Essay Contest Honorable Mention: Serfs No More

How Georgism can end BS jobs and reopen the frontier

Many people have observed that the mid-2010s seem like a historical inflection point. From the success of populist movements in the West, increasing racial divides, and a general loss of faith in any institutions during the pandemic, the period looks like a slow-motion scream. It was as if decades of unspoken feelings were released at once, regardless of their social acceptability.

If you were a particular kind of Millennial or Zoomer, then David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs may as well have been a confession. First published in 2013 and later as a book in 2018, Bullshit Jobs captures one particular unspoken feeling—that working today, while not as difficult as in the past, feels almost uniquely futile.¹

Given the widespread recognition of these feelings, a Georgist analysis of BS Jobs is long overdue. The costs are real and complex, on both a personal and societal level. However, for all of the virtues of Graeber's analysis, his most practical solution—the UBI²—leaves much to be desired from a Georgist perspective. Without a broader suite of Georgist policies, a UBI is unlikely to provide anything more than temporary relief for tenants everywhere. 

The Problem of Bullshit Jobs

What makes a bullshit job bullshit? As defined by Graber, these are not merely unpleasant job, such as those of an oil rig worker or garbage collector. They are roles that, in the grand scheme, are unnecessary for the functioning of an economy. Corporate consultants, doormen, and the managers that order them around are simply not necessary for the world to keep spinning (I recommend reading his book—while a little too long, the categories of useless work are fun to read about).³ We can broadly divide the costs of these BS Jobs into two main categories: economic and psychological. While Graeber brings up both in his essay, I don't think he goes into sufficient detail.

Firstly, the psychological costs of bullshit jobs. According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace report, only a third of employees are engaged in their work. Another 16% actively hate their jobs, while the majority (51%) do not care.⁴ Additionally, a YouGov poll from 2020 that found over a quarter of British workers did not find their jobs meaningful.⁵ This data captures the scale of the damage these roles are causing. But such jobs are not simply a problem that our society lives with in the abstract. The futility of bullshit jobs is a reality many tens of thousands of people experience on a daily basis—a reality that is easier to approach, not through data but through narrative. That’s why I want to tell you about my experience working at a bullshit job—and how it nearly killed me.

My BS Job Story

Following my graduation from University College Dublin in May of 2020, I—with no clue of what I wanted out of life—did what I thought every responsible young person did: apply for jobs in respectable institutions where you can make money and connections. I thought that I did pretty well for myself: I ended up taking a job as an analyst for a major bank in mainland Europe. But despite the supposed prestige and financial benefits of what was supposed to be a major coup for my career, I ended up completely miserable.

If you want the definition of a bullshit job, my job title was a synonym because, let me tell you, half the job was rationalizing not walking out the front door. The average day consisted of a morning meeting where we would discuss the project's progress—which did not need to happen daily given the slow rate of progress—before diving into the work itself. My role involved diving through documents that could verify the identity of the bank's clients and comparing them against details in the bank's internal systems.

While, in theory, this role had some importance (banks handing out loans to whoever asks is a recipe for disaster), the reality was that I, and I believe most of the other people, did not need to be there to do it. A smaller team with better technology could have dealt with the task much more efficiently. But that would be expensive in the short-run, so they hired me.

Combining this contradictory movement of doing the job while believing that I did not need to be there was, as you can imagine, soul-destroying. I found no purpose in the work I was doing. Especially considering the role's purpose was less about protecting the consumer and more about adding another barrier to entry for new companies.

The company badly mismanaged the project with shifting deadlines and no clear direction. Eventually, I concluded that my work neither benefited nor harmed anybody - therefore, it did not matter what I did or how I performed. The technical definition of a bullshit job. It was this realization that, on top of the crushing feeling of isolation, compelled me to try and take my life.

So, yes, I can confirm that Bullshit Jobs have a decidedly negative effect psychologically. While my reaction was especially harsh, the quiet desperation that comes with BS jobs is tragically common.

And those are just the psychological costs. The economic costs of BS jobs, while dispersed, are real. At first glance, this seems almost contradictory—"how can jobs cost the economy?" They shouldn't, according to traditional economic theory - more employed people means more spending money in the hands of the populace and less government expenditure on welfare for the unemployed. Even if these jobs have dubious human utility, surely they have some economic benefit?

Heller at The New Yorker makes the interesting point that BS jobs are almost a backhanded subsidy for a section of the middle class. Whereas in the past, if you couldn't find a role, you would go destitute or rely on the charity of others. Today, you work as some writer of obscure reports for one tendril of a multinational titan, earning an income to add to the economy. While certainly an interesting argument, it seems more like a rationalization. As Bastiat notes, you need to look at what is seen and unseen if you strive to be a good economist. What, then, can we see and foresee from the growth in bullshit jobs?

The growth of the administrative state is something that many on both the left and right have commented on. Graeber acknowledges that, while the number of professors in universities has followed the increase in the number of students, the ballooning of administrative staff has not, despite the dubious utility of all these roles. But in spite of their indeterminate utility, they are well paid. For example, working in DEI can get you a salary of between 42,000 and 100,000 dollars per year. You might not be a millionaire, but this is a comfy gig.

