The Future of Success (21 page)

Aspiring politicians now market their personalities rather than their beliefs or platforms, relying on a growing number of political consultants for promotional assistance. The well-marketed politician has less need of a political party, just as the well-marketed professor has less need of a particular university, the up-and-coming journalist of a particular newspaper, the rising scriptwriter of a TV network or production house, the talented baseball player of a particular team, the star investment analyst of a particular financial house. Political parties, like all other organizations, are becoming collections of entrepreneurs. It should come as no surprise that today’s politicians, divorced from party and platforms, find themselves in continuous mud fights. When a personality is being marketed rather than a party or a set of principles, competition almost inevitably turns personal. Electoral success depends on advancing one’s own persona while destroying that of an opponent. “Opposition research,” a euphemism for digging up personal dirt about one’s opponent, is now a routine feature of American political campaigns.

T
HE SALE OF
the self makes relentless demands on one’s life. It also encroaches on one’s personal relationships. When the personality is for sale, all relationships turn into potential business deals. Unlike David Riesman’s “other-directed” man who wished only to be liked, the new market-directed man or woman wants only to make a deal. Yet when friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances become vehicles for selling oneself, all relationships can become tainted with ulterior motive. In Washington, New York, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, or any other center of dealmaking, it is often difficult to get together for lunch with a “friend” without its being assumed that one party or the other is selling something, or looking to buy. The assumption is often correct.

The market-directed person’s value derives not from acceptance by his or her peers but from what others are willing to pay for his or her services. Hence the central importance of being in demand. In certain quarters, one of the first questions asked of someone long unseen is no longer “Are you well?” but “Are you
busy
?” It’s assumed that if they’re busy, they’re in demand, and if they’re in demand, they
must
be well. The apparent complaint “I’m so busy!” is not really heard as a lament, however sincere. The complainant may have almost no time or energy left for anything in life other than paid work—may even have sacrificed friends and family to the incessant demands of getting ahead—but is nonetheless presumed to be successful in the market, which is the ultimate test of market-directed success.

Riesman’s other-directed person of midcentury America was in danger of losing his identity to the group. The market-directed person at the start of the new century is in danger of selling it. Which is the greater danger? Once, the worst thing that could be said of someone was that he had sold out. Now the worst thing that can be said is that he’s not selling.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HAT THE NEW WORK
is taking a toll on family life is not in great contention. The more interesting question is how this is occurring, and what form it’s taking.

The midcentury nuclear family—husband with steady job, wife at home caring for an average of 2.7 kids and cleaning compulsively, everyone home for meatloaf dinner—was a historical oddity. Go back to the mid-nineteenth century, before large-scale production, and you see complex and shifting living arrangements under the same roof: relatives who came and went, children who died in infancy, stepmothers taking the place of biological mothers who died while giving birth, stepfathers who stepped in when fathers died from one of an array of accidents, infections, and diseases. And it was often the case that all family members had to work—men, women, and children, in hard physical toil for long hours—in order to keep enough food on the table and a roof overhead. The economy was far more precarious than now, as was life itself.

The precariousness of today’s living arrangements, here on the other side of the industrial era, comes not from death but from work, which takes family members away for longer periods of time or which, even when the family member is physically present, is intrusive, preoccupying, and unpredictable.
¹
The new family, such as it is, exists within a complex set of logistical arrangements for getting various members to where they need to be in order to respond to the economy’s new demands. Sociologists have even coined an acronym, DINS—double income, no sex—to describe modern stressed-out couples too tired to do anything in bed but sleep. As they try to coordinate their small slices of time together for maximum effect, such couples have caused a small boom in sales of ovulation-predictor kits. Once a child arrives, a third of working parents now divide up work and child care into shifts, with one partner working during the day while the other undertakes parental duty, and then switching roles for the evening.
²
They communicate with each other by notes, listing who called while the other was out, what happened in the baby’s day, what’s for dinner.

