Do you want to buy wheat crepes [food brand Wheat Thins]?' now the question is, 'Would you like to support wheat crepes and fight Lyme disease?'" These forced statements, coupled with some business forums related to this, are naturally fake garbage.
Given society's growing demand for virtue signals, such discourse and the meaningless work behind it will only increase in the future. Then again, it was precisely because Graeber's original article titled "On the Phenomenon of 'Meaningless Work'" was retweeted many times on social networks that he collected those cases and became a book. Now that the book has been introduced to China, it has sparked a wave of serious and heated discussions in the book review community and podcast world, as if the content of the book is all true facts. We can only hope that the "meaning of work" does not become a new signal of virtue and contribute more burden to the world.
Written by/Han Mingrui
Editor/Zhu Tianyuan
Proofreader/Janin