The Future of Success (14 page)

REPRISE: THE NEW WORK

To summarize, about three decades ago the American economy began to shift out of stable large-scale production toward continuous innovation. The shift has been accelerating since then. Technology has been the driving force. New technologies of communication, transportation, and information, culminating recently in the Internet and so-called e-commerce, have dramatically widened customer choice and made it easier for all customers (including business customers) to shop for, and switch to, better deals. Wider choices and easier switching have intensified competition at all levels—forcing every seller to innovate like mad, cutting costs and adding new value.

In the old industrial economy, profits came from economies of scale—long runs of more or less identical products. Now, profits come from quickness to innovate and attract (and keep) customers. Before, the winners were big corporate bureaucracies. Now, the winners are small, highly flexible groups that devise great ideas, and trustworthy brands that market them effectively.

These changes have come faster to the United States than elsewhere, partly because America was the first to develop many of the underlying communication, transportation, and information technologies on which the changes are based, and partly because the American economy started out less regulated than the others, so capital and labor could move more quickly. Other societies are now showing signs of following in America’s steps.

We’re reaping significant benefits. The American economy has grown much larger, and more dynamic. In recent years, productivity has soared. The economy is capable of putting a much larger portion of its population to work, and keeping unemployment low, without risking wage inflation. A far wider array of goods and services is available, and it’s much easier for customers to get terrific deals. In terms of our material quality of life—what we get for our money—most of us are better off than ever before. There’s a lively debate about whether Americans at or near the bottom of the income ladder are better off than they were, say, in 1970. Relative to what they could afford to buy before, they are in many ways; relative to what most people in American society can now afford, they’re more deprived.

Regardless of how you come out on this last question, it’s important to remember that we’re not just consumers. Most of us spend most of our days working for a living. We also exist within webs of personal relationships comprising families, friends, and communities. With the shift toward a more dynamic and innovative economy have come changes in how work is organized and rewarded, and these changes are altering our personal lives. We couldn’t reap the benefits of the new economy without also experiencing these changes. They’re two sides of the same newly minted coin.

As technology gives all buyers more choice and easier ability to switch, it makes all sellers less secure. The dynamism and innovation that rewards buyers also subjects sellers to less certainty, more volatility, higher highs and lower lows. Almost all earnings are becoming more volatile, and less predictable.

The new era raises the stakes in other ways. Talented and ambitious people have vast opportunities. They can make much more money relative to the median wage than could talented and ambitious people in the industrial era. And many find their work far more stimulating than the mind-numbing bureaucratic jobs of that time. Yet it is also the case that more jobs require unremitting effort, and all workers are subject to greater risks of sharp drops in earnings. Disparities in income and wealth have widened considerably. Not for a century has America endured, or tolerated, this degree of inequality.

What is the true meaning of success under these more extreme conditions? And how do we make adequate room for ourselves, our families, and our communities without some defense against the harsher realities? It is to these questions we now turn.

CHAPTER SIX

W
HAT DO PEOPLE DO
when their earnings are less predictable, their jobs less secure, and their incomes potentially higher or lower than before? They work harder. Not only do they put in more hours on the job; they also work more intensively.

By official estimates, the average American is working longer hours, although there’s some dispute over exactly how many more hours, and some researchers don’t even agree that Americans
are
working longer hours. Each spring the Census undertakes a large-scale survey of some 50,000 households, asking, among other things, how many weeks people worked for pay during the previous year and how many hours they usually worked per week. This isn’t a perfect measure, because some people forget how hard they worked and other people exaggerate—they may feel as though they worked longer than they actually did, or if they didn’t work very much, they might be reluctant to admit it. The vanishing boundary line between paid work and the rest of life causes additional difficulties. Where does work end? Nonetheless, this survey is the best measure we have, and because the same question is asked every year, it at least provides a rough indicator of whether work time is increasing or decreasing over time.

According to this gauge, hours of paid work are climbing. The average adult working American now puts in almost 2,000 hours a year for pay. That’s the equivalent of about two weeks more than he—or, especially, she—put in two decades ago. In 1999, the average middle-income married couple with children worked a combined 3,918 hours—about seven weeks more than a decade before.
¹

Americans are now working longer for pay than even the notoriously industrious Japanese, who are currently putting in about as many hours as Americans did in 1980. According to a recent report of the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, while Americans have been working more, most adults in other advanced economies have been working less. Up until the late 1980s, the average adult American worked about the same number of hours as the average adult European. Now the typical working American puts in 350 more hours a year than the typical European. In France, the number of hours of paid work has dropped from 1,810 in the eighties to 1,656 in the late nineties.
²
(As their economies follow the path blazed by America, there’s reason to expect that the Europeans and Japanese will start working harder, too.)

