Elsewhere U. S. A. Read online

  The salient economic trends that have given birth to this new type of American and his way of life include steadily rising inequality (between the successful and the very successful) and the intrusion of markets into every nook of our lives. Meanwhile, our family lives have been altered by the wholesale entry of women into the formal labor market (and the associated decline in fertility). And, last, computing and telecommunications technologies have delocalized work for many professionals, so that it can be done at all hours from almost anywhere. No single one of these trends drives the others; in fact, they work together in a forward-feeding system of sorts. Family changes— notably spouses selecting each other for their earning power more than ever before, combined with more working women— actually contribute to the rising inequality, while rising inequality, in turn, drives us to work more (and odder) hours, especially when such work is facilitated by new technologies like wireless computing and BlackBerrys. Of course, the development of such technology is somewhat demand driven by a need for flexibility particularly when professional parents both work. And computerization itself is also a direct cause of rising inequality— not to mention the expansion of markets (after all, how could you have eBay Craig’s List, or overnight stock trading without the Internet?). As you can see, it is all one big loop that has been spinning forward. Where it will stop, nobody knows.

  Not only has the combination of these trends engendered a new breed of person, it has changed the playing field for the rest of us as well. The result is a social world where modernist distinctions like home-office, work-leisure, public-private, and even self-other no longer hold fast. In the twenty-first century, the boundary between work and home has largely disappeared, technological gadgets structure family life, business often intrudes on leisure, inequality creates self-doubt in many of us, and dynamic polygamy (i.e., high rates of relationship formation and dissolution) colors marital relations. Many Americans—particularly those with children to take care of— have morphed into a hyperactive people constantly shuttling between where we think we have to be (home? work? the party full of potential clients?) and where we think we should be (the country for a weekend with the kids? with this husband or a new one?). Those Americans who live in this “Elsewhere Society” are only convinced they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination. Constant motion is a balm to a culture in which the very notion of authenticity—a lodestone of earlier epochs—has been shattered into a thousand e-mails.

  Although to some degree all Americans are subject to the forces I’ve just described, those most intensely affected—the Elsewhere class—are the top third of earners who have children, a professional and monied stratum disproportionately employed in sectors where work can be done at all hours yet no physical product is handled (at least directly in their immediate midst). I am speaking of lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs. The greatest rise in economic inequality has actually, surprisingly, taken place within this class. The elsewhere phenomenon is by no means universal; it strikes the younger strata of this class more than the older ones; parents more than the childless; the urban more than the rural; and particular personality types more than others. But even if we ourselves do not succumb to these forces, we all may feel their tug on us, or at the very least we witness their effect on others around us, as well as on the culture writ large.

  What has happened to leave so many of us dangling in uncertainty each morning we rise from our beds to manage our multiple selves? A perfect storm—to use a cliché that fits—of economic and household forces. As recently as 1970, the United States enjoyed a robust manufacturing sector: the business of making stuff. By contrast, today more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy is service-based—thanks partly to increased efficiency (needing fewer workers to make the same amount of goods) and partly due to off-shoring.2 Of course, the line between service and manufacturing is often a fuzzy one: If the design engineer draws sketches for the new children’s toy, but it is prototyped in Nanjing and stamped out on an assembly line in Mexico, is he providing a service or producing a product? Likewise, if a lawyer draws up the contract for the entire deal to happen, does she work in the “manufacturing” sector? For the purposes of this book, when I talk about service work, I am talking about a range of activities that are abstracted from the construction of a physical product that is consumed. Such activities can range from thinking up new ideas for products to massage therapy to bundling mortgages to moving funds across currencies to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. As I will explain later, this service economy has made economic relations so highly personalized that the basis for authority under industrial capitalism has withered, often leading to awkward social relations and frequent misunderstandings in a world of work where the lines between business and the personal have blurred.

  And as recently as 1990, lights out meant work was finished. But today we can clack away on our BlackBerries in the dark long after our spouses have either fallen asleep from exhaustion or left on the red-eye for an early meeting (while back in the office, huge banks of fluorescent lights remain lit for the janitorial staff working their second job). And work we think we must, since inequality and economic insecurity have risen each year since 1969. The figures on inequality are staggering: Today the richest 10 percent earns five to six times that of the poorest 10 percent.3 But the real story is at the very top: As the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tells us, “The 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households; those 13,000 families had incomes 300 times that of average families.”4

  Not just inequality is on the rise—so is economic insecurity. Today, the risk of a 50 percent income drop from one year to the next is over twice as great for the typical American family as it was in 1970.5 This is a remarkable change, and it plays into some of the erroneous diagnoses as to the roots of American economic anxiety. Thanks to dramatic media attention to selected cases of downsizing—such as the shuttering of Maytag factories in Iowa in October 2007—the common perception in America is that job stability has waned since the glory days of the postwar era, and that not even white-collar employees are safe from the whims of capricious CEOs hell-bent on dismantling companies to show short-term profits to shareholders.

