The Cult of We, journalism school, and the extreme price we pay for avoiding bullshit jobs
In 1840, an estimated 70 percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Then the Industrial Revolution came. By the beginning of the 20th Century about a third of American workers were employed in manufacturing.
Now agriculture employs only about 1.3 percent of the workforce and 8.7 percent in manufacturing. If we’re not making food and we’re not making things any longer, what are we doing? What fills the void? Bullshit.
That according to David Graeber, a commentator who died last year (not of COVID), who is credited with introducing the term “bullshit jobs” into the American lexicon in a 2013 article that he five years later turned into a book, “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory,” which I highly recommend (and not because I later found out Graeber anonymously profiled one of my students for his book).
“(E)conomies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines of producing nonsense,” Graeber wrote. “(A) bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
As productivity has increased and employment in the information sector has also increased, Graeber argued that more and more people are employed in overly bureaucratic organizations and pointless jobs.
Anyone who has had a bullshit job knows this is not even a remotely funny topic. I recall my last job as an enlisted Army soldier as an unambiguously bullshit job. Each morning at 4:30 a.m., I drove across Kuwait (literally from one end of the country to the other) to pick up a stack of newspapers, take out a yellow marker and highlight important developments, and hand them over to a staff member before a three-star general woke up and enjoyed his morning coffee. That was a bullshit job, and Graeber estimated that no less than 40 percent of the workforce in advanced economies are employed in similar bullshit jobs.
I thought of Graeber weeks ago after reading a book and an article, each in their own way revealing the product of the current bullshit job boom.
Trading social currency for actual currency
Recently the Wall Street Journal published an article that left me a bit shamed, and at the same time, confirmed long-held suspicions that I spent a long time repressing. It was not the latest news about Bill Ackman’s SPAC that got me so upset, clearly.
“ (J)ournalism schools continue to churn out heavily indebted master’s degree graduates hoping to find a footing in the cratering industry,” the WSJ found. Taking dead aim at the master’s in journalism (MSJ) programs, the report found that MSJ graduates are finding themselves saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and few job opportunities. Even graduates who do find jobs in journalism often are not able to earn enough money to quickly pay off their principal loans.
I hold my MSJ from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. My first year, and most fun year, after I left the Army was spent attending the Medill School. My least fun year was the year after.
After graduation, I spent ten months looking for work. I finally found a job in Macon, Ga., covering a local Air Force base for the Macon Telegraph, owned by McClatchy Newspapers. After a few months in Macon, I convinced my editor and the Washington, D.C., McClatchy bureau to send me to Afghanistan, where I spent several months covering the war in the initial weeks of President Obama’s 2009 surge.
My assignment in Afghanistan was the highlight of my career in journalism, which didn’t last much longer after I returned. Unable to find a higher-profile and higher-paying job in D.C., remaining in the field didn’t make much sense. The New GI Bill had recently become law, allowing me to pay for the entire tuition of another graduate degree. So two years after finishing Medill, I went back to graduate school, this time at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where now I teach.
I got lucky. As a student at Medill, I received monthly checks under the Montgomery GI Bill to help pay for food and rent, and, more critically, received a full scholarship to pay for tuition. Clearly other Medill students were, and are, not so fortunate.
The WSJ found that Medill graduate students are now borrowing a median average of $54,900 to attend the program, the highest of any graduate program on record and higher than the median earnings of journalists of all experience levels.
Yet I can’t help but wonder if I would have been willing to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to avoid bullshit work that, at least in my head at the time, journalism wasn’t. I suspect many students are being lured into the Medill master’s program and other journalism programs with the promise of exciting, meaningful careers, even if it means taking on crippling sums of debt.
The WSJ story forces us to ask ourselves: Is the premium for avoiding bullshit jobs extending beyond simply taking a pay cut? Are students now taking on completely unsustainable levels of debt to avoid a bullshit job?
There is simply no economic justification for taking out nearly $100,000 in student loans, or even a fraction of that amount, to attend a graduate program that is unable to place its graduates in jobs that pay more than $50,000 a year. Yet there still appears to be a demand to attend the Medill School and other places where one seeks to “do what you love” at any and all costs.
Startup culture
By now you should be well aware of the story of WeWork and Adam Neumann. If you aren’t, you can watch a Hulu documentary, soon a TV series, or read “The Cult of We” by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell.
The story would be amusing if it didn’t have real impact on lives. By the billions, the largest banks and venture capital firms funded a multi-year fraud, collectively amounting to little more than a playpen for Neumann and his equally loopy wife.
Putting Notorious B.I.G. lyrics to life — “So much smoke need oxygen, steadily counting them Benjamins…” — Neumann regularly smoked marijuana on private jets before business meetings, once to the point where the plane’s crew needed to deploy their emergency oxygen masks to safely land.
I write this in a coffee shop in the Fulton Market district of Chicago. Across the street is a building with office space leased by WeWork that Nuemann tried to purchase with a separate, personally owned fund. He did this regularly, authorizing his company to lease space from himself.
And of course, Neumann famously told investors that WeWork would “elevate the world’s consciousness” and privately believed he was destined to become “president of the world.”
What on earth would allow the capital markets to fund this nonsense? Because the spaces had demand, if not at the levels that justified a $47 billion IPO. WeWork capitalized on a decade of startup culture that glorified founders ahead of profit and saleable products, luring ambitious twenty- and thirty-somethings into entrepreneurial careers they were not prepared for, with businesses that were never destined to earn sustainable revenue. And I have been guilty of perpetuating this alluring but ultimately destructive culture.
The true genius of WeWork was its ability to speak directly to disaffected workers tired of bullshit work. Emblazoned on WeWork’s walls was a message to all of its members: “Do what you love.” And for a monthly fee of $400 a month, WeWork provided an escape from bullshit, unproductive, dead-end jobs.
If the job market leaves young workers nothing but bullshit jobs, institutions with good and bad intentions will continue to exploit very real pain by offering a way out, for a price.
We need to do better. Policymakers need to do better. If we work hard enough, we should have a right to do what we love and create real value.
-TD
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Weekly reads
On regional divergence: “Senate Republicans and Democrats agree: Time to close regional economic divides,” by Mark Muro (Brookings).
On creating real value: “It’s Time to Build,” by Marc Andreessen.
“Once Tech’s Favorite Economist, Now a Thorn in Its Side,” by Steve Lohr (New York Times)