Much of the trend in America can be accounted for by a dramatic shift by American women—especially mothers—from household work into paid work, or from part-time paid work into full-time paid work. Social changes of this magnitude don’t often happen so quickly. You may be old enough to have lived through all of this and yet still not have appreciated just how big the shift has been. In 1969, according to Census data, 38 percent of married mothers between the ages of twenty and fifty-five worked for pay. Now almost 70 percent do.
³

The trend toward more paid work in America isn’t entirely due to women. Men in professional or managerial jobs are also working longer hours. Since the mid-1980s, the proportion of professionals and managers who work at least fifty hours a week has grown by more than a third. The only people who might be working fewer hours for pay are men whose education went no further than high school, largely because they’re often the first to lose their jobs when businesses lay off workers or when the economy slows.

A PROBLEM?

Simply because most of us are putting in many more hours of paid work than we used to doesn’t mean we’re worse off. Fewer hours are needed to prepare meals these days, thanks to microwave ovens, pre-processed dinners, and ubiquitous fast-food restaurants; there are more options for child care than there used to be (if you can afford it); and the Internet is cutting back on shopping time. There’s a lively debate among researchers about exactly how much time we’re putting in on the job relative to “free” time for other pursuits.
⁴
Some contend that we actually have more free time than we used to. John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of what’s called “leisure studies” at Penn State, examined detailed time diaries kept by a sampling of people between 1965 and 1985—the people in the study kept track of everything they did during the day, including not only paid work but also unpaid household tasks—and found that free time increased over the two decades.
⁵
The professors’ sample was small, and the kind of people with enough time on their hands to diligently keep track of how they spend their time may not exactly represent the average American. Moreover, the professors acknowledge that at least since 1985 most Americans seem to have less free time than they did. Nonetheless, Robinson and Godbey offer a valuable insight: When assessing just how much of a bind we’re in, we need to take account of
unpaid
as well as paid work.

In fact, if you add paid and unpaid work together, it seems doubtful that there was ever a golden age in which more than a handful of wealthy people had a lot of free time on their hands. Most adult women and men have always worked hard. Farmwork was (and still is, for the tiny percent of Americans who continue to do it) among the hardest work, on backs and limbs. Generations of shopkeepers and their spouses put in very long hours. My parents ran a small clothing shop in upstate New York, which demanded their full attention six days a week and most evenings. Figure in the housework, and I don’t remember them with any free time at all.

Writer Alice Walker offers this description of her mother’s work in the early part of the twentieth century:

She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover our beds.
                                     During the “working” day, she labored beside—not behind—my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption—by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children.
⁶

Having a lot of work to do isn’t necessarily bad. Work can give order and meaning to one’s life. It can also provide a sense of self-worth and dignity. Working hard is, after all, a core tenet of the moral consciousness of the West, a cornerstone of the Protestant ethic. In this view, there’s virtue in hard work. “Free time” means idleness, which, even if not inviting sin, surely corrodes character. Much of the debate over ending welfare in the United States has rested upon these beliefs and values, but you hear them in all sorts of places.

Recently I came across an interview with a person named Milton Garland who, at the age of 102, was America’s oldest known wage-earner. Garland had worked for the same firm—the Frick Company of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania—for seventy-eight years, since joining it in 1920. Frick does not, apparently, lay off its workers at the same rate as most American companies. The interview occurred at Washington’s National Press Club, which is headquartered in a building whose refrigeration equipment Garland helped install in the late 1920s. “I love the work I am doing,” Garland said, referring to his current twenty-hour-a-week job coordinating Frick’s international patents and training young workers. “My advice,” he added, “is to go into something and stay with it until you like it. You can’t like it until you obtain expertise in that work. And once you are an expert, it’s a pleasure.” Asked where would he be had he retired thirty-seven years before, when he reached the age of sixty-five, Garland snapped, “In my grave.”
⁷

You may consider certain tasks drudgery while other people find the same tasks richly rewarding. I hate to garden. To me, picking weeds for hours on end is the kind of activity that belongs in one of Dante’s outer rings of hell. You’d have to pay me a large sum of money to do it. But I have a good friend for whom gardening is a delight. He does it whenever he has a spare moment. He even does it on vacation. Some people find taking care of other people to be deeply satisfying. Caring for children, the elderly, the sick, or the disabled can give rich meaning to the life of the caregiver—either when caring for one’s own children or close relatives, or when volunteering to take care of strangers in need. But other people find caretaking to be hard labor. Women may feel morally bound to do it in any event, and may not even want to admit to themselves how much they dislike it (society puts most of the moral burden on women to do caring work, both paid and unpaid).

