Bullshit Jobs are Organizational Signalling

Sometimes people have a good intuitive understanding that something is very wrong with the world, but they lack the analytical ability to explain why the thing is happening. An important skill, related to intellectual charity, is to learn to listen to these visionary heartfelt cries of pain even when the professed explanation or ideology of the author is clearly very confused.

This is the case with Bullshit Jobs. The author, an anthropologist, correctly identifies and gives voice to a very real and serious problem in our world: the fact that many salaried professionals spend their lives doing things that contribute nothing to social welfare. However, he is unable to understand exactly why this happens, and his various explanations range from laughably wrong (a vast evil conspiracy of rich right-wing people who are manipulating the moral fabric of society) to almost right (employees serve the needs of individual managers rather than the organization).

The correct answer is that organizations (and departments within organizations) face the same pressures to spend resources on costly signals and arms races that biological organisms do. Bullshit jobs emerge from the same game-theory dynamics that generate peacock tails, elk antlers, and other wasteful features in animals. Just like a peacock without a tail will not pass on his genes, a company without a marketing department will not sell its products. Just like an elk without antlers will not pass on his genes, a company without a legal department will not be able to keep its resources.

Sometimes the leaders of organizations know what is going on; they would prefer to not have the expense of a marketing or legal department but know that it is necessary for self-defense. However, organizations also face the same incentives for self-deception that Hanson discusses in Elephant in the Brain. People dislike admitting that they are doing things for selfish reasons, so they invent justifications.

It is rational for the organization to hire people to generate these costly signals, because they need to attract attention and resources, but these signals are only a way to take resources form someone else and do nothing to actually make the world a better place. The result is even more pointless and destructive than the the zero-sum games that individual humans play, because millions of human lives are being utterly wasted in the service of Moloch.

This is a very hard problem to solve. People often assume that the problem is due to capitalism and can be solved with central planning, but this is exactly wrong, because departments within government have even stronger incentives to generate and sustain bullshit jobs than market-disciplined organizations.

Ideally there would be some mechanism to identify and heavily tax bullshit jobs as the horrible externality they are. But this is very hard, because from the outside, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between valuable coordination activities and zero-sum signalling. Many managers and planners are extremely necessary and things would cease to function without them. Of course, when you are necessary like this, you have the ability and incentive to extract more resources, so most manager jobs end up as some combination of valuable coordination and value-destroying rent-seeking.

Still, at minimum, a competent society would enact massive taxes on marketing and legal services.