Counter-Currents
1,190 words
David Goodhart
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020
David Goodhart is an upper-class British political centrist who arrived at his views from the Left. He works at a UK think tank called Policy Exchange. He’s the author that first articulated the concept of “Somewheres” vs. “Anywheres.” He has just published a book that expands upon the Somewheres-Anywheres divide and looks at the changing nature of work in the post-industrial economy plus the populist revolts of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
There are two factors to this that are best explained upfront.
Factor #1: De-industrialization has robbed a great many parts of Britain and the United States of an economic base that gives less-educated people decent jobs where they can afford to raise a family. Factor #2: At the same time, a means of sorting and capturing intelligent people to attend an ever-increasing number of universities robs de-industrialized towns of their intelligent young.
This process has created a large cognitive elite in both the US and UK. This cognitive elite has an “Anywhere” worldview and they are detached from many of their fellow countrymen. The “Anywheres” are also living in an echo-chamber. They aren’t really cosmopolitan or particularly broad thinkers. (Goodhart doesn’t say this, but belief in “civil rights” shuts down hard thinking, and “civil rights” is the official religion of England and America.)
These elite work “head” jobs and look down upon those who carry out “hand” or “heart” work — i.e. mechanics or nurses. Meanwhile, the proliferation of universities has made degrees less valuable while being required for jobs that don’t really need university-level certifications. Money and time are wasted on schooling by many people.
The solution is to encourage and support the hand and heart work that ordinary people can do. This includes allowing women to prioritize child-rearing and family care over “head” work at some firm. All of this must occur in a situation where parts of the economy are winner-takes-all. In other words, due to globalization, the dozen or so exceptional artists, actors, or businessmen capture the entire market. There is also the increasing job-stealing threat of artificial intelligence.
An Anywhere fighting for his Somewheres?
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The book hit close to home. While I’d like to believe that I am a fighter for the Somewheres and small factory towns, the truth is I’m an Anywhere expat from a Rust Belt state. The social circle of my youth is the same way. The men in my ROTC detachment would have fit in neatly in any Union Army regiment at the Hornet’s Nest during the Battle of Shiloh, but with one exception, all are now living in a McMansion in a high-income area far from the Middle West doing “head” work. We were also officers, so our combat tours were a shade more comfortable than most. None are in industry, although most of us came from families that worked in industry at some point. Thus, everything in my review should be taken from the perspective of an Anywhere hoping he is helping out the Somewheres.
On the broad level, Goodhart takes an entire book to say that people in the skilled trades are overlooked politically. Additionally, there is a job shortage in those trades, especially now that Brexit is closing off Eastern European workers and Trump has clamped down on immigration.
Goodhart encourages apprenticeships, high school shop classes, and trade schools. If you don’t like sitting in class but want to make money, get in the “hand” business. I’d like to add that citizens of all types should encourage in-sourcing jobs and protectionist economic policies.
Vocation
The book raises the question of what a young man should do for a vocation. It is important to note that many jobs in the “head” department aren’t jobs where a person is free to think on their own. These jobs might not pay much either. Goodhart shows many examples of how builders and mechanics are out-earning office workers.
If I can give some advice on what a man should do for a vocation, it would be to first get a solid read on your IQ. If you have an IQ anywhere above 120 you can write your own ticket if you work hard enough. No matter what your IQ is, steer clear from any “friends” that you might have that smoke weed and go around looking for trouble. Those types of people seem cool in junior high, but become less cool as everyone gets older.
The three top professions are medicine, the law, and the clergy. If you feel called to do any of these jobs, don’t pass them up. As far as enlisting, I must state upfront that there are many ways to serve your country outside of the infantry. Some further advice on this can be found here.
Next, if you can swing it, get advice on what to do from an older male relative. I got very good advice from an uncle about what to do when I was helping him on a construction job on the western prairie. While the route to career success is by twisting staircase and anything can happen, for most people, the choices made in their twenties affect much of their later life.
I personally don’t think that artificial intelligence is going to be the job thief that it is predicted to be. I deeply suspect that most companies that produce “AI software” are really in the gimmick business. The state of AI development is a long way from producing a brigade of Commander Datas. However, the field is a good one to get involved in. Managing AI is going to be the new job and increased demand for anyone that knows anything about it. If you want to get involved in that career, start by reading the works of John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes. They are the pioneers of the field.
No matter head, heart, or hand, you really need to make money. Once you get it, invest it well. Don’t complain about railroad freight rates when you can buy stock in Union Pacific.
