Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. - By Michael Agg...

Crawford rightly asks whether today's cubicle dweller even has a respectable self. Many of us work in jobs with no discernible products or measurable results. We manage brands and implement initiatives, all the while basing our self-esteem on the opinions of others.

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As Crawford points out, much "knowledge work" lacks this element of practical wisdom, of opening out into the experience of others. Just go read a few dissertations.

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While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

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The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Blinder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "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." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.

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The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Binder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "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." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet."

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Now you begin to understand why you watch The Office. The cubicle life is amorphous. What are you actually making? How do you know if you are advancing at your job? Does sending e-mail all day help the brand? Does my boss think I am a good guy? It's an absurd situation, and "self-referential irony supplied by pop culture" helps one cope with that absurdity. Crawford looks around at the sociologists who have studied office life and concludes that the office is best approached as a "place of moral education" with managers acting as therapists, concentrating on helping us become team players. The "team" is what launches the product, lands the account, drives the business. "The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect," writes Crawford. And worse: "He has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise." The team makes us passive and helpless.

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But what distinguishes Crawford from his predecessors is how far blue-collar work, both in numbers and prestige, has fallen since even the '70s. Shop Class surveys an economic landscape where everyone must go to college or else be viewed as suspect, stupid, and/or unemployable. The massification of higher education has also created a new vocational pitfall: I've got a degree; therefore, I should be doing smart, clean, fun, and well-paid work. Except for clean, these adjectives can be scarce in cubicle alley.

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Now, I don't want to leave you with the impression that Crawford is sending us all off to plumbing school. He's not idiotic. His macroeconomic argument is this: "We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power. … But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed)." You might call Crawford a locavore of work. He wants economic policies that are human in scale and provide maximum opportunity for self-reliance and self-employment. That may sound like Declaration of Independence language, but it's not an amber-encased ideal. As Crawford shows, all freedom takes is a little willingness to get your hands greasy.

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The point is to achieve mastery, which in turn gives you a skill not subject to the whims of office politics. Finally, think about how your work affects others. This is a hedge against both narcissistic creativity and doing actual harm.

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