Who has Greater Value, the Scientist or the Plowman?

Wednesday morning,  a bough yields to the previous night's snows.

We live in a culture where work associated exclusively with brainpower is valued more highly than work accomplished through the application of physical energy. 

That’s why, for instance, there is so much emphasis placed on the need for a college education to succeed in life.

People who work with their hands – the blue-collar types – often are not valued for their contribution and, upon occasion, even have their work efforts marginalized. 

Here in Somerset County, New Jersey, where the preponderance of personal incomes is garnered by white-collar workers, there is an increasing scarcity of manufacturing jobs for which the state was once noted.

Yet there are still hundreds of thousands of non white-collar workers around.  We simply don’t take the thinking time to acknowledge them.  The recent snowstorms which descended upon Somerset County in the last three weeks are what made me pause to consider this dichotomy. 

I have a friend who works for a prominent landscaping firm and who (you guessed it) spends the winter months making sure that the walkways, driveways, and parking lots of corporate facilities are kept clean of snow and ice, and safe to use.

If there are no crews out there in the middle of the night, the snow doesn’t get cleared.  If the snow doesn’t get cleared, the degreed personnel don’t get to work the next day. Sounds like a one-dimensional conclusion, doesn’t it?

But just consider the hue and cry of rhetoric that cascaded upon Mayor Bloomberg’s head in New York City when, in the previous storm, the streets were deemed not to have been made adequately passable by the sanitation crews. 

Or recall the similar, but less strident outbursts in New Jersey, when it was discovered that both our governor and the lieutenant governor were absent from the Garden State at the height of the storm.

So then:  Who has greater value, the scientist or the plowman?

The question, or course, is meaningless because of this rationale: A well-tuned, functioning society needs the talents and expertise of all of us, regardless of whether we work mostly with our hands or with our heads. 

To measure the worth of different occupations solely on their stand-alone, economic value misses the point.  No single occupation can survive in a modern society without being linked with all the other contributing occupations which, as a whole, lead to the wealth of this country.  

Besides, I would argue that my friend, the plowman, has an entrepreneurial mind and could outthink and outmaneuver many of my former college-educated associates.