Overlong, but the book offers comfort to those who are performing the white-collar version of burger-flipping and hating...
Forget Piketty or Marx. Graeber (Anthropology/London School of Economics; The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, 2015, etc.) is calling bullshit when it comes to the wage-slave economy.
Cleaning gym lockers; prepping potatoes for the fryer; giving sponge baths to hospice patients. Those are the “shit jobs.” But then there’s working as a corporate lawyer, as an administrative vice president in a state college, or as an HR mediator. Now, as Graeber puts it, we’re in provisional definition territory: “A bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” By the author’s estimate, that’s about half the jobs in the economy, organized at the gracious consent of the mega-wealthy for their benefit, with a whole slew of jobs, from fast-food cook to dog walker, organized around the bullshit jobs to service the bullshit jobsters so that they can spend almost all their waking hours having at it. It’s a pretty cheerless view of the economy, but Graeber makes good points along the way, including the aside that the reason people hate unionized workers who do nonbullshit work—teaching elementary school, building cars—is precisely because they’re not stuck in bullshit jobs. The circularity aside, it makes for solid social criticism, especially when the author fine-tunes the definition: There are bullshit jobs, but within that broad category there are “duct-taping jobs,” the stuff IT guys do to keep the machines running instead of the company spending money to buy decent gear. There’s a logic to it all. As Orwell noted, “a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else.” Whence, as Graeber concludes, the eternal bullshit.
Overlong, but the book offers comfort to those who are performing the white-collar version of burger-flipping and hating every minute of it.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4331-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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