I can't see much that is wrong with this. You might disagree with his conclusions, in which case you can critique them or offer alternatives. This is very different from disagreeing with the claim that there are people who think that their jobs are meaningless. I can't tell which you are disagreeing with.

Except that the article shows that this just isn't the case, depending what you mean by 'society at large'. Gerber's question was about a 'meaningful contribution to the world', but if you ask people if they are doing useful work you get completely different statistics.

It looks like slipping in the phrase 'the world' in the question sets a completely unrealistic and for most people unattainable standard, but jobs don't have to be world changing to be worthwhile.

If we turn that around the question becomes: How many jobs (and what kind of jobs) would still be there if people had UBI and wouldn't need to work for a living?

I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls.

If you can actually show that many current occupations are in reality not productive, then of course that's something we need to address. However that has not been shown and even if it is true, it's not clear why so many people and companies are willingly funding these roles with their own money.

So if you are claiming is that vast numbers of people in the economy are 'wrong' about their spending and hiring habits, you've got a fair bit of work to do to establish that (let's be clear, it has not been established) and come up with a credible plan as to what to do about it, and who gets to decide what the 'right' thing to do is.

Yes. That's exactly the goal of the UBI. That nobody NEEDS to work anymore. How many burger flipper are there that work as burger flipper because they like burger flipping?

Your implicit assumption is that only paid work is real work. But if you remove money as the main motivator for work, people will look for more meaningful occupations and that's where we circle back to Graeber's bullshit jobs which don't qualify as meaningful work.

What is all this ‘meaningful work’ and who’s paying the taxes to support it?

Child care, elder care. Cleaning the house, cooking the meals, getting the groceries, checking the homework, packing the lunches, scheduling the playdates, planning the parties, booking the doctor’s appointments, getting everyone where they need to be, paying the bills, making the calls, preparing activities.

As for taxes, we’ve chosen to allow income inequality to reach ridiculous levels. There are other choices.

This is a strawman. Nobody is claiming that we'll close all restaurants. People who want extra money (or just want something to do) will work in service jobs, and if the supply of workers is too low then that will heavily incentivise automation and investing in productivity improvents.

As well as, possibly (and hopefully), rising pay in hitherto underpaid jobs.

Redistributing what the highly productive produce to the less productive just leads to a less optimal allocation of resources for productivity, that results in a lower level of production and thus consumption than what people would prefer.

I think it would be more accurate to say that you thoroughly reject his argument. You've left 18 comments on this thread but many seem to be predicated on the assumption that your outlook is wholly objective and rest upon premises whose validity is questionable.

> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else.

It is to make your project seem less dogmatic, and yourself more humble.

Here,

> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else

This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.

The economist's rebuttal was to claim that making a meaningful contribution to the world was, in the opinion of the author, "a high bar to clear" for job doers and try to supplant that only with "I have the feeling of being useful" as sufficient for a job to be not bullshit.

It's not trying to undermine the concept of defining jobs by what the job doers say about them.

Thus by simply redefining "non-bullshit jobs" as jobs which are useful to someone rather than useful to society at large, the economist makes no actual comment on the "zero sum jobs" component of "bullshit jobs".

This is such bizarre reasoning it stunned me. The point of the book as to describe a trend of people feeling that their jobs were pointless, "Bullshit", so to speak. But going from there to assuming that the book asserts a universal criteria for what job is Bullshit, without even reading the book, is ???

> Anthropologists are not qualified to... Anthropologists however are trained to... ... a bullshit job is defined as ...

I am not qualified to do X. However I am qualified to do Y. Ah! Y enables me to do X. So let me do X.

The first sentence there is a lie to massage the impact of the later ones. He literally defined what a "Bullshit Job" is, he wrote a book about it. The conceptual scheme of the entire book is his. He wrote the surveys; he defined the topic.

The idea that he is just a passive receiver of a coherent theory of jobs is false; and this is just a rhetorical gambit to disguise the fact that, no, he is the major architect of this idea and of the whole project.

And this becomes more blindingly obvious when other people attempt to repeat a survey asking whether their job is "bullshit" and find only 5% of people saying so.