Learned helplessness

This morning's New York Times Business section presents us with this essay about the diminishing skills of the average American handyman.

“In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,” says Michael Hout, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “People who work with their hands,” he went on, “are doing things today that we call service jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like.” 

That’s one explanation for the decline in traditional craftsmanship. Lack of interest is another. The big money is in fields like finance. Starting in the 1980s, skill in finance grew in stature, and, as depicted in the news media and the movies, became a more appealing source of income.

By last year, Wall Street traders, bankers and those who deal in real estate generated 21 percent of the national income, double their share in the 1950s. And Warren E. Buffett, the amiable financier, became a homespun folk hero, without the tools and overalls. 

“Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house,” says Richard T. Curtin, director of the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. “They know about computers, of course, but they don’t know how to build them.”

All of this is quite true. The article, which I recommend, looks at all manner of contributing factors to this phenomenon from the decline of the manufacturing economy, to the disappearance of vocational education.

But one factor the essay doesn't touch on happens to be the subject of a separate story just a few pages over.  How can we expect American consumers to care about acquiring the skills necessary to maintain and repair the electronics they own when the manufacturer expressly discourages them from doing so? 

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff. 

It's worth mentioning that this sort of thing happens on the software side as well. The new internet being imposed on us by Hollywood and the telecom industry is becoming a much more hands-off instrument than ever before where users are expected to become consumers rather than producers and sharers of content.  This trend has all sorts of interesting consequences but chief among them could be a new kind of learned helplessness with regard to online publishing.  And so Americans could lose yet another powerful tool, a powerful free speech tool, in the same way so many of us have lost the use of our hammers and screwdrivers.