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Two things that I’ve done that I’m proud of. Once, when I was in my mid-twenties, the ancient bakelite fuse in our rented Holloway flat burnt out. I teased out the fuse wire wrapped around one of the heads and rewired it, using pliers, under the light of an anglepoise lamp.

And once, in my mid-thirties, I replaced the seal on our washing machine. Twice, in fact. The first time it took about two hours, and both times I ended up with bleeding knuckles from scraping them against the gigantic rough concrete block washing machines have inside them for some reason (please do not email to tell me the reason). But I got the damn seal replaced.

Sure, I’ve done other things I could be proud of. Raised two kids. Written a couple of books. Won some awards for this and that. Run a few half-marathons. But when I look back and try to think of moments where I really glowed with pride, where I just wanted to walk down the street holding my arms aloft like Rocky on the top of the steps, it was those. Particularly the washing-machine seal. Man. I felt alive.

It’s worth noting that for all the time I was doing those things, I had my dad on the end of the phone, talking me through it.

I am not the first to note that people today are less handy than their parents. My sister even bought me a book called “Man Skills” about 15 years ago, which explained how to do basic around-the-home stuff like bleeding a radiator, for modern men who largely have no idea how to do that. (It’s really very easy.)

My generation’s fathers, though, had no need for such books. My dad once took his mum’s car apart and put it back together again (and I think it still worked, afterward).

Some people feel this is a bad thing, and some sort of indicator of societal decline. Once we could all roof a house, change a car wheel, ski through the snow-laden fir trees silent as a ghost and assassinate the Soviet commissar behind enemy lines, that sort of thing. This soft-handed generation doesn’t know where the mains tap is and needs to get an electrician in to change a lightbulb. We are weak and fallen.

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it, though. I think it’s because of economic specialisation.

I’ve been listening to the economist Russ Roberts on a podcast called EconTalk for a while now. He has this line: self-sufficiency is the road to poverty. He quotes an article by Robert Frank in the New York Times:

[As] a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal long ago, I hired a cook who had no formal education but was spectacularly intelligent and resourceful. Beyond preparing excellent meals, he could butcher a goat, thatch a roof, plaster walls, resole shoes and fix broken alarm clocks. He was also an able tinsmith and a skilled carpenter. Yet his total lifetime earnings were less than even a very lazy, untalented American might earn in a single year.

By any reasonable measure, that cook is far more skilled than I am, or probably than almost any Briton is. And yet he earned sufficiently little that a Peace Corps volunteer could afford to hire him as a cook. Of course there are huge differences between the economies of the USA and Nepal, for various historical reasons, but Roberts argues that the fact that the talented Nepalese had to be a generalist was part of why he is poor.

Roberts imagines a scenario where we are all neolithic deer-hunters. We could each spend our day trying to catch deer, and we’d catch a certain amount. But if I want to increase how much venison I get, I can either hit you on the head and steal yours – which is zero-sum – or I can try to work out ways of being more productive.

One obvious method would be to come up with better technologies: develop better flint knives, or invent the bow and arrow. But another is to specialise.

Roberts again: before the day’s deer-hunting begins, each of us has to make our sandwiches. Making those sandwiches takes a little bit of time, and it would be more efficient if we invested in capital goods to speed it up a bit. If we each have to make our own bread, slice our own meat, and so on, it’s a slow process. But if we’re only making one sandwich a day each, it’s not worth the investment.

If one of us specialises, though, and makes all the sandwiches for the entire tribe, then it becomes economically viable to buy a breadmaker, a meat-slicer, a jar of mustard. (These are definitely things which exist in the neolithic period.) And if you’re making 500 sandwiches, you can make each one quicker than any individual can make their own.

And, of course, then the hunters can specialise too. They no longer need to spend time making sandwiches, so they can spend more time hunting, so there is more venison to go around. By specialising, you have increased the productivity of the entire group.

Roberts’s point (which isn’t his original point, he’s recounting some fairly standard economic theory I think) is that this is true even if we’re all literally identical. Of course, we’re not. Some of us are better at sandwich-making and some of us are better at hunting.

