Oeconomicus

Two thousand years ago, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus laid out a vision of a well-ordered life, one where the management of a household—its land, its resources, its people—required both intellectual rigor and physical engagement. Socrates, in his dialogue with Critobulus, doesn’t just wax poetic about abstract virtues; he grounds his wisdom in the dirt of the farm, the rhythm of seasons, and the tangible labor of cultivation. Xenophon’s farmer isn’t just a laborer; he’s a thinker, a strategist, a steward of systems both natural and human. To be a good citizen, Xenophon suggests, is to understand the interplay of mind and hand, to see the world not as an abstraction but as a fragile, physical web of interdependence.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially as I reflect on the interviews I conducted for this year’s John Pettibone Memorial Scholarship. For years, the applications we received were heavy with predictable ambitions: pre-law, finance, maybe the occasional “business administration” for good measure. These were kids chasing the prestige jobs, the ones that promised corner offices and six-figure starting salaries. But this year, something shifted. I heard less about Wall Street and more about engineering, medicine, and—most strikingly—the trades. Welding. Carpentry. Electrical work. These young people, inheriting a world teetering on the edge of sociopolitical and economic volatility, seem to sense something the rest of us have been slow to grasp: to be an integrated citizen of society, you need to work with both your hands and your mind. You need to understand the atoms that hold it all together.

There’s a profound disconnect when your livelihood is divorced from the physical world. The further your occupation strays from the land—agriculture, mechanics, infrastructure—the less you appreciate the fragility of the systems that keep society humming. Take the lineman, for instance. He knows the grid isn’t just a concept; it’s a sprawling, temperamental beast of wires, transformers, and substations that can fail with one fallen tree or a single lightning strike. He’s got a visceral respect for the infrastructure that keeps your refrigerator running, because he’s the one out in the storm, splicing cables at 2 a.m. Compare that to the consultant, whose world is PowerPoint decks and Zoom calls. The consultant might optimize a supply chain on paper, but does he know what it takes to keep the trucks running, the warehouses powered, the roads intact? Probably not.

Or consider the farmer. Every meal is a quiet triumph, a stoic nod to the labor, weather, and sheer luck that brought it to the table. Contrast that with the marketer, whose relationship to food is mediated through branding campaigns and focus groups. The farmer knows the cost of a failed crop; the marketer knows the cost of a failed ad. One’s a matter of survival; the other’s a matter of metrics. Xenophon would have understood this instinctively. In Oeconomicus, he describes farming as a discipline that teaches virtue through necessity—patience, foresight, resilience. You can’t bullshit a field into yielding; you have to work it, know it, respect it.

This year’s scholarship applicants seem to get it. They’re not just chasing paychecks; they’re drawn to fields where they can touch the world, shape it, fix it. Engineering students talked about designing sustainable infrastructure. Medical hopefuls spoke of hands-on care, not just diagnostics. And the kids eyeing the trades? They were the most grounded of all, talking about building homes, wiring communities, repairing the physical backbone of society. Coming from a generation that’s watched global supply chains buckle, energy grids falter, and institutions wobble, they’re betting on vocations that demand both critical thinking and tangible skill. They’re not just inheriting a volatile world—they’re preparing to rebuild it.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. Large language models like ChatGPT and its successors are rewriting the rules of work. They’re already outperforming teams of doctors in diagnostics, parsing medical data with a precision and speed no human could match. Legal research? LLMs can sift through case law faster than any paralegal, and they’re starting to draft briefs that rival seasoned attorneys. The entire “analyst” class—those white-collar knowledge workers who’ve dominated the prestige economy for decades—is on shaky ground. If your job is about gathering, processing, or synthesizing information, AI is coming for you. And it’s not just coming—it’s here.

The irony is delicious. Back in the 1980s, we thought the future would replace blue-collar jobs with robots. Plumbers, electricians, handymen—these were the roles we assumed automation would erase. But it turns out the jobs that move atoms are harder to automate than we thought. Self-driving cars are still mired in regulatory and technical hurdles, but plumbers, roofers, arborists, and electricians? Their work is too varied, too context-dependent, too rooted in the messy unpredictability of the physical world. Meanwhile, the high-paying, repetitive “knowledge work” of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—law, finance, consulting—is proving far easier to disrupt. AI thrives on pattern recognition and data crunching, which is exactly what those jobs entail. The coal miner who never learned to code? He’s got a better shot at job security than the analyst who never learned to turn a wrench.

This isn’t to say AI is a villain. Far from it. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it amplifies human potential. The question is what we do with it. Xenophon’s farmer didn’t just plow fields; he studied them, adapted to them, learned from them. Today’s integrated citizen needs to do the same with technology. The opportunity for the inquisitive, self-motivated individual has never been greater. The internet is a library of Alexandria in your pocket—tutorials, forums, open-source designs. You can teach yourself to code, to weld, to grow a garden, to repair a generator. The autodidact is back, and the world needs them.

But we also need to leave the cubicle. The digital world is seductive, but it’s not the whole story. Society runs on atoms—pipes, wires, crops, roads. The lineman, the farmer, the electrician—they’re not just cogs in a machine; they’re the ones who keep the machine from breaking. And as AI reshapes the economy, the jobs that endure will be the ones that demand both hands and mind. The scholarship applicants I met this year seem to understand this intuitively. They’re not running from the future; they’re leaning into it, ready to build, fix, and heal in a world that’s crying out for it.

So here’s the challenge: rediscover the world of atoms. Learn to fix a leaky pipe, grow a tomato, rewire a lamp. Study the systems that keep society afloat—not just the ones in spreadsheets, but the ones in the ground, in the walls, in the fields. Xenophon knew this 2,400 years ago: to be a citizen is to be engaged, to understand the fragility of the systems you depend on, to contribute to their resilience. The future belongs to those who can think deeply and work deftly, who can swing a hammer as well as an idea. It’s an exciting time. The world is waiting for us to get our hands dirty.