Abstract

It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies hold a socially useless job, i.e. a job that makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four points in time. We find that approximately 8% of workers perceive their job as socially useless, with sizeable differences between countries, sectors, occupations, and age groups, but no trend over time. A vast majority of workers cares about holding a socially useful job and we find that they suffer when they consider their job useless. We also explore the causes of socially useless jobs.

(joint work with Max van Lent, Leiden University)