David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad.
Someone who sits at SpaceX and first has to calculate the chance than Starship will land on a whale and kill the wale and then calculate the chance that it will land on various other endangered species and kill it, to then conclude that the chance isn't that high on the open ocean, is the kind of person who would say his job is "useless". That's what Graeber talks about with bullshit jobs.
I have a friend who's employed at an state-owned investment bank for local building who's job it was to calculate ESG metrics for the bank and who thought he was doing what Graeber was describing. The metrics he calculated were not going to affect any decisions and likely the rules for the ESG metrics were going to change in a few years anyway.
Ten people want to build a bridge. But they face problems: Who works on the foundation vs. the supports? How do we prevent the left side team from building something incompatible with the right side team? When is the foundation strong enough to start building on top? How do we know if we’re on track or behind schedule?
Today, ten people can't build a bridge because they need to involve a lot of middleman to deal with bureaucracy. Building a bridge was a lot cheaper 70 years when Robert Moses build his bridges. In the timeframe of the Great Stagnation, the necessity to involve a lot more middle men in creating a bridge was created and now we build a lot less bridges.
If you have a mathematician who needs to calculate the ESG metrics for the bridge building project before the bridge building project can be funded building bridges becomes harder.
How can you align your efforts to improve future coordination?
Getting rid of middlemen is often a good way to do so. That's why NEPA reform is important. In health care it's why getting rid of pharmacy benefit managers is a good idea.
Understanding Northcote Parkinson's work about how bureaucracies grow middlemen and then the middlemen make up work for the middlemen to do is key.
David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad.
I think alienation is real but exaggerated, and we also shouldn't take people's alienation as substantial evidence their work is actually meaningless.
My main point is that the kind of jobs that Graeber talks about isn't primarily "trade" or "leadership".
There are some people on the left who think that any job that's doing trade or leadership is a problem, but that's not true for Graeber or tech/progress study people who want less middleman.
If you take universities, they had had leadership fifty years ago as well. The growth of university administration in comparison to professors in the Great Stagnation timeframe is about other middleman.
There are cases where middleman produce coordination but generally the more middlemen you have the harder it is to coordinate everyone.
I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless, and we can get rid of (almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN to people doing real work, and society would be much better off.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyspecific/comments/1fpmtt8/pig_wearing_clothes_in_a_childrens_book_doing/ (It’s not clear to me why a pig society would have a pork-cutting job. Seems rather macabre!)
Like many populist intuitions, this intuition is completely backwards. Middlemen are extremely important!
I think the last 200 years have been a resounding victory of the superiority of the middleman model. Better models of coordination are just extremely important, much more so than direct improvements in “object-level”/”direct”/”real”/”authentic” work.
What do Middlemen even do?
The world is not, by default, arranged in ways that are particularly conducive to human flourishing, happiness, or productive capacity. Sometimes, individuals try to rearrange the world’s atoms to be better for human goals. Whenever you have an endeavor that requires more than two to three such people, or if those two to three people are not closely colocated, you might need a middleman.
An archetypal middleman job then is trade:
You have surplus wheat. I have surplus beans. But we’re 100 miles apart and don’t know each other exists.
A merchant a) physically moves wheat to where it’s scarce (and valued more), b) physically moves beans to where it’s scarce (and valued more), c) figures out an exchange rate, and d) takes on risks of spoilage and banditry. For her efforts, the merchant takes a fractional cut.
Another archetypal middleman job is leadership or management:
Ten people want to build a bridge. But they face problems: Who works on the foundation vs. the supports? How do we prevent the left side team from building something incompatible with the right side team? When is the foundation strong enough to start building on top? How do we know if we’re on track or behind schedule?
A manager: a) figures out what needs doing and who should do it, b) ensures the parts fit together, c) adjusts when reality diverges from plan, and d) makes calls when the right answer isn’t obvious.
Some historical trends
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir. The complaint tablet (circa 1750 BC) tells of poor Nanni’s dealings with Ea-Nasir, a copper merchant/middleman of poor repute who has allegedly sold Nanni subquality copper.
Early Middlemen
Agriculture allowed for the specialization of labor and thus the introduction of middlemen.
Early middlemen had relatively simple jobs, like trading goods and supervising labor. As our societies become larger, wealthier, and more complicated, more and more middlemen are tasked with managing the flow of increasingly abstract concepts: information, risk, relationships, and ideas.
Many societies throughout history were suspicious of middlemen. In classical Confucianism, merchants were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, behind scholar-bureaucrats (middlemen who presumably get a pass because they are the ones studying confucianism), farmers, artisans, and soldiers. Similarly, in the West, Christians were often barred from moneylending and some other forms of trading, relegating the less savory middlemen tasks to Jewish and Muslim traders and bankers.
In the last 200 years, however, it has become increasingly untenable to see the middlemen as doing largely superfluous work . As societies become more and more complicated, middlemen jobs became both more complicated and more numerous, and societies that reject them become increasingly outcompeted and irrelevant.
The 20th century: The good middlemen are truly “middle”men
By the 20th century, all the Powers that Be essentially agreed that we needed middlemen to organize our societies. But there’s still dispute on the details: should we have many bottom-up models of coordination, or is it better to have centrally planned economies with a few leaders and mathematical models at the top?
The second half of the 20th century could be seen as a dialectic between the US and Europe against Russia, China, and other orbiters on whether society ought to be economized or centrally planned.
With a few exceptions, the West resoundingly won. Capitalistic economization leads to substantially greater returns and productive capacity than centralized command-and-control, explicitly Communist or otherwise.
The Information Age
Consider now the late 20th century and early 21st century. Compared to 30 years ago, I think many people, particularly in the intellectual elite, have largely lost appreciation of the value of solving coordination problems and the associated veneration of middlemen.
In particular, I think many people in my circles are missing the “middleman great” intuition in part because they work in tech and/are used to tech. Information technology (”software eating up the world”) is in part an alternative way to organize society.
However, while software engineers see themselves as doing “real work”, the real work they’re doing is feeding into coordination tech, not object-level work like robots or something.
Of the big companies, only Netflix is closer to replacing “real work” (well, storytellers). Most other “tech” companies (think Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) are about reorganizing society through information technology. (Companies like NVIDIA are an intermediate step that feed into software which is primarily coordination tech).
Sometimes the information age solutions are a complement and sometimes it’s a substitute of traditional middlemen.
Takeaways and Future Work
Many people talk about the “economization” of society. But what, concretely and quantitatively, does it actually mean? I’d be excited to see more descriptive and neutral accounts for the degree to which society is economized today, and in particular attempts at graphs for the fraction of different societies and sectors that have become economized over time.