Reviews
"Graeber is an American anthropologist with a winning combination of talents: he's a startlingly original thinker...able to convey complicated ideas with wit and clarity." -- The Telegraph (UK), "Graeber wants us to unshackle ourselves from the limits imposed by bureaucracy, precisely so we can actually get down to openly and creatively arguing about our collective future."-- NPR, "Buoyed by a sense of recognition, the reader happily follows Graeber in his fun attempts to categorize bulls--- jobs into Goons, Flunkies, Box Tickers, Duct Tapers, and Taskmasters, which inevitably bleed together into Complex Multiform Bulls--- Jobs. It's funny, albeit painful, that we've gotten work so wrong and spend so much time at it." -- Bloomberg.com, Praise for DEBT: The First 5000 Years "Fresh...fascinating... Graeber's book is not just thought provoking, but also exceedingly timely."-- Gillian Tett, The Financial Times "The book is more readable and entertaining than I can indicate... It is a meditation on debt, tribute, gifts, religion and the false history of money. Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist and a public intellectual."-- Peter Carey, The Observer, Praise for Utopia of Rules: "Thought-provoking."-- Boston Globe "[A] fizzing, fabulous firecracker of a book... Our contemporary bureaucrats are revealed, in fact, as none other than you and me, forever administering and marketing ourselves."-- The Literary Review
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Synopsis
Millions Of People Have Bullshit Jobs, a form of paid employment, as David Graeber puts it, "that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Take these characters as representative. An unqualified IT consultant, who despite his best efforts to get fired continues to get promoted. An employee who has twenty-five middle managers as his direct supervisors (none of whom respond to his requests). And a government worker in charge of his city's water treatment plant, who decided his time was better spent at home studying his favorite seventeenth-century writer. He collected a salary for six years before anybody noticed. While jobs such as nurses, mechanics, and garbage collectors provide true value, society tends to look down upon them while revering and hand-somely compensating marketing consultants, tax shelter attorneys, and political pollsters. Using arguments from political thinkers, philosophers, and scientists, Graeber articulates the societal and political consequences of these jobs and suggests a kind of blueprint for shifting our values to esteem creative and caring work. Book jacket., From David Graeber, the bestselling author of The Dawn of Everything and Debt --"a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate" ( Slate )--a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs...and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people--HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers--whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society's most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. "Clever and charismatic" ( The New Yorker ), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and "a thought-provoking examination of our working lives" ( Financial Times )., From bestselling writer David Graeber--"a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate" ( Slate )--a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs...and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people--HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers--whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society's most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. "Clever and charismatic" ( The New Yorker ), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and "a thought-provoking examination of our working lives" ( Financial Times ).
