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It certainly doesn't feel like craftsmanship has gained any kind of higher social standing in our time though. The Zeitgeist of the modern times seems to be one of 'try to do the cheapest sellable thing while paying people the least possible'.

Real craftsmanship, the kind that leaves you in awe and feels like an exceptional display of human capacity, seems to be relegated, from my point of view, to a minority of well-off hobbyists who are already free from work and can do what they want without worrying about paying bills.

Every craftsman I know expresses discomfort that the only way they can turn a profit is to sell goods to wealthy people.

That seems odd. I'd rather turn a profit selling goods to people who can easily afford them than selling goods to people who will have to make hard choices or struggle to find the money.

If you make really nice, high quality goods, you often want common people who would appreciate them to have it as opposed to an ultra wealthy person who is buying a door for their 2nd home they visit 3 times a year. (To use a real life example.) I needed a new door at the time and the craftsman told me how frustrated he was he wasn’t making nice doors for people like me.

I’ve felt the same frustration doing excellent quality work on a 2nd or 3rd home that is empty most of the year.

That's one way to spin it. The other is that good quality things have become so low-demand and expensive due to barely-passable-quality things becoming so cheap, that people buying good quality things is now ironically more uneconomical than ever.

So just like before the industrial revolution then. Because back then (pre-1750 or so), most goods were made for the wealthy as well.

> Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.

yes, but no. Many craft skills used in jewelry, architecture and others are lost. For example, some goldsmithing techniques well-known in the 1700s are not reproducible today.

source: trained goldsmith

And how much of today's craftsmanship would be impossible one, two or three centuries ago?

There has never been as much craftsmanship as today. The idea that industry destroyed craftsmanship is a caricature. Modern industry was built on top of deep craftsmanship traditions and only enriched them.

The fact that some things that we knew how to do centuries ago we no longer know how to do is by no means evidence to the contrary.

> Look closer and you'll see that what happened in the UK in the 1700s was in fact enabled by a long and deep tradition of craftsmanship that only got enriched by the rise of new power sources. Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.

I suspect the horses are healthier and stronger than in the 1700s too. I'm not sure I understand your point?

I'd agree that the niche of extremely high quality, bespoke craftsmanship still exists, and that in some cases jobs were augmented by technology rather than entirely replaced, but the point still stands that the work these people used to do has been automated and disrupted by technology.

The fact some people upskilled or reskilled as a response is analogous to coders today. All I'd question is the extent of the disruption we'll see as a result of AI – I worry that this time things will change much more quickly and there may not be plenty of other jobs for people to upskill / reskill in to.

But if that's not true then perhaps whatever software engineering exists in the future will be far more complex than what software engineers have done for the last few decades.

Craftsmanship exists everywhere and is as they say vastly superior, or at least more capable, than ever.

Every random business has some machine that puts caps on bottles or something, and these things are ridiculously better designed, engineered, and fabricated than ever before, because the knowledge and tools available to the designer and fabricator are better than ever before.

You are surrounded by things that are insanely well made by all previous standards. Even the crappy stuff that you don't think of as well-made, because it is junk compared to everything else, still has many aspects that are almost magic.

You're missing the forest for the trees.

Horse population today is in line with the long term average. There was a freak bump from 1850-1920.

Think about this question: is it harder today or 200 years ago for the average person to learn and ride horses?

Same goes for craftsmanship: is it harder today or 200 years ago to find some highly skilled craftsman to do something a random people or organization might fancy getting done?

And software. We may be in the freak bump of software engineers. Seven digits seems like a good guess. Maybe we will revert to a long term average proportion of people with affinity for math and logic. But you bet your horse (heh) that in 200 years it will be far easier for the average person to find some highly skilled software craftsman to do some niche work than it has ever been. Average quality of corporate slop generated by flesh or silicon drones notwithstanding.

Society and the economy will go on growing more complex. Whatever anyone can picture or design in their heads about the reality of things can never approach the real world complexity and variety. And by whatever metric you may choose, the complexity and variety of skills and capabilities in human civilization will go on growing.

> I suspect the horses are healthier and stronger than in the 1700s too. I'm not sure I understand your point?

Horses? I doubt it. They're still infamously fragile creatures today, even with penicillin and vaccinations existing; similarly for strength, not much call for shires and they're now on an "at risk" conservation list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse -> https://www.rbst.org.uk/watchlist-breed/shire-horse/

Possibly also fewer horses in total, though I don't know any stats for that far back and may be over-estimating based on the stats I do have for c. 1900.

The current breeds of horses the Amish use are far stronger and healthier than they were even 100 years ago. For example, current draft horses are so strong they can outperform mules and oxen, and running horses are absurdly fast. I heard of a guy who regularly zips around at 20 MPH with a buggy or cart. That simply wasn’t possible in the 200s.

Of course the costs are higher too. Good horses in the above category can go for north of $100k.