Yet most women are still having children. And most of these mothers are now in the workforce—either because they have to be, or because the cost to them of not working is becoming so high. Some of their children are very young. At midcentury, only 15 percent of women with children under age six were in paid work. By the 1970s, when the economy began shifting, 39 percent of them were working; by the end of the century, 65 percent. Expect the percentage to continue to rise.
Incidentally, this trend offers a way to understand why the American public stopped feeling sympathetic toward poor mothers who accept welfare checks rather than work. At midcentury, the norm was for the mothers of young children to remain home with them. Mothers with working partners relied on their partners’ paychecks; single mothers relied on welfare checks. But by the end of the century, the norm was for the mothers of young children to have jobs outside the home. Once the norm had shifted from women as stay-at-home parents to women as paid workers, people began to ask why poor mothers should be subsidized by government to stay at home with their children while mothers who were hard up but not so poor as to qualify for welfare had to go to work. No one had a very good answer. Rather than subsidize all such women who stayed at home with their small children (as some European nations have done), America simply removed the supports.
THE OUTSOURCED FAMILY
In 1776, Adam Smith noted the inefficiencies of isolated homes scattered about the Scottish Highlands in which farm families had to be hugely self-sufficient. He used these poor and overworked families to illustrate the superior advantages of a division of labor, such as one would find in a town. We are now in the process of extending Smith’s basic economic precept, to an unprecedented degree, into domestic life. All sorts of things that used to be done by families are now being subcontracted to specialists, including food preparation, cleaning, child care, elder care, even dog-walking. As we move further into the new economy, it seems likely that more family functions will be outsourced.
The test a family uses to decide whether to subcontract a particular task is just like the test used by a company considering whether to “outsource” a particular function. Can the subcontractor do the task as well as the family member can do it, but do it more cheaply, considering the alternative uses of the family member’s time? Since the major alternative use of the family member’s time is earning money, the calculation is straightforward: Figure your after-tax income for a given hour of paid work, add in whatever additional psychic satisfaction the paid work provides you, and consider also the possibility that if you didn’t take the work, it might not be there tomorrow (make hay while the sun shines), or that contacts, connections, and your reputation for being dedicated to your work might suffer. Then compare all of this with the cost and the quality of the subcontractor’s work, plus whatever psychic satisfaction you might otherwise get from doing that home work yourself. If the former sum exceeds the latter, you subcontract.
Families are making these calculations all the time—perhaps not quite as systematically, but surely with some feel for relative costs and benefits. And as both men and women work harder for pay, they’re subcontracting out more of what were once family responsibilities. By 1996, spending on take-out meals from restaurants exceeded spending on meals consumed at restaurants. By 1997, spending on take-out meals
and
restaurants exceeded spending on groceries.
25
And even the supermarkets are offering more prepared food: roasted chickens, soups, grilled salmon, cooked vegetables, casseroles. If you wish, you can order your meals or your groceries by phone, fax, or Internet.
Atlanta-based Maid Brigade has expanded more than 20 percent a year for a decade. Working women constitute 80 percent of its clients. For a small membership fee, Streamline (www.streamline.com) will install a large box in your garage replete with refrigerator and security system, for picking up or delivering dry-cleaning, videos, film processing, groceries, pharmaceuticals, or just about anything else you want taken from or brought to your home when you’re not there. Streamline’s director of marketing explains that, “[l]ike businesses, families are rationalizing the number of relationships with their suppliers.”
26
Streamline doesn’t yet pick up and deliver kids to piano lessons or play dates (the box is a bit stuffy for children), but other services do. Some families rely on private van services to shuttle their children from place to place. One luxury Manhattan condo offers “para-parenting” services, featuring a concierge mother or father on call to “direct [your child] to the nearest milkshake, schedule your doctors’ appointments, or book the Spice Girls for your darling’s deb ball.”
