Das Konzept von Bullshit Jobs ist selbst, nun ja, Bullshit

Der leider viel zu früh verstorbene Anthropologe David Graeber hat den Begriff Bullshit Jobs geprägt.

Er meinte damit viele moderne Büro- und Management-Jobs, Berater, PR-Leute, Anwälte, Dokumentare, Koordinatoren, das Schreiben tausender E-Mails usw.

Arbeiten, die eigentlich überflüssig wären und die man ersatzlos streichen könnte, ohne dass die Gesellschaft darunter leiden würde. So seine These.

Ich fand diesen Ansatz immer schon hanebüchen. Es erschien mir heillos naiv zu glauben, dass private Unternehmen so viel Geld verschwenden würden.

Der Ökonom David Deming hat in seinem Newsletter nun ausführlich erläutert, warum das Konzept von Bullshit Jobs selbst, nun ja, Bullshit ist.

[L]et me try to convince you that office work is underrated. The output of many white-collar jobs is not a physical product, but rather improved communication with coworkers, clients, and organizational leaders. Better communication ensures that the right people are doing the right tasks, and better transmission of valuable information improves managerial decision-making.

But humanity’s success as a species has its roots in the economic value of communication.

As cultural anthropologists like Joe Henrich have argued, early humans faced extreme evolutionary pressure to coordinate and work together. Hunter-gatherer societies relied on diverse and unpredictable food sources, and cooperation allowed them to pool resources directly but also to share information such as where certain plants grew or how to hunt certain animals. Henrich argues that culture is our greatest strength because it allows us to transmit knowledge and traits through social learning and group norms rather than through genetic selection, which takes much longer.

Many of the most disruptive inventions in human history were mass communication technologies. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the rapid production of books, which democratized access to knowledge but also led to social upheaval (e.g. the Protestant Reformation). The invention of the radio in the late 19th century brought popular culture to the masses, but it was also a great propaganda tool during the wars of the early 20th century.

You might think that new technologies would eliminate the need for jobs that facilitate communication, but instead the opposite has happened. The printing press made highly trained scribes less valuable, but it created new categories of work (writers, printers, book salespeople) that supported mass communication. Improvements in communication technology tend to increase the total demand for communication, because they enable us to converse with more people and spread our ideas more widely.

Fast forwarding to the present, we see that many jobs in the U.S. economy exist almost entirely to facilitate communication and improve the flow of information. Stenographers and typists create written records of speech to memorialize meetings and court proceedings and to deliver messages. Editors, reporters, news broadcasters, and audio and visual technicians communicate information in various forms to an audience. Business analysts and consultants analyze and interpret information in order to improve organizational decision-making.

Because the human need for communication is nearly infinite, new communication technologies tend to create jobs as fast as they destroy them.

Zuerst wurden Telefonisten durch Drehscheibentelefone ersetzt. Gleichzeitig entstanden aber noch deutlich mehr neue Jobs: Es brauchte nun Sekretäre.

For example, the easy availability of co-workers and clients by telephone probably accelerated the pace of office work, leading to an ever-larger volume of communications that needed to be managed. This expanded secretarial work beyond typing. Companies increasingly needed secretaries to screen and route calls, to take transcriptions of calls and meetings, and to coordinate such work more generally. Mechanical switching made communication by telephone cheaper and more reliable, expanding its use in business.

New job titles often augur substantive changes in work, and this is no exception. The secretary occupation evolved over the first half of the 20^th century alongside rapid technological advances that aided the transcription and communication of language from spoken to written form.

The invention that truly unlocked mass communication was the typewriter. The typewriter was independently “invented” many times during the early 19th century, but early prototypes were mostly curiosities that didn’t pass a benefit-cost test relative to shorthand or regular handwriting.¹ The first commercially successful typewriter was the Remington No.2, which sold about 100,000 units between 1874 and 1891.

Die erste Schreibmaschine kostete zu heutigen Preisen 4.000 US-Dollar.

The secretary occupation evolved alongside the mass adoption of the typewriter. Typewriter production exploded in the early 1900s, with major brands like Underwood selling an estimated 5 million units between 1900 and 1930. Growth in typewriter sales was driven by gradual improvements in quality and cost, including front striking (so you could see what you were typing) and eventually the electric typewriter.³ Large companies increasingly employed secretarial “pools”, groups of secretaries who were deployed to executives as needed for typing and other office duties. Gibbs college, the first secretarial school, opened in 1911.

Over a period where the typewriter was rapidly adopted, the occupation “typists and secretaries” grew sixfold, from less than 0.5 percent of all employment in 1900 to 3 percent in 1950.

Technological innovation in communication increased total demand for communication jobs. New technology didn’t destroy jobs because typewriters can’t write by themselves – they need a human operator. For the first time in history, we could inexpensively create accurate written accounts of meetings, phone calls, and other events. Businesses could also keep records of important transactions such as sales and expenses, and they could store and maintain customers and client information.

At its peak in 1980, office and administrative support work accounted for 12.7% of all workers in the U.S. economy. That’s one in eight jobs devoted entirely to the production, processing, storage, delivery, and retrieval of written information.

Yet since 1980, employment in all three occupation categories has declined rapidly, falling from 12.7% to only 6.8% in 2022. Today, secretaries and administrative assistants are as common as a share of all jobs as they were in 1920.

Warum?

Wegen des PCs.

Once information became easy to store and manipulate, we no longer needed so many people to transcribe, codify, and organize it. Secretaries focused increasingly on other duties, like scheduling and coordinating meetings and personal assistance. Yet office calendars are increasingly digitized and synced up within organizations, and only high-level executives have their own assistant. The job of secretary/administrative assistant is likely in permanent decline.

Doch es gibt neue Herausforderungen: Wir gehen in der Fülle an Informationen unter, die heute quasi kostenlos produziert werden können.

By some estimates, the internet in 2024 collectively stores about 147 zettabytes (ZB) of data.⁴ One ZB is equivalent to the storage capacity of 250 billion DVDs! Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that only about 0.05 ZBs of information was created over humanity’s entire history up to 2003.

When information is abundant, the ability to make sense of it becomes especially valuable. This explains why managerial, professional, and technical occupations have grown since 1980, as rapidly as clerical work has declined. These jobs require you to go beyond collecting and storing information.

Jobs with titles like “business analyst”, “consultant”, and “solutions architect” require workers analyze and synthesize information in ways that improve business decision-making. In some ways, it is data compression, not collection – distilling a sea of information down to its most critical elements. When you have access to more than 250 billion DVDs worth of data, it’s important to know what you are looking for!

We can think of the large language models (LLMs) underpinning generative AI tools as performing incredibly sophisticated operations on data (primarily words). Each time you ask ChatGPT a question, it is effectively compressing all 147 zettabytes of the internet in a way that delivers a highly customized response to your specific query.

Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)

Für Deming sind Routinebürojobs heute in etwa das, was landwirtschaftliche Arbeitetr vor der Einführung von Traktoren waren:

There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.

Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.

Wie immer gilt: Wir kennen die Jobs, die wegfallen. Die, die neu entstehen, werden wir erst kennenlernen.

Hier der ganze Beitrag von Deming:

The Past, Present, and Future of Office Work