Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 3)

Economically, all of this is to our great and unequivocal benefit. But what it means for the rest of our lives - the parts that depend on firm relationships, continuity, and stability - is acutely problematic. There's no diabolical plot here, no trap cunningly devised by evil corporations and greedy capitalists. It's a matter of straightforward logic.

The easier it is for us as buyers to switch to something better, the harder we as sellers have to scramble in order to keep every customer, hold every client, seize every opportunity, get every contract. As a result, our lives are more and more frenzied.

The faster the economy changes - with new innovations and opportunities engendering faster switches by customers and investors in response - the harder it is for people to be confident of what any of us will earn next year or even next month, what they will be doing, where they will be doing it. As a result, our lives are less predictable.

The more intense the competition to offer better products and services, the greater the demand for people with insights and ideas about how to do so. And because the demand for such people is growing faster than the supply, their earnings are pushed upward. Yet the same competition is pushing downward the pay of people doing routine work that can be done faster and cheaper by hardware and software, or by workers elsewhere around the world. As a result, disparities in earnings are growing steadily larger.

Finally, the wider the choices and easier the switches, the less difficult it is for people to link up with others who are just as well educated, wealthy, and healthy as they are - within residential communities, businesses, schools, universities, and insurance groups. And the easier it is for them to exclude the slower, less educated, poorer, sicker, or otherwise more disadvantaged, all of whom have greater needs. As a result, our society is becoming more fragmented.

In short, rewards of the new economy are coming at the price of lives that are more frenzied, less secure, more economically divergent, more socially stratified. As buyers switch more easily to better deals, all of us have little choice but to work harder to satisfy buyers. As our earnings become less predictable, we leap at every chance to make hay while the sun shines. As the stakes rise - toward greater wealth or relative poverty, highly desirable communities or patently undesirable ones - we'll do whatever we can to be in the winner's circle and to get our children safely there as well.

For all these reasons, most of us are working harder and more frantically than we did decades ago when these trends were just beginning, and than do citizens of other modern nations where these trends are not as far along.

The price may be worth it. The terrific deals are benefiting all of us in myriad ways. But even if the price is acceptable today, will it still be worth it in the future as the stakes continue to rise?

There is, undeniably, much to celebrate about the new economy. American capitalism is triumphant all over the world, and with good reason. Neo-Luddites who claim that advancing technologies will eliminate jobs and relegate most of us to poverty are wrong, even silly. Isolationists and xenophobes who want to put up the gates and reduce trade and immigration are misguided, often dangerously so. Paranoid populists who say global corporations and international capitalists are conspiring against us are deluded, possibly hallucinating. We - you and I and most Americans - are benefiting mightily from the new economy. We are reaping the gains of its new inventions, its lower prices, its fierce competition. We are profiting from the terrific deals it's offering us as consumers, and to a large and growing portion of us as investors. We are driving the new economy forward.

And yet . . . As wondrous as the new economy is, we are also losing parts of our lives to it - aspects of our family lives, our friendships, our communities, ourselves. These losses closely parallel the benefits we're gaining. In an important sense, they are two sides of the same coin. And as the new economy accelerates, both the gains and the losses are likely to increase. Working ever harder in order to compete within a system where competition is growing fiercer; selling ourselves with increasing determination within a system that's turning almost everyone into a self-promoter; sorting by wealth, education, and health in a system that's making it ever easier to sort - these phenomena are self-propelling. The more people join in, the more imbalanced the situation becomes, and the harder it becomes for any individual to choose a different path.

In the pages ahead, I explore these trends and their implications in detail. Part One of the book is about the new work. In it, I explain how new technologies are changing the way work is organized and rewarded. Part Two is about the new life. There, I explore the consequences of the new work for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Part Three is about the personal and social choices all of this implies.

The trends I discuss are powerful indeed - but they are not irreversible, or at least not unalterable. We can, if we wish, reassess our standard measure of success. We can affirm that our life's worth isn't synonymous with our net worth; that the quality of our society is different from our gross national product. We can, if we want, choose fuller and more balanced lives, and we can create a more balanced society. The question is: Do we really want to?

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.