Head, Hand, Heart
RWL #217
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! It’s chilly but at least the snow has stopped. My wife and I took the dog for a walk through campus this morning and I was struck by the release of steam from this vent, so I paused to snap it as part of my Project 365.
So Week One of the spring semester is done - only 13 weeks to go - but who’s counting? We’ve also started the placement process for the juniors - I already have two placed - which is pretty great given we aren’t even out of January yet, and many of them are already interviewing. It’s always exciting to see them engage with the real world. I wish I had had this sort of opportunity when I was in college, which is part of why I really enjoy this process. I can help kids have the experience I wish I could have had.
Speaking of kids, my own eldest kid just celebrated her birthday this past week, turning 27. It’s a remarkable thing to see your kids grow up and make their way in the world. She’s been working as an engineer in the defense industry since she graduated from college and she’s now studying computer science and who knows where that will take her - but it’s definitely a place that I can’t follow. I like quant stuff, I lived it and I teach it, but her quant kung fu is much stronger than mine. It’s pretty cool to see.
As a parent, what is interesting is to see just how different your kids are, despite coming from the same genetic source and despite growing up in the same household. Daughter #2, whom students of mine from the early 20-teens will remember as we lived through her teen years, studied art in college and then decided that wasn’t what she wanted to do professionally, and so now she is a sous chef in a fancy Italian restaurant. Smart like her sister, but in a different way. She prefers to work with her hands and be in a bustling and busy environment, constantly working under pressure. If you’ve been an RWL reader for a while you know I rather like cooking, and it’s great fun to go sit in her restaurant and watch her man-handle giant pots of risotto or make huge quantities of marsala, pouring two bottles at a time and then sparking the whole thing into a wash of blue flame. When I watch her, I know I could not do what she does. I can serve a handful of people a nice dinner - I could never serve hundreds of people dinner each night, night after night.
Finally, daughter #3 is on a completely different journey. She will be graduating this spring (God willing and the creek don’t rise) with a degree in psychology and plans to pursue a career in social services, maybe eventually as a therapist. During her college career, she worked at a Community Action Partnership helping with programs like the food pantry for the homeless, and then at Easter Seals working with severely autistic kids, and finally volunteering at a center for at-risk teens. She loves her work and loves the kids she works with. I care about the kids I work with, so we have that in common. But she works with kids who really need her, and she has a well of compassion that exceeds anything I could claim. Whereas her eldest sister works with her head, and her middle sister works with her hands, my youngest works with her heart. Head, hand, heart - all in the same family.
Aside from the fact that I am fabulously proud of my girls, I’m mentioning them because I just finished reading David Goodhart’s book Head, Hand, Heart, and as I was reading it, it occurred to me how well my daughters represented the taxonomy at the center of the book. Goodhart uses the trichotomy of head, hand, and heart to divide up the kinds of labor in society. He argues there are head jobs that primarily rely on cognitive work, such as engineering, computer programming, accounting, etc. Then there are jobs that are primarily skilled manipulation of stuff - the realm of the hand. These include the skilled trades such as cooking, carpentry, plumbing, stone masonry, but also surgery. Finally, there are the jobs of the heart - anything that is primarily about caring. These jobs include nursing, preschool/elementary school teacher, community organizer, and social worker. The trichotomy makes some sense, especially when you allow, as Goodhart does, that most jobs actually include all three types of labor, and he classifies the jobs based on the dominant form of labor. All of the skilled trades have a hefty cognitive component. A carpenter or plumber is constantly solving problems, and fitting their prior learning to unique situations. Being a good craftsman includes having empathy with one’s clients in order to understand what they really need (heart). A surgeon is primarily manipulating patients’ bodies, but also engages in caring and obviously a deep understanding of science and technology. Likewise, modern nursing employs extensive high-tech interventions that require extensive training, and requires physical manipulation of patients and the environment.
In the book, Goodhart makes the argument that since the mid-20th century, Western society (he is British and uses lots of examples from England) has demoted hand in favor of head. Most of human history was dominated by hand labor, and most men were engaged in some form of this work. Professionalization of heart labor came with industrialization as more women left the home, but heart labor was and continues to receive low recognition. Post-WWII, we saw an explosion in the number of people getting post-secondary degrees (going to college) as government programs, such as the GI Bill in the US, made that possible and encouraged it. We have also seen decreasing opportunities for people to pursue non-head careers that provide a good salary and importantly an honorable spot in society’s hierarchy. Goodhart argues this has led, at least in part, to the sense of alienation by large swaths of society because not everyone has an inclination toward or natural talent for cognitive work. Cognitive ability makes someone good at solving symbolic puzzles and seeing patterns, but does not give a person experience to solve puzzles of the physical world (how to fix a car, or repair a leaky faucet), nor does it make them kind or wise. Having spent much of the last 15 years in academia, I can attest that some of the cognitively smartest people I know, who are objectively some of the smartest people in the world, can be pretty clueless on these other dimensions.
With the aging of society, we have a growing need for more people in the caring professions, especially in long-term care. One can enter these professions at all levels of skill, but many of them are not well-paid, and they are physically and emotionally demanding if you do them right. There are also shortages of skilled labor of all sorts in the trades all across the country. As a person trained as a free-market economist, I am puzzled by the fact that the market has not adjusted the incentives such that people find their way to the hand and/or heart roles on their own. Part of the reason continues to be government policy distortions. Most communities no longer make vocational training readily available in high school. Further, we make access to higher education too inexpensive, and it gives people a false sense of the value of what they are getting. Specifically, loans to go to college are too easy to get. The fact that we have a student debt crisis is proof that college is not the right path for everyone. If college yielded what it promised, people would not be struggling to pay back their loans.
In addition to government interventions that distort costs, there is a social issue. Hand and heart work does not get the same social valorization as head work does. Working in a bank gets more social status than being a plumber in most circles, even if most plumbers make more money than most bankers and are more satisfied with their work to boot.
Daughter #2, who makes a great salary as a sous chef and gets lauded by management, is doing great. Just a couple of years out of college, she will probably be a head chef in relatively short order and eventually a restaurant manager if she sticks with it. And yet it took a while for my wife and I, both head workers, to accept that she was going into a trade. We had thought after she earned her art degree that she would go into graphic design, which in some sense is also a kind of hand work, but would have been in an office at a computer, something we are comfortable with. What she had to make clear to us was that she needed work that was embodied in the real world. She couldn’t imagine being in a cube staring at a computer all day. Daughter #3 is the same way. When she comes home from her work at the teen center, she regales us with stories about the kids she is working with, whom she clearly loves. They both have college degrees (well, almost in Daughter #3’s case), which, as good head-parents, we made sure they completed, but I’m not sure either of them really needed to spend four years in an institution of higher learning to prepare for their lives. Apprenticeships would probably have been more appropriate for them. And if they decided later that they wanted to do something in the head space, making it easy for people to go back as adults would be a better public policy.
As a professor at a state university, I see the full range of kids. Some of the kids I work with are clearly destined to be at the highest levels of cognitive performance. Some will fill the great swath of middle management. And many probably would have been better off both economically and in terms of life satisfaction, had they had access to a ladder directly into a career either in the hand or heart fields. We have to have a public policy that acknowledges diversity of ability and interest, and doesn’t push young people into fields where they will be neither productive nor happy.
OK - so that’s it for me. I recommend the book. If you’d like to get a taste before you buy it, check out his interview with Andrew Sullivan here:
Do you find the head, hand, heart taxonomy useful in thinking about careers? Do you think we have over-valorized head at the expense of hand and heart? Let me know in the comments!
I’ll be back Wednesday with links. As usual, willing good for all of you!
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso