Pushback of the Week, September 28, 2025

Reviving and Supporting Craftmanship

A Substack post by TrendCompass (which publishes daily reports on financial and commodity market trends) alerted us to an apparent movement in China toward reviving traditional craftmanship. In a post titled “How Beauty Could Save the World,” TrendCompass flags “a flood of videos…which show Chinese craftsmen and women making a variety of objects of everyday use” from scratch, “all done manually with traditional tools and methods.”

The post’s author suggests that this trend represents a welcome form of pushback against the industrial model “of increasingly efficient hyperproduction of stuff.” In addition to producing more valuable and beautiful objects, a revival of craftmanship, TrendCompass argues, could solve problems related to surplus labor and society’s treatment of the elderly. Pointing out that “Products or services delivered by artisans with a lifetime of experience under their belts are invariably better than those of novices,” the author writes:

“In this sense, people nearing retirement don’t become ‘net consumers of capital,’ as Christine Lagarde called our senior citizens. Through their labor, they become people with golden hands: the most valuable, most honored capital in any society. Instead of becoming a burden and a liability, they become our most valuable asset.”

Fortunately, appreciation for artisanal products appears to be growing in the West as well. A Spanish luxury brand dedicated to such products suggests that we are experiencing a 21st-century “craft boom” and explains why the company is “obsessed” with artisans and their crafts:

“[B]y nature, independent artisan-produced work—as an example of high culture—establishes itself beyond the world of fashion. It outlives trends and takes on a timeless quality…. The things that artisanal products give us that their mass-produced cousins don’t are all the things that were lost in the transition to mass production in the first place: better materials; better build quality; greater useability; and, crucially, that almost indescribable sense that something was made by a real person rather than by a machine.”

A blogger in 2019 wrote about a “less rosy” picture, describing how “Manual labor, artisanal work and traditional crafts are perhaps more endangered, marginalized and misunderstood than ever before.” But this is where the rest of us come in. If we make an effort to shift our purchases to support craftmanship—and encourage some of the young people in our networks to embrace and revive these skills—the world could not only become more beautiful, but we could make a meaningful impact on shifting cash flows away from the predatory entities that want to put “small,” “local,” and “beautiful” out of business.