If specialization is for insects, then hobbies are for humans.
Commentary
As we roll through February, we’re getting to the point of the year where most people start to abandon their New Year’s resolutions. According to
research by Dr. Michelle Rozen, 94 percent of people fail their resolutions within two months. However, this doesn’t mean resolutions are a bad thing.
New Year’s resolutions
make good economic sense. People
want to improve, but monitoring whether you’ve actually improved in something is costly. As such, using the beginning (and end) of a year as a benchmark provides a low-cost way of ensuring self-monitoring. Maybe many fail, but New Year’s provides a good place to start either way.
New Year’s resolutions and hobbies often go hand in hand. Among my friend group, people are pursuing resolutions of improving woodworking skills, learning how to work with glass, and honing jiu-jitsu skills. Recent Pew Research data suggests that, of the people who make resolutions, 55 percent make resolutions about
hobbies.
I see hobby-culture as an important part of our increasingly specialized society. While specialization has obvious upsides, we can also find clear downsides to the tendency. Hobbies act as a perfect hedge against the downsides of specialization.
The Benefits of Specialization and Why It Matters
Specialization as an idea comes at the very beginning of economics as a science. In Adam Smith’s book “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” he introduces the idea of a factory that manufactures pins. He argues that if each person learns to make a small part (1/10th) of a pin, they will be much more productive:“Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.”
Economists have recognized two reasons why specialization improves productivity. Armen Alchian and William Allen present these two arguments in their textbook “Universal Economics.” The first reason specialization improves productivity is that some producers naturally have a lower production cost. As such, specialization allows individuals to produce that which is the lowest cost for them.
For example, a farmer in the U.S. does not have an adequate climate to produce coffee for as low of a cost as a farmer in Honduras. Likewise, the Honduran farmers would have to sacrifice acres perfect for coffee growth in order to grow corn. To remedy these issues, the U.S. farmer can specialize in corn while the Honduran farmer can specialize in coffee, and then the two can trade.
The second source of the gains from specialization comes from learning by doing. People improve at just about any action via repetition. The same is true of production. If a tailor is responsible for producing all kinds of clothes, he will have relatively limited time to learn how to produce suit jackets well. If, instead, he only produces suit jackets, it seems reasonable to think this specialization will improve his skills.
These benefits of specialization have made it commonplace in the modern world. Whereas historically everyone needed to know how to grow crops, mend clothes, chop down trees, and hunt for food, nowadays most people outsource these roles to experts who specialize in them. It’s unlikely that our society could have risen to its current heights of wealth without specialization.
Hobbies: The Antidote to Over-Specialization
Libertarian author Robert Heinlein provides a different perspective on specialization in his book “Time Enough for Love”:“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
What are we to make of Heinlein’s quote here—does this undermine the importance of specialization in society? I don’t think so.
Nowhere does this quote imply that specialized jobs are without benefits. Rather, Heinlein appears to be arguing that people should be well-rounded regardless of their careers. Heinlein is saying that every man should be a Renaissance Man.
So how can someone whose job it is to program computers learn how to design a building, write a sonnet, or build a wall? Put simply, many of the activities Heinlein lists above are hobbies. Admittedly, some of the things on the above list extend beyond the realm of hobbies (I don’t know any amateur bone-setters), but many people learn these things today through their own interests.
One of the benefits of hobbies, then, is that they insure us against the biggest downside of specialization: fragility. If everyone only knows how to do the work associated with his or her own station, what happens if someone doesn’t show up to his station? The whole production process gets stalled.
Imagine, for example, if delivery trucks stopped coming to your local grocery store. How would you get food? Likely, many people don’t have a good answer to this question. Those who have taken up hunting or forestry as a hobby likely do have a good answer because they’ve achieved diversification through hobbies.
This is an extreme example, to be sure, but it is representative of the downside of specialization and the attendant upside of hobbies.
We can imagine a milder example (one that is personally relatable). Let’s say a winter storm strikes and all your local auto repair shops are backed up. The snow causes something on the bottom of your car to become dislodged, and it occasionally scrapes on the pavement.
Maybe, once upon a time in history, car owners would know the necessary information to diagnose the problem themselves. However, in the era of specialization, you are used to taking your car to a specialist. What’s the remedy here? Well, you could wait several weeks for an auto repair shop, or you could call on a friend who is a car hobbyist.
Your friend might not be a professional, but his experience might be enough to make up for your ignorance. At least that’s how it worked out for me, and this example shows exactly how hobbies build resilience.
So if you’re not sure what to do for a resolution this year, get yourself a hobby. Heinlein’s list provides a pretty good idea of where to start.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
