Within four years of the release of his first solo album in 2020, Fred has become one of the most listened-to musicians in the world. He sells out multiple nights at massive stadiums in every city he visits and has headlined the largest music festival in the United States.

Even before this successful solo career started, Fred had already become a prolific producer working with Ellie Goulding, Charlie XCX, Stormzy, Ed Sheeran and others; producing a third of the number-one singles in the UK in 2019; and being the youngest producer ever to win Producer of the Year at the BRIT Awards at 26. The only way to explain how Fred managed to achieve all of this so fast seems to be that he is good at music (something that becomes clear the moment you listen to his compositions). What exactly does that mean? And, how does someone get good at a skill as multifaceted as something like “music”?

The answer in Fred's case was a blend of traditional classroom training and apprenticeship, a pattern we have seen before with the techniques employed by the Bauhaus. Fred's case, though, is instructive, not only because it shows how apprenticeship is a powerful way to teach skills, but because it has lessons more broadly for what it means to become capable in fields that, like music, are complex and amorphous. The implications are significant for both art and science.

The Training of Genius

Fred grew up playing classical music, and there are stories of him recording his own pieces on an aunt's tape recorder when he was as young as eight years old. He attended Marlborough College in Wiltshire, a prestigious boarding school with a history of educating great talent, including the musicians Nick Drake and Chris de Burgh, the creator of “The Lady in Red.” There, he received a top-tier formal education in classical music, and he would often skip his other classes to spend more time practicing in the music rooms. As a result, by the time he was partway through his teenage years, he had as strong a foundation in formal musical training as you could find anywhere. 

It was at this point that he experienced a quirk of fate that transformed his trajectory.

One day, while with his parents in Notting Hill, a family friend invited him to join an a cappella group rehearsal at a neighbor's house. This neighbor was Brian Eno.

Brian Eno is an essential node in the history of modern music. He is credited as the inventor of the genre of "ambient" music starting with his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. He was also a pioneer of "generative" music, well before the current wave of generative AI;  he would use samples and musical snippets algorithmically to “generate” new sounds and create novel combinations. And he developed Bloom, the first generative music app for iPhone, three months after the app store went live.

Beyond these experiments with novel forms Eno played an important role in popular music: mentoring John Cale, the founder of the Velvet Underground; producing tracks for the Talking Heads; and collaborating closely with David Bowie and U2.

And while his own music may not have reached millions, he got there another way by creating the Windows 95 startup sound.

In the early 2000s, Eno hosted weekly music-making sessions at his home and Fred quickly became a fixture. In this setting, he was exposed, consciously or not, to the kind of training plan that has been the standard for apprenticeships for hundreds of years.

At first, he would simply help out with the events, cleaning up, getting tea, arranging song sheets, making sure that everything was going smoothly. Over time, though, he started to participate more and more in the music creation sessions, and he enjoyed privileged access to Eno's mentorship. He would pitch Eno ideas to test out new approaches and received feedback from the master: “I’d then not sleep for six nights making 100 song sketches. ... I’d come back the next week and try to make it look really casual.”2

The most important training moment came when Fred was nearing the end of school and Eno asked him to help produce two collaboration albums he was working on. Help is very different from instruction. Rather than learning in a protected environment, you work in the real world to create something that effectively solves real problems but—in the case of an apprenticeship—with the oversight of someone who has developed taste and technique and can correct you with granular feedback as you make mistakes. Fred seized the opportunity and dropped out of school to work with Eno full time. 

As a result, before he was 20 years old, Fred had received an in-depth education in music theory, practiced all manner of music creation in an environment with rich feedback, and had also seen from Eno exactly what it looked like to work with a team and create an album in the real world.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that Fred simply acquired a set of explicit skills from Eno and his teachers and has since been applying them formulaically. It is true that there are echoes of Eno's influence in Fred's music. Many of Fred's songs use building drones that evoke a strong sense of place, a technique that Eno pioneered. Fred also has a habit of drawing inspiration from sounds that wouldn't traditionally be considered musical, using samples of his friends and the world around him—another Eno quirk.

But at the same time, Fred and Eno are fundamentally different. Eno, while influential, has focussed his efforts on experimental music, not on generating attention or filling seats. Fred makes music for mass audiences, is an adept stadium rockstar, and knows how to take advantage of viral marketing. And, musically, Eno has said he has learned a lot from his student, including Fred’s use of "non-linear" loops within his music. It seems that Fred is just good at music. 

It's possible that Fred has some genetic predisposition to musical talent as a result of some wild fluke but it appears more likely that he somehow learned it from the environments he was brought up in. You can see similar stories in other fields. Picasso, for example, was trained from a very young age by his father, a full-time commercial painter, in how to paint classical pieces, so that by the time he was a young teenager, he was already winning prestigious competitions and painting pieces that to this day hold up with the finest classical works. Yet within a decade, he had traversed multiple other styles of painting and played a determining role in the new style of Cubism, transforming visual art forever.

It seems unlikely that the later work would ever have been possible without his early training. Yet you cannot find in the training itself an articulation of the skills needed to produce this new kind of art. Fred is just the most recent example of an old pattern, of early training by a master leading to competent practitioners who consistently break new ground. The pattern though isn’t simply limited to artists; it is just as relevant to scientists. 

Science as Art

We generally think of science as proceeding algorithmically from the “scientific method.” There is a hypothesis within some field; a scientist runs a set of experiments to test that hypothesis; the results of the experiments are reviewed; and, finally, it becomes clear whether that hypothesis has some validity in describing the world. In our folk idea, this is a procedure that continues step by step. We run through the given hypotheses, and over time our knowledge of the world advances in a piecemeal fashion. The truth, however, is that this description glosses over many of the fundamental uncertainties that characterize how science is done. 

The uncertainties start with how we choose which hypotheses to investigate. The range of possible hypotheses is at least as large as all potential ideas about how the world works. Even if we had vast computational ability and an army of robots dedicated to running through hypotheses it would never be possible to test every one. This is why new protein folding models such as AlphaFold promise to be such a revolution within the biological sciences. By improving our ability to predict the final shape of a specific protein, they help us to decrease the potential hypothesis space associated with what a protein might look like and how it might operate. But such approaches can only ever narrow the potential hypotheses to be selected from. They do not solve the problem of how the scientist will choose—the exercise of their judgment.

In a relatively bounded space like drug discovery—one of the areas that makes use of predictions about protein folding—even with these techniques, selecting the hypothesis always seems to have some element of inarticulable judgment, randomness, or even unknowability baked in. This factor becomes even more important though when we consider hypotheses that lie entirely outside a current scientific paradigm, and so lack a search space within which to narrow the potential hypotheses. How would we describe the process by which Einstein successfully chose the hypothesis of relativity?

How this works in practice becomes clear when looking at how science proceeds. If it were possible to conduct science using an algorithmic process that could be stated and shared, then you would expect the results that mattered in science to be relatively evenly distributed amongst the scientific community3. 

It turns out though that there are some people who are just good at science. Some individual scientists have careers with multiple breakthroughs and highly impactful ideas sometimes across multiple fields, whereas others work diligently in one field for a long time and never create any results that are "interesting" or important to the overall scientific enterprise. So, how do people become good at science?

It turns out that, like with Fred again..'s journey being good at science is a teachable skill. 

Nobel Apprenticeship Networks

As of January 2024, of the 727 people who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics, 696 (96%) come from a single academic family tree4— in other words, 96% of Nobel prize winners can trace back their formal research training relationships (for example, between PhD student and their PhD advisor) to a previous Nobel winner. In fact, 92% of winners can trace that lineage back to a single 17th-century Swiss scientist, Emmanuel Stupanus.  

This is an astounding fact. If you believe that the Nobel Prize is a good indicator of importance within the scientific enterprise, then the implication is that the ability to do science in the most meaningful way has some kind of hereditary quality requiring a particular relationship between teachers and students. And there are some runs in particular that show this in stark relief.

The chemist Adolf Von Baeyer, for example, despite winning the Nobel Prize for creating the first synthetic dye, likely left his greatest legacy, not through his research, but through his lineage of students. In total, he has had 107 Nobel Prize-winning academic descendants. The image below shows 13 that occurred within just four “generations.” Consider a few of these:

Otto Warburg studied under one of Adolf Von Baeyer's students Emil Fisher. In his later career he laid the groundwork for quantifying respiration, identified key features of cancer cell metabolism and finished mapping the operation of a key enzyme in the respiration cycle. One of Warburg's students was Hans Krebs. Following his time working with Warburg in Berlin, Krebs headed to Sheffield University where he continued to study cell respiration, eventually mapping the Citric Acid Cycle or Krebs cycle, the essential final step in the release of energy to the cell in the form of ATP. On another branch, Severo Ochoa studied with Warburg's student Otto Meyerhof. After his training, Ochoa set up residence at NYU and in 1955 he isolated the polynucleotide phosphorylase which enabled him to synthesize RNA kicking off the genetic revolution.

As this particular set of Nobel Prize winners makes clear, something strange is going on. There were some overlaps in areas of research and technique, and maybe with Warburg and Krebs you could argue that there was some transfer of specific knowledge due to their shared interest in respiration. But this cannot account for the full range of breakthroughs that happened. Quantifying respiration and synthesizing dye are so different that they even won Nobel Prizes in different domains5.

It's always possible that some of this linked success is also simply a kind of nepotism. Nobel Prize winners favor their students winning Nobel Prizes. But if we think there is any validity to the Nobel Prize in identifying what counts as truly meaningful science, then this could hardly explain a result of 96% of winners belonging to a single family tree.

It seems the simplest explanation is that there is some kind of skill, or set of skills, that makes one a good scientist, and that these skills are somehow distinct from an articulated description of how to do science. Adolf Baeyer knew how to do good science and he passed it on to his students, who in turn passed it on to the next generation.

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Conclusion

Fred is really good at music. He acquired his skill from a unique kind of training that blended formal instruction with attentive mentorship from an excellent master. And it appears that this kind of training to transfer complex tacit knowledge is common to more fields than just music. The implications of this are serious. 

First, it means that we need to take training from skilled practitioners much more seriously. As individuals and as societies, we should be much more aggressive about seeking out the best in various fields and then finding ways to scale their knowledge through apprenticeships. If we want to have a whole generation of Fred again..s (and we should), then we need to first learn from the Brian Enos of our society.

Second, an implication of this almost hereditary educational transfer of “good science” or “good music” is that our society's ability to act competently in these complex domains is much more precarious than we might believe. It may be the case that the tacit knowledge that allows one to be excellent exists in limited and highly concentrated lineages. If these lines of transmission are broken for even one generation the knowledge lost could be incredibly hard to replace. We should put much more emphasis on preserving and supporting these.

Takeaways

• As seen when looking at Bauhaus, a training program that blends together traditional classroom techniques and apprenticeship-style mentoring can be extremely effective for promoting skilled work.

• For complex and amorphous work where there is no algorithm for producing new results, like music or science, it appears it is possible to train people to be “good musicians” or “good scientists” in the abstract. One of the essential features of this training is apprenticeship-style relationships.

• Effectiveness may be very highly concentrated, with specific lineages accounting for an outsized proportion of our society's competence, as seen with the academic tree of Nobel Prize winners. We should pay careful attention to when this is the case so we can safeguard and continue to expand our abilities.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore for reading early versions of this essay and providing excellent edits, comments, and improvements.

Since then things have improved, I have managed to participate in wiring lights, landscaping gardens, and even removing and reaffixing a door. I am still not a person that could describe themselves as particularly resourceful but I can think seriously about doing a DIY project before dismissing it. This journey required a strong dose of trial and error but the fundamental reason I have been able to do this is YouTube videos. Without YouTube as a resource most of these projects could never even have been attempted.

This experience, though perhaps a little extreme in the distribution, is not out-of-place today. Concrete data on DIY activity in the US is hard to come by. However, it is clear that over the last seventy years the institutions that teach the foundational skills of DIY, everything from woodworking and car repair to gardening and sewing, have been in terminal decline. It also appears from survey data and anecdotal experience, although the evidence is not one-sided, that young people feel less capable than previous generations. Nonetheless, at the same time, according to the most concrete data available, the sale of home improvement equipment, interest in DIY projects has never been greater.

What accounts for this mix of trends?

Over the last hundred years the mediums we traditionally used to teach manual skills - apprenticeships and schooling - have atrophied. First as a result of progressive formalisation, and then by active reprioritization. However, over the same time period, YouTube and similar services, have given people access to knowledge about how to complete complex DIY tasks in ways that would have been impossible in any previous medium. This has meant that even as formal education mechanisms and direct intergenerational skill transfer have declined it has been compensated for by a new ecosystem of informal teachers.

