The Future of Success (34 page)

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Authors: Robert B. Reich

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2
. Nations use different means to measure work time. In the United States, the measurements depend on people’s subjective assessments of the time they put in on the job. Many European countries measure only “official hours” as reported by employers. Nonetheless, since every nation’s measures are used consistently over time, there’s no reason to doubt the trends. See “Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 1999” (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Organization, September 1999).
3
. Data are as of 1997, the most recent date for which they’re available at this writing. From 1969 to 1997, the proportion of married couples in which both partners work for pay grew from 36 percent to 68 percent. These and other related data are summarized in “Families and the Labor Market, 1969–1999: Analyzing the ‘Time Crunch,’         ” a report of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Washington, D.C., May 1999.
4
. Among the first researchers to point out what appeared to be a trend toward increasing hours in paid work was Juliet Schor, in
The Overworked American
(New York: Basic Books, 1991). Her conclusions have been disputed by John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey,
Time for Life
(State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). But debates among researchers about precisely how many hours Americans are putting in for pay, and whose hours are growing the most or the fastest, extend beyond Schor and Robinson-Godbey.
5
. Robinson and Godbey,
ibid
.
6
. Alice Walker,
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 238.
7
. Lawrence L. Knutson, “Oldest U.S. Worker, at 102, Says His Job Still a ‘Pleasure,’         ”
Boston Globe,
March 13, 1998, p. A3.
8
. Ellen Langer,
The Power of Mindful Learning
(Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1997), p. 58.
9
. Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997).
10
. Quoted in Fritz Stern,
Einstein’s German World
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
11
. Henry David Thoreau,
Walden,
conclusion (1854).
12
. The data, from 1997, are cited in Julia Lawlor, “Minding the Children While on the Road,”
New York Times,
July 12, 1998, Business, p. 10.
13
. The data come from Ed Griffin, chief executive of Meeting Planners International, and are cited in Edwin McDowell, “The Many Amenities of Corporate Retreats,”
New York Times,
September 12, 1999, Business, p. 16.
14
. “DDB Needham Life Style Survey” (DDB Needham, Inc.), and National Opinion Research Center, “General Social Survey,” various years.
15
. See Norman Nie and Lutz Erbring, “Internet and Society: A Preliminary Report,” February 17, 2000 (Stanford Calif.: Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, Stanford University). The survey was conducted in December 1999 and was based on a nationwide random sample of 4,113 adults over the age of eighteen.
16
. Christine Temin, “People Who Live in Glass Houses,”
Boston Globe,
August 19, 1999, p. F1.
17
. S. Bianchi, G. Weathers, L. Sayer, and J. Robinson, “Are Parents Investing Less in Children? Trends in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Time with Children,” Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality, University of Maryland, working paper, unpublished, 2000.
18
. The calculation requires that dollars be adjusted for inflation. But readers should be warned that earnings comparisons over time are tricky. In an era of great innovation such as we are now in, a dollar of income often buys better or better-quality goods and services than it did before. Standard measures of inflation may fail to capture these improvements.
19
. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, “Households by Type and Selected Characteristics,” various issues.
20
. Data show that the wives of husbands who are in jobs with less stable earnings and higher rates of unemployment are more likely to work, and to work longer hours, than wives of husbands with more stable earnings and lower rates of unemployment. See, e.g., J. Berry Cullen and J. Bruber, “Spousal Labor Supply as Insurance: Does Unemployment Insurance Crowd Out the Added Worker Effect?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, no. 5608 (June 1996).
21
. Another factor that may partially explain why more workers volunteer for overtime is that fewer working men are now married. So perhaps they have less reason to go home than before.
22
. See Phillip L. Jones, Jennifer M. Gardner, and Randy Ilg, “Trends in Hours of Work Since the Mid 1970s,”
Monthly Labor Review,
vol. 120, no. 4 (April 1997).
23
. Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, “Who Are the Overworked Americans?”
Review of Social Economy,
vol. 56, no. 4 (1998), p. 442.
24
. Interview in
Fast Company,
August 1998, p. 158.
25
. Researchers compared the progress of 523 full-time managers within a large financial-services company who took leaves in the early 1990s with their peers who did not. Controlling for age, gender, and education, they found that leave-takers were 18 percent less likely to be promoted to positions with more responsibility and received lower performance ratings and smaller salary increases. The researchers also found that managers receiving early promotions tended to enter an especially fast track, rising more rapidly to higher levels of responsibility. See M. Judiesch and K. Lyness, “Left Behind? The Impact of Leaves of Absence on Managers’ Career Success,”
Academy of Management Journal,
vol. 42, no. 6 (1999), p. 641.
26
. In pondering the speed with which the wives of high-income men have been moving into the workforce, account must also be taken of changes in the tax code. It is not without irony that the same social conservatives who preferred that wives remain at home were among the most ardent backers of the 1980s drop in marginal tax rates facing wealthy stay-at-home wives—which encouraged them to run out the door and into the job market even faster than they were going before.
27
. Report of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, op. cit.
28
. “A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century,” Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy (New York: The Carnegie Corporation, 1986), and subsequent surveys.
29
. Report of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, op. cit.
30
. This and the following are calculated from Current Population Survey data. I’m indebted to Professor John D. Donahue, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, for this illustration.
31
. Linda J. Sax et al., “The American Freshman: National Year Trends, 1966–1995,” and “The American Freshman: National Norms” for each year thereafter (Los Angeles: Cooperative Institutional Research Program Survey of American Freshmen, Higher Education Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles).
32
. Linda Bell and Richard Freeman, “Working Hard,” paper presented at the Conference on Changes in Work Time in Canada and the United States, Ottawa, Canada, June 1996.
33
. International Social Science Programme survey, cited in ibid., p. 3.
34
. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,”
Saturday Evening Post,
vol. 203 (October 11, 1930), p. 27.
35
. Bell and Freeman, op. cit.