These roles may be splendid for you. But the growth of these roles is likely a net negative for everyone else. Each dollar put towards the salary of an unnecessary administrator is one dollar not utilized to improve the university's facilities, teaching, or research—the goods that make a university valuable. This comes at a time when university costs, particularly in America (though the rest of the world has not gone unscathed) have skyrocketed with no equivalent increase in quality. The proliferation of BS jobs in the sector, which do not contribute to research or education, has to be a part of the story of this price increase.

It is not just in education that you can chart this trend. Housing and healthcare have fallen to the cavalcade of bullshit jobs more thoroughly than any other industry, with the number of assorted apparatchiks vastly outpacing the growth of productive members of these industries. And it is these industries that, as any good reader of Progress & Poverty should be aware, have caused the most personal hardship and political division in our nations today.

Again, this is merely the seen cost. Only when we consider what is unseen can we truly begin to understand the magnitude of this issue. The unseen cost is every bright mind that enters these bullshit jobs. Many of the brightest and most energetic members of our society spend a significant portion of their time in college, the supposed guardian of the liberal arts at the heart of our civilization, applying and working towards getting one of these roles, many of which produce nothing that benefits society.  How many would-be entrepreneurs, poets, scientists, philosophers, and artists are working a BS job instead of something that would better suit their talents and help their society as a whole? We will never know, but that number is not insignificant and represents the most far-reaching cost of BS jobs - the lost opportunities.

The Traditional Solution of UBI/CD

It can be difficult not to despair when one realizes the full extent and meaning of BS jobs. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of the brightest and most capable members of our society work in jobs that do not fulfill them at best and actively destroy them at worst. All the while, BS jobs devour many of our most vital industries whole while leaving others devoid of the talent they need and deserve.

Is there no solution? Is the best we can hope for, as Burnham believed, to guide the Managerial Revolution into as tolerable a state as possible - bleak, but without the manifest cruelties of communism and fascism?⁶

While Graeber's book is certainly a grim prognosis of where we are at the moment, it is not a prophecy. He does not think the world is doomed to such a fate as the one described above. While some of his anthropology and political views may be contentious, his proposed solution to BS jobs is surprisingly commonplace: A Universal Basic Income, or, in Georgist parlance, the Citizen's Dividend.

The UBI/CD provides a floor beyond which no citizen can fall. If the state can provide the baseline necessary to subsist, citizens will not feel as compelled or desperate to work in these Bullshit Jobs; they have the space to find something useful to do rather than just tick boxes for sclerotic royalism. However, even outside of concerns for justice, there are practical reasons to support the UBI/CD that even the most state-skeptical libertarian can appreciate. The UBI is vastly easier to administer than the current bloated welfare system, with its welfare cliffs and perverse incentives. Whether the UBI will lead to a decrease in the size of the state writ large is unclear, as I suspect a portion of the existing infrastructure will have to stay for some level of administration. Even so, the efficiency benefits are hard to ignore.

And to give the UBI defenders their due, the evidence, while mixed, generally trends in their favor. While there are too many to list at this point, the most significant results have found the following:

• In Finland, the pilot UBI program lowered stress levels while improving participants' trust in national institutions. However, the study found that the scheme had no positive effect on employment rates⁷

• Results of studies of the Alaskan PFD have found that the dividend had little to no effect on employment while increasing fertility⁸

• A limited program in Stockton, California, led to improved financial stability, well-being, and job prospects⁹

These results are not insignificant and provide evidence that the UBI would have some positive effects if implemented.

However, doubt is not unwarranted. Most of these experiments were brief, lasting only a year or two. As such, it can be tricky to foresee how an individual's behavior may change if governments introduced a permanent program. This problem is academic—you could resolve this issue with further study and modifications of specific programs. However, I believe there is a deeper issue that these UBI studies have not accounted for. 

We live in a royalist society

If you have studied economics, you know that a market system tends towards equilibrium—the point where supply and demand balance out. In functional markets, this leads to a productive feedback loop—goods produce sufficient profit for companies and utility for consumers to be worth producing in optimal amounts. Consumer good’s prices also tend downwards over the long run while attempting to enter a stable equilibrium, making goods more accessible to all.

However, as mentioned previously, while this trend still occurs in many industries (technology is the most well-known example, though there are others), this productive relationship has broken down in many of the most vital fields in the economy—housing, healthcare, etc. These are the fields most consumed by both royalism—the unspoken privileges granted to land, intellectual property, and monopoly owners under the current system¹⁰—and BS jobs. Is it then any surprise that innovation and affordability are sorely lacking in these industries when nearly all incentives that currently exist pull against them? Why build more housing or reform zoning when scarcity is in your interest? Why make the healthcare system more efficient when that could put you out of a job?