27
When I had a birthday as a young boy, my mother baked me a cake using flour, sugar, and other basic ingredients. By the time my kid sister had her first birthday, my mother had relented to the extent of using cake mix. Then came the big squeeze. By the time my own children were young and had birthdays, my wife or I ordered ready-made cakes with customized messages on top. Now, it’s not unusual for parents to subcontract the entire party to restaurants that specialize in children’s birthdays. These restaurants supply not only the cake but also the balloons, party favors, and games—plus the all-important supervision and cleanup. Pay extra and they get a clown, and even someone to take the video. Meanwhile, Mom or Dad can duck out to check for messages.
Upper-income families of the Gilded Age had their maids, chauffeurs, cooks, gardeners, and nannies, because they had a lot of money to exchange for leisure time. Today’s upper-income families also have household staff. (“I have more people working at my house for me now than I do at work,” says Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One Corp in Chicago, who employs a maid, a nanny, a cook, and a gardener. “I’m a small corporation, essentially.”
28
) But the difference is that today’s upper-income families aren’t purchasing leisure. They’re buying more time to put into paid work. They figure that the return they get from working is higher than the cost to them of subcontracting.
By far the biggest family subcontract is child care. Today most children under the age of five—more than ten million of them—need to be looked after while their mothers and fathers go to work. Forty-four percent of these children are cared for by relatives, including older siblings; 30 percent, by staff members of day-care centers or nursery schools; 15 percent, by other adults in private homes; and the rest, by nannies, neighbors, or baby-sitters.
29
A significant portion of these children don’t get much personal attention within this hodgepodge of child-care arrangements, but as we’ll see in more detail in the next chapter, the market is operating efficiently. The amount and quality of personal attention varies directly with its price.
On this subject, too, public attitudes have shifted as the economy has shifted. In the 1970s, before women with children streamed into the workplace, a majority of adults didn’t think a working mother could establish “as warm and secure a relationship with her children” as a mother who did not work. But by the late nineties, more than two-thirds felt that she
could
.
30
Increasingly, families are also subcontracting the care of elderly parents—another job traditionally performed by women at home—to nursing homes, residential long-term-care facilities, hospices, and personal attendants at home. Some families are even subcontracting the sort of personal care and attention one spouse or partner might give to the other had they more time and emotional energy: Now they rely on massage therapists, coaches, counselors, spiritual guides, personal trainers, and shrinks.
When all this caring, fixing, delivering, cooking, cleaning, raking, clipping, and birthday-partying was done inside the home, it wasn’t included in the official “national product” because money didn’t change hands. Women’s work at home never appeared in the national accounts. But now that families are subcontracting more of what they used to do themselves, these tasks have suddenly emerged as growth industries, and the national product is that much larger. In fact, there’s a multiplier effect. Many of the people—mostly women—who get paid to do these subcontracted tasks devote a portion of what they’re paid to paying someone
else
to take on some of the tasks they no longer have time or energy to do within their
own
families.
When my mother baked my birthday cake, her labors contributed only indirectly to the economic statistics, showing up as a tiny addition to the agricultural production and retail sales of the ingredients she purchased. When she moved to using cake mix for my younger sister’s birthday, the “processed foods” category of the national product grew a tad. Our own boys’ ready-made cakes added to America’s service sector the labors of ready-made-cake bakers. The modern subcontracted birthday party adds still more to America’s bulging service sector, including the personal services of party planners, waiters, clowns, and attendants with video cameras. Each stage records greater prosperity, although the cakes have not noticeably improved.
WHAT’S LEFT
Underlying the legal definitions of a “family” are four simple criteria we used to take for granted: Members of a family were expected to remain committed to one another for life. They spent a lot of time together under the same roof. Families reproduced themselves biologically, and helped their offspring grow into adulthood. And they supported one another—financially and with caring attention.
Most families still conform to these four basic criteria, but to a lesser extent. And every trend line is moving in the opposite direction—largely because of the changes we’ve seen in how work is organized and rewarded. Connections are becoming more temporary, people spend less time together, couples are having fewer children, financial support between spouses is eroding, and care and attention are being subcontracted. Extend these trends into the future, and “family” may mean something entirely different from what it used to.
