The Future of Success (36 page)

Read The Future of Success Online

Authors: Robert B. Reich

Tags: #Business & Economics, #Labor

BOOK: The Future of Success
4.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
27
. While it is true that doctors and professors also tend to work one-on-one or in small groups, and their pay is still relatively good, it should be noted that many of their routine duties are fast being taken over by lower-paid nurse practitioners, interns, graduate students, or itinerant lecturers.
28
. See Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), for a study of how the caring attention traditionally provided by many women has been turned into a commodity.
29
. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Occupational Outlook Handbook,
2000–01 Edition, Bulletin 2520 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2000).
30
. Leslie Eaton, “Tourism Is Helping Put Some Back on the Job,”
New York Times,
August 30, 1998, p. A29.
31
. Todd Purdum, op. cit.
32
. Quoted in James Brooke, “Cry of Wealthy in Vail: Not in Our Playground!”
New York Times,
November 5, 1998, p. A18.

TEN: THE COMMUNITY AS COMMODITY

1
. For evidence that Americans are joining up less, see Robert Putnam,
Bowling Alone
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
2
. For evidence that Americans are segregating more by income, see Paul Jargowsky,
Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City
(New York: Russell Sage, 1997).
3
. James Brooke, “Cry of Wealthy in Vail: Not in Our Playground!”
New York Times,
November 5, 1998, p. A18.
4
. For one example of this already occurring, see Laurie Flynn, “Georgia City Putting Entire Community Online,”
New York Times,
March 17, 2000, p. C4.
5
. “Policing for Profit: Welcome to the New World of Private Security,”
The Economist,
April 19, 1997, pp. 21–4.
6
. On the situation in Chicago, see Bill Dedman, “For Black Home Buyers, a Boomerang,”
New York Times,
February 13, 1999, p. A15.
7
. Xianglei Chen, “Students’ Peer Groups in High School: The Pattern and Relationship to Educational Outcomes,” U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Educational Statistics, 1997, 1998. On economic mobility as it relates to education, see George J. Orjas, “Intellectual Capital and Intergenerational Mobility,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
(1992), vol. 1, p. 107.
8
. D. J. Robertson and J. S. V. Symons, “Do Peer Groups Matter?” Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Discussion Paper, 1996.
9
. L. Katz, J. Kling, and J. Liebman, “Moving Opportunity in Boston: Early Impacts of a Housing Mobility Program,” Harvard University, September 1999.
10
. Cited in Tamar Lewin, “In Michigan, School Choice Weeds Out Costlier Students,”
New York Times,
October 26, 1999, p. A14.
11
. Data on school districts funded in part by private foundations are available from U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Educational Statistics.
12
. “Highlights,” Newton Schools Foundation, vol. 13, no. 1 (Fall 1999).
13
. Editorial page, August 24, 1998, p. A12.
14
. Despite efforts by many states to better equalize school funding, differences still exist. Public school expenditures per pupil (in 1996 constant dollars) in school year 1992–1993 (the most recent date for which such data are available) for districts in which median household income was less than $20,000 was $4,237; in districts where median household income was $35,000 or more, it was $6,661; among the wealthiest school districts, expenditure per pupil ranges up to $9,500. See U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “National Public Education Financial Survey,” yearly issues. See also U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics,
The Condition of Education
(1997).
15
. Quoted in Michael Janofsky, “Financial Aid Bargaining Drives Admissions Frenzy,”
New York Times,
April 5, 1999, p. A12.
16
. Caroline Hoxby and B. Terry, “Explaining Rising Income and Wage Inequality Among the College-Educated” (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Series, No. 6873, 1999).
17
. Quoted in Frances Perkins,
The Roosevelt I Knew
(New York: Viking, 1946), pp. 282–3.
18
. The survey was conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change. It involved 10,881 physicians in sixty randomly selected communities in 1996 and 1997. Doctors depending on managed-care plans for 85 percent or more of their income spent, on average, 5.2 hours a month caring for indigent patients, while doctors who derived no income from managed care spent nearly twice that amount, or 10 hours a month. The study is reported in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Managed Care Squeezes Research Funds and Charity Health Aid, Studies Find,”
New York Times,
March 24, 1999, p. A20. See also Diane Rowland, Barbara Lyons, Alina Salganicoff, and Peter Long, “A Profile of the Uninsured in America,”
Health Affairs,
vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring II, 1994).
19
. Laurence Zuckerman, “Developer of Notes Program to Focus on New Venture,”
New York Times,
October 1, 1997, p. D2.
20
. Quoted in Deborah Solomon, “As Art Museums Thrive, Their Directors Decamp,”
New York Times,
August 18, 1998, Section 3, p. 1.
21
. Quoted in David Greenberg, “Small Men on Campus,”
The New Republic,
June 1, 1998, p. 19.
22
. Ibid.
23
. These averages are from data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, P-20 series, various issues.
24
. Calculations by Nicholas Johnson and Iris Lav, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, based on data from the national Conference of State Legislatures. Posted on the Internet at www.cbpp.org/930sttzx.htm.
25
. Quoted in Pam Belluck, “Please Stay, We’ll Pay You, Nebraska Begs Its Brightest,”
New York Times,
February 18, 1998, p. A1.
26
. Editorial page, November 30, 1998, p. A22.
27
. Calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Annual Survey of Government Finances, op. cit.; National Center for Education Statistics,
Digest of Education Statistics for 1999
; and citations in David Minge, “The New War Between the States,”
The New Democrat,
May–June 1999, p. 27.
28
. Steve Lopez, “Money for Stadiums but Not for Schools,”
Time,
June 12, 1999, p. 54.
29
. For a similar comparison in Cleveland, see Melvin Burstein and Arthur Rolnick, “Congress Should End the Economic War for Sports and Other Businesses,”
Region,
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, June 1996, p. 5.
30
. Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus: Inscription for the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor,” 1883.
31
. Judith Miller and William Broad, “Iranians, Bioweapons in Mind, Lure Needy Ex-Soviet Scientists,”
New York Times,
December 8, 1998, p. A1.
32
. Larry Greenberg, “Canadian Professionals’ Compensation Trails That of Their U.S. Counterparts,”
Wall Street Journal,
December 23, 1998, p. A4.

