I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book from Netgalley because I'd read a few articles about it, including one by the author himself I believe, and thought it sounded good. And it's a fantastic idea for an article; but less so for a book.

The central thesis - jobs can be divided into intellectual labour (head), manual labour (hand) and caring labour (heart), and all but the former have become increasingly underpaid and worse, undervalued in recent years - is very sensible and something that people of many political persuasions can agree with. Dare I say it, but it's common sense. Unfortunately, where Goodhart goes wrong is that the book rambles wildly off the original theme, and always in ways that weakens it. I spent the majority of my reading experience trudging through endless culture war nonsense, mostly involving Goodhart being an apologist for the Brexit voters (it's all your fault for denigrating the working classes, you London-resident, Guardian-reading, metropolitan elite! etc) and generally lashing out at "woke" culture. I don't mind Goodhart being a small-c conservative, but most of this felt barely relevant to the original thesis of the book, and I suspect it's simply a re-hashing of much of what he wrote in The Road to Somewhere, his previous book (although I haven't read it yet).

One of the worse tangents Goodhart goes off on involves the question of whether intelligence is inherited or not. Now, aside from the fact that Goodhart favours a far more genetic determinist position than I do, I think this is largely irrelevant to the whole "Head, Hand, Heart" concept - the point is that manual and caring jobs deserve equal esteem, regardless of whether it's genetics or environment that determines 'intelligence' and thus suitability for the highly-esteemed 'Head' jobs. But also - far more concerningly - this is the section that quotes extensively from Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve is a thoroughly debunked and pseudoscientific book which promotes the idea that promotes some rather racist ideas about genetics and intelligence. This does nothing good for Goodhart's credibility, and even makes him seem quite sinister at times. It's one thing to say that some people are less suited to white-collar jobs but their work deserves equal esteem - there's nothing wrong with that concept - but if you combine that with tacitly endorsing a man who argues that black and poor people are intellectually inferior, and well, the implication is something a lot more worrying.

There's more I could talk about here, but basically all you need to know is that this book has a sensible thesis but one which is better suited to an article than an entire book, and Goodhart tries to pad it out with a lot of culture war nonsense. Even if you agree with his positions, I think a lot of it is boring, irrelevant, and just begging for a decisive editor to intervene and cut it down. I suspect this book was rushed out in order to capitalise on both the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the importance of 'Heart' workers, and on Brexit/the success of The Road to Somewhere. It's disappointing, because it had such great potential. It still gets two stars rather than one because when Goodhart is right he's very right, and because again, the central point of this book is something that needed to be said

This is an academic look at the professions today, head being cognitive work, hand being manual work and heart care work. Goodhart argues that cognitive employment has been deemed greater than manual and care employment.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, reported that, according to Google, over the last thirty years there has been a sharp increase in the use of economic words and a decline in the use of moral words: “gratitude” down 49 percent, “humility” down 52 percent, and “kindness” down 56 percent.

I believe this is a very good and rounded educational book, and should be given to every 17-18 year old to read before deciding about their future and if they plan on going to university or not.

This is a difficult book to review. Like Goodhart's previous book, The Road to Somewhere, it's central thesis - that we have overvalued academic qualifications and "knowledge-related" jobs (head) over manual (hand) and care-centred (heart) work for too long - is interesting and likely to be influential. To me, however, it often seemed like an over-extended magazine or journal article. He criticises "magical thinking" about the benefits of higher education in policy-making, but could be regarded as guilty of the same in relation to manual work, especially given England/UK's very poor record on vocational education over the last century and more. There is lots of data here but also many anecdotes from Goodhart's friends, which often seem like padding especially when they drift off into largely irrelevant and predictable rants about the shortcomings of "modern" architecture. However, the main shortcoming is the lack of workable solutions offered. Like many commentators of the centre-right (broadly speaking), he seems to pine for a golden (imaginary) past without realising, for all his quoting of Harari and co, that social and technological changes make it increasingly impossible to achieve. So in short, it's worth reading but could have been taken so much further.