Mises Wire

In Graeber’s Paradox, Graeber captured something real: many workers today feel trapped in positions they know serve no clear purpose. Yet he located the cause in capitalism/neoliberalism rather than in bureaucracy. He imagined a world where elites deliberately maintain wasteful employment to keep people docile. But the modern West is not a laissez-faire system; it is a dense web of monetary interventions, taxes, subsidies, and regulations.

From an Austrian perspective, most “fake jobs” appear precisely where the market test is suspended by government intervention, where profit-and-loss signals are muted, and where coercive funding shields inefficiency from discovery.

For the reader, let me briefly recall David Graeber. Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and social theorist, a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and one of the best-known academic critics of capitalism in recent decades. His book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) argued that much of modern employment consists of meaningless, socially useless roles produced by capitalism itself. His diagnosis resonated widely, yet his explanation was ideological rather than economic.

The essay below summarizes my article published in Economic Affairs, “Beyond David Graeber: How State Intervention Creates ‘Bullshit Jobs,’” in which I propose, for me, the most robust alternative reading on this phenomenon, rooted in Austrian economics and classical liberalism. My central claim is simple: state intervention, not capitalism, is the actual engine behind the proliferation of meaningless jobs.

Regulatory Inflation: How Paperwork Replaces Production

Every new rule converts productive effort into compliance. Hospitals now employ more administrators than nurses; universities more managers than teachers. These people work hard, but at activities created by legal mandates, not consumer demand. Ludwig von Mises warned in Bureaucracy (1944) that once regulation replaces entrepreneurship, success depends on satisfying procedures rather than customers. Regulatory inflation thus breeds armies of “box tickers” and auditors whose function is to exist.

Distorted Economic Calculation

In competitive markets, unproductive roles tend to vanish. But the market test collapses when subsidies, tax privileges, or political contracts intervene. Firms and public agencies can afford to retain roles that generate no value because their funding is guaranteed. Mises identified this as the calculation problem: once money and prices are distorted, society cannot tell which activities create wealth or merely consume it. BS are the labor-market face of that problem.

Symbolic Labor and the Politics of Appearance

Graeber accurately described the alienation of well-paid professionals who feel useless. Yet the cause is not capitalist exploitation but bureaucratic symbolism. When law and politics dictate who must be hired, promoted, or reported on (through quotas, equity mandates, or CSR requirements), organizations reward appearances over outcomes. Workers sense the hollowness of tasks performed for compliance rather than service. The result is a culture of status without substance, the moral fatigue of pretending to produce.

Monetary Distortions and the Compliance Economy

Easy-money policies intensify the problem. Decades of artificially low interest rates and central bank bailouts push capital (and human talent) into finance, legal risk, and administrative control. Graduates who might have founded firms or engineered products become compliance officers or ESG consultants. Cheap credit softens budget constraints, allowing corporations and governments to hire for optics rather than innovation. In Hayek’s terms, monetary intervention distorts the structure of production (and with it, the structure of employment).

Why Graeber Misdiagnosed the System

Graeber saw inefficiency and assumed capitalism caused it. But, in genuine markets, inefficiency is punished. Fake jobs thrive only where competition is dulled (namely, in public bureaucracies and regulated monopolies). Consider the Spanish civil servant who drew a salary for six years without showing up, as he does in his book, a story Graeber himself cites. Such absurdity survives not because of a profit motive but because no profit motive exists. The absence of market feedback, not its excess, sustains waste.

How Markets Measure Value (and Bureaucracy Destroys It)

Graeber claimed we can’t objectively determine a job’s social worth. Austrians agree that value is subjective but emphasize that prices aggregate subjectivity into an objective signal. A job sustained by voluntary exchange proves its value; one sustained only by coercion or subsidy does not. Markets may err, but they self-correct. Bureaucracies cannot, because their funding never depends on consent.

The Geography of Meaninglessness

If this Austrian hypothesis is correct, BS jobs should concentrate in highly regulated, high-spending economies. Indeed, France (where government outlays exceed 57 percent of GDP) shows some of the densest administrative employment in the developed world. By contrast, leaner economies, such as Switzerland or Singapore, with smaller states and freer markets, exhibit higher productivity and stronger reported job satisfaction. When the state expands, it means contracts.

Restoring Meaning to Work

Graeber was right that people long for purpose. He was wrong about where it comes from. Meaningful work arises from freedom, not from bureaucratic design. To shrink the universe of fake jobs we must:

• Simplify and stabilize legal codes;
• Eliminate subsidies and mandates that reward non-productive sectors;
• Reinstate hard budget constraints in public institutions;
• Allow creative destruction to cleanse inefficiency;
• End monetary manipulation that fuels compliance industries

In short: deregulate meaninglessness away.

Conclusion

Graeber’s work captured a genuine malaise but inverted its cause. Such jobs are not the offspring of markets but of interventionism, of governments that mistake paperwork for progress and regulation for morality. If we want work to matter again, we must let individuals freely create, exchange, and fail. Only then will labor recover its dignity and society’s vitality.

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