ELEVEN: PERSONAL CHOICE

1
. Freud’s “
Lieben und arbeiten
” appears in Erik H. Erikson,
Childhood and Society
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 229.
2
.
New York Times
/CBS poll, October 1999. Of the 1,038 young people polled, 50 percent of those from households with incomes above $75,000 reported that their lives were harder and more stressful than their parents’; 38 percent of those from households whose incomes were less than $30,000 reported the same.
3
. General Social Survey, cited in Tom W. Smith, “The Emerging 21st Century American Family,” National Opinion Research Center, General Social Survey Report, no. 42, November 24, 1999, Table 11.
4
. See Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Second Shift
(New York: Avon Books, 1989).
5
. Cecile Andrews,
The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
6
. From Thoreau’s journal, March 11, 1856.
7
. Thoreau’s
Walden,
“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854; New York: Signet, 1949), p. 66.
8.
Walden,
“Economy,” ibid., p. 14.
9
. Poll conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide, April 9 to April 12, 1999, of 1,096 randomly selected visitors to AOL’s Opinion Place, reported in “How Much Is Enough?”
Fast Company,
no. 26 (July–August 1999), p. 108.
10
. The editor of
Real Simple
states the purpose of the new magazine at the start of its first issue, April 2000.

TWELVE: PUBLIC CHOICE

1
. The big choices of the industrial era are nicely chronicled in Robert H. Wiebe,
The Search for Order 1877–1920
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1967). Other useful histories of the era are Morton Keller,
Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1913
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Samuel P. Hays,
The Response to Industrialism 1885–1914
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR
(New York: Random House, 1960); and Steven J. Diner,
A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1997).
2
. Frederick Lewis Allen,
The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900–1950
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), p. 215.
3
. Michael Sandel,
Democracy’s Discontent
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
4
. From Roosevelt’s speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 1910.
5
. Princeton Survey Research Associates, “People and the Press: 1999 Millennium Survey” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, conducted April 6 to May 6, 1999), released October 24, 1999. See also International Communications Research, “The Nation’s Worries” (Washington, D.C.:
Washington Post,
conducted October 27 to October 31, 1999), released November 7, 1999.
6
. The phrase is from Saskia Sassen,
Globalization and Its Discontents
(New York: New Press, 1998).
7
. For a fuller discussion of earnings insurance, see Gary Burtless, Robert Lawrence, Robert Litan, and Robert Shapiro,
Globaphobia: Confronting Fears About Open Trade
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution Press, Twentieth Century Fund, and Progressive Policy Institute, 1998).
8
. The idea of a small “transactions tax” on financial transactions was first proposed by economist James Tobin. See his “A Proposal for International Monetary Reform,”
Eastern Economic Journal,
vol. 4 (1978), pp. 153–9. The idea was developed more fully by Lawrence and Vicki Summers, “When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for a Securities Transactions Tax,”
Journal of Financial Services Research,
vol. 3 (1989), pp. 261–86.
9
. For a thoughtful analysis of a proposal to provide each American, upon reaching eighteen years of age, a financial “nest egg” considerably larger than the one I propose, see Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott,
The Stakeholder Society
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
10
. L. Katz, J. Kling, and J. Liebman, “Moving to Opportunity in Boston: Early Impacts of a Housing Mobility Program,” Harvard University, September 1999.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m indebted to several colleagues and friends (and to many who fit both categories) who read earlier versions of this book and offered useful criticisms. Special thanks to Katharine G. Abraham, John D. Donahue, Janet Giele, Claudia Goldin, Christopher Jencks, Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, Lisa Lynch, Martha Minow, Katherine Newman, Richard Parker, Robert Putnam, Michael Sandel, Julia Schor, Jack Shonkoff, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and Ralph Whitehead for their valuable insights. Thanks also to Emily Axelrod, Douglas Dworkin, John Heilemann, John Isaacson, Rafe Sagalyn, and my intrepid editor, Jonathan Segal, for their fine suggestions about how to better express all of this. Several of my students helped me track down obscure bits of information and checked their accuracy. I’m especially appreciative of the labors of Roblyn Anderson-Brigham, Lauren Brown, Julia Gittelman, Valerie Leiter, John Lippitt, Debbie Osnowitz, Susan Schantz, and Andrew Sokatch, all of the Heller School at Brandeis University. My assistant, Mary Del Grosso, deserves special thanks for fortitude and good cheer throughout. Research was made possible by grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Center for National Policy, to which I am grateful. Last, but really first, I want to toast Clare Dalton, a dedicated teacher and scholar as well as community leader, mother of my children, and my partner for three decades, who discussed and debated with me every one of these pages. Whatever is noteworthy in this book I owe to all of the above; its shortcomings I claim as my own.

A NOTE 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 has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He is a co-founder and national editor of
The American Prospect,
and his writings have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s,
the
New York Times,
and the
Wall Street Journal.
This is his eighth book. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Clare Dalton. They have two sons.

Other books

Say You're Sorry by Michael Robotham
Heart of the Incubus by Rosalie Lario
Alice-Miranda at Sea by Jacqueline Harvey
212 LP: A Novel by Alafair Burke
Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross
Caught Redhanded by Gayle Roper
A Chick in the Cockpit by Erika Armstrong