More homes are effectively vacant for longer periods of time. Both partners are on the road, or if working in the vicinity, they are away for more of the day. Small children are trundled off to day care. Elderly parents live alone or in nursing homes. Few families synchronize their schedules sufficiently to dine together. Working parents arrive home long after the stomachs of children demand to be filled. The portion of married Americans who say “definitely” that “our whole family usually eats dinner together” has dropped by a third in the last twenty years, from 50 percent to 34 percent.
³

Some families have even got to the point where they schedule a weekly meeting. Craig Forman is the chief executive officer of myprimetime.com, a Web site intended to help busy working people make better use of their time. Every Sunday at 6:30 p.m., Forman meets with his wife, Cecile, and their seven-year-old son, Elliot. “My week doesn’t have a beginning or an end,” Forman told the editors of
Fast Company
.
⁴
“I live the startup life: I travel a lot, and I carry a bunch of cell-phones plus an Internet pager. This family meeting allows us to come together and update one another about what’s on tap for the week ahead.” At one weekly meeting, they discussed whether Elliot, who had always attended French-speaking schools before the family moved to their present home in San Francisco, should have a French tutor. “Our family meetings are like my company’s project update sessions,” Forman said. “We take turns telling one another what’s on our schedule for the coming week and what’s been nagging at us.”

T
AKE A SNAPSHOT
of a typical group of people living together in the early 1970s, and compare it to a snapshot taken a quarter-century later. The biggest difference you will see is a sharp drop in the percentage of married people with children at home, from 45 percent in 1972 to 26 percent in 1998, combined with an
increase
in the percent of unmarried people without children, from 16 percent to 32 percent.
⁵
In short, the typical household has shifted from married with children, to unmarried without children. At midcentury, domestic sitcoms like
Father Knows Best
and
Leave It to Beaver
reflected the household norm; today, sitcoms revolve around the new style of unattached young singles like those in
Ally McBeal
and
Friends.

Several developments, starting in the seventies, explain this change. First, women gained greater control over procreation. They got access to more effective contraceptives like the Pill.
⁶
And in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t prevent women from getting, and doctors from performing, abortions during the early stages of a pregnancy. Yet women’s greater reproductive autonomy cannot explain all of the change. Surveys also show a significant drop in people’s
desire
for large families. In 1972, a majority of adults (56 percent) thought the ideal number of children was three or more per family. By the late 1990s, less than 40 percent held this view.
⁷

Something else began to happen in the 1970s, and it has been accelerating since. It’s actually two things, closely related. Both pertain to the larger trends we’ve been looking at, but each of them warrants separate examination.

THE BIG FAMILY CHANGE (I)

The first thing driving some women into the workforce starting in the seventies was the relative decline in the earnings of their male spouses or partners. The shift from large-scale production toward innovative ideas and personal services has been particularly hard on men, who used to do most of the production work. As their earnings declined, their wives or partners began to work for pay in order to prop up family incomes.
⁸
(Of course, many poor women had never left the paid workforce.)

The drop in the earnings of blue-collar men has been well documented, although there is a debate over its steepness. In some ways, a blue-collar family in 2001 is still better off than it was in 1979 even if its dollar income has dropped according to standard measures of inflation. Given the new spirit of innovation, some products and services are cheaper than they used to be, many are better, and there are a lot of new ones. Long-distance telephone calls cost less, as do television sets, airline tickets, and a host of other things. You can now buy digital recorders, educational software, antidepressants, and Viagra. A doctor can have an MRI machine scan thin slices of your body, looking for tiny traces of cancer. Chances are, you’ll live longer. And as I have stressed, you can shop more efficiently for terrific deals.

Yet even in an era of abundance, some people may feel
relatively
deprived compared to the status they used to have in society. As the overall living standard of Americans continues to rise, families who fail to gain ground understandably feel themselves to be losing ground. Both men and women in such families will want to work longer hours for pay because they perceive the need to gain some of that ground back. They are less motivated by envy of their better-off neighbors than by a sense of what constitutes a minimally acceptable standard of living for themselves and their families. Many blue-collar families feel that they have been running harder since the late 1970s just to stay in place. Women have been running especially hard.

THE BIG FAMILY CHANGE (II)

A second group of women has been moving into the workforce for a different reason. They’re responding to the increasing rewards available to creative workers who develop new ideas, solve problems, and discover how to cut costs. These new opportunities for women began opening up in the early seventies when the economy began shifting in this direction, and they’ve been escalating since. In the future, expect even greater opportunities for talented women.

When I attended college in the late 1960s, most women who were attending at the time expected to become teachers or nurses. But by the early seventies only a small fraction still had their eye on these noble but relatively low-paying professions. Other options had opened up, some paying far more. This occurred in part because the crusading efforts of a group of highly able and forward-thinking women pried open many doors. Ensuing laws against employment discrimination also helped. But the doors would still be shut were it not for the stirrings of a new economy with an increasing need for brains and creativity. Since the 1970s, as the new economy has claimed more ground, the earnings and opportunities for well-educated women have soared.

