Do you (also) have a bullshit job?

My Twitter poll doesn't seem to be that unrealistic

I just ran this poll on Twitter/X:

(I consider non-profits/NGOs to be public sector because they have tax benefits.)

The attentive reader will notice that the ratios are not the same. Let's do the math (with rounding):

• Private sector: 15.3/(15.3+62.1) = 19.8% (171 out of 865)

• Public sector/NGO: 7.2/(7.2+15.4) = 31.9% (80 out of 253)

• Relative rate: 31.9 / 19.8 = 1.61

This difference is large and significant (p < .001). However, what about the sampling bias? Thinking about sampling bias is not just a simple matter of noting whether the sample is representative or not (it is obviously not). However, the question is whether we can think of a plausible way that the sample ended up biased enough to explain the results. The most obvious idea here is that people with bullshit jobs spend more time on Twitter taking polls, but this would bias both proportions upwards, and wouldn't create much of a difference by itself. My Twitter followers are about 90-95% male, but this would mainly skew the data towards the private sector (since more men work there proportionally) and would not create the difference either. But is there even any bias?

Assuming all subjects are American (the largest group), it seems about 80% work in for-private/private sector versus government/non-profit/NGO. However, this leaves out the unemployed, which I also consider to be not working in the public sector/NGO (their job is to do nothing and get welfare, by definition a bullshit job). Overall, then, it seems there is little bias in the industry sampling.

The more obvious issue with the poll is that it is based on self-reported bullshit job status. On the one hand, workers themselves definitely know whether they don't even work. However, they may not know whether what they do is "anything useful". It's hard to say which way the bias goes here, but I would guess towards lowering the numbers, since it is ego-hurtful to admit that one's job is bullshit.

If we accept the values as a rough estimate, it appears that about 20% of the population has a bullshit job. That's a lot. Is that believable? If the value is that high, I should know several such examples, which I do. Here's some examples:

Person A works as a lobbyist in an NGO (public sector). They do nothing most of the time and has an auto-clicker on their work computer so it is marked as active. Once in a while they participate in some calls and the like.

Person B works as a programmer for a large company (private sector). They do nothing most of the time. Occasionally they participate in meetings and does a small amount of coding taking about an hour or less. They also have an auto-clicker on their work computer so that it is marked as active.

Person C works in the government (public sector). This person has a colleague who while ostensibly working for the government is actually spending their time doing homework in work hours, which they do because they are also a student (also subsidized). They are also receiving disability on top of this (amazingly, this person is also from Haiti). Person C has themselves also spent a number of years doing very minimal work while playing computer games during work hours.

I am sure readers can contribute more examples, perhaps from their own lives.

I interpret the findings as a social diease of affluence. The more affluent a country is, the more it is possible to engage in freeloading/parasitic behavior. All the examples above concern large organizations, which certainly makes freeloading easier. If you work in a start-up with 3 people, the others would notice you are useless. If you work in a 50 person team with middle managers, who also may have bullshit jobs and thus may care so much, your chances of getting away with it are much better.

Finally, we can verify whether this is realistic by looking online. Reddit (naturally) has an entire community devoted to tips and tricks for having multiple 'full-time' jobs at the same time. An example:

Many people claim to be working 5 jobs and so on. This is not so hard to believe because we also know there are some men who have multiple girlfriends at the same time, much like a job.

This kind of finding is relevant for Elon Musk's purges. Clearly, Twitter had an absurdly large number of useless people before he took it over, as he was able to fire ~80% of the staff without the company crashing (granted some were later re-hired). We may also notice that the scale of the DOGE purges are very small in the American economy. These only concern federal workers (because that's what Trump can issue executive orders for), and these only comprise 2.5% of the working population (light red in the circle diagram). Given my results, it would seem that Musk should aim to cut about 30% of the staff. It's probably better to cut too many and then rehire as need be, and hire more productive people to make things effective (automate things with code/AI, remove regulations that cause inefficiency).

What about the future, are we heading towards sneaky-backdoor universal basic income in the form of bullshit jobs? Some people think so:

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.

Graeber was some kind of left-wing extremist ('anarchist') and an anthropologist, so it's probably not wise to take his word for the numbers, but nevertheless, it seems he had the right idea here. I should read the book.