In Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, the blending together of government policies, cheap money in the form of credit, and changing social mores have created fertile ground for the pestilent spread of the management class over that most noble of endangered breeds, the Tradesman. Modern America, Crawford argues, has not only been negligent in its failure to nurture manufacturing as a species of the American economy, it has looked the other way while paper-pushing Managers overwhelmed the workforce.

What does this Managerial disease look like? Surely you've spotted him in your travels, the feckless office worker who bumbles through his day, helpless to make heads or tails of his work, but brainlessly content all the same to pull a paycheck in exchange for taking meaningless orders from his superiors and passing them onto his hopeless subordinates.

There is but one creature inoculated against this blight, the Tradesman, that most pure and rugged of men who, armed with wrench and welder's mask, endeavors to maintain his sacred trust, the still flickering flame of the American cowboy. This staunch individualist is a free and honest soul who labors for but two purposes, love and his own satisfaction.

This is Crawford's portrait of the American workforce, a job market polarized into those who find enlightenment by working with their hands and those who remain in the dark because they don't. As my sarcasm indicates, this is overly simplistic.

Shop Class as Soulcraft lays down a sensible premise; work with ones hands is often rewarding because there is an immediate and visible result of ones labor. Crawford exemplifies this with his Tradesman, a man who benefits from a kind of double satisfaction because not only are the results of his labors pleasing to himself, they also please his customers, either by providing them with new, hand-crafted products, or newly repaired versions of already treasured items. The Tradesman, thus, can go home each night knowing he has had a tangible and positive impact upon a world which is dominated, more than ever before, by workers who have mastered only a corporate craft.

If the Tradesman is the beneficiary of this double satisfaction, the Manager is doubly deprived. Not only does he never experience the pleasure of creating with his own hands, he is denied even the slightest interaction, good or bad, with his customers. He is, like his countless comrades, hardwired into a corporate superstructure that not only prevents him from receiving satisfaction, it prevents him from understanding his own job, his own function as a worker. And if this weren't bad enough, the Manager must also contend with the feeling of worthlessness that accompanies employment at a corporation with whom he is made utterly redundant by the millions of MBAs waiting to replace him.

Who would you rather be, Crawford seems to ask.

Unfortunately for Crawford, there are two significant flaws in his argument.

Firstly, reward is subjective. Reward is personal. Reward can't be distilled into some mathematical formula that is then universally applied to human kind. A midlevel lawyer at a large firm is but one of many lawyers contributing to a dry and complex case; does he feel no satisfaction when that case is successfully prosecuted? A medical researcher is but one of thousands of men and women combining their efforts to cure Cancer; does she feel no satisfaction when her research is completed? Even Crawford's beleaguered, bumbling Manager; does he feel no satisfaction when his division does well? Yes, the Tradesman has access to the immediate reward of a job well done, but that does not diminish the delayed reward of the lawyer, the doctor, or even the Manager.

Einstein revolutionized our world with his theories on physics and the nature of the universe. Did he experience no sense of reward because it required years of toil for him to generate his ideas? He must have known that only a fraction of the population would be capable of understanding his theories; did that reduce his reward? Einstein never even generated a product for a customer. How is he not permanently locked out of Crawford's system of reward?

I am a writer, an occupation which forces me to work for long stretches of time on novels that offer no reward until they are completed and or published. This does not cheapen my life or diminish my happiness. I write because it is a skill at which I excel. Should I drop this most intellectual of pursuits and pick up engine repair because I'll only find enlightenment when my hands get dirty?

No.

Secondly, satisfaction in both work and life is powerfully driven by financial compensation and job security. A trade offers someone a skill they won't soon forget, but what if the market is suddenly flooded with people with precisely their kind of skill? What if a technological advancement makes obsolete the precious skill the Tradesman is dependent upon? And this assumes that the Tradesman in question is single... What if he has a family to support? Logically, anyone in this situation would prize stability over personal reward which is more likely to be offered up by a large corporation than lonely self-employment.

So not only is reward subjective, it is situational. You are presented with two Crawford-style managers, one has a child in and out of hospital and the other does not. Do these two managers have an equal level of job satisfaction? Of course not. Odds are, overwhelmingly so, that the manager with the sick child appreciates his job more than the unburdened manager because the burdened manager has obligations that supersede his own happiness. Now we've introduced prioritized reward where the importance of personal enlightenment is weighted based on the necessity of the person's job.

It's getting complicated, isn't it? Maybe just a little too complicated for Crawford's simple, polarized theory.

In conclusion, it is clear that Crawford is an intelligent and educated person who struggled to find meaning in a world that wasn't suited for him. When he found his happiness, he wrote about it, perhaps to help codify his thoughts on the issue, perhaps to offer encouragement to others who felt trapped in the same unrewarding cycle in which he found himself. Insofar as Shop Class as Soulcraft is a kind of self-help rumination on the nature of tradework, it is interesting. But if thoughtful curiosity was ever Crawford's aim, it was lost in his final draft, 256 pages of self-righteous theorizing that boils down to "work with hands good. Middle management baaaad." There are valid arguments for how the ascendance of the management class has upset the applecarts of both the American economy and the family unit,but these are ignored in favor of the author's own journey which leaves precious little room for any of the myriad factors that explain why people stay in jobs they do not like.

For Crawford's sake, I'm glad he is happy in his new life as a motorcycle repairman, but there's a suggestion here that there's no way any paper pusher can be as happy as Crawford is, that, for the betterment of ones mental health and America as a whole, they should join him in his world of dipsticks and stripped down engines. That is not only presumptuous, it's unkind.

If you'd like to read this book in spite of what I've said here, or even because of it, you can buy it here. And if you think I've been grossly unfair, feel free to come back and tell me about it, within reason of course.