In 2019, I published a book whose English title would be something like From Graft to Craft. I argued that craftsmanship isn’t a sector but a model of work that could in principle apply to any job. The distinction I built the book around was between graft (fragmented, deskilled, industrialized toil) and craft (a finished piece of work you can put your name to). To work as a craftsperson means autonomy, responsibility, creativity, and mastery of a result you can be proud of. A developer, a nurse or a consultant should all be able to work that way. Instead, too many of us are handed the deskilled version and feel alienated or bored.
A fascination that never quite matched reality
For years, the story of graduate-degree holders walking away from bullshit jobs to become bakers, cheesemakers, brewers, restaurateurs kept coming back in the media. These reinventions fascinate everyone, journalists first of all, forever hunting for seductive stories about rediscovered meaning, hands deep in the grease. But our collective fascination always said more than the phenomenon warranted. The neoartisans were, statistically, a rounding error, a marginal trend inflated into a movement because it flattered a widely shared dream as well as nostalgia for a wholeness of work that probably never existed in the first place.
We’ve been here before
All of this was already in the air more than 15 years ago. Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) made the philosophical case. The former think tank director who quit to fix motorcycles argued that manual work demands real intelligence and offers a psychic wholeness that knowledge work, for all its prestige, often doesn’t. The cultural craze was real. It even reached software, where “software craftsmanship” became a movement with a manifesto, a way for developers to insist their work was a craft and not an assembly line.
The craze was everywhere but in employment statistics. The trades actually kept struggling to recruit. The bullshit jobs kept multiplying. Software craftsmanship stayed the conviction of a passionate minority while most engineering work industrialized anyway. The much-mythologized flight of elite graduates into the trades was, in the end, statistically negligible.
Trades in high demand. White collars in the doldrums.
Start with the trades. Skilled-trade shortages have become structural across the developed world: aging workforces retiring faster than young workers can replace them, and recruitment rated difficult across the board. Roofers, welders, electricians, auto body workers and butchers are hard to find. In my small country alone, France, at least 150,000 craft jobs sit unfilled, and roughly 300,000 artisanal businesses will need new owners over the next decade as large generations retire. The U.S. is staring at the same wall: More than one in five construction workers is over 55, and the construction industry alone needs an estimated 349,000 net new workers this year, most of them just to replace retirees. Across all skilled trades, one industry analysis projects a shortfall reaching 2.1 million unfilled positions. All of this arrives just as climate change multiplies the need for construction, energy retrofits, insulation, and the physical adaptation of cities.
Meanwhile, the future white-collar workers can’t get hired and are increasingly pessimistic about their future. In the U.S., recent college graduates—those between 22 and 27—are now more likely to be unemployed than the workforce as a whole, something the New York Fed’s data, going back to 1990, had never recorded before. Their jobless rate sat at roughly 5.6% through mid-2026, well above the national rate. Gallup’s global polling makes the mood vivid: The U.S. now has the widest gap of any country between how young and old adults view the job market, with just 43% of Americans between 15 and 34 calling it a good time to find work, 21 points below their over-55 counterparts. The steepest pessimism of all sits with the most educated young Americans still looking for full-time work, the people a college degree was supposed to protect.
AI, both the cause and the alibi
Artificial intelligence is probably part of the reversal, and certainly part of the alibi. When a company slows hiring, “we’re automating” is a more flattering story than “we overhired in 2021 and can’t afford the downturn,” and the two are genuinely hard to separate. The evidence that AI is doing real damage is mounting: Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and coauthors found that since late 2022, early-career workers between 22 and 25 in the most AI-exposed roles—software developers, marketing staff—saw a 16% relative decline in employment, even as older workers in the same jobs held steady. But the picture is contested. Anders Humlum, a University of Chicago economist, points to payroll data showing that the companies spending the most on AI actually expanded their entry-level headcount.
What isn’t contested is where the damage concentrates: the bottom rung. The tasks that language models handle best (summarizing documents, drafting first-pass code, producing the standard memo) are those once handed to juniors so they could learn the trade. Now that these tasks can be automated, the short-term move is to stop hiring the person who used to do them. The trouble is that a ladder without its bottom rungs is one you can’t climb onto. Companies are trimming a real cost today while dismantling the system that produces their future senior talent.
Gen Z is already doing the math
The cost of college makes the calculation even more brutal in the U.S. The New York Times has documented a Gen Z turning to trade schools to shield themselves from both student debt and AI. Enrollment in public vocational schools reportedly rose nearly 20% between 2020 and 2025. AI can write an email, but it can’t install a sink or weld a valve, they reason. The main obstacle they name is other people’s judgment. The vocational path is not seen as prestigious. Only a tiny minority of parents want their child to choose a manual trade.
But the young increasingly see the trades as meaningful, as offering secure prospects and fostering independence. Many say they’re ready to move toward technical or hands-on work. For that trend to have a future, we need to support apprenticeship, make it into a machine that inserts young people. Alas, apprenticeship hasn’t grown lately . . .
Why this time might actually be different
The craftsmanship craze of the 2010s stayed marginal because the numbers didn’t back it up. Prestige and pay kept flowing to the knowledge jobs. Today, however, three forces could actually make craftsmanship into the model of the future.
The first is AI. As it industrializes white-collar work and floods it with slop, generic, deskilled, interchangeable output produced at scale, the comparative value of work that can’t be faked and slopped goes up. You need a weld to hold and a pipe to not leak. Craftsmanship could become an economic choice in the late 2020s.
The second is physical demand. It’s enormous. The housing crisis gripping much of the developed world is, among other things, a construction problem. We are not building fast enough, and much of what we have built needs work. Climate change compounds it. The energy transition runs through the built environment: Insulation, retrofits, heat pumps, and the wholesale renovation of aging housing stock require a lot of work. Adaptation to a hotter, more volatile climate means reinforcing, rebuilding, and redesigning cities and infrastructure for conditions they were not made for. None of this can be prompted into existence.
The third is demographic. It will force us to widen the definition of craft. As populations age, we won’t only need roofers and electricians but also a lot of people in care work. We don’t usually file caring professions under “craftsmanship” but we should. They demand exactly what defines craft: embodied skill, judgment, a result that depends on the person doing it, and a physical presence. If craft is work that accumulates in the body and can’t be faked, then bathing a frail patient without hurting them, or reading distress in a person, is craft of a high order. Recognizing it as such may be the most consequential revaluation of all.