SEVEN: THE SALE OF THE SELF

1
. William H. Whyte, Jr.,
The Organization Man
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), pp. 76, 147, 150.
2
. David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
3
. Whyte, p. 448.
4
. Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman
(1949; London: Penguin, 1998), p. 65.
5
. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Education released data from a survey of young people in full-time jobs who had received their college degrees in 1992 and 1993, asking how they found the jobs. Personal connections led to jobs three times more often than did college “placement” offices or job recruiters, and twice as often as want ads or official postings. See “Early Labor Force Experiences and Debt Burden,” Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics Report No. 97–286, July 1997. See also Barber, Daly, Giannatonio, and Phillips, “Job Search Activities: An Examination of Changes over Time,”
Personnel Psychology,
vol. 747, no. 4 (1994), p. 739.
6
. The proposition that in the emerging economy financial success turns more on motivation and creativity than on elite credentials is consistent with the findings of Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale, comparing the earnings of students who were admitted but declined to attend certain elite colleges (whose average student scored relatively high on the Scholastic Aptitude Test) with students who did attend such colleges. A few years after they had graduated, the two groups’ average earnings were about the same. See A. Krueger and S. Dale, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables,”
Industrial Relations Section Working Paper,
no. 409, Princeton University (July 1999).
7
. In the same study, Krueger and Dale found that students from low-income families, presumably less well connected than their peers from higher-income families, benefited more substantially than did higher-income students from being educated at the more prestigious and selective institution.
8
. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment is summarized by him in “The Small-World Problem,”
Psychology Today,
vol. 2 (1967), pp. 60–67.
9
. On the importance of high-status “connectors,” see P. Marsden and J. Hurlbert, “Social Resources and Mobility Outcomes,”
Social Forces,
vol. 66 (1988), pp. 1038–59. See also Mark S. Granovetter,
Getting a Job
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
10
. Charles Babcock, “Clinton Friend Referred Lewinsky for Internship,”
Washington Post,
January 1, 1998, p. A12.
11
. Eric Eckholm, “China’s Colleges: A Rush to Party, as in Communist,”
New York Times,
January 31, 1998, p. A1.
12
. Jill Abramson, “The Business of Persuasion Thrives in Nation’s Capital,”
New York Times,
September 29, 1998, p. A22.
13
. Ibid.
14
. At this writing, Rundgren’s music can be found at www.tr-i.com.
15
. The rise of Mary Meeker is chronicled by John Cassidy in “The Woman in the Bubble,”
The New Yorker,
April 26 and May 3, 1999, p. 48.
16
. Meeker’s reported compensation for 1999, and Morgan Stanley’s reported earnings, are found in Charles Gasparino and Randall Smith, “Wall Street Scores in ’99. Now for the Big Bonus Round,”
Wall Street Journal,
December 9, 1999, p. C1.
17
. Quoted in Bernard Weinraub, “Hollywood Raises Curtain on 2000,”
New York Times,
February 20, 1999, p. A7.
18
. See Alison Leigh Cowan, “Lessons: Questions in a Change of Heart,”
New York Times,
February 23, 2000, p. A23.
19
. Interview with John Isaacson, president of Isaacson, Miller, Boston, September 23, 1999.
20
. Quoted in the
Boston Globe,
November 12, 1998, p. C1.
21
. The Barro episode (including quotes cited in these pages) is described by Sylvia Nasar, “New Breed of College All-Star,”
New York Times,
April 8, 1998, pp. C1, C3.
22
. The thesis is nicely explicated in Robert Frank and Philip Cook,
The Winner-Take-All Society
(New York: Free Press, 1995).
23
. Quoted in Kyle Pope, “For TV’s Hottest Item, It’s Let’s Make a Deal,”
Wall Street Journal,
April 5, 1999, p. B1.
24
. Dale Carnegie,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936).
25
. Miller,
Death of a Salesman
, op. cit., pp. 21, 65–6.
26
. David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 47–9, 83.
27
. Suze Orman,
The Courage to Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance
(New York: Doubleday, 1999).
28
. Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You,”
Fast Company,
August–September 1997, pp. 83–94.
29
. Quoted in Bryan Miller, “Serving Chef Under Glass,”
New York Times,
October 10, 1998, p. B1.
30
. Quoted in Tracie Rozhon, “The Agent as Hot Property,”
New York Times,
April 19, 1998, p. C1.
31
. See Ann Jarrell, “Doctors Who Love Publicity,”
New York Times,
July 2, 2000, p. F1; Abigail Zuger, “Doctors’ Offices Turn into Salesrooms,”
New York Times,
March 30, 1999, p. F1.
32
. The self-promoting dentists are described by Rick Marin, “Polishing Their Image,”
New York Times,
January 31, 1999, Section 9, p. 1.
33
. Bruce Orwall, “Wall Street Bets on Entertainment Idol’s Earning Power,”
Wall Street Journal,
September 26, 1997, p. B1. Martha Stewart’s incorporation is a matter of public record.

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