  The truth, however, is that the average length of the longest employment relationship in the typical career still remains over twenty years. Nor have “firings” increased. During recessions, it is the rate of rehiring that varies, not the rate of job “separation” (total monthly separations have hovered between 3.0 and 3.5 percent of the workforce since 1948).1∗ In other words, time out of work may increase for those who do quit or get fired, but the rate of quitting or firing does not change.

  Even the highly publicized layoffs of white-collar employees are a media myth: economists Steven Allen, Robert Clark, and Sylvester Schieber find that average job “tenure and the percentage of employees with 10 or more years of service have actually increased” in large firms, the type that are often spotlighted in news reports.6 In fact, when we look at the economy as a whole, we find that volatility has greatly decreased over the last twenty-five years. Recessions are shallower and recoveries are smoother. Unemployment and interest rates don’t vary as sharply. (Remember 17 percent interest rates on thirty-year mortgages in 1981?) Economists call this “the great moderation” and argue over what has caused it.2†

  Here’s one of the places where it is important to distinguish between earnings, on the one hand, and income, on the other. Research by none other than the Congressional Budget Office has demonstrated that among those employed, earnings volatility has been flat since at least 1981 (as far back as they were able to look). That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it is wrong to say that total household income volatility has risen dramatically. It just means that these economic shocks have less to do with wa
ge cuts or getting fired. The bigger culprit is the increasingly important role of women in the formal labor market. More women are working than ever before, but on average women still maintain a more flexible relationship to paid work. When children are born, for instance, women are likely to reduce their work hours (thereby depressing overall household income). When children reach school age, and especially when they leave the house altogether, women tend to increase their labor supply. What’s more, the blackjack-like doubling down effect of high-earning men marrying high-earning women is one of the untold stories contributing to the rise in economic inequality.

  Add in divorce—and even more important, the formation and demise of cohabiting relationships—and you’ve got a lot of household income drops having nothing to do with employers wielding the ax more often. According to Dr. Jeffrey Timberlake, for example, about a quarter of American children experience two or more mothers’ partners by the time they are fifteen!7 Over 8 percent experience three or more maternal domestic partners! That’s a lot of earning power coming and going (not to mention emotional turmoil).

  Over and above the part that female labor force participation plays in family income fluctuation, the increasingly important role that women play in the economic life of a family forms the bedrock of the real story of middle-class anxiety. That’s because household labor—most notably child care—has not gotten any easier in the meantime. Blending work and home responsibilities is no easy feat, especially in a 24/7 service economy that allows many of us to work from home at all hours. One California executive said how great it is to work in his slippers and jeans, do yoga in the middle of the day, and sometimes even make love to his wife. Southern Connecticut is filled with private-equity managers who are able to move billions of dollars of capital at a keystroke while wearing their pajamas. And many say that given how globally and frequently they do have to travel when they leave home, it’s great to sometimes be able to telecommute instead of trudging into some fluorescently lit office—even if it is a corner office.8 Telecommuting, so to speak, cuts both ways: It allows many professionals with children to work from home. But it allows many professionals with children to work from home all the time. Add in rising inequality across the top half of the income distribution and you’ve got a recipe for work, work, and more work (this trend, of course, creates more inequality as higher-wage earners work more hours than lower-wage ones). The economist Daniel Hammermesh found, for example, that even when they do the same amount of housework and work the same number of hours at their jobs, it is upper-income women who complain more about a time crunch as compared to their lower-income counterparts.9 That is, when you can earn more per hour, the opportunity cost of not working feels greater and the pressure is all the more intense.

  Another myth is that Americans are moving around more than ever. In fact, while we travel more for leisure and business and commute longer distances to work, we are actually relocating less often than we did in previous eras. In a study titled “Ever More Rooted Americans,” the sociologist Claude Fisher shows that the percentage of Americans who moved in 2000 (about 17 percent) is 3 points lower than the 20 percent who moved in 1950.10 So the story of the mobile creative class hopping from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to Massachusetts’s I-90 corridor is perhaps one for young adults—if at all. Once we have children, we change partners more than we change locations. Upper-class jet-setters may do business across the globe, but they are increasingly rooted in their home lives.3∗ The reason? Certainly not domestic bliss, as we well know. Homeownership is, perhaps, the real reason—having risen from 43.6 percent in 194011 to 68.1 percent in 2007.12 (Who knows how many additional divorces are prevented thanks to the difficulty of liquidating the family home? Or how many are caused by the foreclosure crisis?)