This second group of women haven’t entered paid work in order to maintain family incomes. When they have married, their husbands are usually well-educated men comfortably in the top fifth of male earners. Consider: In 1979, 55 percent of women with such wealthy husbands were working outside the home, earning an average of $15,800 (in 1996 dollars). By the late 1990s, 75 percent of them were working, earning an average of $27,175. That means their earnings have shot up 113 percent—far faster than the earnings of women whose husbands are not in the top fifth, and faster even than their own husbands’ earnings.
⁹

Quite apart from any inherent satisfaction they get out of working outside the home, these women have faced the steadily increasing costs of
not
working. As their job opportunities have become greater and their potential compensation has grown, the sacrifice entailed in rejecting careers in favor of home and family has grown in tandem.

This also suggests why more women than ever are enrolling in college—more women, in fact, than men. About 70 percent of young women are now heading to college from high school, compared to only 64 percent of male high-school grads. If the current trend continues to the year 2007, there will be 9.2 million young women in college and only 6.9 million young men.
¹⁰
This marks a stunning reversal from just a few years ago, when young men attended college in far greater numbers than young women. Midcentury parents who could not afford to put all their children through college routinely sent their sons and kept their daughters at home, assuming (correctly) that educated sons had better job opportunities than educated daughters.

Well-educated women still earn less than well-educated men, even when they’re doing the same jobs. As noted, gender discrimination has yet to be wrung out of society. But if present trends continue, it seems a safe bet that sometime this century women will catch up. The new economy rewards traits that women are no less likely than men to possess: inventiveness and empathy, which I’ve previously described as belonging, respectively, to geeks and shrinks. Moreover, as I said earlier, education is highly correlated with future income (and with the valuable connections leading to good jobs), so as women match men in acquiring college diplomas, and the connections that come with them, the gap also will narrow. You already can see something of the trend: In families with two wage-earners, women have steadily gained ground on their spouses. In 1980, fewer than one in five working wives earned more than their husbands; by 2000, nearly one in three did. Among highly educated women, nearly half now earn more than their husbands.
¹¹
Meanwhile, women are taking over a steadily larger portion of managerial and professional jobs. Excluding teachers and nurses, they held less than 20 percent of all managerial and professional jobs in 1970 but more than 36 percent in 1999. Among high-powered professionals, the increase went from 9.2 percent in 1970 to more than 25 percent in 1998.
¹²

But here’s the rub. As noted, high-powered jobs in the emerging economy tend to demand total commitment. It’s all or nothing—fast track or slow track. If you want to remain on the fast track, you have to work late with customers and clients, be available at all hours, develop your contacts and connections, and stay abreast of new developments. Yet many women continue to be the major caretakers in their families. And, unfortunately for them, many men want them to be. It’s almost impossible to be both the major breadwinner
and
the major caretaker in a family.

If men want to have children as much as potentially high-earning women do, those women will be in a position to strike a deal: Men will have to take on at least half of the caretaking responsibilities. On the other hand, if it turns out that men are more willing than women to forgo parenthood, women will continue to be faced with a shortage of prospective husbands and partners willing to do at least half the work of raising a family. So women will continue to have to choose between fast track or slow track with children, as many are doing now.

Women can’t have it all. Nor can men. Not long ago, Alice Hector, then a partner in a high-powered Miami law firm (the same one where Attorney General Janet Reno once worked), lost custody of her daughters to her ex-husband, Robert Young. While she had toiled long hours at the firm, Young, an unemployed builder, had stayed at home with their girls. After the divorce and during the custody fight, Hector argued that she spent as much time with her daughters as most professional working parents spend with their children. Perhaps she did. But this line of argument didn’t persuade the presiding judge. The judge was more interested in which parent spent the most time caring for the kids. “It is clear from the record,” he said in awarding custody to the father, “that it is Mr. Young who is available to the children after school, takes the children to the doctor and dentist appointments and actively participates in the children’s school and after-school activities.” Added Young, after the judge’s decision was announced: “The reason she was able to devote so much time to her vocation is that I made my vocation my kids. Dads can be moms, too.”
¹³

What happened in this case may offer a glimpse into the future. Even if both parents work full-time, presumably one of them will have to choose between the fast track and the slow track. Women who care more about keeping their children than about earning more money and holding on to the power and prestige that come with it won’t make Alice Hector’s mistake; they’ll let their husbands get on the fast track, and they’ll stay on the slower one in order to ensure that, if a split should occur, they will win custody.