This book is written from a centrist position, but it takes into account what white advocates like F. Roger Devlin have been saying for at least 10 years. It also quotes books such as The Bell Curve and Bowling Alone that were taken very seriously in journals like American Renaissance and The Occidental Quarterly. The neo-liberal consensus is crumbling.
Ultimately, Paul’s advice to the Colossians still has merit: “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”
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15 comments
“They aren’t really cosmopolitan or particularly broad thinkers. ”
This is exactly my experience among the educated elite. They are clearly high IQ, in a genetic sense, and they are well-educated for some value of ‘educated.’
But they tend to be extremely narrow-minded on all social and political issues and have clearly never contemplated anything aside from knowing what the ‘correct’ opinion is.
In New York, it was a long running joke, repeated in TV shows and in real life, about the Manhattanites that “have never been north of 14th street.” They didn’t add, but could have, “except for my college trip to Israel.”
I would recommend medical school, but be wary of tuition ballooning and student loans. That said, if you feel you have talent don’t shy away from DO schools or carribean schools—they get good residencies! I have a friend who is a doctor and he says that yes, medicine is getting harder but it’s still better than anything in the business sector. They also get a lot of vacation. Nurses do well in these ways too. Nurse anesthetists make six figures! Healthcare is very stable in the face of trends in the economy, like Covid.
Law is good, but there are too many lawyers. They are degree mills. Don’t attempt if you have a DUI or any sort of criminal record. You need to go to a top ten law school if you do. Nevertheless it would be useful to have dissident rightists with legal expertise! Just don’t feel guaranteed a lot of money in law. 40% of people with law degrees don’t practice law.
Engineering is good I think, and a good entry ramp into either profession. Chemical engineering can make a lot of money. It’s a degree people will respect.
That said, I don’t think iq matters much for whites. I feel we are all in a narrow band, allowing for some very dim and exceptionally bright, but that most of what defines us is hard work and how we define ourselves personally. Except for the higher echelons of the arts and sciences, I think we can each of us do whatever we choose, if we work hard enough.
I agree that medicine is good and law is only good if you go to a top school, but I would add that connections can help a mediocre law degree a lot.
I disagree that engineering is good. It was ten years ago, but then everybody majored in engineering, and now it’s overcrowded and not expected to grow much, and the sheep are still stampeding toward that slaughter. IT, on the other hand, is a great field. It depends on the job but some are growing a lot. Systems analyst is a great job. Software developer is good too. They highly likely to be Asian, which means the market is sucking them into the US because it needs their labor. They are also very unlikely to be black, which suggests it’s a good career for IQ 120+ people.
Yeah, but if people have connections, they already know it, so they probably don’t need advice. Worse is the subset who think they are connected and find out not! Always have your own back up plan.
Engineering is a good degree, even if you don’t practice it bc people will take it seriously, whatever you want to do. I think part of that is A) relative difficulty (if you were hiring someone would you pick an engineering major or political science major? I would pick the engineer even for a writing job.) then B) standardized curriculum, in that it’s easy to compare people from the same school because they have roughly taken the same courses by the same profs. One of the things I find so unfair about college is you are trying to compare people from vastly different schools who basically tailor their own curriculum. There’s luck and gaming the system involved. So many things.
I like this topic, obviously. I want there to be more comments.
“You need to go to a top 10 law school.” Really? You really believe that statement? I have a friend who went to maybe a Top 20 – absolutely NOT top 10 – and he makes millions of dollars a year. Do you know how many lawyers there are? And how few can go to a space-limited Top 10 law school? Do you think all the other law school grads don’t do law?
I know a guy (Yale undergrad), who went to not even a top 100 law school (for personal reasons related to his son’s custody issues), and now has his own practice, with a suite of lawyers working for him, and who makes high six figures. I have another friend, who went to barely a Top 100 law school, who is a managing partner of a mid-sized firm, making maybe several hundred thou per yr. I have another friend who did go to a Top 5 law school (Michigan), and he does not practice, preferring business.
I think the number of lawyers should be massively restricted on social policy grounds. A truly free society only needs a small number of them – and the more there are, the more they agitate for yet more laws (which equal “full employment acts for lawyers”, but are wasteful of capital and resources, including time and energy).
You are right, there are many lawyers from third tier law schools who do very well, but what I mean is that such people will be relying on their own talents to get there. There are rock stars from every law school, but they are the minority. There are actually rankings that show the average starting salary for each law school and it decays exponentially.
I always understood I had no special talents and had to get whatever I had through degrees and gaming the tests.
Throughout the Western world, liberal capitalists use the cry of ‘skills shortages’ to justify mass immigration. At the same time, in Australia, the system for training apprentices has been degraded by decades of budget cuts.