This does not necessarily signify a problem. People
want
this new kind of “family” life—at least in the superficial (and admittedly tautological) sense that they’ve chosen it for themselves. And their attitudes about the ideal family have changed to become better aligned with the choices they’ve made, as I’ve also shown. Yes, there are surely strains and tensions along the way. Finding good and affordable child care or elder care, for example, is a major hassle. Many people say they’d like to find a better “balance” between work and family. But, overall, they’re accommodating to the new economy by downsizing and outsourcing the family.
E
CONOMIC
and technological forces can’t explain everything, and I want to caution you against assigning all credit or blame to them for what has been happening to the family. Undoubtedly there are cultural shifts at work here as well. But it is striking that the changes in family structure and attitudes about family directly parallel the changes in our economic system that began in the 1970s and are now accelerating. The old system of large-scale production offered most men steadier work and more solid wages, and offered women fewer opportunities for paid work. The new system of continuous innovation features less predictable earnings from year to year or even month to month, and wider disparities in earnings. And it induces harder work in terms of time and emotional energy.
Undeniably, the emerging economy bestows great benefits on us as consumers and investors. We have more choice, and we can more easily switch to better deals. Our dollars go further, and productivity is rising. The emerging economy also generates more opportunities for talented women, as well as talented men, to earn more money. And it gives almost all women the option of having a job rather than being entirely dependent on a male breadwinner.
Given the new economy, the choices people are making about family are entirely rational. But the more fundamental choice has never been posed, and the more basic question never asked: Would we choose every aspect of this new reality if we fully appreciated its consequences for the family life we might otherwise have? In other words, as with other aspects of our personal lives, is the new economy worth what it costs us?
CHAPTER NINE
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T
HE WAY
work is coming to be organized and rewarded places a premium on personal attention. Personal attention is an ever-larger portion of the gross national product, an ever-bigger percentage of every dollar spent and earned. Among the fastest-growing job categories are attention-
givers
—people who care for, tend to, or oversee children, the elderly, the disabled, the depressed and anxious, as well as more or less healthy adults who want more attention for themselves and are able and willing to pay for it.
There are two specific reasons for the growth of the attention industry. First is the increasing number of people who are working harder and subcontracting more of what had been family responsibilities, many of which are all about giving attention. Second is the growing productivity of machines, including computerized machine tools and robots inside factories, and, in the service economy, automated bank tellers, automated gas pumps, voice-activated telephone answering systems, and digital devices that soon will do just about everything. Notably, one thing machines cannot do is provide personal attention. (Perhaps one day a robot will be capable of giving people a sense of being cared for, but I’m not betting on it.) So many people whose jobs have been supplanted by highly productive machines are selling their personal attention instead, and many more will do so in the future.
WHY THE HUMAN TOUCH MATTERS
People don’t always prefer personal attention to technology. For making routine bank deposits and withdrawals, I’d rather deal with an automatic bank teller than a human one. Not only is the ATM down the street available all the time, but it also doesn’t require that I be polite to it, or even speak to it. I’d prefer to save my scarce social energies for more important encounters. And give me self-service gas pumps over full-service any day. They’re cheaper and faster.
Yet it’s also true that personal attention can be pleasurable, and its lack distressing. I enjoy going to restaurants where waiters make a fuss over me, and detest large department stores where it’s almost impossible to find a salesperson. The human desire for attention goes deeper than this. In fact, scientists hypothesize that human beings
require
some degree of personal attention in order to be healthy. In the 1940s, René Spitz, a French psychoanalyst, compared two groups of infants—one housed for the first few months of their lives in an orphanage, whose nurses kept them well fed and clothed but had no time to give them personal attention; the other, in a home for delinquent mothers, who gave their babies one-on-one attention—and found that only the second group developed normally.
1
Recently, Harvard’s Mary Carlson elaborated on the Spitz study by examining infants in Romanian orphanages who had received adequate medical care and nourishment but very little personal attention. As a neuroscientist, Carlson was most interested in how these infants’ brains were affected. She found the children to be mentally and physically retarded, many displaying repetitive body movements similar to those observed among baby monkeys that had been physically isolated from other monkeys.
