Without Zen inThe Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Sorry, Robert Persig)

Still, like Persig's novel, it is an inquiry into values.

"When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. 'I was always tired,' he writes, 'and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all.' He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. . . . ."

"Princeton economist Alan Blinder [argues that] the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of." More here.