Monitor | Ask yourself this morning: Is my job a load of billshut?
The conspiracy view that the ruling class devised pointless work for the masses may be off the mark, but so is Keynes' forecast of 15-hour week
London School of Economics professor David Graeber caused something of a stir last month with an article in Britain's Strike! magazine whose title I shall render euphemistically as "On the phenomenon of billshut jobs".
Strike! proclaims itself a publication of the radical left, dealing in "politics, philosophy, art, subversion and sedition".
Yet although Graeber's article was peppered with language that could have come from a 1970s revolutionary socialist tract, with references to "the ruling classes" and denunciations of the "profound psychological violence" done to workers by their jobs, there wasn't much either radical or especially left wing about his highly entertaining polemic.
There was, however, a great deal that rang true.
No doubt we have all wondered what HR managers contribute to the world
Graeber set out to solve a puzzle. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the 20th century advances in technology would allow us all to work for just 15 hours a week. Why, wondered the LSE professor, has this prediction so signally failed to come true.