Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

Why should this be? If what we do for pay is making us richer, why are our personal lives growing poorer? Why can't we dedicate more of our material gains toward making our lives outside paid work richer? The British economist John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, cheerfully predicted that in a hundred years England would be eight times better off economically, so that its people would choose to work only fifteen hours a week. Their material needs satisfied, they would see the love of money as "one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities" that affluence had cured. Keynes probably will be correct about most people being far better off materially in 2030, but incorrect about their working fewer hours, at least if Britain keeps going the way of the United States, and we keep going the way we have been.

Of course, not everyone is far better off materially than a quarter century ago. Some aren't better off at all. And many people are working harder because they have to. But here's the strange thing: The richer you are, the more likely it is that you are putting in long and harried hours at work, even obsessing about it when you're not doing it. A frenzied work life may or may not make you better off, but being better off definitely seems to carry with it more frenzy.

Consider some counterintuitive statistics: In America, college graduates earn on average 70 to 80 percent more than people with only a high-school diploma, which is twice the premium accorded to a college degree twenty-five years ago. So you might suppose that people who have graduated from college would feel they have to work somewhat less intensely than high-school grads. You'd be wrong, of course. It's the college-degree holders who are working the longer hours. And maybe you'd also think that, with the college premium having doubled, college students themselves would be somewhat less concerned about being well-off financially than they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. But you'd be wrong about that, too. Surveys show they're far more focused on financial success than ever before.1

What's happened? Have college grads become greedier, more obsessed by money? Maybe, but there's no good reason to assume so. Has our national character changed in just a few decades? It seems unlikely; the character of a people doesn't alter so quickly.

The typical American works 350 more hours a year than the typical European, more hours even than the notoriously industrious Japanese. You might then suppose that more Americans would prefer to work a bit less, sacrificing some earnings. But only 8 percent of them say they would prefer fewer hours of work for less pay, compared with 38 percent of Germans, 30 percent of Japanese, and 30 percent of Britons.

Do we have a workaholic gene that the citizens of other advanced nations lack? Or is work so much more satisfying and enjoyable here? Both seem doubtful. We didn't used to work that much harder than they did, decades ago. Why have we started to?

We hear a rising chorus of American voices resolving to slow down. Yet more of us seem to be speeding up. We say with ever more vehemence that we value family. So why are our families shrinking and family ties fraying - fewer children or no children, fewer marriages, more temporary living arrangements, more subcontracting of family functions to food preparers, therapists, counselors, and child-care givers? We talk more passionately than ever about the virtues of "community." And yet our communities are fragmenting into enclaves filled with people who earn similar incomes - the wealthier, walled off and gated; the poorer, isolated and ignored.

Are we engaged in mass hypocrisy? Mass delusion? Probably neither. Most Americans seem genuinely to be seeking more balanced lives. The problem is that balance between making a living and making a life is becoming harder to pull off because the logic of the new economy dictates that more attention be paid to work and less to personal life.

Here is my argument, in brief:

The emerging economy is offering unprecedented opportunities, an ever-expanding choice of terrific deals, fabulous products, good investments, and great jobs for people with the right talents and skills. Never before in human history have so many had access to so much so easily.

Technology is the motor. In communications, transportation, and information-processing, the new technologies that gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s are now racing ahead at blinding speed. They are making it easier to find and get better deals from anywhere and allowing us to switch instantly to even better ones. These technologies are radically sharpening competition among sellers, which in turn is provoking a staggering wave of innovation. In order to survive, all organizations must dramatically and continuously improve - cutting costs, adding value, creating new products. The result of this tumult is higher productivity - better, faster, cheaper products and services of every description.

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.