Bullshit jobs and the missing 15-hour week
Keynes thought we'd be working fifteen hours a week by now, and the productivity showed up roughly on schedule. What we did with it was invent more jobs, including a lot the people doing them privately think are pointless.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted we’d be working 15-hour weeks by now. On the technology he was basically right; one person can build in an afternoon what used to take a team of developers months. So why is everyone still on a laptop on the sofa at 9pm? The usual explanation is that we’re greedy consumers who traded our free time for gadgets. I don’t buy it.
The rise of bullshit jobs
Most of the new jobs are in administration, management and consulting rather than in making the gadgets, and a lot of them feel pointless to the people doing them. The anthropologist David Graeber called these “bullshit jobs”: work that doesn’t appear to contribute anything. What makes the idea stick is how often the people in those roles agree with the description. If the productivity gains were real, and this much labour is non-productive, it’s worth asking who exactly is making the things we buy.
Some of this is about power
A workforce with a lot of free time is a political force. Look at the social upheavals of the 1960s, which happened during the stretch when Keynes’s prediction still looked achievable. Keeping people busy, even with low-value work, keeps things where they are. It also props up the idea that working is a moral duty whatever the work actually produces, which is convenient, because it sends resentment sideways at people whose work is obviously essential rather than upwards.
Watch how much abuse train drivers get during a strike. The strike causing that much disruption is itself the evidence that the work matters. The reaction gets the logic exactly backwards.
The value paradox
The jobs that most obviously matter, like nursing, teaching and sanitation, tend to be among the worst paid and the lowest status. Take those people out and society stops working within a week; COVID demonstrated this in real time. Take out the corporate lawyers and the consultants and the effect is harder to spot. That mismatch is what you get from a system optimised to keep its existing structure in place.
What to take from it
- Automation reorganised work rather than reducing it. The technology could have bought us free time. It got spent making more work instead. Getting technology to actually serve you takes deliberate effort.
- This isn’t only a corporate problem. Bullshit jobs turn up in every sector, and what feels meaningless to one person is fulfilling to another. You have to work out which one you’re in.
- What we pay for work is often unrelated to what it does. Essential work is underpaid and a lot of high-status work isn’t obviously essential, which is neither stable nor fair.
- The system is built to keep itself running. Your happiness was never one of its inputs. Knowing that lets you navigate it on your own terms.
- None of this is about blaming individuals. It isn’t laziness or greed, it’s structural, and naming the structure is what lets you choose differently inside it.
Source: Graeber’s original essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”.