However, the impact of this transformation is uneven, with both promising advancements and meaningful drawbacks. Although YouTube is a powerful new avenue to learn mechanical skills, it still falls short of covering the essential elements that a comprehensive training program could provide. There are some experiments happening to expand the scope of novel DIY education to account for this with things like Makerspaces and craft kits. But, it is still early days, and even with these products we are unable to address the most pressing issue. The reason we let the education of manual skills degrade is because we have come to value this kind of labour less. If we think that the wisdom of our hands is important and not something idly tossed aside then we should look much more closely at how our society values and trains these skills.

The History of Handiness

A just-so story of the early history of manual skills might go something like this: At first, most groups of people (tribes, family units, clans etc.) were fully responsible for producing all the goods that the group needed: homes, furniture, clothing etc. There was perhaps some minor specialization within each group and irregular trade further afield but for the most part everyone ‘did it themselves’. As the economy developed, and different groups became interconnected, specialization accelerated and specific jobs associated with particular crafts began to develop.

This specialization was associated with technology improvements and meant more sophisticated skills were required to create end products. Under such an economic model craftsmen needed to find ways to train the next generation to expand and continue their business lines. As we've seen, one of the first mediums that developed for this training, as an augmentation to standard intergenerational transfer, was apprenticeships.

Over time though, as specialization continued and industrialized society developed, training for these skills became still more formalized. Shop classes were created to begin training all school-goers from a young age, and vocational colleges were setup to offer the final stage of formal education that could allow someone to take on a craftsmanship role. These institutions lacked the holistic skill transfer of apprenticeships and intergenerational training but they still ensured that there was a broad based understanding of manual skills across the population.

In the last 50 years though, even these institutions have started to erode. Following WW2 there was an increased focus on four year colleges as the pinnacle of education with special emphasis on having returning servicemen enter college as part of the G.I. Bill. These efforts continued up to the present with other legislation like the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and have led to a prioritization of formal and testable skills like maths and reading at the expense of shop class and similar education in manual competence.

Why is this a problem? There are existential reasons that a lack of manual competence can be damaging to a society. DIY work has a unique ability to put us in touch with the world, to gain a visceral sense for what it takes to create something good, and to be humbled by that experience. "In our attempts to craft useful beauty, what we are also crafting is ourselves"1.

But, even at a functional level a loss of these skills brings with it serious risks. Under a classic free market economic perspective the kind of specialization is not a major issue. The market forces will naturally lead people to specialize and then trade between them will solve for any relative inability to receive a particular good. Certainly this has held true in the abstract. Despite a lack of formal education for manual skills we experience greater material abundance now then at any point in the past. The issue though is that this abundance has come at the cost of fragility.

Any person, city, or country, requires a large set of capabilities across different domains to be able to deal with the variety of challenges that can emerge in a complex world. You can see an example of this in your own body. If another person were to attack you on the street you could use your arms and legs to fend off the attack or at least run away. But, if instead you were to catch a cold then you would rely not on your arms and legs but on your immune system to fight off the virus. Without both of these requisite capabilities you would be too weak to face the wide range of challenges that the world presents.

In cybernetics a system that displays this kind of complex set of capabilities is said to have multiscale requisitive variety In the exact same way our body needs multiscale requisitve variety to deal with all the problems that could assault it, our society needs multiscale requisite variety to be able to deal with any problems that could come up. It has been pointed out now many times, but this was made clear to everyone by the supply chain break downs that happened during COVID.

In a clean economic model issues like this would be naturally corrected for by the market by diverting people from one area of production to another. But, skill sets are not fungible, and once lost they are not easily replaced:

"An art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost. There are hundred of examples of this to which the process of mechanization is continuously adding new ones. These losses are usually irretrievable. It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts - equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics - to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago."

Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi

One way you can understand this is by imagining what would happen if there was a sudden boom in house construction but a severe shortage of good framers. The classical economic model would say that this situation would lead to many people switching into framing from other careers and the problem would be solved in short order. But learning complex skills, especially ones which require a lot of tacit knowledge, is not so simple. It may be possible for a framer in New York to write down the steps needed to install a new door frame but is this sufficient for someone in Miami to successfully complete their own installation? The system may eventually correct, but in the meantime there will be real economic hardships.

Luckily however, it appears that we may have a saving grace from new technologies that have made this issue slightly less pressing.

Digression: What does it look like when millions of people suddenly need a desk but you can't buy a desk?

During the COVID-19 pandemic there was a boom in home improvement projects. As people were confined to their homes and unable to travel or work elsewhere there was, over a very short period of time, both an intense interest in improving home space as well as time to actually make the improvements. Overnight there was a significant rise in searches for building products and an almost 15% jump in the sales of home improvements goods

Especially because they were stuck at home, there was no way for people to access traditional mediums to learn how to complete these projects. So, they turned to YouTube.

Searches for How To videos of every kind grew rapidly with a particular jump for videos associated with DIY projects. And through these videos, as well as some trial and error, millions of people began to muddle through what it means to develop manual skills.

How YouTube creates skilled craftsmen

Without trying to make too fine a distinction, there are roughly two types of YouTube DIY videos.

The first is the classic "How to" video that explains a specific task. Recently, I was looking into what it would take to switch the swing of a door in a new apartment. The current swing reduces the room's usable space and I wanted to see how hard it would be to flip it around. To do this I browsed a variety of "How to" videos like this one:

In a "How to" video the steps needed to complete a task are laid out with an accompanying video and commentary. This can be a super slick production like this example from B&Q, a home improvement retailer in the UK. Or, it can be a shaky handcam from a craftsman documenting a recent job. Usually the former will get you the basic information faster but the latter is the better source of education, even if it takes a bit more effort to digest. Either way, depending on the craft in question, it is rare to find a single video that has all the exact steps you will need to follow. Often you will have to combine different videos, and include some improvisation. But, through this collection there is almost always enough information to have a good starting position with a project.

The second kind of video I would describe as the "DIY influencer". These are individuals that regularly show their projects over time. These may follow a specific theme or even have detailed instructions on how a thing is created but there is no formal path through the videos that are posted and they are generally too specific to be of use in completing a specific job. The content remains educational but it focuses on projects that represent their 'brands'.

Because the content is more diffuse people will watch it less because they want to complete a particular project and more because they are generally interested in the craft on display. By watching a single influencer repeatedly across time you can learn how to be a good at a craft in a similar way to how an apprentice might watch a master craftsman as they go about their day and pick up skills by observation and imitation.

Of course these two categories are not completely distinct. DIY Influencers will often create How To videos and a How To video channel will regularly throw in something that looks more like a DIY Influencer post. But, it is these two kinds of education working in concert that makes YouTube so useful for picking up skills. By having explainer videos that can go into detail on particular tasks combined with a broader look at the ways that a top craftsman operates someone can receive a pretty holistic education in a set of DIY skills. Certainly, enough to build themselves a desk or cook a passable spicy chili garlic noodles.

But even with this combination YouTube does not present a complete solution to teaching manual skills. A YouTube video remains a disembodied artifact. You may be able to learn all the steps needed but when it comes time to pick up tools and materials or find a friend to help you with a project you may find that the situation 'on the ground' lacks the things you need to succeed.

Moreover, although a video is a much richer medium then a set of written instructions, it is still a kind of formal education and there is significant tacit knowledge lost in the process of formalisation. A DIY Influencer in New York may now be able to show a video from multiple angles explaining how to frame a door. But for someone in Miami it's almost certain that, at least in their first couple installations, they will still be surprised at the ways they need to hold the wood to be able to set it up correctly or how humidity affects the wood over time. These and any other number of things are lost on a video but would have been clear if they had learned the skills in person and in situ.

Where do we go from here?

YouTube has given people otherwise bereft of formal methods a way to learn foundational manual skills. It's hard to judge for sure, but this seems to have provided the DIY movement a new lease on life and helped to ensure a base level of manual competence across a new generation. However, there is much more that could be done. There are two major gaps in the medium itself that are starting to be addressed today: access to tools and materials, and in-person teaching.

Buying tools and materials can be overwhelming - as I experienced the first time I went to pick up lumber. The things you need may not be readily accessible and there is often just as much skill required to shop well as there is in the other parts of a job.

One way to get around this is following through a similar path to the one taken by the meal kit companies pre-configuring set packages of tools and materials that can rapidly prepare someone to start working. One example of this today is Glory Allan who prepare DIY sewing kits with everything someone needs - apart from the sewing machine - to get started on their first project.

To solve the transfer of tacit knowledge the most tried and true mechanism would be a return to in-person education. Scaling the apprenticeship model is great, as is expanding access to classroom education but we need more options for casual DIY hobbyists as well. Makerspaces like Toronto Crafts, which provides in-person classes on basic wood working skills, offer one promising avenue for this kind of learning.

Ultimately though we need to change what we care about. Although these new tools for learning manual skills are wonderful they can not, on their own, address the change in values that has occurred. If we want our societies to develop the variety of manual skills that are required to navigate our complex world then we must once again have people care enough to want to pick them up. During the pandemic a lot of people suddenly cared about these skills out of necessity. If we want them to keep caring now that consumer supply chains are again operating robustly we need to find more ways to integrate DIY practices into daily life. One of the most immediate paths we have to do this is by returning to a world where manual skills are once more presented as a prestigious and broadly available part of childhood education.

Not only would this help solve our society’s need for multiscale requisite variety but it may also help satisfy our souls. Learning how to use our hands to make things in the real world may go a long way to fixing some of the anxieties and the lack of attention that seem to plague our day to day.

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Acknowledgements

This essay is an experiment in a slightly more informal argument based on my observations of YouTube and skill acquisition. I also benefitted a lot from conversations with Glory Allan founder Andre Chin though all my conclusions are my own. Any feedback would be welcome.

Beck At It

Why learn craft in the age of automation?

I spent the pandemic lockdown trying to get good at something I was intrinsically horrible at: painting. It was a way to escape the soul-sucking screens of my laptop, phone, and Netflix…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 4 comments · Becky Isjwara

One question that it prompted: Is it possible to develop taste without learning a craft?

Of course, taste and physical ability with a craft vary to some degree independently but it’s also clear that knowing how to make music makes one a much better music critic. What do you think?

France had an early start in the race to develop a home-grown nuclear industry. But this advantage didn’t easily convert into rapid advances in nuclear power production. As the network of scientists and polytechniciens tried to scale their model reactors into a functioning nuclear power system, they encountered new challenges, but also new opportunities. The way that these issues were resolved would end up laying the foundations for the country's success in scaling the system in the 1980s and ‘90s. 

As Gabrielle Hecht documented in her book The Radiance of France, the French nuclear industry was shaped by the political and economic struggles of two competing institutions: the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA) and Électricité de France. Both groups were highly involved in the development of nuclear power, but their aims and organizational structures were orthogonal. And, their initial forced collaboration led to competition and compromises that were counterproductive for the industry. 

The CEA was set up in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle as one of his first major acts of reconstruction. The post-war government saw technological progress as an antidote to geopolitical decline and a way to reclaim France's “civilizing” mission. The CEA was developed as part of this vision to lead the primary efforts of the French state in developing nuclear capabilities. It would report directly to the prime minister’s office, to ensure independence from other bureaucratic and political concerns and to keep the institution  “on mission.”

However, from the beginning, the nature of that mission was not perfectly clear. The CEA had multiple mandates: "ensuring French grandeur, the significance of independent energy sources for national autonomy, and the primacy of nuclear expertise." In practice, this meant that while they were meant to develop nuclear technology on all fronts, they were most responsible for France’s nuclear weapons program. 

At first, this goal was implicit. At the beginning of the Cold War France outwardly pursued a policy of peaceful nuclear energy development. However, with the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the development of nuclear weapons became an official aim for the group. And not long after, in 1960, the first French nuclear bomb was detonated, making it the fourth country—after the US, Russia, and the UK—to test an independently developed nuclear weapon.

The Électricité de France (EDF) was formed shortly after the CEA in 1946 for more prosaic reasons. After the war, the electricity system in France was highly fragmented with over 1000 local utilities. It was also suffering from serious degradation as a result of the conflict and it was unclear how it would find the resources to effectively rebuild the country’s industrial base. To address this, the government undertook a process of nationalizing and centralizing the various entities that had previously been responsible for electricity generation and operations in France to "unify the production, transmission and distribution of electricity in a single enormous utility.” EDF was the result. The final group reported to both the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry, and was ultimately seen as one of their tools for economic development. 

In other words, while the CEA was created to achieve a broader cultural dream of French “grandeur” through a particular national technological ambition—nuclear weapons—the EDF was created simply to produce the most energy at the lowest cost. 

Because of their overlapping areas of responsibility—the development of nuclear technology, and the management of the electrical grid that any nuclear power would be connected to—the CEA and the EDF worked closely together. However, their competing aims quickly came into conflict. 

While the CEA focussed on technical nuclear capabilities with an implicit goal of creating a nuclear weapons program, the EDF was centered on more practical concerns around developing an "economically viable nuclear energy program." These disagreements played out in competing designs for reactors:  the EDF looked to prioritize the maximum energy production at the lowest possible cost, while the CEA focussed on the creation of plutonium as a precursor to nuclear weapons and as a way to rapidly increase technical know-how amongst French scientists.

