REPRISE: THE SORTED COMMUNITY
As a result of all these maneuvers, the burden of paying for the things that the less fortunate members of every society most need is being shifted more squarely onto them. This is the ultimate consequence of the sorting mechanism.
People with the greatest bargaining power—able to strike the best deals for schools, universities, child care, health care, insurance, taxes, returns on investments—are already the best off. They’re likely to be well educated (or have well-educated parents), healthy, wealthy, and economically secure. Those with the least bargaining power—on whom the burdens of economic change are falling the heaviest—must settle for the poorest schools, little or no access to universities, minimal or no child care, poor or no health care, and no insurance against the vagaries of the market. And as they become more socially isolated, they also lose connection to a wider economy that depends ever more on connections. The bargaining power of everyone between these extremes is also inversely related to their need.
No one designed the system this way, nor intended this result. It’s the product of a large number of separate decisions by individuals seeking to do the best for themselves and their loved ones. It doesn’t suggest that people who are wealthier and more fortunate have become less charitable toward people who have less. The better off may sincerely want to help those who are falling behind. Many contribute to a host of worthy causes. They may in fact disapprove of the sorting that’s occurring, to the extent they are aware of it. But the sorting itself may reduce their awareness of how others live who are less fortunate than they. And even if they are fully aware, the sorting mechanism has raised the stakes. For them to act on their own to join a poorer community would require them to sacrifice comfortable neighborhoods, good schools, access to excellent universities, high-quality health care and child care, valuable connections, and all the rest of the benefits that come from belonging to the more exclusive community. A decent society should not have to rely on saintliness.
The sorting mechanism further increases the pressure to earn as high an income as is possible. High incomes buy you and your family memberships in excellent communities. Low incomes force you to reside in poor communities with inadequate schools, few parks or playgrounds, unsafe streets, and a host of social problems. As the sorting mechanism becomes more efficient, the benefits of membership in a desirable community and the costs of having to settle in an undesirable one diverge more sharply, further raising the stakes.
This is not the end of our story. We are not slaves to present trends, nor captives of the sorting mechanism. We can, if we want, assert that our mutual obligations as citizens extend beyond our economic usefulness to one another, and reorganize ourselves accordingly. In this, as in other aspects of the new economy, we have choices.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
To love and to work.
—Sigmund Freud, on what a person should be able to do well
1
M
OST OF US
are more prosperous than ever before. We own more. We’re able to get terrific deals. Yet the deepest anxieties of this prosperous age concern aspects of our lives that can’t be bought. Many of us worry about the erosion of family, about our own inadequacies as spouses or parents, about the difficulty of sustaining genuine friendships, about the brittleness of our communities, and about the challenge of keeping intact our own integrity.
Paid work is demanding more of our time, often more emotional energy and psychological preoccupation. As noted, the typical American is working 350 more hours a year than the typical European, more hours than the Japanese. And this feverish pace doesn’t even include the time taken up with the ever more ubiquitous intrusions on personal life—phones, faxes, beepers, e-mails, business trips. Nor does it account for the preoccupations, exhilarations, and anxieties that overflow paid work and flood the rest of waking life and sometimes even sleep. Many of us don’t run out of time as much as we run out of juice. Constantly being
on
—creating, teaching, convincing, and selling—can be emotionally draining. Burnout can occur well within the bounds of a forty-hour week. Even if there’s physical time for friends, family, community, and personal reflection, there’s no psychic space left. Alternatively, we’re so juiced up by work that we don’t want to spare juice for anything else. The rest of life is becoming downsized, outsourced, and sorted.
Is this the choice we’ve made? Is this the future of success?
WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT, ANYWAY?
Economists and most social scientists assume that the best way to measure what people want is to watch what they do. Psychologists and psychoanalysts assume that, regardless of what people say they desire, the real test is what they choose. If people wanted to live according to different priorities and were willing to accept the sacrifices that those different priorities entailed, presumably they’d do so.
Some people are compelled by economic necessity to work harder and more obsessively, but necessity can’t explain much of the trend. American managers and professionals who were already living well grew far wealthier between the mid-1980s and the end of the century. And yet over the same period of time, the proportion of them working more than fifty hours a week rose by one-third. In fact, as noted earlier, the higher your earnings, the more likely it is that you’ll work hard. It’s not that you earn more
because
you work harder; you work harder because of what you can earn by doing so. Nearly 40 percent of male college graduates and 20 percent of female college grads work more than fifty hours a week for pay. College graduates earn considerably more than people who don’t graduate from college, yet they’re four times more likely than nongraduates to be putting in more than fifty hours a week at their jobs.
