A modern author rediscovers 一位现代作家重新发现帕金森定律Parkinson’s Law SISYPHUS, king of Corinth, was condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. 科林斯的国王西西弗斯被诸神惩罚将一块巨石推上山顶，再眼看巨石滚落，周而复始，永无止息David Graeber, an anthropologist, thinks that many modern workers face the same fate today, forced to perform pointless tasks, or “bullshit jobs”, as his new book* calls them. 人类学家大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber）认为，今时今日，许多现代劳动者面临同样的命运，被迫执行毫无意义的任务Mr Graeber defines a bullshit job as one “that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”他在新书*中把它们叫做“扯淡的工作”, 格雷伯把扯淡的工作定义为“完全没有意义、没有必要，或有害的工作，连员工自己也不能证明它有理由存在”though they may have to pretend that they believe in it. This definition, and indeed much of the book, combines two categories of roles.，不过，他们可能还是不得不装出一副对工作使命深信不疑的样子 他的这个定义——以及书的大部分内容——包含了两类工作 In the first are jobs that Mr Graeber tends to think are socially worthless, such as corporate lawyers or investment bankers第一类是格雷伯认为毫无社会价值的工作，比如公司律师或投资银行家.(Some of those workers may take an equally dim view of the utility of anthropologists（他们之中可能也会有人同样对“人类学家”的价值嗤之以鼻.) In the second group are jobs where employees find themselves with little or nothing to do and, worse, must still look as if they are frantically busy. 第二类工作是员工自己没多少事或者根本没事可做，更糟的是，还必须表现出一副忙得不可开交的样子What is his evidence? The author places a lot of faith in anecdotes and a couple of opinion surveys which found that only 37-40% of workers in Britain and the Netherlands felt they “made a meaningful contribution to the world.” 他的证据是什么？ 作者大量采信了趣闻轶事和几个民意调查，这些民调发现在英国和荷兰只有37%到40％的劳动者认为自己“对世界做出了有意义的贡献”。He doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that modesty might govern their answers.他似乎没考虑到这些答案有可能是人们自谦的结果 In any case, the contention that many of us are wasting much of our time at work is hardly a new one 无论如何，这种认为许多人在工作上虚耗年月的观点并不新鲜. C. Northcote Parkinson coined the idea that “work expands to fill the time available” in an essay in The Economist in 1955, adding that “there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.” C·诺斯古德· 帕金森（C. Northcote Parkinson）于1955年在《经济学人》发表了一篇文章，提出了“工作总会填满全部可用时间”的观点，并补充说“需要完成的工作与可能被指派来完成这项工作的员工数量之间关系不大，甚至毫无关系。”The futility of many middle-class jobs is also an old theme, being the plot driver of the 1970s British sitcom “The Good Life”. 许多中产工作徒劳无功，这也是个老题材，上世纪70年代英国情景喜剧《美好生活》（The Good Life）的剧情就以此展开Nor are feelings of boredom and pointless activity confined to the arena of work. 无聊和无意义的活动也不仅局限于工作领域Anyone who has been a schoolchild can remember being forced to write essays, or take tests, about subjects that seemed neither interesting nor likely to be of any use in later life.任何上过小学的人都会记得被迫写作文或参加考试的经历，题目或科目既无趣，在将来也不见得有什么用处 Indeed, many teachers are probably as bored marking the schoolwork as pupils are producing it. 事实上，许多教师改作业时很可能跟学生做作业时一样无聊Nevertheless, some workers will feel that Mr Graeber’s analysis is timely.尽管如此，一些劳动者会觉得格雷伯的分析很适时 Both meaningless job titles and mindless tasks seem to have proliferated.虚衔和机械盲目的任务似乎都已激增 A study† by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, two management theorists, estimated that there are nearly 24m corporate “bureaucrats” in America, or about one for every 4.7 workers. Reassigning them to more productive tasks could give the American economy a $3trn boost, they reckon. 他们认为，如果重新安排这些“官僚”从事更有生产力的工作，能给美国经济带来三万亿美元的增长Mr Graeber constructs some elaborate theories as to why this problem has arisen. 格雷伯构建了详尽的理论来解释该问题的成因He suggests that automation in recent decades did cause mass unemployment but that society conspired to create a bunch of illusory jobs to disguise the fact. 他认为，近几十年来，自动化确实导致了人们大规模失业，但社会协力创造出一大堆虚职来掩盖这一事实He also argues that while executives in the Reagan/Thatcher era prided themselves on how many low-level workers they could lay off, they then hired lots of management flunkies to enhance their status. 他还指出，虽然里根/撒切尔时代的高管们以成功裁撤大批底层员工为傲，他们随后又在管理层里聘用了一大群应声虫来巩固自身地位And he postulates that it is all part of a system of social control, in which young people are loaded up with debt and then pushed into meaningless jobs in order to pay it off, thereby keeping them docile.他认为这是社会控制体系的一部分，在这一体系中，年轻人背负债务，然后被迫从事无意义的工作来偿还，从而被驯服 But these explanations seem inherently unlikely. Modern executives are motivated by share options which usually require them to meet profit targets. 但是这些解释似乎从根本上讲不通。现代高管拥有公司股票期权，这通常会促使他们追逐利润目标They are pursued by activist investors, who may get them fired if they underperform. 维权投资者也紧盯着他们，如果他们表现不佳，可能就会被赶下台Given those threats, bosses would hardly employ lots of useless, profit-sapping staff.鉴于这些威胁，企业老板们不大可能会聘请大量毫无用处而徒耗利润的员工 Instead, the problem lies in the nature of a services company. 相反，问题存在于一家服务型公司本身的特性中In a factory, you can count the widgets made each day, which limits the scope for bullshit. 在工厂中，你可以统计工人每天制造的产品数量，限制怠工程度In a service business, it is harder to monitor the quality and quantity of output. 但在服务业，你很难监控产出的质量和数量Like the old quip about advertising, executives may know that half of their workers’ time is wasted, but not which half. 套用那句打趣广告业的老话就是，高管们可能知道员工们有一半的时间都虚耗掉了，但就是不知道是哪一半In response to this lack of knowledge, executives create a host of targets, and hold a lot of meetings to try to understand what is going on. 面对这种无知，高管们制定出一系列目标，大量开会以试图了解进展 As Messrs Hamel and Zanini put it, “A growing percentage of employee time gets consumed in efforts to keep the organisation from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.” 正如哈默尔和扎尼尼所说的，“员工花费越来越多的时间来防止组织被自身的复杂性压垮。”In other words, there is no need for Mr Graeber to construct elaborate theories about neoliberal conspiracies to explain the phenomenon of wasted effort. 换言之，格雷伯没必要构建复杂的新自由主义阴谋论来解释劳动者做无用功的现象Parkinson nailed the issue six decades ago: “Officials make work for each other.” 早在60年前，帕金森就已一语中的：“官员们彼此为对方制造工作。” * “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”, published by Allen Lane. †“The $3 Trillion Prize for Busting Bureaucracy (And How to Claim It)”《扯淡的工作》，艾伦莱恩出版社出版。† 《打破官僚作风，赢取三万亿美元奖金（以及如何兑奖
