I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)
I can give it a shot just as example.
I grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the middle (page 157 to be specific, but if you want to give me another page number between 1 and 326 I'm happy to do the same thing for that page).
The first thing I see on that page is a quote from Barack Obama and some commentary on it:
> "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 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 [sic] took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
> To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that "market solutions" create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular...
Okay, lots to digest there. Let's ignore the grammatical mistake (it should say legislation instead of legislature).
If we follow the citation for that Obama quote we discover that it's not a primary source but rather an article from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mr-obama-goes-wash...
...published June 26, 2006.
Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect. Graeber says:
> here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement
That quote isn't only taken out of context, it's given a new context that's an outright lie.
Obama was not president in 2006 and in that quote he wasn't "reflecting on his signature legislative achievement".
In fact, the next line in the article he cites starts, "Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate..."
This is senator Obama, more than a year before he announced he was running for president, answering a specific question about why there needs to be a provision in healthcare legislation for job training for workers who would be displaced if the US moves to a single payer system.
Given the proper context that quote reads very differently and doesn't at all support David's argument.
And even if the context of the quote was what he fabricates it to be (reminder - it's not), the argument still doesn't make sense to me.
Even if a different system would eliminate those jobs it doesn't mean that in the context of the current system those jobs are "bullshit".
If we allow technology to progress far enough almost every job will change or manifest enough to be markedly different from the jobs we have today. People used to get paid to deliver ice door to door. We invented freezers and now there are fewer ice delivery jobs. It doesn't mean those jobs were "bullshit" when the people were doing them, it just means that technology progressed and made them obsolete ... like it eventually will with every job. Of course a bunch of new jobs were created in the process. And those jobs, along with every job, will change and disappear over a long enough time horizon.
So are you arguing that all jobs are bullshit? Well don't we still need people to do stuff? Hmm well we'll need a system to decide who does what. Some kind of distributed system where we vote with our dollars perhaps...
And there's 3 or 4 other ways to cut down the argument there. And that's just a random half-page of the book. The whole thing is like that.
Looks like a miss for him on Obama's take on jobs in healthcare (I even a tweet from what looks like Graeber's account musing about this Obama quote). I wish he was alive so we could email him about it.
Anyway, what we're looking for is logical fallacies in his critique of capitalism. You certainly found a mistaken attribution and thus incorrect assumption about the mindset of someone in power but as you indicate it kind of doesn't matter, because the core argument is that one argument against single payer healthcare (or just fixing America's objectively broken healthcare system) is that people will lose jobs as a result. Here's an article from Politico pointing this out: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for... . People do make this argument, about the healthcare industry and others.
So for his underlying point, that the American healthcare system is propping up a lot of bullshit jobs, you seem to disagree, but I don't think that counts for a logical fallacy. Having myself interacted with the American healthcare industry, I have to agree with Graeber. Each interaction involved a rat's nest of bureaucratic nonsense and tens of people. The hospital I went to had a person whose entire job was middle-manning the insurance companies and the patients. So we could start with Graeber's general argument that probably a lot of those jobs aren't really necessary. These companies seem to agree when they do waves of layoffs. It's not even really an anticapitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist critique part of the argument is that the jobs are bullshit because they don't help, or in fact harm, society. This is the "single payer would be better" argument. Again I don't find any logical fallacy here, just perhaps an argument you disagree with. It's a similar critique he applies in the mutual fund investor vs teacher argument: why does the mutual fund investor get paid more when teachers are more valuable? Why do Americans spend so much on healthcare when universal or socialized systems can give more healthcare to more people for less money? Whatever the Americans are doing simply isn't efficient, but it's propped up as a star of capitalist resource allocation: even here you seem to imply that simply critiquing the American healthcare system is somehow anticapitalist. Now that I think about it, actually, it's not anti capitalist to argue that the American healthcare system is inefficient, it's simply objectively true: Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else, including countries with socialized healthcare.
However he is obviously anticapitalist and also takes the position that the jobs are bullshit because healthcare should be universal and thus insurance company jobs shouldn't exist (my interpretation). What's logically fallacious about this?
As for the argument that part of the reason the American government (not just pressure from think tanks or whatever) maintain this healthcare system because doing so props up a lot of jobs, which Graeber does incorrectly make based off a misquoted statement by Obama, yes, the chain of thought doesn't work, but it's not the only thing America props up for a jobs reason alone. The TSA, which fails the majority of its audits, is a rather famous example of an institution maintained by the USA simply as a jobs program. https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
Anyway, you did find a bad quote that I haven't seen anyone else point out, you may have some other pretty interesting insights to Graeber's book. I'd personally read a collection of "random half-page point by point" breakdown by you, it would interesting, and rigorous critique is important to me.
One other thing:
> Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect
I don't understand why this makes anything suspect? Nor do I see much to indicate The Nation is a leftist paper. I found this article as a good measuring stick: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-war-mil... So certainly the paper is not a Tankie one, which would definitely make the whole thing suspect as simply a mouthpiece of the CPC, but it's clearly not, so I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than that it might lean different politically than you.
It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd.
By the way, he did propose two possibilities to alleviating the degradation of bullshit jobs: unionization, and universal basic income.
> Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
In the book, he argues that 50% of jobs are bullshit, not 15%.
> He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics
You may also be interested in his book Debt, an extensively cited book where he challenges the unscientific nature of modern economics. You'll find there a very rigorous critique of modern economics.
> David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory.
Perhaps the book was too steep an introduction to theories of labor and philosophy that are perpendicular to those commonly taught in public programs and held in general by a large part of society? The theories seemed quite coherent to me, but maybe that's because I had already read Marx and Kropotkin before reading Graeber. What did you think about some of these ideas from the book:
1. It's very strange that our society rewards hedge fund managers with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and teachers with 50k a year, considering by any measurement a teacher is far more valuable to society than a hedge fund manager. It seems capitalism is not good at allocating resources in a way conducive to a healthy society.
2. The general application of Marx's concept of capitalist modes of production being highly alienating for workers, but applied to modern careers like middle management for insurance companies or whatever.
3. Puritan-capitalist work ethic has turned professionalism and capitalism into a religion
4. Bullshit jobs are keeping the population too busy to protest or revolt
> And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths
Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book. None of his critiques of capitalism itself seemed all that surprising or even really new, it was mostly more arguments against the mythological invisible hand of the market and the fabled efficiency of the market so far as I read it.