If states implement a UBI without dealing with these more fundamental problems, I am confident that it would not bring about the drop in BS jobs that Graeber expects. There is no reason why royalism would not reassert itself, simply at a different equilibrium point. Herein lies the problem with solely focusing on the UBI - it does nothing to break the back of royalism, which is swallowing the majority of economic progress today. The best-case scenario? The UBI will provide temporary alleviation. The worst? An unintentional subsidy of the rentier class.

Why is the LVT necessary to make this solution work?

Given the problems listed above, I am not convinced that the UBI alone would be sufficient to reduce the prevalence of bullshit jobs. However, there is a way to reduce the chance of the UBI becoming a subsidy for the rentier class. Even non-Georgist economists recognize that the majority of the growth in the rate of return for "capital" that has taken place since WW2 has, in actuality, been a growth in the rate of return for land.¹¹

So tax land! A land value tax, a high one, would significantly slash the gains that go to the rentier class for simply holding. They would have to do something with it (improve, sell, etc), meaning that your rent money would pay for something instead of being a nice passive income for your landlord. 

Of course, while the LVT is the centerpiece of Georgism, it is not the only policy we are interested in implementing. IP reform, ending cronyism, zoning reform, and others are all key planks in emerging Georgist thought. These reforms would also assist in breaking down the royalist system as it currently exists. Regardless, BS jobs could become a thing of the past if even some of these policies were implemented.

What it would give back - a frontier society.

Georgism is fraught with misconceptions, but the one I find most troublesome is what I will call the "Technocratic Conception." Georgists that agree with this view conceptualize Georgism, not as a radical ideology of its own, but as a patch for Neoliberalism - a way we can resolve many of the ideology's problems. I can accept this approach as a political matter - different arguments work better for different audiences, and Georgism does appeal to folks of a more technocratic bent. I can also accept that Georgism is decidedly part of the liberal tradition. However, I think the principles underlying this technocratic conception are wholly unsatisfying. Georgism's chief virtue is not that it is useful⁠—its chief virtue is that it is just. 

You can boil Georgism down to three simple claims - that no man can own the world, that any attempt to do so is unjust, and that the poverty which results from doing so is disastrous for the souls of men.

In 1885, George gave a speech to a crowd in Burlington, Iowa. In it, he laid out the great crime of poverty - how it makes men sacrifice their morals for profit and how it, as Graeber notes, leads to men "working ten hours a day in order that he may sleep eight and may have two or three hours for himself when he is tired out and all his faculties are exhausted."¹²

The cause of this poverty?

If men cannot find an employer, why cannot they employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out from the element on which human labor can alone be exerted. Men are compelled to compete with each other for the wages of an employer, because they have been robbed of the natural opportunities of employing themselves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world on which to work without paying some other human creature for the privilege.¹³

George noticed that when land is owned privately, the sphere in which men can take action to improve their lives is reduced. They no longer have the chance of simply walking out into the horizon to find a place where they can be productive. They are constrained.

Graeber is correct that the UBI would give individuals the space to figure out how to improve their lives. But he is more right than he thought - what is money if not opportunity? While you cannot walk off into the sunset to look for opportunity anymore, the UBI and LVT together present a reasonably good alternative to working a bullshit job that does nothing for you or the world at large.

Here is where I find the greatest virtue of Georgism when discussing bullshit jobs. Unlike Graeber, I don't think we will be working 15 hours a week after Georgism. From climate change, the crisis of meaning, space exploration, to the opioid epidemic, there is much to be done. All are problems that need to be solved, can be solved, and will be easier to solve if more people can risk working on them.

Georgism cannot and should not aim to end work. But ending pointless work is entirely within our powers.

1.  David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant”, Strike!, (August 2013), On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

2. Sean Illing, “Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one”, VOX, (November 2019), Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one:

3. Graeber, “Bullshit Jobs”, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

4.  Gallup, “State of the American Workplace”, State of the American Workplace

5. Eir Nolsoe, “Quarter of British workers find jobs lack meaning”, YouGov, (February, 2020), Quarter of British workers find jobs lack meaning | YouGov

6. George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, The Orwell Foundation, (originally published 1946)

7. Catarina Midões, “Universal basic income and the Finnish experiment”, Bruegel, (February, 2019), https://www.bruegel.org/blog-post/universal-basic-income-and-finnish-experiment

8. Sigal Samuel, “Everywhere UBI has been tried, in one map”, VOX, (October, 2020), https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map

9. Rachel Treisman, “California Program Giving $500 No-Strings-Attached Stipends Pays Off, Study Finds”, NPR, (March, 2021) https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973653719/california-program-giving-500-no-strings-attached-stipends-pays-off-study-finds

10. Dan Sullivan, “Are you a Real Libertarian or a ROYAL Libertarian?”, http://www.wealthandwant.com/pdf/Sullivan_RL.pdf

11. Karl Smith, “Piketty and the case for land capital”, Financial Times, (February, 2014), Piketty and the case for land capital | Financial Times

12. Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty”, April 1, 1885, Henry George: The Crime of Poverty (1885 speech)

13. Ibid.