I've nearly finished reading the terrific new book by BBC presenter Evan Davis, Made in Britain (haven't yet caught up on the TV series). The fact that I agree almost entirely with Evan means it is obviously an excellent book, not to mention a good read – it almost made me miss my tube stop yesterday.

In a nutshell, it gives a balanced perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of UK manufacturing. The strengths include some significant advanced manufacturing sectors, quite a few thriving niches, and real strengths in innovation and creativity. Together these mean that although employment in manufacturing has fallen dramatically over recent decades, and its share in the economy has also declined sharply, the level of output, and consequently the productivity of UK industry, has risen. We are nowhere near as weak compared to other leading industrial nations as we typically think. Needless to say, there are weaknesses too, all of them well-known, including the national mania for investing in housing and the unbalancing effect of our financial services industry.

I particularly like the clear logic the book applies to the natural evolution of the economy from primary to secondary to tertiary activities, and the consequence of productivity growth in the dynamic sector of its day for that sector's future size relative to total GDP and employment. I also applaud the book's calm insistence that trade with China – its cheap consumer goods for our investment goods and services – is on balance a good thing for both the Chinese and the British. I haven't seen the calculation of the likely costs and benefits set out in such an accessible way anywhere else.

One chapter that is particularly intriguing looks at the psychology of manufacturing. Why do we worry particularly about the health of manufacturing? Why is there something especially satisfactory about doing a job whose output is tangible? The book compares the innate job satisfaction of working on building aircraft at BAE Systems versus selling advertising space on a commercial radio station. It argues that the tangible must have a special psychological status, and references books on craftsmanship. There is obviously something in this – it's a constant trope of the literature of work. Although all the increment in GDP since around 1980 has been intangible and literally weightless (see The Weightless World – pdf), and although many people inveigh against materialism, physical stuff seems to have a privileged status in our minds.

But this isn't the whole psychological story. Some service sector jobs also have a privileged status in most of our minds – teaching, nursing, and caring, I would suggest, perhaps also being a musician or an artist – but not working as an actor or a lawyer or banker. And some manufacturing jobs would be seen as inferior too, depending perhaps on how they are labelled. Working on an aircraft engine is one thing, or working as a lathe operator, but what about working on the assembly line in a food processing factory? This carries over to our views about different sub-sectors themselves, the caring professions as opposed to the exploitative ones, the romantic engineer as opposed to the pathetic chicken-plucker. I don't have an uber-theory about the status of these different economic activities, but my ideal economy would have a lot of us earning our living making music, dancing and painting – and making TV and radio programmes, creating beautiful clothes and devising delicious meals –  as well as caring for children and the sick. And I'd be happy for my sons to become engineers, or economists, but definitely not investment bankers.