Which Jobs Make a Meaningful Contribution to the World?

In the latest episode of If Books Could Kill, hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri discussed Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber. The books describes the rise of pointless and degrading jobs in post-industrial societies, but it is apparently short on data and definitions. One survey inspired by Graeber’s work was a YouGov poll in the UK that asked people whether they find their jobs “making a meaningful contribution to the world” (50% said yes). I am following up on that with an informal survey of my own. (Fell free to jump right to the survey if you don’t want to read on.)

That YouGov survey asked people about their own jobs. A different approach, which goes back decades in American sociology, is to ask random respondents how they evaluate different occupations according to their “social standing,” or what we call “occupational prestige.” This is a cultural perception rather than a self-perception, which means everyone assesses doctors and lawyers, not just doctors and lawyers. That’s the approach I take here.

I also noticed that there was some slippage in the discussion of “jobs” in the podcast, with the term sometimes referring to industries (like advertising) and sometimes to occupations (like advertising executives). An old insight that Matt Huffman and I developed (but did not invent) was to use the intersection of Census occupation and industry categories to mean “jobs.” So, a secretary in an auto manufacturing company is a different job than a secretary in a bank. This turned out to be quite important for the study of gender segregation. (We further added a geographic dimension, so the same occupation/industry combination was a different “job” in New York than Chicago, but that’s not the point here.) For the issue of whether jobs are bullshit, this seems reasonable to me. For example, I do some pretty unexciting tasks in my job because I support the mission, but doing the same tasks for a terrible company would be much more depressing. You might think “universities” are just bullshit generally, but I think some jobs at universities are more bullshit than others.

So, I got out the 2020-2024 American Community Survey from IPUMS, and generated a list of the 200 most common “jobs” — occupation-industry combinations (editing the titles to make them shorter and clearer) — and poured them into an All Our Ideas survey, under the question, “In your opinion, which job makes a more meaningful contribution to the world?” You see two random jobs at a time, and vote for the one you think makes a more meaningful contribution. It’s an anonymous survey that doesn’t ask any other questions, or collect any individual information.

It looks like this:

All Our Ideas is run by the nonprofit Citizens Foundation. The results summary and data are available to all users at the site (click “results”). Unfortunately, they have recently gummed up the platform with AI gunk, but you can just ignore it. (If you have better ideas for where to host a survey like this, I’m happy to hear them.)

Since I posted it on Bluesky, Facebook, and LinkedIn last night, we have about 21,000 votes, so you can already look at some results — or just jump in and start voting, and vote as many times as you want. It’s fun! And interesting. I’ll report back with some analysis later, but the more votes we get the more reliable the rankings will be. Feel free to share the link.

Here is the survey.

Thanks for trying it.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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