2
Human touch seems to be an important aspect of attention. One study compared two groups of premature infants. The first were placed in incubators, where they received all the nourishment and warmth necessary for them to mature into full-term infants. The second got something extra: For ten days, three times each day, their bodies were massaged by a nurse, who reached in through portholes in the incubator walls. The second group gained 47 percent more weight, and were released six days earlier, than premature infants who didn’t get such massages. Years later, the children in the second group still weighed more than children in the first group, and performed better on standard tests of mental and motor skills.
3
Personal attention appears to improve the health of adults as well. In one of the most ambitious research projects ever undertaken, epidemiologists tracked more than 4,000 elderly residents of Alameda, California, from 1965 to 1974. At the start, the researchers matched people with roughly the same health conditions and incomes. During the subsequent nine years, in every group, the death rate among those whose ties to friends, spouses, or extended families were weak was three times higher than the death rate among people whose ties to others were strong.
4
Another study of more than 1,000 elderly people found that the two most important predictors of physical and mental well-being were the frequency of visits with friends and attendance at meetings; the more contact and attention, the better the health.
5
A third study, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, measured changes in lower-body strength, coordination, and manual dexterity among a group of elderly men at intervals of two and a half years. The researchers discovered that the best single predictor of physical well-being was emotional support and attention from other people.
6
Recently, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University investigated the psychological effects of Internet use.
7
They randomly chose 169 people in the Pittsburgh area and tracked their behavior over one to two years.
8
It turned out that the more time people spent on the Internet, the more depressed and lonely they became. This result surprised not only the researchers but also several of the computer and software companies that had funded the research, expecting just the opposite. Since the Internet allows people to connect easily with others through e-mail and “chat rooms,” the researchers initially assumed that the Internet would provide a richer mix of relationships than were usually available face-to-face, and hence contribute to better psychological well-being. During the course of the study, participants reported that they did in fact use e-mail and Internet chat rooms. But they also noted that the more time they spent online, the fewer direct interactions they had with family and friends, simply because they had less time for them. So while the
quantity
of their interconnections with other people remained the same or even increased, the
quality
of their relationships declined. “Our hypothesis is there are more cases where you’re building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feelings of connection to other people,” said researcher Robert Kraut, professor of social psychology at Carnegie Mellon’s Human–Computer Interaction Institute. Relationships “over long distances without face-to-face contact ultimately do not provide the kind of support and reciprocity that typically contribute to a sense of psychological security and happiness.”
9
No one knows exactly why direct human contact seems to be so important to physical and mental health, but neuroscientists who study the brain have some guesses. Positive attention from another person reduces certain hormones normally associated with stress—in particular, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. The urine of infants who are rocked or massaged contains lower levels of these stress hormones than does that of infants who aren’t.
10
In the MacArthur study on aging I mentioned a moment ago, the elderly men with more human contact and attention also had lower levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol in their urine than the men receiving less contact and attention.
11
From an evolutionary perspective, it shouldn’t be surprising that human contact reduces stress. The human animal evolved in families and clans that offered protection as well as shared sustenance. The primitive parts of our brains probably remember that to be alone or out of contact with other people is literally dangerous, while to be showered with attention is the very essence of safety.
At the start of the twenty-first century, this need for personal contact poses something of a problem for human beings, who often can’t freely give or get as much personal attention as they might like. The new work requires too much of their time, emotional energy, and psychological involvement. So what do they do? Increasingly, they pay for attention.
BUYING MORE ATTENTION, OR LESS
More than three million people in the United States, and a million in Europe, now spend their working days sitting in cubicles, wearing headsets, staring at computer monitors, and responding as best they can to a steady torrent of questions or complaints about electronic gadgets, pensions, credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, Internet purchases, or family problems. And the number of such call-center, help-desk, or customer-service “hot line” phone jobs keeps growing rapidly in places like Cincinnati, the British city of Leeds, and Dresden—places where factory jobs have disappeared but legions of reliable workers remain.
