Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [92]
4 Lamont as quoted by Polillo, Structuring Financial Elites, p. 159.
5 If you have ever had a friend sell your car for you, you know how this works. It’s best not to burden your friend with all the details of what’s wrong with the car. That way, when the buyer asks what problems the car might have, your friend can honestly say he doesn’t know. This is how the used-car industry works; when you trade your car in, it is never sold to its next owner by the same dealer. Instead it passes through one or more auctions. The ownership history is purposefully obscured, the service history purposefully discarded. This keeps everyone involved morally pure. Economists speak of “asymmetric information,” in which one party to a transaction has an advantage over the other, but I have seen no discussion of this phenomenon, where an entire market is predicated on the discarding of information. The securitizing of sketchy mortgages, and the invention of complex derivatives based on them, seems to accomplish a similar purpose (granting that it serves other purposes as well), though in this case the process is overlaid with an apparatus of mathematical complexity that spares its participants the kind of self-awareness used-car salesmen suffer. Only the person who originally writes the mortgage has to deal with that.
6 See the account of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that aired on the NPR show This American Life: Episode 355, “The Giant Pool of Money,” available at www.thislife.org/radio_episode.aspx?episode=355.
7 I quote from pp. 11-13 of a draft manuscript of Talbot Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2009.
8 M. P. Lepper, D. Greene, and R. E. Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Over-justification’ Hypothesis,” JPSP 28 (1973), pp. 129-37.
9 The old Protestant value of devotion to work for the sake of work may instill virtues like diligence, but is mute when it comes to assessing particular kinds of work against one another. The liberal ideal of work that is freely chosen (as exemplified by the later writings of Betty Friedan) is similarly indiscriminate, demurring from judgments of better and worse (this resemblance was noticed by Russel Muirhead in his excellent book Just Work). Both of these attempts to give work transcendent meaning are in deep harmony with the market logic of fungibility, which posits an essential equivalence between all commodities. They collapse the distinctions that matter to us, and on that count would seem to misrepresent the human dimension of our productive labor. For how could the character of what is produced, and its meaning within the larger web of human practices in which the product is used, not cast its light of a particular hue over the activity of making, or fixing? This is especially so when the maker’s or fixer’s activity is enlivened by a direct perception of the thing made or fixed, being used in its full context.
10 I am also connected to other mechanics, who may judge my work in ways a rider wouldn’t. Through the winter and spring of my last year in Chicago, Fred Cousins had seen only disconnected parts (the starter motor; the engine case halves) of the café racer I was building. When one day in late May I came by the shop on the finished bike, he looked it over for a few minutes without saying a word. Finally, crouching down, he pointed out that the clip holding on the master link of the drive chain was positioned 180 degrees from the traditional convention. Only later did I come to see why the conventional way is better.
11 This was brought home to me at the vintage races at Virginia International Raceway. In amateur motorcycle racing, most of the riders