Sometimes the same activity can be perceived as being pleasant or unpleasant depending on its context, or how it’s described at the outset. Psychology professors Sophia Snow and Ellen Langer divided a sample of adults from the Boston area into two groups. They asked both groups to do the same tasks. Among the tasks were sorting a set of Gary Larson cartoons into whatever categories the groups chose (funny/not-so-funny, cartoons about men or about women, or anything else) and also changing one or two words in each cartoon to alter the meanings. For one group, the experimenters referred to these tasks as a “game.” For the other, the experimenters referred to the tasks as “work.” Afterward, the people in both groups were asked questions about their experience, including how much they enjoyed the tasks and how much their minds wandered while doing them. It turned out that more people in the “game” group than the “work” group reported that they enjoyed the tasks, and “game” group members reported that their minds wandered less when doing them.
⁸

My former student who’s creating Internet games for thousands of simultaneous players seems to love her work, and not just because she expects to make a lot of money from it. She’s actually having fun. She likes the people she works with. She loves the crazy, hip, frenzied world of the Internet start-up. So what if she rarely gets home before 10 p.m. after having put in at least twelve hours, and doesn’t have time on weekends to do much of anything except her washing and her bills? She doesn’t seem to mind.

It’s not unusual for professional women to find paid work outside the home more fulfilling than unpaid work inside the home. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild interviewed and observed the behavior of 130 employees of a particular company (she didn’t reveal its name).
⁹
She found that many of the women employees preferred to spend time at the company rather than at home. They felt that home imposed more difficult demands on them (sullen teens, needy babies, dirty dishes, unappreciative spouses). They often felt more competent and appreciated at work than at home. Their friendships with co-workers were stronger than with people outside work; their “parenting” of subordinates at work was better and more satisfying than their real parenting at home. They even found co-workers to be more helpful in coping with traumas, such as the death of a parent, than was their family or their religious congregation (many men felt the same way). Hochschild is a careful researcher, but her findings probably can’t be generalized to the entire workforce. The company in which she did her interviews and observations treated its employees unusually well. Yet it is surely the case that unpaid work at home is sometimes felt to be difficult and unrewarding, relative to paid work outside the home.

Work can be a “calling,” in the sense that it expresses some deeply personal commitment, or draws upon a talent or source of energy that would exist regardless of how much the job pays. I have met a number of doctors who still view their practice primarily as a public service, a labor of love and duty. So too with many teachers, social workers, and—yes—even politicians. I have not yet found an investment banker who feels this way, but there must be one or two out there.

Tasks undertaken because of their inherent fascination can motivate harder and more passionate work than jobs performed solely for money. “In the last year I have worked more strenuously than ever before in my life and a few weeks ago I finally solved the problem,” Albert Einstein wrote to his cousin Elsa, when working on the mathematical underpinnings of what was to be his general theory of relativity. “Now I have to give myself some peace or I shall go
kaput
right away.”
¹⁰

Many authors, artists, philosophers, and actors do their work for no reason other than the deep satisfaction they find in it, or a deep compulsion to do it. Often they take another job to pay the bills. This is not a new phenomenon.
Know your bone,
advised the nineteenth-century writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life.         .         .         . Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.”
¹¹
When Thoreau needed money and wasn’t gnawing on his bone, he surveyed land. T. S. Eliot was a bank clerk; Nathaniel Hawthorne, a clerk in the Salem customhouse he immortalized in
The Scarlet Letter;
Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives sold insurance. William Faulkner claimed to have written
As I Lay Dying
in time left over from twelve-hour days as a manual laborer. From 1866 to 1885, Herman Melville was an outdoor inspector for the New York customhouse; Walt Whitman was a copyist in the U.S. Army paymaster’s office in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Arnold, a school inspector. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French sociologist who came to understand more about this nation than anyone before and perhaps since, was a government clerk in France. Benedict Spinoza, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, earned his keep by grinding and polishing lenses. Einstein wrote a paper setting forth his theory of relativity when he was a twenty-six-year-old examiner in a patent office. William Carlos Williams was a physician. And Stanley Bojarski (whom you may not have heard of because he has not yet made his name) works by day as a legal assistant in the sedate, buttoned-down law offices of Dewey Ballantine, in midtown Manhattan, and by night as a comic female impersonator in a gay-themed musical revue called
Howard Crabtree’s When Pigs Fly.
There is a long tradition of American actors and aspiring actors—especially the latter—waiting tables, painting apartments, and driving cabs. After retiring from working in my father’s shop, my mother turned to painting lovely pastel portraits and landscapes, and sells enough of them to pay for her art supplies and have a small kitty left over.