Humans are creative and should be trusted to know how to spend their time constructively, rather than forced to accept jobs that contribute zero to their wellbeing or to society. David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, was in Hay to talk about Bullshit Jobs, the theme of his new book.
According to his research, perhaps as many as half of us do jobs that we are ourselves know are pointless, and this has devastating impacts on the health of society. How do you know if a job is bullshit? “If it’s got the word strategic in the name, don’t take that job. If you can’t explain what a job does to an eight-year-old, it probably doesn’t do anything,” he said.
The increasing march of mechanisation is driving a fear that we’ll all be out of jobs, but he said we were looking at the situation in the wrong way. This is an opportunity to provide an income for everyone, so people can give up on their bullshit jobs and do something they really want to do.
“There’s been this fear of what’s going to happen when the robots take the jobs, the proletariat will simply be sitting there staring at their beer, playing pool and having knife fights with each other. I think that this shows an incredible lack of faith in humanity,” he said.
“There are plenty of societies where the average workload is two or three hours a day maximum. Even the average mediaeval serf did not work eight hour days, they were probably working four or five if you average it out over the year. There are plenty of societies where people have leisure, they figure out things to do, people are really creative. What’s wrong with us that we can’t imagine what people would do with themselves if they had some time on their hands and they didn’t have somebody making them sit at a desk and pretend to work all day? What the hell is wrong with us?”
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