TL;DR: the section on vocation makes a lot of unsupported assertions and “it seems obvious that” applied to things which are not at all obvious.
[T]o think that we suffered a net loss of vocation and purpose, is either historical ignorance or blindness induced by romanticization of the past.
You need to put a number on this before I’m willing to accept that this is true. Two particular points you raise are definitely not changed from pre-industrial times: intellectual jobs are still rare and only available to a privileged few, scientists are still reliant on patronage (now routed through state bureaucracies rather than individual nobles, but still the same thing), and actual professional artists were and are such a small portion of the population that I don’t think you can generalize much from them.
Meanwhile, count up all of the jobs that today are in manufacturing, resource extraction, shipping, construction, retail, and childcare. To this number we should add the majority of white-collar email jobs, which I argue are not particularly fulfilling—people may not hate working in HR or as an administrative assistant, but I doubt that most of these people feel that it’s a positive vocation. Is the number very different from the number of people who were peasants beforehand? Are we sure that this represents progress rather than lateral movement?
More to the point, there are some unexamined assumptions made here about what counts as “vocation”, and what kinds of occupations are likely to supply it.
Anecdotally, the farmers and ranchers I know have a very strong sense of vocation, and high job satisfaction all around (modulo the fact that they are often financially pressed). The article, however, seems to treat agriculture as automatically non-vocational.
As alluded to above, white-collar work often seems to lack the sense of vocation and pride of work. The article above wants to lump them in with “intellectual jobs” and assumes that they are automatically preferable to alternatives.
A notable exception to the previous is IT, but we note that programmers are best considered a modern example of skilled craftsmen.
Generally, the article wants to conflate vocation with choice, which I believe is false.
A better way of drawing the distinction is between “bullshit” and “non-bullshit” jobs, and one might then observe that modernity has a much higher proportion of bullshit jobs than pre-modernity. But expounding that requires a full post of its own.
Here’s some quantification, from Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”. See full chart below.
I did not say or mean that agricultural is non-vocational. But I think it is not the ideal vocation for 50+% of the workforce.
Vocation is not the same as choice, but when you have choice, you are more likely to find your vocation. That is the point.
Vocation is not the same as choice, but when you have choice, you are more likely to find your vocation. That is the point.
I think we have little idea how “vocation” works. It could be like marriage where cases of arranged marriage don’t reduce the likelihood that someone develops love.
I think my strongest disagreement here is that the category of “disagreeable” does not cleave reality at the joints, and that the category “non-routine cognitive” contains a lot of work which is not, in fact, intellectually or spiritually fulfilling in the way implied.
Is that disagreement enough to change the (predicted) truth value of Jason’s claim though?
I’ll admit to being biased here. I live in a rapidly-developing middle-income country; the difference in opportunity between my generation and my parents is nearly as vast as between 1910 and 2009 in Gordon’s statistics. To me, while I agree wholeheartedly that Gordon’s categorization doesn’t cleave reality at the same joints Jason’s does, it’s still ~irrelevant in that it doesn’t change my mind on the directionality of Jason’s claim.
TL;DR: the section on vocation makes a lot of unsupported assertions and “it seems obvious that” applied to things which are not at all obvious.
You need to put a number on this before I’m willing to accept that this is true. Two particular points you raise are definitely not changed from pre-industrial times: intellectual jobs are still rare and only available to a privileged few, scientists are still reliant on patronage (now routed through state bureaucracies rather than individual nobles, but still the same thing), and actual professional artists were and are such a small portion of the population that I don’t think you can generalize much from them.
Meanwhile, count up all of the jobs that today are in manufacturing, resource extraction, shipping, construction, retail, and childcare. To this number we should add the majority of white-collar email jobs, which I argue are not particularly fulfilling—people may not hate working in HR or as an administrative assistant, but I doubt that most of these people feel that it’s a positive vocation. Is the number very different from the number of people who were peasants beforehand? Are we sure that this represents progress rather than lateral movement?
More to the point, there are some unexamined assumptions made here about what counts as “vocation”, and what kinds of occupations are likely to supply it.
Anecdotally, the farmers and ranchers I know have a very strong sense of vocation, and high job satisfaction all around (modulo the fact that they are often financially pressed). The article, however, seems to treat agriculture as automatically non-vocational.
As alluded to above, white-collar work often seems to lack the sense of vocation and pride of work. The article above wants to lump them in with “intellectual jobs” and assumes that they are automatically preferable to alternatives.
A notable exception to the previous is IT, but we note that programmers are best considered a modern example of skilled craftsmen.
Generally, the article wants to conflate vocation with choice, which I believe is false.
A better way of drawing the distinction is between “bullshit” and “non-bullshit” jobs, and one might then observe that modernity has a much higher proportion of bullshit jobs than pre-modernity. But expounding that requires a full post of its own.
Here’s some quantification, from Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”. See full chart below.
I did not say or mean that agricultural is non-vocational. But I think it is not the ideal vocation for 50+% of the workforce.
Vocation is not the same as choice, but when you have choice, you are more likely to find your vocation. That is the point.
I think we have little idea how “vocation” works. It could be like marriage where cases of arranged marriage don’t reduce the likelihood that someone develops love.
I think my strongest disagreement here is that the category of “disagreeable” does not cleave reality at the joints, and that the category “non-routine cognitive” contains a lot of work which is not, in fact, intellectually or spiritually fulfilling in the way implied.
Is that disagreement enough to change the (predicted) truth value of Jason’s claim though?
I’ll admit to being biased here. I live in a rapidly-developing middle-income country; the difference in opportunity between my generation and my parents is nearly as vast as between 1910 and 2009 in Gordon’s statistics. To me, while I agree wholeheartedly that Gordon’s categorization doesn’t cleave reality at the same joints Jason’s does, it’s still ~irrelevant in that it doesn’t change my mind on the directionality of Jason’s claim.