An Excellent Article

An Excellent Article:

In The New Atlantis, Matthew Crawford writes on "Shop Class as Soulcraft." It reminds me of the writings of the greatest economist of the 20th Century, Joseph Schumpeter. Having demonstrated the flaws in the Marxist understanding of capitalism, which predicted that capitalism's increased monopolization and consequent fall were inevitable.

However, Schumpeter wrote, capitalism was still doomed. It wouldn't be economic processes that destroyed it, but the rise of the intellectual who had no other practical means of making a living:

One of the most important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the facilities for higher education.... The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.... All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite.…They swell the host of intellectuals…whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment….righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism

I'm all for education, and even for intellectualism as long as it doesn't lead to the sort of man who can't make a living any other way.

A man should know how to make a living with his hands as well as his mind. This isn't just a philosophical position, but a very practical one. If you want a well-paying job that can't be outsourced to India, learn to be a plumber or a welder. If you want to be able to fix the things in your life without having to pay through the nose, learn to use tools, and keep them handy.

Learn to make your own things, for that matter. If you like to collect something, learn to make it. Then you can have as much of it as you want, just the way you want, and will have things to trade to other collectors who share your interest.

I think it was Heinlien who wrote that "Specialization is for bugs." You should pursue both knowledge and practical skill. Don't let anyone tell you to do one or the other.