As working-class jobs have become more precarious and demeaning, professional jobs have become more meaningless and depressing. Anthropologist David Graeber has defined an entire category of “bullshit jobs” and traced their proliferation throughout the corporate world and other sectors. In large part, these are make-work positions for professional elites that exist primarily to pad the prestige of those above them. These jobs are not simply menial or dull, and they are often well-paying, but they are utterly pointless and some­times even internally acknowledged as such. For all the talk of market efficiency, the “information economy” has created a vast category of professionals who do nothing but copy and paste McKinsey info­graphics into presentations for no social or even narrowly commercial purpose. After Graeber published his first essay on the topic, tens of thousands of readers began sending their own accounts of their expe­riences in these positions to Graeber and other commentators.Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and crea­tivity, it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly. The conclusion of one recent empirical study of corporate law firms—“greater amounts of work that associates consider more interesting is negatively correlated with firm profitability”—could be applied across most elite job categories. This state of affairs is not only disorienting to professionals indoctrinated to believe that their career should be their “passion.” It also foreshadows further economic pressure on their class when the next recession, the increasing automation of white-collar jobs, and the logic of shareholder primacy all take their toll.

How do ENTJs reconcile their extroverted nature with the fact that most people are generally illogical and inefficient?

I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes.

Colleges teach our young people that the U.S. became rich on the backs of free black labor. That is utter nonsense. Slavery does not have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. I doubt that anyone would claim that the antebellum South was rich, and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was outlawed: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Pichai doesn’t seem able to comprehend that the essence, and the joy, of parenting may actually lie in all the small, trivial gestures that parents make on behalf of or in concert with their kids — like picking out a song to play in the car. Intimacy is redefined as inefficiency.