The conflict was eventually resolved in the 1970s, when France moved to base the future development of the nuclear system on the American-designed Light Water Reactors (LWR) as the primary form of nuclear power in the country. This design prioritized electricity generation at the expense of plutonium creation and favored the institutional structure and priorities of the EDF. There was significant pushback at the time, but once this decision was made, the CEA was sidelined to focussing primarily on nuclear weapons production, leaving the EDF free to chart French nuclear policy moving forward.

The EDFs Competitive Advantage

Two factors helped the EDF to emerge victorious and proved instrumental in the success of France’s nuclear power in the latter half of the 1900s and early 2000s: the cultivation of a new capability in economic modeling, and an institutional imperative to maintain ownership over the full technical designs for new reactors.

Because of the EDF’s mandate to maximize electricity generation at the lowest possible cost, economic considerations were always paramount in the institution’s decision-making process. During the 1960s, as computers became increasingly available and economic modeling was in vogue, this emphasis on economics led them to develop a new department: the Services de Etudes, Économiques Générales (SEEG), run by Marcel Boiteux. This group was responsible for developing economic forecasts to predict the price of electricity under varying conditions, the cost of creating new power plants, and everything in between. Their abilities in this domain quickly became some of the best in the country, and the calculations that the SEEG put out would become the primary facts used by both the EDF and the CEA in arguing for their respective policy positions. 

This positioning gave the EDF significant leverage when making the economic arguments for adopting the LWR systems. It also meant that once they were more in control of the system’s future, the EDF had an ability (or at least a perceived ability) to make accurate projections and thereby ensure the “profitability” of their system. With such an ability, they could drive policy decision-making effectively in favor of additional nuclear power capacity. 

The second factor in the EDF’s success was an institutional imperative to maintain control over the design and management of their reactors. Early on, the CEA had adopted a “policy of champions,” according to which  the CEA would identify French contractors as potential national “champions.” They would then give them authority over developing the various parts of the nuclear reactor facilities, usually under a lead project management firm that was similarly selected. The belief was that this approach was important for the mandate of “ensuring French grandeur.” These contractors would be able to develop technical know-how and become global leaders in their respective industries. In theory, this also fit with the CEA’s vision of a more autarkic industry that could be of greater value for military purposes.

By contrast, the EDF believed that to achieve their targets for electricity generation and cost management, they would need to develop the skills to create and manage nuclear power facilities in-house. Under the “policy of champions,” the various contractors would naturally attempt to bid up their various parts of the construction. There would also be a constant incentive to obfuscate the real work needed to develop the plants, as one-sided knowledge would leave more negotiating power in the hands of the contractors. As the EDF was ultimately responsible for maintaining cost and efficiency, they wanted to avoid this situation and ensure that they had the know-how and technical expertise to build efficiently themselves, with private industry acting simply as suppliers. 

This in-housing of technical and managerial competence allowed the EDF to both mount more compelling arguments in favor of the LWR system and ensure that such a system, once selected, could be effectively operated, expanded, and even exported by the French state. It also meant that the EDF was positioned well to continue to innovate and expand their production of the LWR system, even though the designs and licensing had originally come from the US. As the LWR system gained in global prominence, this meant that France could continue to build out its nuclear power system to take advantage of a larger potential market for their products based on a shared platform. Ironically, pursuing a policy that explicitly aimed to develop French champions backfired, and it was the policy aimed at producing the best possible solution that allowed such a champion to emerge.

By the mid 1970s, the EDF had emerged as a competent and well-organized steward of France’s nuclear power system. In the last part of this series next week, we will look at the final ingredient that led to that system’s continued growth through the 1970s and ‘80s, precisely as other countries were scaling back their nuclear programs: the role of national identity.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore for reviewing an earlier version this essay and providing edits and comments.

This article could not have been written without Gabrielle Hecht’s book The Radiance of France. It is an incredible case study not only of how nuclear power developed in France between 1945 and the early 1970s but more importantly a powerful account of how ideology, politics, and technology are always interleaved in the deployment of any industrial concern.

Introduction

In the early 1900s France produced cutting-edge research on radiation and was home to some of the earliest glimpses of nuclear technology. Professor Henri Becquerel had identified that radiation issued from uranium, without an external factor, in 1896. Following his lead, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered additional elements that give off radiation, including polonium and radium, and coined the term “radioactivity.” Eventually their son-in-law, Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie, proved that it was possible to create a radioactive chain reaction with uranium atoms, filing a patent for his discovery on May 4th, 1939.

Barely three months, later Hitler invaded Poland, and by May 1940, German tanks had crossed the border into France. The war destroyed the French scientific institutional apparatus and, out of fear that information would get back to the Nazis, the French scientific community was cut off from the efforts of the Manhattan Project. After the Allies won, France was devastated. As the country entered the second half of the 1900s, it was demoralized. Its statehood, let alone its technical prowess, was challenged. Nowhere was this more obvious than in their non-existent nuclear program. As Gabrielle Hecht puts it in The Radiance of France::

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki highlighted the enormous technological gulf between France and the United States. The consequences of the war for the French empire remained unclear, but prospects already looked grim in Indochina. The embarrassed, destitute nation resigned itself to accepting American economic aid in the slow and painful task of reconstruction. To use Robert Frank's phrase, France entered the second half of the twentieth century "haunted by its decline."

Yet by the 1960s, France had developed one of the most advanced nuclear programs in Europe with a fully operational, independent, military capability, and multiple working nuclear power stations for civilian use. They were even starting to export the technology to other nations. Today, they are the undisputed leaders in nuclear power generation. In fact, as a result of the country’s fleet of nuclear power plants, they have become the world's largest exporter of electricity. How did this happen?

There was no single policy or overriding quirk of French history that ensured such a triumphant outcome. Instead, it was the combination of a robust education system, privileged access to a novel tradition of knowledge, the emergence of a powerful state institution with pro-nuclear incentives, and a new set of political approaches. Alongside these factors was also the creation of a national identity that led to a set of non-standard decisions when face-to-face with a unique political opportunity.

No country’s approach to developing a capable nuclear industry, or any other industrial outcome, could be modeled entirely on France’s success. But, there are many lessons that can be learned from their story.

The Story of French Nuclear Development

People

When Germany invaded France, many scientists fled to Britain and the US, bringing with them everything they knew about the nascent field of nuclear technology. However, because of the new Vichy regime, and a less-than-positive relationship with the leader of the French resistance, Charles de Gaulle, the allies were reluctant to share secrets in the other direction. This reluctance was eventually formalized as part of the Quebec Agreement, by which Britain and the U.S. agreed to work together on the Manhattan Project and excluded other foreign nationals from participation.

Canada was not formally included, despite the agreements having been signed in Quebec. Nonetheless, thanks to its close relationship with both countries and a well-developed university system, they ended up becoming a base for much of the shared research. This unique role also meant that when several French associated scientists who could work on the nuclear effort were denied positions in U.S, and British labs, they were (somewhat begrudgingly) allowed to go work with the Canadians at the Montreal Lab.

In the end, the research done in Montreal proved central to the efforts of the Manhattan Project. And, in September 1945, a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the lab produced the Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP)—the first operational nuclear reactor outside the U.S.

Later, many of the scientists from this project would return to France to form the foundation for the French nuclear program. In fact, one scientist in this group, Lew Kowarski, was put in charge of the efforts to create the first French reactor. He designed the reactor (Zoé) to mimic the designs used for ZEEP. And, by leveraging his knowledge from that project, his team was able to create a working reactor in 1947.

This kind of direct transmission of knowledge was essential to the creation of the nuclear industry everywhere. Soon after the war,  Russia developed its own approach to nuclear power through a mix of espionage and independent efforts. Then, over the course of the Cold War, Russia and the U.S. allied bloc exported Nuclear Power technology to a host of countries as part of their respective attempts to build economic and political influence. However, by being the only foreign nation fortunate enough to have a set of scientists who had directly participated in the Manhattan project, France was able to get a significant head start.

Another significant factor that enabled France’s success in developing a nuclear industry was its educational system. France’s most competent scientists and technologists were all students of the Ecole Polytechnique, an elite university just outside Paris aimed at training the next generation of national engineers. The school had two unique aspects.

First, unlike most other country’s elite universities, the program was explicitly aimed at developing engineers that would work for the state. Graduated polytechniciens received significantly more opportunities to work on large-scale national projects and received very high status. Generally, students at less-well considered universities, who garnered the humble title of “civil engineer,” would go work in private industry.

The prestige associated with the school came in part from the high standards of training. But what was more important was a belief that the school cultivated an ideology of public service and leadership that was deemed morally and socially superior. Only the polytechniciens were considered fit to work for the glory of the nation. Such an ideological backing would later become essential to the development of the institutions that would scale up France’s nuclear power production.

Second, alongside technical courses and scientific endeavours, the Polytechnique emphasized an education in general management and leadership. Upon graduating, the polytechniciens were meant to be able, not only to innovate in scientific domains, but to effectively organize large-scale projects and interact with a wide variety of technical pursuits beyond their specialties. As Jean Bertholt put it during the interwar period:

The general aim of the Ecole Polytechnique is to educate leaders [chefs] for every branch of national activity that requires extensive scientific knowledge coupled with an extensive general culture [culture générale étendue]. By means of a strong moral, physical, and intellectual education, students are prepared to become leaders in the corps, services, and companies which need them.

As we have seen before with the Bauhaus, this generalist approach to training students can reap significant rewards, preparing them to engage all the resources at their disposal to achieve a particular aim.

Polytechniciens dominated the French nuclear industry from the very beginning, leading the country’s efforts to set up both civil and military applications of all kinds. In this process, both their ideological devotion to state building and their training in generalist leadership were put to good use.

This foundation of knowledge and elite corps of engineers dedicated to the state meant that, among the nations that were not part of the Manhattan Project, France took an early lead in developing a home-grown nuclear power industry. However their eventual ascendence was not assured. As we will see in Part 2, despite the high-minded utilitarian ideology of the polytechniciens, the industry was not without its own forms of competition and personal intrigue. These would present challenges for the French project, but eventually opportunities as well.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore for reviewing an earlier version this essay and providing edits and comments.

This article could not have been written without Gabrielle Hecht’s book The Radiance of France. It is an incredible case study not only of how nuclear power developed in France between 1945 and the early 1970s but more importantly a powerful account of how ideology, politics, and technology are always interleaved in the deployment of any industrial concern.

Construction Physics

What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?

For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call a…

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2 years ago · 77 likes · 16 comments · Brian Potter

The whole thing is full of gems. For me though one of the most interesting parts was how the cultural direction that was set for the labs. Thomas Vail, who setup the unit promoted an ethos of continual investment to ensure technical innovation and long-term growth, something he had picked up while working for the US Post Office.

This paragraph sums up his impact:

”While Vail retired in 1919 and died the following year, he made sure to leave the company in the hands of leadership that believed in his credo of universal service, and that constant innovation was the path to get there. Vail conceived of the telephone network as ‘an ever-living organism’ which required ‘unceasing effort, continually improving and upbuilding.’ Thanks to Vail’s efforts, it became an article of faith within AT&T that technical innovation would always be needed, and would be valuable even if it took many years to bear fruit.”

Later in the piece Brian Potter also adds that:

”John Pierce, the force behind Bell Labs’ communication satellites, argued that ‘it's very important for laboratories to have some responsibility and some general goal’: labs operate best when there are people on the work that you’re doing. Pierce argues that Bell Labs and the other great labs of the 20th century ‘were really needed, and they rose to the need.’ Not only did this clearly articulated, strongly felt purpose provide a powerful motivation, but it created a ‘problem-rich environment,’ a clear set of problems that can act as a guiding star.”

So, one thought and a set of questions.

A government has a monopoly on the state. As such, the kinds of universal vision that AT&T had: “a telephone in every home”, are, by necessity, at the heart of every major government institution: ‘a railway to every corner of the country‘, ‘a system of justice available to every citizen‘ etc. This means that these institutions are ripe for the kind of programs that were setup at Bell Labs.

But, somewhere along the way, in most countries these institutions seem to lose the sense that to achieve their mandates requires “unceasing effort, continually improving and upbuilding“ (whether that be scientific, technological, economic or other).

I think one of the key things that drives this is that as an institution makes progress towards its goals it ends up lowering its standards. Every home gets connected to the telephone system, a rail line is built across the country, and the courts are open to all citizens. Suddenly the reasoning that drove the institution to innovate originally is no longer there. The need to push on boundaries and solve hard problems disappears and standards are naturally lowered to simply maintaining the status quo (with assumptions about long run degredation).

Is this actually the case for what happens? And if so, is there a way to raise standards again?

