Don’t you just hate it when a good theory falls apart? The late anthropologist David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs had a great premise: that the modern economy has generated vast numbers of pointless jobs, and “the people doing these jobs are completely unhappy because they know their work is bullshit”. Corporate lawyers, lobbyists, middle managers — they’re all useless and they know it.

It is five years since the book was published but people are still talking about it, especially in the context of today’s puzzle over why some people have left the workforce since the pandemic began. Did workers just get tired of the pretence that what they were doing all day actually mattered?

The problem is, the data doesn’t back up the “bullshit jobs” theory very much at all.