A recent YouGov poll in the UK found that 37% of respondents said that their job was not meaningful. The report goes into some detail on levels of job satisfaction, but in short a third of people turn up to work every day in the knowledge that their job probably doesn’t make the world a better place. Anthropologist Dave Graeber took this as proof of his hypothesis that about 20-25% of people are employed in “bullshit jobs,” jobs that don’t really need to be done. It’s a pretty damning indictment on the way our society is organised that in the name of efficiency, we’ve created millions of roles whose workers think are utterly useless. Part of how we came to this situation is, I believe, an adherence to the 20th century notion that a successful economy is one with full employment. Where everyone who wants a job has one, and nearly all of those who are physically capable of work, are in it. During the post war period in across Europe and the Anglosphere this notion rang true as economies were yearning for more workers. As the century ran on, productivity improvements, information and communications technology, and automation displaced many of the jobs that kept developed countries at near full employment. Unemployment rose, as did the “bullshit jobs” Graeber bemoans, both as a way of putting off a question we don’t really want to answer: How do you organise a society that doesn’t require full employment? What to do with the 20% of workers the economy simply doesn’t need? Developed economies have tried employing them in meaningless work, as the YouGov poll shows, as well as blaming them for their lack of industriousness by filling their unemployment with meaningless forms and processes. I think in time we’ll see a third option come out of the shadows of the fringe left and right, and become a more mainstream talking point; the universal basic income. I might write another blog post on how a basic income works, but in short, you pay each and everyone a basic income, enough to cover basic housing and food, from there, they essentially choose how to use their time. So will it happen, and what would you do with your time if you had a basic wage?

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