New Respect for Manual Labor Many people have a negative attitude about manual labor. In the age of information, prestigious jobs do not require getting your hands dirty. The push toward processing data and away from making things comes from "a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy," Mathew B. Crawford wrote in The New York Times Magazine. but the downturn has brought into sharp relief that the road away from material reality does not lead to a utopia. Many "knowledge workers" are looking anew at the prospect of working with their hands. Some are making political statements through their jobs, while others are preparing for the worst in a dismal economy. The goal is to develop skills that cannot be outsourced. "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet," Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, told Mr. Crawford. You can't raise chickens over the Internet, either, which is one reason farms are attracting young workers in the United States and Japan. "I had nothing much to lose, and in times like these, I felt I needed to learn to make my own living," Shinji Akimoto, 31, a former information technology worker, told The Times's Hiroko Tabachi. Mr. Akimoto is part of the Japanese government's Rural Labor Squad, which is training 2,400 jobless young people to work on farms. The new agrarians often have political motivations. Alex Liebman, 19, an American biology student, is on his third farm internship. "I'm not sure that I can affect how messed up poverty is in Africa or change politics in Washington, but on the farm I can see the fruits of my labor," he told The Times's Kim Severson. "By waking up every day and working the field and putting my principles into action, I am making a conscious political decision." While there is much to be said for a fresh look at manual labor, some things are best left to the professionals. --

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