Political and economic philosophy is a dangerous subject to write. Your words will have a natural target audience. Fail to properly shade your text to your audience and your book will end up in (large) piles in a discount book warehouse. Or, in the age of digital books, with a 7-digit rank in the overall store...

Fortunately for the readers of this book, Graeber's commentary is equally caustic towards the movement conservative, the country club liberal, and even the well-meaning but slightly sanctimonious social democrat. The central thread of this work, which builds on an earlier essay that he published, is that regardless of whether you speak of the public sector, the academy, or private industry, the desire to build fiefdoms and heirarchies in the workplace give rise to the proliferation of meaningless jobs that are as damaging to the mental health of their incumbents as they are wasteful.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a large portion of one chapter dealing with the phenomenon of people working in BS jobs in order to fund their passion. Graeber accurately, and with recourse to excerpts from several interviews, documents the difficulties with this lifestyle and the drain on creative energy it can cause.