Socially useless jobs
Do you think your job has meaning and is useful for society? Given that this commentary is read mostly by people working in the financial industry, my guess is that many of my readers might have doubts from time to time. After all, we are not firefighters or doctors but money managers and relationship managers. Nevertheless, I was astonished to see the results of a recently published study amongst 100,000 workers in 47 countries that measured what percentage of the workforce considers its job socially useful or useless.
8% of workers perceive their jobs as socially useless and 17% are not sure, which indicates that they at least have some doubts about the usefulness of their jobs beyond providing an income to the worker. But this also means that c. 75% of workers consider their job socially useful, or in other words: a large part of the workforce is delusional about the usefulness of their jobs.
We live in the 21st century, for heaven’s sake! Unless you are a doctor, farmer or carpenter, chances are you are working in a job that is not necessary and potentially not useful for society. Here is a simple test: If the tasks of your job did not exist a hundred years ago, chances are, it is not contributing very much to society. Most of the jobs created in the last century were invented to provide inputs for parts of the economy that are clearly not essential in nature and would hardly be missed if they were no longer there. If you are a millennial reading this and are outraged about this statement, consider that we used to have a pretty good life before the internet and smartphone came along. Neither of these inventions are necessary and their usefulness for society is at least debatable.
In any case, the study showed that there are significant differences in the percentage of workers who perceive their jobs as socially useless. Amongst firefighters, social workers and teachers, the percentage of people who consider their jobs useless are the lowest and often close to zero. But things are more interesting when we focus on the opposite end of the spectrum, the 20 jobs with the largest share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless. Amongst them we find sales and marketing professionals (which include PR professionals), finance managers, brokers, and economists (I am not going to comment on that). In other words, office jobs in the service industry and in business areas that are not producing “stuff” are often considered to be socially useless.
Funnily enough, the study also found that managers tend to find their jobs socially useless less often than the employees who work for them. A regression analysis shows that the percentage of top-level managers who considered their job socially useless was c. 2.4 points lower than their employees, all else being equal. This can also be seen in our chart below. 21.0% of sales professionals consider their jobs socially useless, while only 11.4% of sales managers consider their jobs useless. I will let you come to your own conclusions as to what may cause this difference in perception…
Top 20 occupations by share of workers who consider their job socially useless
Source: Due and van Lendt (2019), Fidante Capital.