Can you simply create an ever broader vision of what your institution needs to achieve? Maybe, once you have a railway across the country you can now aim at connecting every city? Or, is there some way that this scope inflation will also run its course? Instead of transforming the vision of the entire enterprise, can you raise standards in a local way within specific departments? Or, does that cut you off from generating a “problem-rich environment“?

If you have any thoughts please drop a comment below. I would love to know what you think.

The Continuing Influence of the Bauhaus

By exposing students to practical skills in a multiplicity of arts, and offering heuristics that could apply across disciplines, the Bauhaus program taught a kind of universal creativity, representing not simply a course in architecture but the first education in “design” as a general discipline. The teachers and graduating students of the Bauhaus were able not only to create compelling buildings, but to produce work across media. This potential became clear after the school's dissolution, when its alumni dispersed across Europe and the U.S., bringing with them what they had learned.

The influence of this diaspora is everywhere: lamps, tables, chairs, watches, and cars, to name a few.

One story perfectly captures how this pervading influence came to be. Herbert Bayer, who had been the school's lead for printing and advertising, arrived in New York in 1938, where he met Walter Paepcke, a Colorado industrialist. Paepcke was beginning to invest in the Colorado town of Aspen to convert it into a skiing hub and global cultural destination. He convinced Bayer to move to the city to help lead his artistic projects there.

In Aspen, Bayer became the lead architect, artistic director, and principal designer for the Aspen Institute, one of the most important and enduring think tanks of the last century; the Aspen Music Festival, one of the top classical music festivals in the U.S.; and the International Design Conference in Aspen. The last of these institutions, although now closed, likely had the most lasting effects. In 1981, a young Steve Jobs, in the early years of leading Apple, visited the conference and discovered the principles of the Bauhaus, especially their theories on the total work of art and standardisation. A few years later, speaking at the IDCA in a building that Bayer had designed, Jobs had this to say:

By 1986 we're going to ship more computers than automobiles in this country. ... One of the reasons I'm here is that I need your help. If you look at computers they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or off designing buildings but hardly any of them are designing computers. But we're going to sell 10 million computers in 1986 whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great ... and people are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do their automobiles today. We have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves. We need help, we really really need your help.

Bauhaus’s influence on Apple would later became even more ingrained when Jobs promoted Jony Ive, an admirer of the school, to lead the company’s industrial design in the 1990s. 

Ive brought the Bauhaus focus on simplicity and functionality to Apple design. And, that design has gone on to influence every computing device in the world. It’s fair to say, that your very experience of reading this essay is shaped by the Bauhaus.

Nonetheless, the most important and lasting impact, has been on our buildings. In 1958, Mies van Der Rohe completed the Seagram Building in New York—a building so influential, it’s hard to imagine what New York, or any other major city in the world, would look like today without it. The design choices that the Seagram Building emphasized—the main building set back from a plaza, a double-height main floor, and complete standardization of the facade from the top of the first floor to the mechanical area—became the default for skyscrapers for decades after it was completed. It continues to influence every new large building in major cities today. 

The Bauhaus “Style”

Today, looking at the Bauhaus influence on modern design, people will talk about a Bauhaus “style”, which emphasizes mechanization, simplicity, a conscious display of functionality, and muted colors. These elements are what allow you to look at a Braun shaver, an Apple computer, the Seagram Building, and the Wassily Chair and recognize a family resemblance.

However, creating a style in this manner was never the original intention. In a history of the Bauhaus, Gropius insisted that "associations with any kind of 'style' were studiously avoided," and that "a 'Bauhaus Style' would have been a confession of failure and a return to that very stagnation and devitalizing inertia which I had called [the school] into being to combat". The Bauhaus was first and foremost an educational institution for training creativity as a skill. It did not want to propagate a style, system, dogma, or vogue but simply to "exert a revitalizing influence on design." 

Yet if we look at the products that were influenced by the Bauhaus, they have unmistakably similar aesthetics. No matter how Gropius may protest, it is clear that a particular style did take root. Still, he is correct that it was not a style of the Bauhaus making. It was the style that was in the air: Modernism. The Bauhaus achieved their goal of revitalizing design, but this new energy was released primarily through providing momentum to this new style.

Long before the Bauhaus was formed, the seeds of Modernism had already been planted in Europe. Otto Wagner (1841–1918) and his disciple Adolf Loos (1870–1933) had begun to reframe the practice of architecture with an emphasis on function and simplicity. And architects everywhere were beginning to focus on new building types that were possible as a result of “modern” materials such as concrete, steel, and glass. 

Gropius was no stranger to these movements. His  first job was in the office of leading Modernist Peter Behrens, who would also teach Le Corbusier—perhaps the single most important Modernist architect. Here, Gropius was steeped in the currents of Modernism, as was clear in his first solo commission: the Fagus shoe factory that he designed and built with Adolf Meyer (later one of the masters at the Bauhaus) between 1911 and 1913.

The factory not only included a Modernist focus on function and simplicity, but was also the first European example of “curtain wall construction,”, where the outer layer of the building is non-structural, allowing it to use any materials the designer or architect wishes. Today, we are all intimately familiar with this technique, as it defines the glass towers in our city centers.

In the same year that the factory was finished, Gropius made a trip to America, where he encountered the new industrial architecture of grain silos and large-scale infrastructure. When he returned to Germany, he published a book with photos of the silos, calling for architects to emulate the “style” that they embodied: "clear contrasts, orderly articulation in the arrangement of every part, and unity of form and color.”

Even with this rallying cry, though, it would be wrong to overstate the degree to which a Bauhaus focus on Modernism was simply due to Gropius's interests. By the beginning of the 1920s, it was the water that the Bauhaus teachers and students were swimming in. To go in a different direction would have required a serious departure from the zeitgeist of European architecture.

Why did no such departure take place? In his critique of Modernism, From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe argues that the fundamental reason was precisely the Modernists’ insistence on newness and a process of original creativity at all costs—or  as he puts it, their decision to "start from zero." The style’s simplicity was just the inability to have a dialogue with traditional forms. As he puts it in parody when describing the Bauhaus preparatory course:

[The teacher] would walk into the room and deposit a pile of newspapers. … [T]hey were to turn them into works of art. When he returned he would find Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper … train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that. [The teacher] would pick up the cathedral and the airplane and say: “These were meant to be made of stone or metal — Not newspaper.” Then he would pick up the absentminded tent and say “But this! – this makes use of the soul of paper. Paper can fold without breaking. Paper has tensile strength. This! — is a work of art in paper.” And every cortex in the room would spin out. So simple! So beautiful! – starting from zero!

The Bauhaus set up an environment that mimicked the old apprenticeship formats, and this allowed them to impart complex tacit knowledge to their students. But in their attempt to “break free” from the architectural tradition, they fell into a kind of conformist mimetic double bind that was simply the opposite of the tradition. 

Alongside a distrust of tradition, Modernism was skeptical of ornament in general. There was a belief that all ornamentation was frippery, a dressing up of the fundamental form for the building, a way to lie about what was actually being built. Instead, they preferred to emphasize the function of the building, leaving no barriers between the people that used a building and what the building was for. But if you cannot reference traditional forms or use any kind of ornamentation, what can you build other than a box?

Another challenge was the misguided Modernist assumption that the aesthetics of mechanization would be unstoppable. Mechanization and factories did, of course, eventually become essential elements of construction, the economies of scale were unbeatable. But, there are no constraints on what a factory can produce. The Modernists looked at the majority of products associated with mechanization, such as cars, tanks, bunkers and grain silos, and assumed that the aesthetic was a natural result of the process of industrialisation. In fact, in the decades preceding the rise of Modernism, the amount of ornamentation on buildings had increased dramatically precisely because mechanization had been applied to the creation of ornament, bringing down its price.

Beyond going against the revealed preferences of the users of architecture, stripping ornament from buildings and objects has also led to Modernism stripping places of the kind of design that gave them a unique character. Historically specific application of ornament was an essential part of marking out buildings as being part of a local style. Something that could participate in the unique character of a country, town, or city. Without that ornament those buildings could be anywhere.

Ultimately, the Modernist style has a mixed history at best. Many of the objects that fell within the Bauhaus sphere of influence are beautiful and have great charms: typefaces, watches, lamps, and cars. Some Bauhaus-produced architecture, such as the Seagram Building or the TD Centre, are daring works with their own kind of austere attractiveness. And a few objects, such as MacBooks are a testament to the possibility of bringing together craftsmanship and scale, through profound simplicity and a focus on effortless functionality.

On the whole, however, the products of Modernism are not looked on kindly, and this is clearest in the realm of architecture. In poll after poll, 70 to 80 percent of people significantly prefer traditional buildings1, and this preference appears to be true across age, gender, and political leaning. Before the rise of Modernism, highly ornamented, colourful buildings characteristic of a place were the norm. Now, they are a rarity. Despite all of the challenges it faced, for the last hundred years, Modernism won. 

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The Bauhaus Legacy

Wolfe thinks that the primary cause of the victory of Modernism was a kind of conspiracy among elite architects, architecture schools, corporations, governments, and groups with a socialist political leaning. There may be some truth to this, but it is not the whole story. It seems likely that the unique program of the Bauhaus played an essential role in the movement achieving the prominence that it did.

The Bauhaus was a catalyst that gave the Modernist style the ability to enter every aspect of our lives. By training their students to treat a building as a total work of art and putting them through a rigorous apprenticeship program, they produced a generation of architects who could create a total picture of what a building could be, and execute on that picture in economically sound ways, coordinating across all of the relevant arts and trades. That this vision was Modernist was decisive for the final outcomes but incidental to the approach.

At the same time, by emphasizing the need for a total artist and training their students in many media, the Bauhaus cemented the idea of design as a general discipline that could be practiced across multiple domains. The flexibility was not simply ideological but came from a place of genuine capability and allowed the Bauhaus alumni to transform every dimension of our world in pursuit of a cohesive Modernist vision.

Today, many would say that the Modernist style associated with the Bauhaus is fundamentally flawed. But, if we want to build a better world with different kinds of architecture and design principles, we must learn from the Bauhaus how to develop the skills needed to achieve it.

Takeaways

• The Total Work of Art. No aspect of a building, piece of craft, or ‘product’ in the most general sense exists in a vacuum. To create comprehensively good products we need to be intentional with all of the associated arts.

• The Total Artist. To be able to pursue a total work of art across multiple disciplines we need to have some capacity in those disciplines - it is not good enough to manage others. Instead we should aim to build a comprehensive set of tacit knowledge across multiple domains.

• Standardization. Deciding ahead of time to optimize a product for standardization will allow you to plan effectively, reducing complexities, costs, and risks.

• Design as a discipline. There are skills common to the design of all objects at all scales. Training people in these design principles gives them an edge as they explore various domains.

• ‘No style’ is a style. If you are unwilling to take a stand on the kind of product you want to create you will inevitably become trapped in the zeitgeist you find yourself part of. If you want to avoid a kind of unintentional mimesis you must take a a thoughtful position.

• Style is context dependent. A style that works well in one domain, like the industrial design of laptop computers, can be disastrous in another domain, like building people’s homes.

• Skill is not enough. If you apply skill with a bad theory of what good looks like it is easy to end up providing energy to an ultimately harmful outcome.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore and Brian Hagood, for reading early versions of this essay and providing edits and comments.

All of the quotes for the section headings are from Gropius’s manifesto The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. I found the ABC’s of Triangle, Square, Circle: The Bauhaus and Design Theory particularly helpful for understanding how education at the school operated. Although familiar with the general distaste for Modernism previously I found From Bauhaus to Our House really helpful for refining the nature of that critique. I was also heavily influenced by Samuel Hughes article for Works In Progress, The Beauty of Concrete. And Brian Hagood’s work, Believing in Beauty.

Introduction

What connects the gleaming skyscrapers in the core of our cities, the sleek surfaces of our computers, the bold colors and provocative forms hanging in the MoMA exhibit of Abstract Expressionism, and Gen Z’s tendency to omit capital letters?

In the early 20th century, an art school emerged in Weimar, Germany, that brought together potters, architects, painters and writers. This assemblage would exist for only a brief period, yet during that time its professors and students incubated the theories and aesthetics that would come to dominate every area of artistic production over the next 100 years, and eventually characterize design in every facet of our daily lives. This school was the Bauhaus.

The most direct, lasting, and important of the Bauhaus's influences was the buildings we live in. The skyscrapers that have become the archetype for modern vertical architecture were conceived at the school before being built in New York in the 1950s and 6Os, primarily through the influence of Mies van de Rhoe. 

At the same time as the school was shaping our new spaces for living and working, it was also transforming our way of seeing. The early Bauhaus artistic directors Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee offered a new approach to the visual arts decomposing colour, shape, and form—a process that culminated in the works of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

But the school's impact was not limited to expensive architectural practices or the elite institutions of professional art. The Bauhaus also shaped the progression of all modern printing and graphic design, creating some of the first modern sans serif typefaces and championing a ‘New Typography.’

