Bryan Caplan offers two poetic tributes to low-skilled workers: one written by him and one written by ChatGPT. He writes in his conclusion of the first:
I freely confess: Very few of my personal friends are low-skilled workers. I’m a professor and a nerd, with decidedly high-brow tastes. If I tried sharing my feelings with any particular low-skilled worker, my outreach would no doubt come off as awkward and condescending. But I still declare before the whole world that I am deeply, sincerely grateful for low-skilled workers’ ubiquitous life-sustaining and life-affirming contributions. Contrary to popular insinuations, you are not charity cases. You keep us alive. You put roofs over our heads. You care for our children and our elders. You pick up the slack of life, taking care of the troubles others are too frazzled to handle. You deserve respect and appreciation, not casual disdain. Elites who talk as if you’re a massive burden aren’t merely rude. They are massively, blatantly, grotesquely wrong.
And ChatGPT writes in the second:
The nobility of low-skilled work is not that it is romantic. Much of it is tiring, repetitive, boring, and unpleasant. The nobility is that people do it anyway because other human beings value the result. That is enough. More than enough.
The economic case is overwhelming. Low-skilled workers expand output. They lower prices. They let higher-skilled workers specialize. A surgeon with a clean operating room, an economist with childcare, a CEO with a functioning supply chain, a parent with takeout dinner, and a tourist with a made bed are all more productive because someone else handled tasks that needed handling.
This is the division of labor. It is not glamorous. It is glorious.
And here is the ode:
To the janitor who makes the office usable before the office workers arrive.
To the dishwasher who saves the evening after the diners depart.
To the roofer under the August sun.
To the cashier who absorbs a hundred tiny indignities and still says, “Have a nice day.”
To the hotel maid who restores order after strangers leave chaos.
To the delivery driver who turns my laziness into dinner.
To the immigrant with poor English, little money, and a heroic willingness to start at the bottom.
Thank you. You are not a problem to be solved. You are fellow builders of civilization.
The least we can do is stop getting in your way.
Truly beautiful, as is the work he praises—directly and through AI prompting.
Neil Hacker explains how ASML makes the essential chips that run our world:
The most advanced version of this technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is used to make the very smallest chips. The smallest in 2025 were marketed as three nanometers, roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair.
To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. [emphasis added]
Dan Williams argues that the idea of speaking truth to power is misguided:
A simple heuristic that power and truth systematically collide doesn’t get you anywhere. Powerful people often speak the truth; the powerless often speak nonsense; and very often nobody—neither the powerful nor the powerless—has a clue what is going on, which is why we need rigorous, trustworthy, truth-seeking epistemic institutions in the first place.
Substacks referenced: