saved articles

But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are simply talking about teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing would be to leave them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in every sense except that you don’t get paid for it (though if you’re receiving a scholarship or an allowance, you actually are getting paid for it). In fact, like almost all the other activities Patrick or Brendan might have been engaged in had they not been obliged to take on “real world” jobs, their classwork is actually more real than the largely make-work projects they ended up being forced to do. Schoolwork has real content. One must attend classes, do the readings, write exercises or papers, and be judged on the results. But in practical terms, this appears to be exactly what makes schoolwork appear inadequate to those authorities—parents, teachers, governments. administrators—who have all come to feel that they must also teach students about the real world. ...

Chapter 6 Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment? How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. —Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675 We have already considered the economic and social forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs, as well as the misery and distress those jobs cause for those who have to do them. Yet despite this evident and widespread distress, the fact that millions of people show up to work every day convinced they are doing absolutely nothing has not, until now, been considered a social problem. We have not seen politicians denouncing bullshit jobs, academic conferences dedicated to understanding the reasons for the rise of bullshit jobs, opinion pieces debating the cultural consequences of bullshit jobs, or protest ...