All of which is to say nothing of the impact the school had on furniture, photography, and Apple products.

The Bauhaus haunts us to this day, often where we might least expect it. Such a singular influence deserves an explanation. How did this German arts and crafts school founded in 1919 in a beleaguered and defeated Germany, and shut down less than 15 years later by a Nazi purge of 'subversive' art styles, achieve such dominance? Was there anything special in their methods that drove these effects? 

The answer is a story of philosophical idealism, practical discipline, and an intense focus above all else on craft. The Bauhaus, under the influence of the German Kindergarten system and the Arts and Crafts movement in England, sought to merge theory and practice with a new approach to design centered on the building as a gesamtkunstwerk—a “total work of art”. 

Through the skill of the people that it trained in this method, the Bauhaus became the vital engine for the whole field of modern design. However, this liveliness did not ensure that the work they created would be loved. The Bauhaus stylistic record is mixed at best, with their buildings often described as "sterile" and "inhuman", or a field of "glass boxes". Nonetheless, their importance is irrefutable. 

If we wish to create an alternative design language for our world, or achieve anything like the same degree of lasting, multi-dimensional impact to the way people approach the arts, we must understand their work. In Part I, we’ll consider how this group’s holistic approach to their craft allowed them to create a new kind of artist with a new philosophy of art. In Part II, we’ll consider how those artists applied that new philosophy to exert an outsized influence on the modern world.

The Beginnings

The Bauhaus emerged from the reconstruction of Germany after the First World War, when the German government sought to create a new institution to train the next generation of builders. To lead this institution, they turned to a rising star of architecture in the country, Walter Gropius. Gropius came from a storied architectural lineage: his father was considered a great architect, and it was clear from a young age that Gropius would follow in his footsteps. Yet it was equally clear that he was looking for something new.

Gropius was keenly aware of the importance of craftsmanship and technical skill. When traveling in Spain at a young age, he was exposed to traditional tile manufacture in Catalonia, which, as he wrote in his journal, “instilled in him a great admiration for the intricacies of good craft work in any kind of material". During his training at an architectural practice, Gropius also studied the Arts and Crafts movement in England, an anti-industrial group that "aimed to eliminate the distinction between free and applied art, finding inspiration in the shapes and colors of nature, in Mediaeval Europe – and in Japanese art". 

When he was asked to  take over the Grand- Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, Gropius saw his opportunity to put into practice his incipient theory of architecture and education. He insisted on combining the School with the Fine Arts Institute, explaining, "the principle of training the individual's natural capacities to grasp life as a whole ... should form the basis of instruction throughout the school instead of in only one or two arbitrarily 'specialized' classes".

The new school was called the Bauhaus ("house of building"), imagined as a modern version of the medieval stonemasons guild, the Bauhütte. It would be a "collaborative group of artists of all disciplines united in constructing a new and better world".

The Bauhaus Program

Gropius would eventually crystalise the aim of the Bauhaus as the production of a gesamtkunstwerk—“a total work of art". As he put it in the opening lines of his 1919 manifesto that launched the school's program,

The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building! To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of the fine arts; they were the indispensable components of great architecture. Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as “salon art.”

In other words, a building should contain thoughtful products from every art and craft involved in its construction to live up to its potential.

Originally, this kind of cooperation between the arts was the default. Painters, sculptors, and architects would naturally collaborate on every work they completed. However, with the rise of "salon art", museums, fine art, art history, and art theory, the different arts had started to be treated as independent units that could be worked on, and even perfected, separately from one another. The aim of the Bauhaus was to bring them back together. At first, this meant consciously designing the furniture, visual art, sculpture and other natural aspects of the built form. Over time, though, as the school continued, this would expand to include advertising, commercial endeavors, theater, music and even political reform to influence the society in which the building was created.  

To create a total work of art required a total artist. The Bauhaus recognised that a building was always a matter of collaboration between multiple artists, but they reasoned that managing that collaboration would require a holistic understanding of the arts involved, at least by the primary architect. This meant not only a theoretical knowledge of the various parts of the building, but also the ability to marry that theory with practice. The skill of academically trained people was, in Gropius's words, "amateurish studio-bred order which is innocent of realities like technical progress and commercial demand". Instead, the Bauhaus sought to create competent architects who could get things built, and the entire curriculum was structured with this aim in mind.

New students at the school signed on as 'apprentices' of a multi-year program that included both classroom education and working on real world problems. The first step was a six-month preparatory course developed by Johannes Itten, who had previously been a teacher in primary and secondary schools. The course was inspired by the Kindergarten movement, where children were "educated with a routine of craft-based, geometrically pure manual exercises". During the course, "Practical and formal subjects were taught side by side so as to develop the pupil's creative powers and enable him to grasp the physical nature of materials and the basic laws of design". In this way, the course was something like what you would expect from joining a Shaolin temple or learning karate at Mr. Miyagi's shop, a space to inculcate a beginner's mind for design.

Following the preparatory course, the next three years focussed on training the specific skills that students would need in the construction of a building. Courses covered practical instruction in materials and tools, formal instruction in the theory of architecture, and more abstract design concepts such as volumes, colors, and composition. Students would receive instruction on everything from textiles to bookkeeping to gain the holistic set of skills that the Bauhaus vision demanded.

At the end of this training, students graduated to become Journeymen, which allowed them to work on real building projects. Journeymen would continue with a mix of on-site and research work until they received a diploma. 

Having a course structure modeled on apprenticeships was ideal for the Bauhaus. It allowed them to create a holistic program covering all aspects of the building, while creating plenty of space for the picking up of tacit knowledge. Again, as Gropius put it, "The best kind of practical teaching is the old system of free apprenticeship to a master-craftsman, which was devoid of any scholastic taint".

Craft in a World of Machines

Yet this eagerness towards the adoption of craft was not without its anxieties. At the time that the Bauhaus was operating, concerns about the impact of mechanization were pressing. Recent generations had experienced a rapid industrialisation, and the First World War had convinced many that these industrial capabilities would transform the world. There was a prevailing assumption that the economic superiority of factories and mechanization was undefeatable, and that these methods would come to dominate all areas of production. 

The Bauhaus grappled with this situation through their emphasis on what Gropius called "standardization". For Gropius, it was clear that "the machine is the modern medium of design". So, as the Bauhaus training program progressed, it emphasized the use of machines in the creative process, and every student had to work for a time in a factory. The hope was that if the factory form of creativity was understood, it could be improved, to emphasize the process of craft rather than subsuming craft under its economic might.

This, then, was the program: an apprenticeship aimed at creating architects that had both a theoretical and practical knowledge of all the arts needed to create a building. It began with bottom-up training in the forms and methods of architecture and continued until the apprentices could take on almost any artistic role required. Throughout this training, there was an emphasis on standardization and the deployment of the arts in an increasingly mechanized world. 

We'll return to the impact of this final aspect of the Bauhaus approach on their buildings in Part II. But for now, we can note that this knowledge of the factory and the impact of mechanization meant that the students of the Bauhaus were fully prepared to make use of these factory techniques, including the resulting scale, in their final works—whether they be buildings, furniture, advertising, or something else.

This kind of preparedness was an essential aspect of the Bauhaus program. Upon graduation, the student had developed practical skills that could be deployed to create art in multiple domains, but also the ability to cross-pollinate ideas between those domains. When you have worked on a particular problem in the real world, it gives you new ways of seeing that problem that are not obvious to those who have simply studied those problems in a classroom setting. In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford describes this as a ‘disciplining’ of attention:

“When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander.”

Through the marriage of practice and theory, students of the Bauhaus had experienced exactly this kind of disciplining to see new aspects of the problems they attended to. Uniquely, though, as a result of the school’s multi-modal training, this deepening of attention was matched by a breadth of attention that could take in all of the components of a design. It was this combination of breadth and depth that made them shockingly effective.

As we’ll see in Part II, such effectiveness was not simply theoretical. By translating their skills across disciplines and using heuristics learned in one place to shape another, the Bauhaus were able to influence a huge variety of objects and have a lasting influence on design throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore and Brian Hagood, for reading early version of this essay.

All of the quotes for the section headings are from Gropius’s manifesto The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. I found the ABC’s of Triangle, Square, Circle: The Bauhaus and Design Theory particularly helpful for understanding how education at the school operated.

Part II looks at the wide-ranging and lasting influence of the Bauhaus to understand just how this method of training translated into impact, as well as taking a closer look at the ways such impact may have been misguided.  

Megaprojects1 are large-scale infrastructure projects with budgets of $1b or more. They matter not simply because the ‘products’ that they create have far-reaching impacts on our societies, but because they are a perfect example of how we express - or fail to express - our most sophisticated technical competencies and complex organizational practices. In theory, they are the grandest physical, social, and technical achievements of our civilization. In practice, however, the track record for megaprojects is underwhelming.

Bent Flyvbjerg is the world’s foremost academic researching the success and failure of megaprojects2. According to the data that he and his team have collected, 92 percent of all such projects will run over budget, over time, or both - to say nothing of whether they achieve the benefits they were originally intended for. This implies that when we try to operate at this scale our reach, almost inevitably, exceeds our grasp.

Even on small projects though, while the results may not be as catastrophic, we do not fare much better. The data isn’t as good but it is certainly the case that the majority of home renovation projects will suffer from meaningful cost overruns and most of us are familiar with team projects at school or work that drag on well past their due date. Is there anything we can do to try and avoid these issues?

How Big Things Get Done which Flyvbjerg co-authored with Dan Gardner in 2023 tries to answer this question. The book describes a set of patterns shared by all successful projects. Studying these patterns seems like a good place to start to improve our situation. Luckily, the advice can be summed up in one word: Planning.

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Today, many who work at startups or tech companies, and even some that work in large corporates or government infrastructure departments, have become suspicious of planning. They believe that success in large, innovative projects relies primarily on a kind of tinkering and creative problem solving. They say that “necessity is the mother of invention”, they should “move fast and break things”, “pivot” often, and be “agile”. From this vantage point the future of any project is generally unknowable and the best approach to discover the path forward is to respond to the immediate problems in front of us with the appropriate effort and creativity.

How Big Things Get Done calls this approach “Think fast, act slow” and believes it is the primary cause of our project woes. If we run quickly at a solution to a problem without a proper understanding of what implementing that solution entails we will inevitably come across unforeseen obstacles that will delay our progress. As these unknowns become known they are liable to sap our momentum and slow us down. The longer the project is delayed as a result of this the more other problems are likely to pile up.

You can imagine constructing a new house. It is discovered that the soil on the lot is unsuitable for the type of concrete that was originally poured for the foundations. This means you need to go back and dig up more area to relay that foundation. However, the contractor responsible for digging has now gone on holiday. Once they return a couple weeks later summer is in full swing and the ground has become too dry to dig without risk of later movement and settling. So, you need to wait a few extra days for rainfall. By the time you have recovered from one problem the cascade of additional issues may have left your original solution impractical, infeasible, too expensive, or even unhelpful for achieving your original goals. “Projects that fail tend to drag on, while those that succeed zip along and finish”3.

Instead, the book argues, we should cultivate an approach of “Think slow, act fast”. If we remain focussed on our aims and take the time to fully map how we will achieve them during the planning stage - while it is cheap and easy to make changes - then we can maximize our chances of completing the right work fast and on budget. During a project it is impossible to avoid some problems coming up, you can never create a detailed enough plan to catch everything, and it would be a fools errand to try. But, with proper planning you can tame a project’s worst risks and create confidence that you have a good approach. Doing so increases the speed of the project and reduces the potential complexity of the problems that need to be solved along the way.

Good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers.

To start, this approach means remaining focussed on the original reason for the project. A project’s stakeholders, and sometimes even each individual stakeholder, will have multiple conflicting aims at the beginning of a project. At a minimum these need to be resolved. Yet, even with a clearly defined North star, you will still run the risk of being distracted from this goal as you develop the details of the plan .

The most common culprit for this is becoming solution oriented rather than remaining problem oriented. Once you have a solution in hand, especially if at first it sees like a great answer, you can start to make excuses as you uncover issues with the approach you’ve chosen. If this continues and you still hold fast to the solution you chose you will inevitably either water down your aims to accept a less good outcome, or change them altogether in service of something that originally had only been chosen as a tool.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Abraham Maslow4

To avoid this you need to always keep the goal in mind. As Steven Covey says you have to “keep the main thing the main thing”. This means that when you have a solution you must continually test whether it will really get you where you want to go. A particular tactic How Big Things Get Done recommends here is the Amazon practice of working backwards. Before you commit to a solution, as part of planning, write a press release or imagine a launch party as if you had chosen that solution. Is it the outcome you were hoping for?

With clarity on where you will end up once the project is complete you now need to make sure that the implementation of that solution is not going to run into any catastrophic problems along the way. The best way to do this is to iteratively create models of the project with increasing levels of scope and resoloution. The book calls this “Pixar Planning”.

