Part 1

The Future of Success; Working and Living in the New Economy
by Robert B. Reich, Ph.D.

If you think it's getting harder to both make a living and make a life, economist and former secretary of labor Robert Reich agrees with you. Americans may be earning more than ever before, but we're paying a steep price: we're working longer, seeing our families less, and our communities are fragmenting.

With the clarity and insight that are his hallmarks, Reich delineates what success has come to mean in our time. He demonstrates that although we have more choices as consumers, and investors, the choices themselves are undermining the rest of our lives. It is getting harder for people to be confident of what they will be earning next year, or even next month. At the same time, our society is splitting into socially stratified enclaves - the wealthier walled off and gated, the poorer isolated and ignored. Although the trends he discusses are powerful, they are not irreversible, and Reich makes provocative suggestions for how we might create a more balanced society and more satisfying lives. Some of his ideas may surprise you; all should spark a healthy-and essential-national debate.

A few years ago I had a job that consumed me. I wasn't addicted to it - "addiction" suggests an irrational attachment, slightly masochistic, compulsive. My problem was that I loved my job and couldn't get enough of it. Being a member of the President's cabinet was better than any other job I'd ever had. In the morning, I couldn't wait to get to the office. At night, I left it reluctantly. Even when I was at home, part of my mind remained at work.

Not surprisingly, all other parts of my life shriveled into a dried raisin. I lost touch with my family, seeing little of my wife or my two sons. I lost contact with old friends. I even began to lose contact with myself - every aspect of myself other than what the job required. Then one evening I phoned home to tell the boys I wouldn't make it back in time to say good night. I'd already missed five bedtimes in a row. Sam, the younger of the two, said that was O.K., but asked me to wake him up whenever I got home. I explained that I'd be back so late that he would have gone to sleep long before; it was probably better if I saw him the next morning. But he insisted. I asked him why. He said he just wanted to know I was there, at home. To this day, I can't explain precisely what happened to me at that moment. Yet I suddenly knew I had to leave my job.

After I announced my resignation, I received a number of letters. Most were sympathetic, but a few of my correspondents were angry. They said my quitting sent a terrible message; it suggested that a balanced life was not compatible with a high-powered job. Many women on the fast track were already battling a culture that told them they were sacrificing too much - and here I was, they said, essentially telling people the same thing. Others complained that while it was easy for me to leave my job and find another one that paid about as well while giving me more room for the rest of my life, they didn't have that choice. They had to work long hours, or the rent wouldn't get paid and there would be no food on the table. So I was sending the wrong message to people like them, too. Still others wrote to inform me indignantly that I shouldn't think myself virtuous. Hard work was virtuous, abandoning an important job to spend more time with my family was not.

Perhaps I should have expected that my career decision would carry symbolic weight - I had, after all, been the Secretary of Labor. In fact, I'd had no intention whatsoever of sending a message about how other people should lead their lives. Certainly I didn't think there was anything virtuous about the choice I'd made. But until that time I had been making a different choice, an implicit one, without acknowledging it. That was the problem. The wake-up call my son requested was a wake-up call for me to make an explicit choice, and make it consciously.

The experience made me notice a lot of things I hadn't seen before, even though I'd spent most of my adult life examining work and the economy. It focused my attention on the struggles most of us are having over paid work and the rest of our lives - men as well as women, young people setting out on their careers, middle-aged people who in years past would have already resolved these matters - including choices that sometimes are posed starkly, but more often are subtle, and appear in various guises. And it caused me to want put together what I've observed about the large-scale changes occurring in the global economy with these small-scale personal dramas. This book is the result.

I am writing here about making a living and making a life, and why it not only seems to be but actually is getting harder to do both. Acres of paper and oceans of ink have been expended in detailing the dizzying exuberance of the emerging economy. Yet there has been almost no discussion about what it means for us as people, and about the choices that lie before us for the kinds of lives we wish to lead. The deepest anxieties of this prosperous age concern the erosion of our families, the fragmenting of our communities, and the challenge of keeping our own integrity intact. These anxieties are no less part and parcel of the emerging economy than are its enormous benefits: the wealth, the innovation, the new chances and choices.

My purpose here is to invite a debate that's larger than the admonition to "slow down and get a life." To view the struggle for a better balance between paid work and the rest of life only as a personal one, waged in private, is to ignore the larger trends that are tipping the scales. It's not just a personal choice; not simply a matter of personal balance. It's also a question of how work is - and should be - organized and rewarded. It's a question of a balanced society.

The central paradox is this: Most of us are earning more money and living better in material terms than we (or our parents) did a quarter century ago, around the time when some of the technologies on which the new economy is based - the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet - first emerged. You'd think, therefore, that it would be easier, not harder, to attend to the parts of our lives that exist outside paid work. Yet by most measures we're working longer and more frantically than before, and the time and energy left for our non-working lives are evaporating.

Copyright © 2001 by Robert Reich.

About the Author

Robert B. Reich is University Professor at Brandeis University and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis's Heller Graduate School. He is also a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. This is his tenth book. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.