Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [13]
But is it feasible to make a decent living in the trades? Or are we headed for a “postindustrial” society in which there will be little need for the work of the hand? Are we perhaps already there? What are the economics of “the knowledge economy”? My purpose in this book is to elaborate the potential for human flourishing in the manual trades—their rich cognitive challenges and psychic nourishment—rather than stake out policy positions or make factual claims about the economy. But it may be well to consider some economic views that can nourish our skepticism about the postindustrial vision, and open the way for our larger inquiry.
The Future of Work: Back to the Past?
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Princeton economist Alan Blinder considers the question of job security and falling wages for U.S. workers in light of global competition:
Many people blithely assume that the critical labor-market distinction is, and will remain, between highly educated (or highly skilled) people and less-educated (or less-skilled) people—doctors versus call-center operators, for example. The supposed remedy for the rich countries, accordingly, is more education and a general “upskilling” of the work force. But this view may be mistaken. . . . The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not.18
Blinder suggests the crucial distinction in the labor market will be between what he calls “personal services” and “impersonal services.” The former either require face-to-face contact or are inherently tied to a specific site. Physicians who treat patients don’t need to worry that their jobs will be sent offshore, but radiologists who examine images have already seen this happen, just as accountants and computer programmers have. He goes on to point out that “you can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
Blinder’s analysis suggests a future of rising wages for construction, for maintenance and repair work on physical plants, and for maintenance and repair of durable machines (such as cars) that aren’t so cheap that they become disposable at the first sign of trouble, as for example a toaster oven is. In a follow-up piece in the Washington Post, he writes that “millions of white-collar workers who thought their jobs were immune to foreign competition suddenly find that the game has changed—and not to their liking.”19
He finds 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs to be potentially offshorable, ranging from “scientists, mathematicians and editors on the high end” to “telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end.” Blinder predicts a massive economic disruption that is only just beginning, affecting people who went to college and assumed their education prepared them for high-paying careers with lots of opportunity. Now their bosses are looking to India, or the Philippines, and finding well-qualified people who speak good English and will work for a fraction of what Americans have been earning. Architects face this threat, but builders don’t.
The MIT economist Frank Levy makes a complementary argument. He puts the issue not in terms of whether a service can be delivered electronically or not, but rather whether the service is itself rules-based or not. Until recently, he writes, you could make a decent living doing a job that required you to carefully follow instructions, such as preparing tax returns. But such work is subject to attack on two fronts—some of it goes to offshore accountants and some of it is done by tax preparation software, such as TurboTax. The result is downward pressure on wages for jobs based on rules.
These economic developments command our attention.