One of Pixar’s unique qualities as a movie production house is that they spend significantly more time planning a movie than their peers. First, a director is allowed to take months to come up with an idea for a movie that seems promising. This can be one line as simple as “A French rat loves to cook”. This idea is then turned into a 12 page outline to show how it could become a movie. After several iterations with feedback this outline is turned into a 120 page script. Again, several iterations will happen. At this point the script is turned into a storyboard that is photographed, and turned into a video with voice actors reading the lines. This generates a full simulation of the final film in miniature and it again undergoes the a process of intense scrutiny and iteration before finally being ready for full scale animation and production. By the time the final film is greenlit it will have undergone this storyboarding process an average of 8 times.

At each stage of this process the film’s creators are developing a more accurate model of what the final film will be. It is an expensive and slow process, but, because it is still in draft form, nowhere near as costly or slow as making changes to the film once it is already in the final production phase.

How Big Things Get Done’s admiration for this method helps explain the gap between the approach that Bent Flyvbjerg calls for and the kind of tinkerer, creative culture behind the sentiments mentioned at the beginning of this piece. In particular, it may seem that this emphasis on planning is dismissive of the Lean Startup methodology that informs ideas like pivoting, and failing fast, and has taken root as a core process tool in the creation of new tech companies. In truth, the books thinks that the Lean Startup is an excellent methodology. But, it needs a reframing.

Under Lean Startup builders are instructed to focus on running experiments fast with real data and then iterating to get to a working product and company. This means having an idea, rapidly building a low quality (i.e. buggy) Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to illustrate that idea, putting it in front of users to get feedback and then, if the MVP doesn’t work, pivoting to a new idea and building a new MVP. The theory behind the method is that through emphasizing feedback and being open to go in whatever direction makes the most sense for your target market you can bootstrap to something that works for users. Seemingly the opposite of a plan.

For Bent Flyvbjerg though this precisely is the work of planning. You have specified your goals with precision: “Make something people want” then you have set about creating ever more refined models (MVPs) for how to reach that goal. At this stage mistakes are still low-cost and recoverable. In other words you have created a great plan. The execution of the plan when the company “scales” is a very different matter that comes later.

Planning is doing: Try something, see if it works, and try something else in light of what you’ve learned. Planning is iteration and learning before you deliver at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of delivery going smoothly and swiftly.

Unfortunately, there is a limit to models. By definition, a model is a low-dimensional representation of the full project. 3D-printing can never replicate welded steel. Pseudocode can never replicate a production system. This means that once the project is underway there will always be new issues that come up that a model alone can’t help you plan for.

The best way to prepare for these kinds of problems, that can’t be captured explicitly in a model, is with expertise. When someone works on a project they develop a body of practical, tacit knowledge that they can bring with them to similar future projects. This is why architects are often considered to do their best work in the last decade of their careers rather than their first, the weight of experience from seeing so many buildings be constructed simply outweighs any kind of brilliance in the theoretical stage before those buildings come to life. All new projects have some existing analogous projects that have been previously completed. So, bringing on people who worked on these completed projects to help with the new one is a way to ensure the plan has been vetted not just by ideas, models, and theories but by experience.

Precisely because it isn’t something that can be acquired in the planning process this experience is hard to fathom. If we do not have it ourselves the best we can do is gesture at the fact that someone who has that experience should be able to make sure the project can be a success. Yet, it is invaluable to have around.

We do not make the most of experience because we do not appreciate how deeply experience can enrich judgement and improve project planning and leadership.

The final ingredient for a successful plan is standardization and more specifically creating modular components. This does two things to transform the project’s effectiveness. First, it allows the project to take full advantage of the learning curves that come from creating a smaller set of components at a larger scale.

Construction Physics

Where are my damn learning curves?

A phenomenon that shows up repeatedly in a variety of production operations is the learning curve. Essentially, the learning curve (also called the experience curve, or the progress curve) is the observation that production efficiency tends to improve at a fairly regular rate - every doubling of p…

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4 years ago · 16 likes · 18 comments · Brian Potter

Second, it means that the project can be flexible to changing demands. If there is a small fixed number of potential components then all it takes to change the project scope is to change the configuration of those components. The canonical example of this is solar power:

[Solar power is] born modular, with the solar cell as the basic building block.In a factory, put multiple solar cells together onto a panel. Ship and install the panel. Install another, and wire them together. Add another panel. Add another until you have an array. Keep adding arrays until you are generating as much electricity as you like. Even giant solar farms consist of little more than that. Solar power is the king of modularity. It is also the lowers-risk project type of any I’ve tested in terms of cost and schedule.

The alternative to standardization, and modularity, is one-off and unique. Which of course brings all kinds of dangers. One-off means non standard and non modular, beyond this though the more unique a project is the less talent and experience you can take advantage of in planning, the less confident you will be in creating models that reflect the final reality, and the harder it will be to remain tied to your aim. If you want your project to succeed uniqueness is the enemy.

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How Big Things Get Done is not a romantic book. There is little respect for the passionate, creative, extraordinary, or heroic entrepreneur who will break down walls and challenge norms to get things done. However, it is sentimental in the way that all great works of economics are. It imagines a better world that could be achieved through great care, discipline and thoughtful planning. Another way of saying this is that the approach Bent Flyvbjerg advocates for is a kind of definite pessimism in opposition to the indefinite optimism that characterizes most projects. It strikes me as very Danish5.

Ultimately, it is a work of popularization. So, if you are looking for specific advice on how to actually build a project it would make more sense to look at some of Bent’s more detailed academic work or, even better, case studies on projects that look similar to the one you want to create. However it is an excellent entry point for thinking about the fundamentals of project design and delivery and offers a posture that we could all learn from. I plan to re-read it

Emphasize planning, work backwards from what you want to achieve, create iterative models of the final project, focus on amassing as much relevant experience as you can, and seek modularity wherever possible. If we are looking to become more competent in getting big things done these principles are not a bad place to start.

How Big Things Get Done

Takeaways

• Plan more. If you want a project to succeed you should spend much more time planning than you think you need. The more you can de-risk up front the more likely you will achieve what you set out to on-time, on-budget , and with the desired outcome. “Over”-planning is possible but unlikely.

• Plan wisely. You have to fight with every project to keep the main thing the main thing. As solutions are proposed, especially if at first they seem like they fit your needs, it is easy to become solution oriented rather than remaining problem oriented. When that happens even if you deliver the solution as expected (unlikely) you run the risk of building the wrong thing.

• Planning is doing. To create a solid plan you need to run experiments and get feedback. Model the entire project from start to finish in a rough form and see what your solution looks like. If you can’t build such a model in the real world then find case studies that map as closely as possible to the project you are aiming to complete.

• Value experience properly. When it comes to completing projects on-time, on-budget and with the expected results there is no substitute for working with people who have done it before.

• Standardise. The best way to give yourself an edge in bringing down complexities, costs, and risks is to standardise the elements of your project. Create modular components to take advantage of learning curves and the ability to scale up and down as needed.

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll”
– Shigeru Miyamoto the inventor of Mario, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda

Humans love to play, and we have been creating games to help us play for a very long time. We have found dice at archaeological sites from well before 5000 BC, and the oldest board game we know of comes from an Egyptian burial site dating to 3500 BC. Over the last 50 years, though, a new medium for game play has come to dominate our societies: video games.

In June of 1972, video gaming escaped from the confines of toy projects in research labs and entered the mainstream when Nolan Bushnell created Atari and they put out their first product: pong, the first arcade game. Almost immediately video games became a huge industry. By 1982, the video game market, driven mostly by arcade games, had more revenue than movies. In 2022, video games brought in more than $180 billion globally—more than any other form of entertainment.

Yet this rise of video games has not been without concern.

In the US, there have been repeated waves of worry about video games. Pinball machines, a proto-video game, were termed 'insidious nickel stealers' and banned in NY in 1942. The 1999 Columbine High School shooting produced a moral panic over whether violent video games cause aggression. Today, as video games have become ubiquitous, they have been implicated in anxiety, depression, ADHD and more - especially among kids. 

In China, the worries are even more serious; recently one state news outlet even called them “spiritual opium.”1, a loaded phrase given Chinese history. Concerns range from worries that video games cause myopia to fears that they will divert attention from more productive work, and even decrease masculinity. As a result, the government has banned gamers under 18 from playing from playing for more than one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.

At the same time, video games have been described as a promising platform for skill acquisition, and in particular for teaching kids. Evangelists say that games are perfectly suited for 'brain training', improving cognitive abilities, and teaching new subjects, pointing to gamers such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for proof that games correlate with genius.

So, what is it? Do video games offer new avenues for skill acquisition and cognitive development, are they merely a fun distraction, or even a risk to our mental health and social order? Given the growing time and money we spend on them, we should probably care very much2.

Video games, like all avenues for play, are a powerful way to learn rudimentary skills. Video game environments are also uniquely suited to developing an increasing sense of agency and a flexibility in taking on new roles in the real world. This is especially true for children and for people just starting to develop new faculties. But, they also bring risks: video games can stunt skill development just as easily as start it, and addiction is real and damaging. Nevertheless, we should not fear video games, and instead should treat them with respect and give them their due place in society.

The Prospects of Gamification

Interest in the relationship between video games and skill acquisition began quite early in the life of the medium. It quickly became clear that dedicated gamers would devote a huge number of hours to play: serious gamers will routinely spend more than 10,000 hours on their favourite game.

It was also clear early on that gamers' skill levels improve over time. Empirically, users have nearly perfect classical learning curves: the more they play, the better they get, with diminishing returns.

This high level of engagement and the unambiguous learning curves are closely related. Both exist because video games are engineered from the ground up to create a sense of “competence satisfaction": a feeling of "leveling-up, continual advancement without a clear plateau, a clarity of goals, [and] granular and cumulative feedback"3.

Video games do this in two ways. First, they create a well-defined landscape of things that matter to the gamer. This might be through showing quantitative measures of health or ability, using arrows to point to relevant objects like treasure chests, or providing feedback when you strike an enemy. Second, they match the player's abilities to this landscape. There are varying degrees of difficulty, but you can be sure you have the tools necessary to win.

This feeling of competence combines with a sense of autonomy that comes from being able to make real choices within the game. This combination of competence, satisfaction and autonomy means the video game environment is engineered from the ground up to feel like a place of mastery: "Unlike most real-world domains, such as work and school, virtual environments can offer intrinsic need satisfactions with immediacy, consistency, and density".4

So video games are highly motivating, but it's not clear that this makes them useful for building competencies outside the game world.

At a macro scale, video games have been hypothesized to improve hand-eye coordination, strategic thinking, and even intelligence more generally. However, in almost all domains, there is no concrete evidence for these claims. 

The vast majority of empirical studies have serious methodological problems. Tests of specific effects from gaming usually are conducted on a limited number of users, test a complex intervention that is hard to repeat, and draw conclusions from small effect sizes. 

When testing at the population level, studies will compare groups that play video games or don't and try to draw conclusions, but they usually give little attention to potential confounding factors. For example, one influential study claims that video games significantly improve processing speed, deductive reasoning, and mathematical intelligence in Pakistani children. But the study looks at these self-described gamers vs. non-gamers without considering, for example, whether the gamers are from higher-income families — which would make sense, given that video games require both money and leisure time. If that were the case, you would then have to ask whether these differences were driven by the better nutrition and schooling available to the wealthy, amongst other things.

Despite these issues, there does seem to be some consensus that action games may marginally help with perceptual attention skills, and some puzzle games like Tetris can help with particular tasks, such as spatial rotation. Still, it hasn't been shown that this translates more broadly. In the case of brain training and general cognitive improvement, there is a "lack of consistent evidence that long-term exposure to brain training ... improves performance on non-game measures of executive function"5.

In a more targeted way, video games have been considered a potential way to improve education and teach technical subjects such as maths, science, and languages. Some approaches here are promising, but none have yet been found to be a silver bullet in their domains. When they do seem to work, the most consistent reason given is that they lead to more attention to the material over a longer period of time. As one researcher describes it, "The use of games and gamification is therefore most essentially a motivational intervention—a strategy to facilitate sustained engagement."6.

Is this strategy a good one when it comes to skill acquisition? To answer this question, we need to consider Duolingo and the gamification of language.

The Case of Duolingo

When Duolingo was released in 2012, I was in university starting to learn Chinese, and the app made a splash in my circles of the internet. It was endorsed by Tim Ferris, and one paper claimed that the app would teach the equivalent of a first college semester in Spanish in ~30 hours—a compelling proposition for a 19-year-old in their second college semester of language learning. Since then, Duolingo has become incredibly popular.

The core of Duolingo's appeal is that it takes the gamification of language learning to the highest possible level. Badges, levels, points, reminders, and social aspects combine to create a hyper-compelling experience. A multitude of memes attest to the almost-painful feeling that comes with breaking a learning streak, and Duolingo appears to be getting even better at this: in the last four years, the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users has grown from 22 percent to 30 percent.

