Wait...are most jobs fake?

Scott Carney Investigates · May 27, 2026 · 19m

In 2013 the anthropologist David Graeber examined one of the strangest contradictions in modern capitalism: despite exponential gains in productivity, people were working even harder that ever. In his landmark essay called “On the Preponderance of Bullshit Jobs” and then a book a few years later, Graeber showed how as much as 37% of all jobs in capitalist societies are, well, bullshit. Or, to use his own words “where even the person doing the job secretly believes the job really shouldn’t exist.(...) But nonetheless, part of the conditions of employment is that you have to pretend that it…