Book: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.

I was between 3 and 4 stars for this review but decided to stick with 3. The book has some interesting insights and the whole motorcycle thing resonates a lot with me, but in general, I found myself bored by the pacing and abstraction.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • Things have a hood under the hood nowadays (cars). When you open the hood, you don’t see that many of the parts anymore
  • Economists would argue about taking the time to make what can be bought
  • “I feel proud when I take my wife to a local restaurant and we receive special treatment” because he restored the Cook’s bike
  • “It feels good when I go to the local riders meeting and some of them are using my shop’s T-shirt
  • Many jobs are being offshored. Architects may be offshored but not builders
  • Separate knowledge workers from manual workers is not a plan to have an efficient process but to reduce the price of manual workers. It may or may not extra
  • According to Taylor: all brain work should be removed from the shop and concentrated on a planning department
  • When Henry Ford introduced the assembly link, many workers abandoned the company. They were hiring 900+ to keep 100
  • Ford doubled the salary of their workers to keep the assembly line staff. This movement made workers work harder to keep their high paying jobs and which boosted the whole process, increasing the number of cars made by a factor of 3
  • This movement destroyed the enjoyment of work and changed the wage to compensation
  • Marketers were called consumption engineers in the early decades of the 20th century
  • Changing “wage” to “compensation”, so workers can satisfy themselves with consumerism
  • Consumption, no less than production, has to be researched, creating an increase in desire
  • “Be frugal and free” was then changed by a spending and debt habits
  • Fix your own things. Be the master of one’s own stuff
  • Fix one’s own car is not to use time, but to have a different experience of time, car, and self
  • The dipstick was removed from the new Mercedes not because we don’t have to care about oil anymore. They have taken control from you in favor of UX
  • Comparison between the stereo and the guitar. A guitar needs a skilled human to play it while a stereo makes every music instantly available for everyone. A guitar is a thing and a stereo is a device. A thing requires practice, while a device invites consumption.
  • Life is what you make it. Start making it your own.
  • The word “Idiots” comes from the greek “idiotis”
  • The curious man is always a fornicator. — saint Augustine
  • The manager’s career depends entirely on the quality of the work relationships because the criteria of evaluation are ambitious. Managers have to spend a good part of the day managing what people think of them.
  • “When I had a master’s degree, I felt I belong to a certain order of society” Note: I never had this feeling, I feel good about that.
  • For students, grading becomes more important for society (and social purposes) than for pedagogical ones
  • The teacher has to question the student to show him his current state of knowledge and then you can recruit his pride for the love of learning
  • Comparison of office workers with bureaucrats of the Soviet Union
  • Leasure can become play, and then be absorbed into work in the forms of long hours in the office
  • Currently, workers have to identify with the corporate culture and have a big “buying” to the mission. The division between work life and private life has eroded.
  • It’s the office rather than the building site that seen the speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulations. The author believes that when there’s no concrete task, which can be viewed by all, there’s no secure base for social relations
  • The way we know a hammer is not by looking at it but by taking and using it. We Master things by practice
  • Chess players recognize the position of the pieces by experience, he saw that before
  • People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right
  • Any work that can scale up may be depersonalized and will be vulnerable to degradation
  • Real knowledge arise from confrontation with real things
  • When the author saw the group of electricians in India, the feeling of being a foreigner among foreigners vanished. He saw them doing the same things he does at work. — 💭 It makes me think if it would be the same for remote workers like me.
  • Only a fellow journeyman can say “nicely done!” for some details of the craftsmanship