This popularity has spurred research into the app’s effectiveness, but as with other research into skill acquisition, the answer here is unclear. Some argue that it works incredibly well, while others see it as a tool with limited use. Which way you see it seems to depend on what you think Duolingo should be doing.

One class of studies, such as the paper cited above, measure the app by vocabulary and grammar principles learned. These usually find that it "can promote acquiring two languages"7 and is "easy to use"8. 

The other approach asks whether Duolingo actually helps people speak another language so they can use it in their life. From this angle, the results are less impressive. Researchers have found that the app is not based on "communicative competence"9 and that it cannot provide “adequate help for advanced learners” or help in "spontaneous speech production". 

This is exactly the dynamic that language learners describe. When you are starting out on a language, Duolingo is a great tool for rapidly getting up to speed on basic vocabulary and grammar, and for seeing a lot of examples. However, for reaching real fluency, it quickly outlives its usefulness. It’s easy to develop a streak because of the gamification, but that streak soon becomes counterproductive to the real aim of learning a language.

This is the issue on which skill acquisition and video games ultimately turns. 

A video game constructs a specific realm for action, with clear goals, abilities, obstacles, and feedback. This realm is one with intense experiences of competence satisfaction, but it also defines the limits of the kind of competencies you can develop.

This is all fine and good so long as you are just getting started or need a rudimentary introduction to something and there is always room for some amount of skill transfer10. However, the fantasy world that the video game creates is deeply compelling even after this initial period. If you continue to play past the point of gaining an introduction to the skill, you risk not only wasting your time but even warping your ability to really learn.

Agency, Addiction, and Play

In his work Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi. Nguyen frames this fact of games—that they create an artificial world for developing competence—by arguing that they are in fact a kind of aesthetic product. In the same way that painting is the art of creating visualization, music is the art of creating sounds, and so forth, games are the art of creating a particular type of agency.

A game tells us to take up a particular goal. It designates abilities for us to use in pursuing that goal. It packages all that up with a set of obstacles, crafted to fit those goals and abilities. A game uses all these elements to sculpt a form of activity. And when we play games, we take on an alternate form of agency. ... Goals, abilities, and environment: these are the means by which game designers practice their art. And we experience the game designer's art by flexing our agency to fit.11

When we play games, we adopt a mode of agency by taking on the goals of the game for a limited time and adopting a particular agential mindset—"the pairings of a particular kind of interest with a focus on a particular set of skills". In other words, it teaches us, not some specific competencies, but what it is to be the kind of agent who takes a particular kind of action.

To give an example, when I was growing up, I played a lot of two-hand card games with my Dad: cribbage, piquet, gin rummy, whist. These gave me my first taste of what it is like to be in a negotiation.

In two-hand card games, each person has a set of options for what they can play, and they have some knowledge of what the other will play, based on the cards in the deck. One person may simply have a better hand and will be sure to win overall, but through deftly navigating what cards to play, and when, you can eke out more or less of the final pot. 

These are some of the fundamental qualities of a negotiation. When I was first exposed to real negotiations in a business setting, I recognised the flavour of it from the card games that I used to play. There was no actual skill development to prepare me for negotiation. For each particular kind of negotiation I still had to learn everything about the options that were available to both parties, the way to communicate, and more, but the role of a negotiator was not new to me. 

Nguyen writes about games in general, and my experience came from card games, but the principle is exactly the same in video games. RPGs help one to understand the role of uncovering more of the world and sculpting an identity, first-person shooters give a sense of the role of rapid decision-making, team coordination and fast twitch responses, and so on. These are not specific skills that can be used in the real world, but they are ways of thinking and being that prepare you for interacting with a real-world domain. 

Tobi Lütke summarizes this principle when explaining why he encourages the use of video games at Shopify12:

It's just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio. ... part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. … Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking. 

What are other situations where you can – in a compressed way – practice these skills that you need in the business world? I make strategic decisions for my job at the company. … How often do I do this in a year? A couple times, maybe once a month? I don’t think so. Major opportunities to bet the company and allocate resources don’t come around that often.

But if I sit down for an evening of poker, I make these decisions every hand. And then you look at a game like StarCraft … or Factorio, and in a very compressed, fun environment, follow a certain activity over and over and over again. And doing that will change your mind, and your brain, and help you be prepared for situations you could never predict ahead of time.

Understanding these different roles through video games is a profound gift. Video games allow for creative explorations of agency in many more dimensions than traditional games, and by having access to these other dimensions, we expand our understanding of the roles we can play. This is most helpful for young people and kids who otherwise would not have the opportunity to inhabit these kinds of agencies because of age, physicality, experience, etc.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that "Games offer easier entry points into novel modes of agency precisely because they are thinner, narrower, and more precisely defined". These agencies are not commensurate with the kinds of complicated and nuanced lives that we need, or want, to live every day. The reward that comes from the competence satisfaction of games, alongside the easy, simplified world that they present, means that video games are highly addictive. 

Gaming disorder has been added to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, and it may enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the canonical reference book for psychological disorders in the US. Under the WHO’s definition, gaming disorder happens whenever there is a pattern of gaming behaviour that is uncontrollable and harms the rest of a life.

And many lives are being harmed—according to one 2021 metastudy, gaming disorder affects 2–3 percent of all gamers (similar to the number of problem gamblers among people who occasionally gamble). If this is true globally today, then there are 140 million people suffering from a video game addiction.

This is a big number, but it doesn’t diminish the good that video games do for our agency. Video games can help us develop new ways of approaching the world when we are just starting out on something, and that is exactly what we do as kids. The psychologist Jean Piaget saw play as a kind of assimilation, allowing a child to interpret environmental stimuli and incorporate them into their existing schema. When you are just starting out, you need access to simplified worlds in order to do this kind of play effectively, and video games offer more worlds like this then any other medium we have. 

Video games allow us to adopt new roles and expand our agency and, at least at the beginning, can be a useful tool for learning a new skill. At some point, we need to grow up and put our games behind us; they will not help us become who we need to be13. But removing them altogether would make it impossible to use them effectively as part of growing up in the first place.

Conclusion

Video games have opened an entirely new dimension for human creativity and exploration, including new tactics for motivating activity and engaging in creative play. The newest kinds of Virtual Reality and the use of LLMs will likely allow this to go even further in creating spaces for novel play that can mimic many more aspects of the real world. 

This play in video game environments leads to both a more adaptable and effective understanding of agency, as well as a limited set of real-skill acquisition related to these enclosed worlds. 

However, play is not the real world. By their nature, games must select and constrain the kind of actions that players choose to take, reducing the complexity and dimensionality of the real world down to a particular basket of options to be selected from. This means there are fundamental limits to the training that can take place in a video game environment. It also means that video games risk creating some of the worst kinds of addiction. Like gambling, they give the user the illusion of a completely defined and controllable universe—a place where you never have to deal with the truly unknown. 

We should not fear video games. Many things are by nature addictive but have come to be important parts of building our societies. Video games are genuinely useful in certain constrained environments and can offer us a path to adopting new stances as free agents. We just need to know where their boundaries lie.

Takeaways

• Video games are a massive and growing industry. We need to understand the relationship between gaming and the development of competence. 

• At present, it seems like video games can help create rapid improve in very well-defined areas of practice but cannot be a replacement for real-world training. They should be used aggressively when starting on a learning curve but removed as soon as they become a hindrance.

• More counter-intuitively, Video games can also teach us what it is like to be a particular kind of person and to operate with certain kinds of action. A way to prepare for roles we might take on in the world. Especially for children this is an essential part of development.

• Video game addiction is real and harmful. We need to take it seriously.

• Oddly, restrictions to decrease video game access by young people then make them fully available to adults are the opposite of an ideal scenario. It is children, who are still figuring out how to navigate the world and need more constrained play, who have the most to benefit from video games.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Bellafiore and Case for reading early versions and providing essential feedback.

I couldn't have written this essay without the MIT Handbook of Game-Based Learning as a reference material for understanding the current research on video games and skill acquisition. C. Thi. Nguyen's book Games: Agency As Art was also essential. It is a wonderful piece of modern philosophy and a very inspiring work.

Footnotes

“You're Overpriced"

Benjamin Graham to Warren Buffet when he offered to work for him for free. Graham would hire Buffet three years later starting him on his career as an investor.1

Young people are pretty useless. Humans have one of the longest periods of juvenile dependence of any animal. It takes 4 months after we're born before we can hold our heads up on our necks and it takes at least another 8 months before we have the coordination needed to feed ourselves. We limit people from voting in elections before they are 18 and increasingly there are arguments we would be wise to not consider someone a fully formed adult until they are 25 and their pre-fontal cortex has stopped developing2.

Alongside this long developmental arc there is an even more pernicious learning curve for competence. Our ability to learn things and bootstrap new skills is clearly phenomenal. If it weren’t you could never explain the heights of human art, science, and craft that we see exhibited every day. But to get there takes energy, good teachers, a conducive environment, and most importantly time. Kids who haven't yet had the chance to learn in this manner are, for lack of a better word, useless3.

So, when Warren Buffet went to Benjamin Graham - the legendary inventor of value investing - and offered to work for him for free Graham was not wrong to say that free was overpriced. Rather than Buffet’s free labour representing a boon, bringing on the young upstart would have been a drag for Graham as he exerted all kinds of energy to teach the youngster the tricks of the trade.

This seems like a pretty brutal chicken and egg problem. If young people are so useless how can we justify the cost of creating a learning environment for them so they can start to provide value.

One of the first ways we tried to solve this problem was with apprenticeships.

The History of Apprenticeship

The idea that a young person should be bound to a specific master so they can learn the fundamentals of a craft is a human universal. It appears in some of the oldest records we have from China4, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. However, the form of apprenticeship that we commonly reference today was a product of early modern Europe, and in particular England.

The basic structure looked like this: A master craftsman - a person skilled in a trade like tanning, carpentry, cordwaining5, or tinsmithing - needed additional labour to expand their business. At the same time, a young person who needed to gain an economic foothold would look to learn from that master. To formalize the arrangement the two would sign articles of indenture tying the apprentice to the master’s house.

The period of apprenticeship began young, usually around the age of 13, so the contracts were often brokered by the apprentice’s parent or guardian. This protected the apprentice from signing something they couldn’t understand, and offered some guarantee to the craftsman that they would not be put out by a feckless youth breaking a contract.

Commonly the tenure for the apprenticeship was in the range of 7 years. During this time the apprentice lived with the master, receiving free room and board as well as some very modest form of compensation. In the final years the apprentice would 'graduate' to become a journeyman or a freeman6 - a recognised skilled craftsman in their own right - and receive the wages appropriate to that role while still in the master’s shop.

Benjamin Franklin describes his apprenticeship in precisely these terms:

"[I] at last was persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve years old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year. In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my brother."

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

This pattern was well understood and almost everyone, regardless of social position, interacted with apprenticeships in some manner or another. However, the institution remained ill defined.

Apprenticeships had been entered into the law in 1563 starting with The Statute of Artificers enacted by the parliament of Queen Elizabeth I. In principle, the law meant that the length of contract could be enforced and, nominally, guilds had the ability to set wages. In practice, apprenticeships were essentially unmanaged and varied dramatically from one town to the other, let alone between professions. Ultimately each apprenticeship contract was a unique agreement between apprentice and master.

As Joel Mokyr puts it the apprenticeship market was similar in this respect to the marriage market. Everyone understood what it was in the abstract and knew it was essential to the operation of society but it had a flexibility to encompass nearly every kind of human interaction within a particular economic frame.

Although it was widespread apprenticeship was a brutal business. Some data shows that as many as half of all apprenticeships would not finish their term. Some of this was due to unforeseen circumstances such as serious economic hardships or the death of either the apprentice or master. More often though the contract was broken early by either an unhappy master reneging on the bargain or a fleeing apprentice taking their skills elsewhere. Again, as a typical case, this can be seen with Benjamin Franklin who ran away from his brother in Boston after just 5 years to head to Philadelphia as he felt his brother had "demeaned me too much"7.

Nonetheless, despite this rough hewn system, and the high attrition rate, apprenticeships flourished and played an increasingly important role in European economies.

In fact there have been arguments that apprenticeships laid the foundation for the industrial revolution in England. The system created a stock of “brilliant tinkerer[s] with little formal education but with excellent mechanical intuition, good hands, and a quick mind”8 that were essential in the early stages of the industrial revolution.

Over time, as part of an ostensible desire to decrease exploitation on both sides, there was pressure to standardize the model and bring it under institutional control. This happened, first, through self-administration by the guilds of master craftsmen, then increasingly by the courts, and finally through rounds of government legislation9.

In the US, as Benjamin Franklin's story shows, apprenticeships were alive and well even before the declaration of independence. However, they took much longer to standardize than in the old world, the first law governing apprenticeships in the states was only passed in 1911 by Wisconsin, and the law governing apprenticeships at the federal level - The National Apprenticeship Act - was only passed in 1937 when the Department of Labour was put in charge of regulating apprenticeship as part of the series of reforms that took place under FDR.