It’s cheaper and easier to import semi-skilled labour than to train our own. While ever this logic of the bottom line drives state policy, the situation will be dire.
If the state will not fulfil its role in training future generations, perhaps there’s a space for the reemergence of trade guilds?
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This is really an important issue. I hope C-C loops back to it.
It is in the working.
A huge scam of our time is the theory that YOU can’t find a job because YOU don’t have enough training or degree. So you spend money and get the more training/degree – and still cannot find a job.
Why? not because you are untrained/un-degreed, but because there are tons of people ALREADY out there that have exactly the training/degree you now have. More people than jobs.
Since the Oil Age began, and the Information Age followed, there has been a worldwide declining per-capita demand for human labor, both head and hand. Simply put, more people than jobs.
And when the Left feeds and vaccinates the brown masses, this imbalance is made worse.
When there are more people than jobs, unemployment and lowering wages happen. Supply and demand.
When there are more jobs than people, full employment and rising wages happen.
How can the world get to “more jobs than people”?
Not “make more jobs”. Only economies create real , durable jobs, at living wage.
The solution is global demographic regulation, to bring human density into equilibrium with economic demand.
This could be a real case for applied eugenics. Fewer people, better people, worldwide.
The Left can’t offer this solution, we can.
Good points. You need to be actively thinking about what job you are preparing for and where you will be in x number of years all during your edumication. The schools will gladly sell you pointless degrees, eg in west Nilotic studies, and the cabals controlling upper academics, esp the higher one goes on the us news and world report, are certainly not your friends. They will not actively attack in most cases, unless you make yourself a lightening rod with rightist politics or anti Zionism, but they will let you run off a cliff for sure. Academics in particular seems to be a cartel controlled by such and people closely intermarried with them, regardless of talent level. Be wary what you are told, and check the facts for yourself. One friend was in some humanities PhD program, and the profs would confide in him of the fellow students: “there are not going to be jobs for any of these fools! You’re smart though, you’ll get a job.” Now with a PhD he’s working some job that I’m not even sure requires a college degree lol!
It also quotes books such as The Bell Curve
It basically cribs The Bell Curve, if this review is any good indication.
“It is important to note that many jobs in the “head” department aren’t jobs where a person is free to think on their own. These jobs might not pay much either. Goodhart shows many examples of how builders and mechanics are out-earning office workers.”
Socrates thought for himself. He was a stone mason, though I doubt he out-earned too many higher status people because his wife was always mad at him. Likewise, most mechanics don’t earn much. And who said all or even most office workers were smart?
“Head” jobs require you to learn an intellectual “techne” or craft. People who specialize in them are the proverbial “Anywheres” Goodhart writes of. Socrates went around Athens making fools of such people, so they made him drink hemlock. If you don’t master a craft, you’ll be a dead stone mason, so I recommend a craft. At least then you can abscond somewhere before they put you on trial..unless you want to, you know, go down in history as a great mind and founder of Wester Civilization.
The crafts with the most job growth are in IT. Check out tech jobs on the BLS to see which ones are in demand most. As a general rule, the higher the percentage of women in the field, the more like a woman you will have to act. The lower the percentage, the less like one you’ll have to act. You must either act like a woman or do jobs they don’t like.
By the way, about 10% of key figures in the pro-white movement are women. That’s about the same percentage as are engineers. We are mostly doing a job women don’t want to do, so that is where most readers should go, and IT is still high percentage male. Engineering is too but is also overcrowded.
I wanted to add that the author of the book is wrong that intelligence is overewarded. In the US it correlates with individual income by 0.30 and with GDP per capita across nations by 0.68. This means it is inherently sacrificial and under-rewarded. General factor personality correlates with income and and job performance at about the same rate, so it is a wash. However, ESTJs in MBTI, who are typically high on only general factor personality traits of extroversion (E) and conscientious (J), are the second least likely to be gifted and the highest earning while INTPs are the most likely to be gifted and the lowest earning, so while general factor personality isn’t overcompensated, being ESTJ is–in fact, to a ridiculous degree. People are also overpaid for experience when in their mid 40s. People are likely overpaid because of connections, particularly in fields where demand for the jobs outpaces supply. Funny, that this book author can splash a bunch of words on paper and be ignorant of basic correlations that would prove him wrong. I will say, however, that Goodhart’s intelligence was overrewarded with this book deal.
Essentially, he is stating that people are underrewarded for trait agreeableness in healthcare, which is true, and introversion in mechanical work, which is true, but then he scapegoats intelligence instead of fingering the real culprits which are extroversion, conscientious, ESTJ, senior level experience, and connections. Smart people are not to blame. Old, polite, connected people are.
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