I’m reading Head, Hand, Heart, a book about modern cultural division by the British journalist David Goodhart. In it, he argues that mainstream culture in the U.S. and U.K. has come to fetishize academic achievement above all else, and the vocations that actually provide the most utility are overlooked, diminished, and financially undervalued.
It’s a framework for understanding the current state of western politics, and the backlash to technocratic “elite” liberalism evidenced by Brexit and the Trump election. For me, it’s also a way of understanding the malaise and frustration I see among many of my peers.
According to Goodhart, “Head” people have received undue attention in recent decades, and a disproportionate amount of social currency. Head people attain prestige through careerism, landing high-status jobs in politics, major corporations, and popular media. “Hand” people are those with specific hard skills – think craftsmen, technicians, mechanics. “Heart” people are those who work in jobs related to caregiving, nursing, and similar fields.
My life followed the blueprint of a Head person fairly well. I went to college and then worked at Google for 6+ years. Big Tech companies are newer entrants to the pool of elite institutions, like big banks and consulting firms, that attract what Goodhart calls the “cognitive class.” But they’re also, of course, engineering companies and so attract Hand types in equal measure. It’s an interesting quirk that distinguishes them from prestigious firms that don’t require hard skills upon entry. As a result, a place like Google is home to both Ivy League valedictorians and technicians who maybe didn’t go to college at all.
I joined Google as someone who had excelled in Head but not Hand for most of my life. I was the epitome of the liberal arts major who, after 4 years of what felt like a lot of work, was left wondering how to leverage my newfound understanding of 20th century European political movements. I remember the doubts starting to creep in as I wanly submitted my 60th cover letter of the day to a $20k/year job on Idealist.org. My trajectory had always been verified “successful” by the institutional quantitative markers of SATs, GPAs, and report cards. Where had all that led? In practical terms, was it simply about acquiring a certain superficial certification before settling into a career as a social media marketing manager? How was this possible?
That feeling of dissonance reemerged after I started at Google and found myself in a peer group of designers and engineers. Many of them had not gone to a 4-year college. Many of them took non-traditional paths. Most of them were much better at their jobs than I was. I felt behind and ill-prepared. Goodhart takes care to point out in his book that technical trades are underpaid, but if that’s true then tech is definitely an exception. When I decided that I myself wanted to “try my hand” at design, and develop a specific skillset, I was initially frustrated. Here I was, at 24, working after hours to develop the skills necessary to do my job, attending classes on the weekend, reading textbooks on grid systems and color theory. This felt like school. But I had done school, already! And I had done it well, or so I thought. I was fortunate in that I was able to learn on the job. Many people in my situation end up shelling out $120,000 for a vocational master’s degree.
The debate over the value of a liberal arts education is very old. The liberal arts vs. hard skills debate has a history as long as education itself. But in this 21st century job market there are increasingly acute paradoxes inherent to how we think about academic success, personal fulfillment, and what the marketplace rewards. The end goal of an ambitious young student is to get into a good college and “go places.” What happens when this imagined place turns out to be a $2,000 swivel chair in the office of a startup with a mission of putting babies…on the blockchain?
My early-career disillusionment stemmed from the realization that there is an inverse relationship between utility and compensation that completely betrays the myth of “market dynamics.” The white collar jobs that smart, privileged university graduates attain are not particularly useful. Tech companies, desperate for “talent,” devour well-credentialed college grads like krill. Because growth is a success metric, they treat hiring as an end unto itself, thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. All of this is good news for well-schooled white collar job seekers (especially young ones). Meanwhile, the so-called “essential workers” of our society are paid horribly and command little respect in the social order. There seems to be a very weak relationship between what is needed and what is valued.
I’m in Iowa this week – 🌽 – and recently found myself in a long conversation with some Iowa St. professors about the state of the university. One of them was a charming old guy who had been in the Plant Sciences department since the early 60s. (As you might imagine, the Plant Sciences department at Iowa St. is relatively well-endowed.) The other professor was in the History department, and spent a lot of time bemoaning the budget cuts that were eliminating her departments and funding. Again, nothing new here. I remember these same conversations from when they decided to cut the theater program at Cornell while I was there. This history professor was decrying how they wanted to “turn the university back into Iowa Tech,” and “they’re letting in pretty much anyone now.” In other words, the cultural ideal of the university as a place of prestige and intellect was disintegrating. In my head, I was wondering if that’s so bad.
The Head, Hand, Heart framework at least gave me a new way of thinking about the distinctions between these various paths, and a new way to appreciate people who take an entirely different route to “success” in life. I don’t believe we’re genetically predisposed to one path or another. I don’t think we necessarily have to choose. But the status quo of devaluing manual labor breeds inequity on the collective level and dissatisfaction for the individual. We should rethink whose work we value, and why. Prestige is a shared vision. It can only be deconstructed collectively.