Despite the important start for apprenticeship the historical trend for the form in the last century has not been good. In the US in 1947 there were nationally 94,238 registered entrants to apprenticeship programs. In 2010 there were only 109,989 despite a doubling of the population. With limited exceptions this kind of trend has also been true across Europe.

There were three reasons why the apprenticeship model fell out of favour. The first was that the dynamics of the market changed.

Apprenticeships work so well because the skills of the craftsman are holistic. If you go to a master carpenter you expect to employ someone who not only knows how to make a chair of a certain set of dimensions but someone who can “work with wood” along with all that such working entails. This calls for a kind of skill that is complex, generative, and fully embodied.

As industrial society developed however, rather than the well rounded craftsman of the early modern times we needed more individuals that could operate in a factory setting doing one thing very well. In such a model the need for a long period of training fell away. As Joel Mokyr describes it:

[The Apprenticeship] labor market was affected by the growing division of labor: the finer the division of labor, the simpler the tasks and the easier it would be to get an untrained beginner to be productive (even though the master himself had to acquire supervisory and managerial skills). As markets expanded, the division of labor became finer and the demand for unskilled labor increased even if the workers were termed “apprentices.” The closer the relationship was to one of pure wage labor as opposed to training, the less reluctant the master was to take on more apprentices.10

The second shift was a cultural change that accompanied this economic change. We began to prioritize technical, formal and propositional knowledge over general, informal, and procedural knowledge. Instead of skills being learned on the job we imagined a world where the same skills could be taught just as well, if not better, in a classroom setting.

Lastly, as apprenticeships become more strictly codified and governed the possibility of creating apprenticeships in novel industries decreased. The economic arrangement of an apprenticeship, as such, is flexible to nearly any skill that humans could express. However, after the system was set down legally if you were unwilling or unable to go through the hoops to register your novel industry like marketing, supply chain management, or software development then it was a system that became much harder to participate in.

In this move away from the apprenticeship model it feels that we may have lost something. Our young people didn't stop being useless. Are the techniques that we use today to learn our crafts just as good as the apprenticeship models of old?

Why does Apprenticeship work?

Ultimately the apprenticeship model was created to solve a labour market problem. The master, needs to be able to find cheap labour but the available pool of trained freeman is too small. The apprentice, needs to gain skills that will make them employable but still needs to support themselves - at least with food and shelter - while they remain an economic drag.

The solution to these two problems is to create a contract bridging the two positions through a combination of time and the right learning environment.

First, the 7 year period of indenture ensures there is enough time in the relationship for both parties to benefit.

At the beginning of the contract, the master loses money while they are training the apprentice. However, they recoup these loses later by continuing to pay apprenticeship wages, once the apprentice is operating at a level closer to a journeyman.

The apprentice on the other hand can lock-in the wages they need for sustenance while still being confident that they will receive the education they need. They will have the direct attention of a single master for the full period of indenture, and more importantly, the incentives are aligned. The better the master is able to train the apprentice at their craft during their tenure the more value they will recoup from having the apprentice work for them later on.

Second, both sides believe that the environment created by the apprenticeship will be optimal for the apprentice to learn.

Today we associate almost all of our learning with what goes on in schools and laboratories, or with ‘book learning’. In this environment we deal with a series of formal propositions: “Force = Mass x Acceleration”, “Concrete is good for fire-resistance and sound-proofing", “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future”, “Python is a particularly adept language for working with big data and complex mathematics”. We memorize and manipulate these propositions to derive ‘rational’ solutions to the problems we face.

The truth however is that the vast majority of what we need to know to operate effectively in the world is not graspable in a propositional way like this.

Most knowledge is tacit or non-formal it either has not, or perhaps even cannot, be written down as a proposition11. The learning may involve a set of non-formalised heuristics and a distinct pattern language for the craft but nothing that can be used in an algorithmic manner.

Instead, when an apprentice learns from a master, rather than learning formulas, proofs, and taxonomies they take in this tacit knowledge through a kind of “monitored participation”12 . In other words they participate in the workshop of the master, and attempt to mimic them with feedback to let them know whether that participation and mimicry has been effective.

To start with they are given the most menial and low-risk tasks like cleaning and organising or making deliveries. Then as their competence is proved they ‘graduate’ to following more complex behaviours.

The other reason this has to be the case is that the skills that the apprentice learns are multi-faceted, dealing with every aspect of a particular craft, so they require a holistic learning environment. This is why the requirement to provide the apprentice room and board was seen originally not just as an arrangement to keep them fed and sheltered but an essential part of a fulsome education13.

The importance of this tacit and holistic knowledge along with the long timespan needed to take it in is why the cultural assumption we have that schooling can replace the apprenticeship style relationship is a bad one.

The situation today has not substantially changed from prior centuries. Although we live in an industrialized and services oriented society we still have huge problems figuring out what to do with our youth. This is, of course, backed up by the experience of every person that has left school to get a job and immediately realised they were woefully unprepared14. But more importantly, the gap between youth and adult employment15 remains stubbornly high, and appears to even be getting worse over time.

This situation is similar globally and in some places worse. In China in the last few months sharp increases in youth unemployment (when including those in school) jumped as high as 20% and even the fully adjusted rate has remained around 15%16.

Within this climate some people have again attempted to promote apprenticeships as a solution.

In the US the first major change was an update to the NAA made in 2008 as one of the final acts of George Bush's term. The change introduced a managerial rather than simply regulatory role with the Department of Labour and created a group responsible for the active promotion of apprenticeships. Despite this new role however apprenticeship numbers initially remained sluggish.

The definition of an apprenticeship in the new law was relatively broad: a length of at least 2000 hours (~1 year), minimum age of 16 etc. and there was new funding and power for the DoL but they were unable to face the core issue that over time the set of Registered Apprenticeships had become restrictive and mismatched to the economy. There was no meaningful way to increase the number of apprenticeships in a mature apprenticeship market like steel manufacturing if the industry as a whole was stagnant.

This changed in 2017 when a Trump executive order created Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs. These essentially allowed any company to begin operating an apprenticeship program as long as it was vetted by an approved party like a trade group, education institution etc. In it's early years this appears to have allowed for an expansion of apprenticeships by adding new fields. Though it remains to be seen how much of this recent success is simply an artefact of the pandemic and associated changes in labour markets.

In recent years there has also been a revival of interest in the apprenticeship format - though not always using those words - among some of the larger tech companies. Tesla has introduced multiple programs to train high school graduates in advanced manufacturing and Shopify's Dev Degree program gives the same cohort a way to earn a CS degree while working at Shopify for 4 years and earning a salary17.

Anecdotes from the Dev Degree imply that it still is faced with the problems of traditional apprenticeships that attrition is high with many of the students not going on to continue working for the company. However, this doesn’t imply that the program will not be a success. Just as with grocery sales or credit card debt, there will be some rate of loss that is acceptable to the employer. And, without doubt, the ecosystem of software engineering as a whole will be healthier from all the people that picked up the holistic skills of a developer then chose to go use them somewhere else.

From Apprentice to Freeman

Apprenticeships are a path to a thick skilfulness in a craft and a real solve for the problems of training and helping the next generation of young workers become productive members of the workforce, but they are also more than this.

The reason that in early modern Europe an apprentice was called a freeman or journeyman at the end of their tenure was that they were qualified to be a 'free' citizen or to ‘journey’ out into the world. They were prepared to live and work in a city without restriction. The apprenticeship had liberated them not just economically but socially.

Once at university, in a fit of religious zeal, I was forcefully expounding to a professor and friend about how I thought I needed to become a monk in order to find enlightenment. I reasoned that without the complete seperation from society that the monastic life promised there would be no way to fully dedicate myself to that journey. In response my professor wryly explained that, contrary to popular opinion monks were in fact a lot like the army.

In the army you gather a group of people who for one reason or another are usually at the fringes of society or looking for a significant change in their life: socially outcast, ejected from home, on the cusp of university, under-ememployed etc. and give them food, shelter, community, a habit of discipline, and - most importantly - an identity. The army on surface separates people from the broader society but in reality it provides them with a universally recognized place within it.

I thought that I needed to go become a monk because it was the particular skills of a monk that would lead me on the right religious path and that there would be no way to develop those skills in society. It turns out in retrospect that what I was really craving was to grow up and join the society as a recognized individual with an identity and the monastery seemed to be a path to do this.

As Jordan Peterson puts it:

"Discipline should therefore be regarded as a skill that may be developed through adherence to strict ritual, or by immersion within a strict belief system of hierarchy of values. Once such discipline has been attained, it may escape the bounds of its developmental precursor."

Like the army or the monastery apprenticeships are a sacrifice. The apprentice sacrifices many of the best years of their youth and the multiplicity of career options that they could see before them to undergo a specific course of training. Yet, just like the army or the monastery apprenticeship also represents a gift of freedom. At the end of their tenure the apprentice has been given an identity and a chance to navigate society as they see fit.

In our noble drives to democratize access to the liberal arts and our cultural valourization of the dropout entrepreneur we have inadvertently looked down on the creative capacity, economic windfall, and social liberation that can come from apprenticeships. As we seek as individuals and as a society to find new avenues for building capability we would be wise to rediscover this form.

It may not look exactly like the apprenticeships of old. Certainly the Tesla Manufacturing Development Program and the Shopify Dev Degree wouldn’t perfectly fit the mold. But, if we can find ways to allow young people to make long-term commitments to become part of a tradition of tacit knowledge and skilfulness we will all be richer for it.

And, for the young people, they should be encouraged that if they are willing to make the kind of sacrifice that an apprenticeship entails the economic and social rewards are more than worth it.

Some Takeaways

• Apprenticeships are a time tested solution to not only the challenges of youth unemployment but more profound issues of skill development.

• By enforcing a long tenure and being part of a holistic work and life environment the apprentice picks up the tacit knowledge that is needed to excel at a craft and in a workplace. Something that school and ‘book learning’ is structurally incapable of. As AI becomes capable of automating all work that can be captured as propositions it will be increasingly important to cultivate these kinds of environments.

• For the masters, or companies, that run them apprenticeships are a risky business. However, they can solve a labour market problem and more importantly they create an on-ramp for the kind of skilled labour that could one day provide a huge surplus value.

• There is momentum behind experimentation with apprenticeships today as the legal structure has been liberalized and there is a cultural shift with companies realizing that school can not replace training on the job. To accelerate this we will need to lean into giving employers the freedom to offer lower starting wages and longer tenure of contract as these are the core elements of what make apprenticeships a worthwhile trade.

• Apprenticeships require serious sacrifice from both the master and the apprentice. The kind of sacrifices that we are not comfortable with today. However, the long-term economic and social rewards are significant. And, the path to mastery is one that ultimately leads to personal achievement and freedom.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brian Hagood, David Zhao and Chris Spoke for reading early version of this essay. I could not have written this without the paper The Economics of Apprenticeship by Joel Mokyr.

Why write Skillful Notes?

There is an increasing anxiety about our ability to do things. At a micro scale we worry that our technology is making us scattered, anxious, and unable to do deep or meaningful work. At a macro scale there are fears around atrophying state capacity. This is coupled with a general sense that we are facing a kind of competency crisis we may not be prepared for.

More prosaically, but also more practically, everyone is interested in the question of how they can get better at doing the things they care about.

Skillful Notes is a project to understand how it is we become able to do things.

We'll explore this through case studies, discussion of specific heuristics via historical examples, breakdowns of competing theories, book reviews and more. This will include:

• The power of the apprenticeship model and the role it played in developing the foundational competencies needed for the industrial revolution

• How the Bauhaus cracked the code to create an artistic revolution, the modern skyscraper, Steve Jobs, and gen z internet speak

• A review of How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg

• The opportunities and dangers of video games as a new landscape for skill acquisition

• How France went from being a nuclear energy laggard to the undisputed world leader

• And more...

Over time the aim is for these notes to become a collection somewhere between IDEO’s field guide to human-centered design, Farnam Street’s Mental Models, and the Bismarck Brief’s case studies. A toolkit of data, theories, and stories that we can use to help us become more capable1.

If we can can improve our understanding of how we get better we stand to gain more than we know. Not only will our increased capacity help us to create a society that is characterized by progress, creativity, and abundance but we may even find spiritual peace.

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on…”

This quote comes from Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head and it describes the feelings that follow from physically creating something. However, the experience it evokes is something that follows competence wherever it is expressed2.

I cannot promise that every essay will be perfect but I can say you should find at least one idea each week that will help you, and your communities, on your journey towards competence. And, I will always be aimed at getting better.

If you ever have any comments, questions or ideas please reach out! My DMs on Substack are open or you can feel free to email me at ben@skillfulnotes.com

You can also follow this project on X @skillfulnotes_

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