Hands in the machinery
There’s a lot of truth in Matthew Crawford’s article The Case for Working with your Hands, although although the attempt towards the end to link it to the financial crisis is a little clunky. His general points about the value of manual work still stand, particularly where he implies1 that the education system in a modern economy is little more than a delivery system for office workers. The best shot comes towards the end of the piece, though:
The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.
The “visceral experience of failure” is not something that people enjoy facing, but it’s essential to experience it for exactly the reasons that Crawford describes. Those who haven’t been through that aren’t the sort of people I’d trust, but unfortunately wealth and power tend to protect you from the impact of those those experiences – you might experience failure, but you won’t necessarily experience it viscerally. In the information economy, this is multiplied by the fact that the distance from failure is increased; Crawford suggests all students should learn a trade before they begin work, but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.
And now I’m going to plaster a wall.
May 28, 2009
2 responses to Hands in the machinery
… “but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.”
Not sure he thought that through: isn’t it middle class lore that dealing with the “trades” implies taking on a certain degree of uncertainty as to the outcomes, costs, timings and disruption?
I think one of the implications in the articles is that this is a lesson that people need to learn – that some tasks can simply be unpredictable because the world is unpredictable. I’d tend to agree – having just tried to remove a small concrete outcropping on my stairs and realising that the rebar extends all the way out, I now need more time and money to fix it.
On the other hand, my builders were cretins for leaving a small concrete outcropping on my stairs in the first place.