How Striving for Full Employment Ruins Everything: A Selection from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2019)

“At least since World War II, all economic policy has been premised on an ideal of full employment. Now, there is every reason to believe that most policy makers don’t actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much ‘upward pressure on wages.’ Marx appears to have been right when he argued that a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ has to exist in order for capitalism to work the way it’s supposed to. But it remains true that ‘More Jobs’ is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on. They differ only about the most expedient means to produce the jobs. Banners held aloft at a union march calling for jobs never also specify that those jobs should serve some useful purpose. It’s just assumed that they will—which, of course, means that often they won’t. Similarly, when right-wing politicians call for tax cuts to put more money in the hands of ‘job creators,’ they never specify whether those jobs will be good for anything; it’s simply assumed that if the market produced them, they will be. In this climate, one might say that political pressure is being placed on those managing the economy similar to the directives once coming out of the Kremlin; it’s just that the source is more diffuse, and much of it falls on the private sector. . . .

Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: ‘I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,’ Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. ‘Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, “Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.” That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?’

I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.

So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.

That a political culture where ‘job creation’ is everything might produce such results should not be shocking (though for some reason, it is, in fact, treated as shocking); but it does not in itself explain the economic and social dynamics by which those jobs first come into being.”—David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2019)