There’s even evidence that the higher your earnings, the more likely it is that your teenage children will feel that their lives are more frenzied than yours. In one poll of young people aged thirteen to seventeen, affluent teenagers, regardless of race or gender, were substantially more likely than nonaffluent teenagers to report that their lives were harder and more stressful than their parents’ lives.
2
Perhaps this is because the poorer teenagers hear stories of their parents’ toil and struggle and feel that their own lives are easier by comparison, while the more affluent teenagers hear stories of “making” it, with an implicit warning about the danger of sliding backward. I’m reminded of a Roz Chast cartoon in
The New Yorker
(a magazine whose readers are rarely impecunious) picturing two boys with baseball caps and backpacks, under the caption “Most Likely to Succeed.” One boy is saying to the other, “I’d love to come over and hang out, but now that we’re competing in a global economy I can’t.”
Attitudes of college students seem to be shifting toward wanting to work even harder for more money. As has been noted, only 41 percent of college freshmen in 1968 listed being “very well off financially” as a very important personal objective. Then, most were more interested in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” But financial well-being steadily gained ground and philosophy of life steadily lost it until, by 1998, 74 percent of college freshmen listed being “very well off financially” as essential. As I’ve emphasized, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that today’s students are greedier than previous generations. Record numbers of college students are volunteering to work in their communities. They just have a more pecuniary focus for their lives.
Adult Americans also seem more intent on children’s working hard. A large sampling of Americans has been asked annually to choose the one attribute that is “the most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life” out of a list of five: to think for oneself, to obey, to work hard, to help others, or to be well liked and popular. Since 1986, when this question was first asked, about half the sample has continued to choose “to think for oneself.” But over the years, the only attribute to have steadily
gained
in importance has been “to work hard”—from 11 percent in 1986 to 18 percent in 1998.
3
From the viewpoint of social scientists, who assume that the best way to understand what people want is to watch what they do, the easiest conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Americans are choosing hard work for themselves and their children because they
want
to. Forget a “better balance.” All the talk about making room for the rest of life—about the importance of family, friends, community, personal callings, and spiritual fulfillment—is just superficial posturing in front of the cameras.
Yet personal choices don’t occur in a social vacuum. We choose one way or the other because certain consequences attach to those choices, consequences that depend partly on how society has chosen to organize itself. That a prisoner chooses to scale a high wall topped by barbed wire doesn’t mean she
wants
to scale high walls and traverse barbed wire, but only that her circumstances have led her to do this dangerous thing. Were the conditions of her imprisonment to grow steadily harsher, or the world outside the prison to become far more comfortable, she might choose to scale even higher and more dangerous walls. But to conclude from this that she is developing a preference for higher walls is to fail to understand the essence of what’s happening. Her increasing effort is due to the widening contrast between her life inside the walls and the life she could lead outside them.
REPRISE: THE BIG CHANGE
Why do most Americans work harder than they did three decades ago? Not because they are more dedicated to work now than before, or have progressed to a different point on the evolutionary scale. Something else must have happened, and must still be going on. Why does the average American work 350 more hours a year than the average European, and still want to work harder for more money? Not because Americans’ brains are differently wired than European brains. There must be another reason, having more to do with the situations Americans and Europeans find themselves in than with their genes.
Why do college students today place greater value on financial well-being than did college students three decades ago? They aren’t greedier. What’s changed? Why do today’s adults place greater store on children’s learning to work hard than did adults only a few years ago? Here again, something must have happened to make adults more concerned about the consequences of not working hard.
Why are people having fewer kids? Not because they love children less than they used to. Again, there must be another explanation. Why is your choice of community much more important now than it was years ago? Not because citizens have become more intent on living in pleasant neighborhoods with good schools than they used to be. Here, too, something has happened to change the calculation and raise the stakes. In these and other examples I’ve offered in these pages, personal choices about work and life are taking place within a larger set of societal changes.
We must be careful to avoid placing too much responsibility for these trends on technological and economic changes alone. Human animals are complicated creatures, influenced by many different things. Yet the preceding pages do suggest how changes in technology and the economy are altering how work is organized and rewarded, which in turn influence how you lead your life. Let me summarize.