In fact, some of us are better at both. It might well be that one person is the best sandwich-maker and the best hunter. But even then, that person is best doing the thing they’re best at. Even if they can make more sandwiches than I can, and kill more deer than I can, if they’re especially good at making the sandwiches then it’s best if I go and kill the deer. That’s the 19th-century economist David Ricardo’s argument about comparative advantage and trade. But we don’t need that here: even in a population of identical clones, it would make sense for some of us to focus on sandwich-making and others on hunting deer.

What’s also true is that this can only happen in a fairly big society. There’s just no point in investing in that breadmaker if your tribe only has three people in it. More seriously (and again to paraphrase Roberts) if you’re a subsistence farmer on a one-acre plot, there’s no point in buying a grain-thresher or combine harvester.

As societies get bigger and more advanced, the amount of specialisation they can support becomes greater. Eventually, when your tribe is big enough, you might need two sandwich-makers, or three, or 100. Then you might need someone to make bread knives and chopping boards to support the sandwich-making industry. Eventually you need several of those, so you need machine shops to make the tools to make the bread knives, and so on.

At each stage, people become more specialised and less generally capable. At first, people can make all the equipment they need to make a sandwich and to catch a deer; they can make the sandwich and they can kill the deer. They have a wide range of skills. But they’re all really poor, because they can’t specialise.

Later, they get more specialised. The sandwich-makers never learn to hunt; they are less skilful than their ancestors, strictly speaking. They might be somewhat better at sandwich-making but they haven’t got a clue how to gut a stag. Their offspring in turn are even less skilled. They can make the sandwiches but they can’t make the knives that they use. Each generation focuses more narrowly on more specialisms, and trades with other people for other services.

There is some bit of me that will always feel slightly less – gah, awful word, but – manly for not being able to adjust the gear cable on my bike myself, or fix a broken toaster. And the memory of repairing that washing machine really is one of my proudest. But inherent in the very idea of our society getting richer is the fact that we’re going to become more specialised.

One day, in a thousand generations later, we will end up with scenarios where some of us are sufficiently specialised that literally all we can do is sit in our spare rooms typing words on a laptop about economic specialisation. The future me will have to pay someone to turn his swivel-chair around and to lift his coffee cup to his lips, because he’ll have forgotten how to do those things. And it will be a good thing.

I did a thing about whether we’re all going to be killed by an asteroid. (Probably not!)

And a longer piece about the economic effects of monarchies vs republics, but that won’t be published until the weekend, so you’ll just have to hang on.

I don’t know the blogger Resident Contrarian well; this is the first time I’ve read his work. But this felt like a good companion piece to the above. He writes about some of the stark discontinuities and tradeoffs you have to make when your income is (comparably) low. I thought it was especially interesting noting that, as well as self-sufficiency being the road to poverty, poverty forces you to become self-sufficient. And, of course, the time spent doing car repairs or whatever are time not spent working on the spreadsheets which are your comparative advantage – it’s a vicious cycle:

You are also more or less forced to learn to do mechanic work. I’m an administrator by trade – I usually work in the kind of jobs that have “assistant” appended to them. One of my greatest prides is typing speed, and when people ask me my hobby I tell them “Excel”. If you were judging me by my interests and natural skillset, you wouldn’t expect me to be able to change my own tires. But over the years necessity has forced me to get pretty decent at car work – I’ve done clutch rebuilds and head gasket jobs and a bunch of other miserable (for me) work that I would have rather avoided. But this was often the only option I had – it was either figuring out how to replace an alternator or do a full brake job over the weekend or lose my ability to get to the grocery store in under an hour. Keep in mind the money saved here is just the labor – parts still have a cost that’s unavoidable.

The practical upshot of this is whenever I drive, it’s very slowly, very carefully, and listening in terror to any small noise the car makes. It’s a constant stress, and it’s limiting; we don’t go on long road trips often, and when we do my joke with my wife is usually something like “Well, if the car breaks down somewhere else, we’ll just start living there”.

Since this piece was written, something has gone right in his life, and he’s written a follow-up: “On being rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class.”

This is Geek Week with Tom Chivers, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

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