Why do companies keep hiring people to do this sort of work at a cost of about $5 per customer call when they could pay just 50 cents per call for an automated “voice-response unit” that would give customers just about the same answers (after the caller went through a sequence of “option menus” and pushed several telephone keys), or just a few
pennies
per inquiry for an Internet service requiring only that customers tap their questions or comments onto a computer keyboard? Because a friendly human voice builds customer loyalty. Says Howard McNally, AT&T’s vice president for consumer product management, in discussing AT&T’s new special “0-0” help line, “Our new directory assistance service has less to do with traditional notions of productivity than it does with using a personalized service to create a competitive advantage.”
12
But even as companies are staffing up call centers, they are simultaneously investing in cheaper ways to respond. It’s a sure bet that in years to come they’ll figure out how to separate their better customers, who want and are willing to pay for more personal attention, from lower-paying customers served by automated and Internet devices. To put it another way: Increasingly, customers will be getting the degree of attention they pay for.
Think of this as a kind of scale of attentiveness, depending on its price. The cheapest form of attention won’t involve a human being at all, just some preassembled information off the Internet. Pay more, and you’ll get a voice-activated robot, maybe even a three-dimensional hologram of a person. Pay still more, and you’ll summon a real human being on the other end of a telephone, but only for a few moments. Pay even more, and you’ll elicit the attention of someone at a call center who takes time to download some personal information about you and match it to a database—giving you some useful information as well as the comforting feeling that you’re being specially cared for. Pay more than that, and you may even get a personal visit to your home or business. Pay still more, and you’ll be pampered to your heart’s content.
The brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch is busily creating a hierarchy of attentiveness. Its clients with accounts of less than $100,000 in assets are being herded toward its customer-service call centers, where they receive crisp, standard responses to their inquiries. This frees up Merrill’s highly trained “financial consultants” to devote more time to affluent clients who generate larger commissions.
13
Not long ago, the director of Merrill’s Long Island district, one of its most profitable, issued an e-mail to brokers setting out the new policy with admirable candor: “If we are to be Financial Consultants to wealthy and successful individuals and businesses, then we don’t have time to provide personal services to the poor. . . . Remember . . . the game is still more assets in bigger accounts,” he wrote. “If there are still F[inancial] C[onsultant]s that really enjoy servicing small accounts, please let me know, and I will get you a nice salaried job in the Investor Services Group where you can deal with poor people to your heart’s content.”
14
What do the “wealthy and successful” get, exactly? Some of it is custom-tailored advice. But much of it is simply personal attention—a reassuring voice, a familiar personality, someone who may become a trusted friend. In the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, luxury meant Waterford crystal, Wedgwood china, and a staff of household servants. People with great wealth displayed their status through, in Thorstein Veblen’s memorable phrase, “conspicuous consumption”—an ongoing demonstration of their exemption from industrial life, unfitness for manual labor, and almost infinite capacity for leisure.
15
Today’s affluent, by contrast, are money-rich but time-poor. So for them luxury takes a different form: exquisite personal attention designed to make their frenzied lives as efficient and pleasurable as possible. People of more modest means, meanwhile, have access to increasingly efficient technologies that provide them much of what they need but, notably, with fewer human touches.
Michelle Siron, a thirty-eight-year-old management consultant, is picked up from her London hotel by a chauffeur driving a Range Rover for a smooth ride to Heathrow Airport. There she’s met curbside by an attendant, who checks her in for her flight even before she emerges from the car, then escorts her to a private lounge, where she sips tea and nibbles on smoked salmon sandwiches while her hair is cut and blow-dried. Once on board, she gets a manicure and a neck massage. Flight attendants respond to her every wish. “It really takes the stress out of travel,” Michelle (a real person, who in fact experienced this) reports.
16
Contrast Michelle’s experience with that of a discount air traveler—call her Jennifer—who, weighed down with luggage, shuffles through a noisy and crowded Heathrow, waits an hour in a long check-in line, just barely manages to find a plastic chair to sit on in an overcrowded waiting room until her row number is called, is then squished into a small seat in the back of the plane, thrown a tiny snack by a harried flight attendant who disappears for the remainder of the trip, and finally, six hours later, commences a one-hour wait for her luggage to show up. By the end of the journey, Jennifer’s stress hormones are at a fairly high level.