• Your earnings are less predictable than they were before. You can’t be nearly as confident today about what you’ll earn in the future as you could be in the old system of large-scale production. Even if you work diligently and are good at what you do, the demand for your services may drop unexpectedly because customers find better deals elsewhere. This puts you in a dilemma, because many of your costs of living are fixed—mortgages, rents, car payments, insurance, and the like. So what do you do? How does your behavior change from what it used to be when your earnings were steadier? Now, you must make hay while the sun shines. You work harder when the work is available against the risk that your income may drop in the future.
• If your skills are in great demand now, you’re likely to be paid more than were people near the top of the income ladder in the old system. Pay used to depend largely on rank or seniority. Now you’re paid for your ideas and your ability to sell. If you’re a truly superb geek or shrink, you can earn vast sums. You’re also likely to have generous employment benefits and a great work environment, maybe even a gym and a Jacuzzi downstairs. And your work is likely to be interesting, even fun. On the other hand, if you’ve been in a job that’s rote or routine, which a large number of people here or around the world can do just as well—or your job can be done by computerized machines or by software over the Internet—you’re likely to be paid less than you used to be paid for doing it, and you may be losing your benefits. And forget the gym and Jacuzzi. In fact, you may lose the job entirely. Unless you have the education and skills to become a geek or a shrink, there’s a good chance that your new job will involve providing personal services at relatively low wages. Some of this work is satisfying, perhaps even ennobling; much of it is difficult or frustrating.
• If you’re in the latter category and losing ground relative to the standard of living that most people deem acceptable, you have to work harder to prop up your family’s income, and your spouse or partner may be working longer hours as well. If you’re on the winning side and earning a lot, you may want to work longer and harder, too, but for a different reason. The sacrifices you’d make by
not
working so hard—the income and perks you’d give up, as well as the challenge and the fun—are much bigger than they were under the old system. For the same reason, you’re more likely to go after one of those high-paying jobs rather than, say, teach school; were you to settle for the more modest income, you’d be giving up far more than you’d have given up making the same choice years ago.
• Even if you’re doing well, you’ve got to continue to hustle. The market is changing quickly, customers are being offered a lot of new alternatives to which they can switch easily, and competition is intense. There’s no relaxing, no cruise control, no resting on your laurels or seniority. Today’s great idea might not last more than a few days or weeks, because rivals will be quick to copy it or try to come up with something even better.
• Furthermore, you’re either on the fast track or you’re not. Either you remain in close contact with your clients and customers, develop your connections, and stay up-to-date with new developments in your field, or you’ll earn a lot less money and perhaps have a lot less interesting work. Yes, the new organization of work gives you more flexibility in how and when you do your job. Sure, it’s easier than ever to work part-time, go on a long vacation, or take a year or several to be at home with a new child. But beware. If you do any of these things, you’ll pay a big price. Don’t expect to get back on the fast track easily, because while you were gone too much will have happened, and other people will have moved in to take over your clients and connections and develop new expertise.
• You’re no longer in a big organization that will steadily promote you up the ranks because you do your job competently and well. Increasingly, you’re on your own, which means you’ve got to promote
yourself.
It’s not enough to be smart or creative or have a cool idea; a lot of people are smart and creative, with cool ideas, and they’re competing with you for business. You’ve got to attract and keep customers. You may have to use all of your connections—including friendships and even distant acquaintances—to expand or keep up with the demand for your services. You’ve got to make a name for yourself rather than invest a lot of time and effort in a particular company or organization. You need to put yourself into “play” by orchestrating bidding contests for your services.
• The sorting mechanism is becoming ever more efficient. If you work hard, sell yourself effectively, and do well, you’ll be able to pool your winnings with others who have done well. This means you can live in a charming, safe community; send your kids to a nurturing child-care center, an excellent school (a public school in an exclusive upscale community or a top-tiered private school), and then on to a superb university; belong to a comfortable health club (a “public” facility in your tony township, or a private spa); have comprehensive insurance at a reasonable cost, and good health care with an attentive doctor and access to a highly reputed medical center. But the sorting mechanism will treat you far less well if you have less to bring to the table. If you’re at or near the bottom of the earnings scale, your community is apt to be blighted and dangerous, the schools lousy, the health care minimal or nonexistent.