  This rise in homeownership, in turn, may itself be a source of anxiety for several reasons. First, when you rent, you don’t have to think twice before pouring some glob down the drain. After all, it’s not you who has to pay for the plumber if it stops up. Homeowning, in other words, creates a lot of hassles with which we have to deal on a fairly regular basis. Second, while homeownership has historically proven to be a good investment, especially when you figure in the money saved from not renting, it does entail a fair bit of risk and worry. Risk with respect to the value of your home. And worry in that you have to constantly be figuring out whether you should refinance, add on, renovate, take out a home equity line of credit, and so on. No longer is the home a haven from the business world. Now the family home is a potential profit (and loss) center, too.

  The sum total of these trends is that even though (professional) Americans are doing better than ever before—especially those lucky enough to be in the top half—many of them think they are falling behind. For example, when the New York Times conducted a poll in Manhattan—the most unequal county in the United States—it found that upper-income folks ($200K+) were almost twice as likely as those with lower incomes to say that “seeing other people with money” made them feel poor.13

  Something is new here. Ever-striving Americans in a land of immigrant dreams and Horatio Alger myths is nothing remarkable on this continent. What is novel is that Americans used to work themselves to the bone for material necessities and to rise up out of constant struggle so their children wouldn’t have to. Leisure was something you attained when you reached a certain income level. Today, a different dynamic has taken shape: For the first time in history, the more we are paid, the more hours we work. Paradoxically, perhaps, we do this now because among the luckiest of us the rewards for working are so great, they make the “opportunity cost” of not working all the greater. The result is that we no longer have leisure-class elites. The rich are working harder than ever. (Even those born to great wealth now feel the pressure to work for work’s sake.) Rather, leisure is something for the poor. This seemingly arcane economic measure—the income elasticity of leisure—represents a fundamental change in how many of us live; and, obviously, this change has affected not just when we work, but also how we play, how we love, how we raise our children—how we live.14

  Of course, there will always be those folks who cut against the grain. Those who—despite the Wharton M.B.A. and all the student loans it took to acquire—choose to spend their days at the beach surfing, drive an old beater car, and organize spontaneous games of ultimate Frisbee on the weekends. But they may acutely feel that they are swimming against strong social currents and economic undertows. So much so that sometimes such efforts to preserve tradition become so self-aware, so hypercon-sciously pursued as to defeat their own purpose. The point is that even the same action—say playing catch with one’s kid on a Saturday afternoon—takes on a different meaning because the entire social playing field has shifted beneath the feet of those ballplayers. That is, you can never go home again. Even the same cherished rituals and actions may evoke very different emotions given the new context in which they are situated.

  So, it’s not hard to understand why so many apparently successful Americans are suffering from what we sociologists used to call alienation. An old term, to be sure, but one that I think needs to be revived. It’s the best one-word definition of the sense many of the folks in this striving, monied class have that they present themselves as one person but are really another; that we carry alongside ourselves a kind of mirror self (or selves) in which our reflections always differ slightly from the “real” thing. In these strata, many are dogged by an increased disconnect between how they expect to feel—when they get a big promotion, when they interact with a colleague, when they buy something online, when they hang out with their kids at the beach—and how they actually feel. And though the most objective statistics indicate that they are doing better than ever before, these professionals still feel more nervous, work harder, and even sleep less (or so they claim to survey takers—I’m skesptical that this is not a new sort of bragging) than at any time in American history. Driven by a phantom anxiety that something big is going to go
wrong, the most successful professional class in the most powerful country in the world lives in fear that its personal house of economic cards is about to collapse. Maybe that’s why Awhile drinking has declined, adult use of other mind-altering substances such as Valium or marijuana has risen to the point where mature adults consume more than teenagers for the first time since such trends were first tracked.15

  I believe I may be describing some folks you know. They— and how they live today—are what this book is about. There’s plenty to examine. For, in 2009, their triumphs are often followed by an aftertaste of disappointment—seeded by either the nagging feeling they don’t deserve it or, conversely, that the accolade indicates the low standards of the bestower. Many of this new breed of intraviduals feel stressed out and dislocated from both home and work responsibilities. Since, for almost all of their great efforts, most professionals produce nothing tangible at their place of work, many can frequently feel like frauds. Hence the constant fear among many folks that they’re one misstep away from being “found out.” And all this in a culture that has blended work and leisure ethics to such a degree that there is actually a meta-pressure to not appear stressed out. They have to get that report done and the kids off to school. But they also have to look cool while they are multitasking, as if they were teenagers who didn’t want to get caught studying for the big test lest they be called eggheads.