On craftsmanship and effective value, and, eventually, the death of the rural economy
(Warning: this entry actually came out a lot darker and more depressing than I expected. You might want to skip or delay reading if you can't face that sort of thing at the moment.)
A couple of days ago I mentioned the decreasing relative value of craftsmanship. I'll use woodwork as my primary example, but other fields face the same problem. Essentially, a skill that has traditionally been a valid way of making a living has become much less viable in the modern era because of the increasing quality and plummeting costs of mass production. The individual craftsperson has much harder time selling their craft pieces for an amount that compensates for the time and expense of their craft.
One such craftsman is my brother-in-law. He was a timberframer, building custom homes, until the housing market crashed in 2008. Now he still has a business doing small custom work-accent pieces, such as doors, and furniture-but his business is no longer viable as a sole source of income. He built a shop and fully equipped it with professional-level equipment before the crash, so he faces none of the expenses or debt that someone trying to enter the field would face. Even with those costs removed, he simply cannot price his work low enough to compete with mass-market furniture.
Other crafts face the same problem. Consider sewing. I planned to make a bed skirt, figuring I could make one cheaper than buying one. Not true: 5 yards of muslin from Joann costs about $7, and the fabric for the skirt itself-let's call it 4 yards (45" width) of one of the cheaper $7/yard decor fabrics-comes to $28. Assuming I can avoid shipping and tax, that's $35 bucks for materials, not counting thread. Alternatively, Amazon will drop one on my doorstep in two days for about $12, $20 if I want to go fancier. Clothing is even worse, exacerbated by the Chinese fast fashion industry largely operating without worker protection.
Even in writing, so much good writing now exists for free on the web. Any writer wishing to sell pieces now faces a huge body of free work available that simply did not exist twenty years ago.
In general, believe it or not, I think this is a good thing. I'm not here to rant about how people don't appreciate quality craftsmanship any more. Most people simply neither need nor derive any additional pleasure from a grain-matched, properly-joined, solid oak bookcase that will last 150 years versus a particle-board bookcase from Ikea that will last 20, provided it's not moved too often. Furthermore, even for people who would appreciate the crafted bookcase, many simply cannot afford one. I can build such a case, and have access to a shop, and yet I have two $50 Ikea bookcases. The better quality that even someone whose skills are as basic as mine can make simply is not enough to justify the additional expense right now. And overall, even people in the lowest strata of society have access to much nicer things than they did, say, 30 years ago. Quality-of-life improvements that even reach the poor are objectively awesome, but they come with a cost.
People who make things create value. They take raw materials and convert them into desirable goods. But the value they create must be high enough to cover their expenses and provide them with a living income, or they simply cannot sustain their craft. Mass production and automation are killing jobs, both for the unskilled labourer and the craftsperson, and those jobs aren't coming back. For the craftsperson in particular, their market increasingly centers on luxury and specialty goods, resulting in a smaller potential market, driving up costs, further reducing the potential market size, etc., and leading to a shrinking pool of skilled craftspeople and possibly loss of knowledge.
My brother-in-law primarily works as an insurance adjuster for home claims, leveraging his experience as a builder to evaluate damage. This is, essentially, a service job that cannot be easily shipped overseas. Even so, he recently bought a drone so he can evaluate roof damage without having to go up a ladder. That saves a lot of time and lowers chance of injury, meaning he can evaluate more claims, meaning the company needs fewer adjusters to cover the same workload. Automation again reduces the available jobs.
Frankly, I find this terrifying. Personally, as someone who likes to be independent and make things (lasting things, as opposed to writing software that's worthless in a year), I see a world in which such careers are vanishing. More generally, traditionally the rural economy has been driven by a combination of unskilled industry and local craft, and that will never again be viable, thanks to globalism and corporatism. Half of the country is watching their means of survival disintegrate, through no fault of their own, but no one has come up with any large-scale alternative. That's a recipe for cultural disaster, and Trump is only a relatively minor first symptom.
This kind of got away from my original point. I'm no longer sure what my original point was. Craft is dying, for good reason but it's still dying, and I don't know if that's fixable. We, both in general and in particular the poorer portions of society, have a ton more and nicer options for clothes, furniture, entertainment, etc. But the price is that craft is dying, and my money goes to Ikea rather than the local cabinetmaker. The rich get richer, and the poor have nicer stuff when they lose their jobs.
What are your thoughts? Because this scares the hell out of me, and I don't see any way for it to end well.