I wish I could go back in time and give this book and Tom Hodgkinson's "How to Be Idle" to my 27-year-old self. It would have opened my eyes to what was going on with me and my career at the time. I was pretty miserable after a few dead-end jobs, and starting to despair. Hodgkinson would've shown me I wasn't alone and I wasn't broken. This book would've shown me exactly where the working world WAS broken, and why I was having such a hard time with it. Sadly, neither book was available back then.

The main question of this book is "Why aren't we all working 15-hour weeks, as we were promised in the 1930s?" The answer Graeber finds is that we absolutely could be, but because of some unfortunate political and cultural choices made by society in the 20th century, 94% employment was taken as the greatest good and the goal of the economy. Thus, a number of meaningless jobs have been created, and even those jobs that aren't meaningless are increasingly buried in bullshit paperwork.

Graeber's mostly interested in exploring the nature of the problem, rather than solving it, but he does see some promise in the Universal Basic Income proposals of the late 20th century, although he acknowledges these can be hijacked by right-wing bad actors if we're not careful. Solutions aside, his history of how the problem arose is very compelling.