Matthew Crawford's 'The Case For World With Your Hands'

In Matthew Crawford’s, “The Case for World with Your Hands” he discusses the social role and intrinsic value of blue collar jobs verse white collar jobs. Crawford’s main argument is that blue collar work is not less intellectually challenging then white collar work, in fact he makes the point that manual jobs can be even more intellectually challenging and have more responsibility then the average desk job.
Crawford advocates for a change in this social rule that a blue color job is “less worthy” than a white collar job, sometimes that people only resort to out of lack of other options. He suggests instead for us to educate the youth in both abstract and hands in schools and encourage them to follow what gives them the sense of satisfaction

that Crawford was only about to find as a motorcycle mechanic. He reasoning for this is that to some people the abstract world of an office or another common white collar job tends to be unsatisfying and leaves the person with a lack sense of accomplishment in their work. Crawford supports this by telling of his own experience working in a cubical structured job, ”Working in a office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of a given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque, and responsibility diffuse, the experience of agency can be elusive” (368). Here Crawford expresses what he believes many young adults face once entering a work force they never had any real interest in, but persuade anyways because they believed they were not fulfilling their potential in life due to constant reminder of this from family and teachers growing up.
In this way Crawford uses emotional persuasion to support his argument, which overall turns to turns out successfully. Yes, Crawford did not single-handily change how society views blue collar work verse white collar work, but his essay starts as an invitation to open the discussion on why society has these views and if they should stand. And this is how a change in a social norm can happen. Crawford may not be the hurricane, but his essay serves as one of the first waves. The only major flaw in Crawford’s argument is his lack of logical support. While emotional persuasion is extremely effective for gaining support for an argument, logical support is needed to reinforce the argument from those who challenge it. The only logical support Crawford gives throughout the piece is mentioning the difference of income saying that he made more money working his manual job then he did when he started his white collar job. Even then he never gave truly factual support to his comparison. In this way, Crawford’s argument lack, though still in the overall perspective, Crawford’s argument serves as an excellent jumping off point for the discussion of blue collar verse white collar careers.