Nice to see more empirical backing of the Bullshit Jobs theory
The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.
The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were “bullshit”—socially useless and meaningless.
What is “bourgeois decadence theory?” I thought bourgeois decadence was just a way of comparing the capitalists to popular depictions of romans during the fall of Rome?
I think it came more out of Graeber’s desire to provide a left wing critique of bueracracy in order to take it back from the right and correct some of the missteps of previous socialist movements. It’s in the same vein as Utopia of Rules imo.
There’s also lots of “bullshit jobs” in Graeber that still aid in valorization. Lawyers for example. The issue is that their role is only relevant in our particular social context. You can make a movie without lawyers in theory, but can’t in reality (if you want it to sell). So lawyers, who aren’t redundant, can still look at their work and go “this is pointless, jurassic park could get made with or without me.”