Elsewhere U. S. A. Page 3
An earthquake in the social landscape is not quite the right metaphor for what has happened to us. A better analogy is global warming: In their slow and steady march, these socioeconomic trends (and the new breed of person they have engendered) have invisibly crept upon us like rising CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The alteration to the social landscape has been a slow accretion by degrees, much the same way a city evolves from a patch of primordial forest. No one moment marks the change from totally rural to completely urban, but before we know it, our world is different, and we may wonder how we got here. Or we may only be able to retain a vague notion that things somehow used to be different. We might even confuse these feelings with the nostalgia for our own individual youth with which they mingle. But they are indeed distinct from youthful nostalgia in that the loss has been collective rather than individual.
The present story will not focus on isolated economic trends in themselves—there are already plenty of books out there which do that. Rather, I seek to explain how these trends have combined to give rise to a new type of American and to a new texture of everyday life. This kind of narrative is only possible now. While we were being born into this new era, such selves-understanding was not possible. But now that birth is over and the new epoch is here—and here to stay. And we must begin the process of making sense of it.
The first part of this book describes the birth of the Elsewhere Society over the course of recent history. I then go on to show what those changes mean for specific aspects of our everyday experience. In a nutshell, what has happened is that many boundaries that were the hallmarks of industrial capitalism— investment v. consumption; private sphere v. public space; price v. value; home v. office; leisure v. work; boss v. employee; and ultimately, even self v. other—have become blurred and interpenetrating. The result is this Elsewhere Society, where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or a guidebook. This very book intends to serve as the first-edition guidebook to this new world we have created.
1∗Note that the economic term job separation is a nice euphemism that borrows from the domestic realm.
2†Central bankers such as Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan like to say that they learned how to manage economies better. Others give them less credit and claim that it is a question of more liquid credit markets, increases in international trade, just-in-time management techniques that have reduced crises of over- (and under) supply, more flexible labor practices, or any combination of the above. The irony that is difficult for many on the left to swallow in the wake of highly public disasters such as the Enron bankruptcy is that deregulation (when it doesn’t lead to monopoly) and globalization lower economic uncertainty rather than raise it. An apt metaphor is perhaps an electricity grid: When the grid is larger and more cross-connected, the chances of a power surge or power lull in one sector resulting in a disaster are lower if that sector can offload its extra power to (or suck amperage from) a different part of the grid. We may hear of more “blips,” so to speak, since we are connected to a much wider economic grid. But the chances of one of those blips hitting us are lower, thanks to the moderation of being in that larger risk pool, and the damage done when such a blip hits (i.e., recession) is less severe.
3∗In fact, it is lower-income Americans who have experienced a slight rise in moving, even as the overall rates have declined. (See Claude Fisher, “Ever-More Rooted Americans,” City & Community 1 [June 2002]: 174-94.)
From the Protestant Ethic to the Elsewhere Ethic
We all know we are on some new wild ride. We may have all made mental notes to ourselves to slow down, examine our (multiple) lives, and take stock of what has happened— but, of course, we don’t have time to reflect. The result is that many myths get perpetuated to explain our anxious feelings. For example, it is not true that firings or layoffs have increased. Likewise, our jobs have gotten more—not less—complicated. And overall economic volatility has decreased, not risen. The common diagnoses may often be wrong in this way; however, we all know the symptom quite well—there is a palpable sense out there that many of us have lost control of our lives. Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere feel like they need to be not just in two places at once but literally everywhere at the same time.
Their sense of unease has been made worse since the speed of change has left them with no chance to recalibrate expectations and arrive at a fresh social paradigm. Each economic epoch must—in good time—come to an ideological equilibrium of sorts. In America prior to the 1930s, that equilibrium was best explained by The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920). In this classic text, Max Weber argued that the key to the development of market capitalism was the emergence of a new moral paradigm. In medieval Catholic Europe, poverty was a virtue, and to profit off one’s fellow man was considered evil. But the Protestant Reformation and its association of earthly riches with heavenly salvation changed all that, and, Weber argued, acted as the engine of capitalist growth. Protestantism in general—and Puritanism in particular—eliminated the formal structure of the Church and paved the way for a one-to-one relationship with God. This resulted in an enormous amount of spiritual insecurity: How do I know that I am saved if there is no priest—no sacred rite—to guarantee it? The answer lay in appearing blessed by living an ascetic life, working hard, and accumulating lots of money. Success as salvation created a very effective incentive structure. The individual controlled his worldly enterprise and was given spiritual options that vested in the afterlife.
However, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the rise of trade unionism eclipsed the Protestant Ethic somewhere around the middle of the last century. The newfound wealth of a globally dominant U.S. economy allowed for a truce between expansive corporate America and organized labor such that a communitarian ethos could reign supreme. Books like Whyte’s Organization Man or David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd attest to this change in the social character of 1950s America.
There has always been an uneasy compromise between the individual and community life in America. And the fundamental tension in midcentury American society was thus the tension between individualism and conformity—between, on one hand, the heroic entrepreneur who amasses personal wealth, and on the other hand, the loyal corporate soldier. The Protestant Ethic valued thrift over consumption, work over leisure, and meritocracy over social connections. But the large bureaucratic organizations like IBM, GM, and RCA that dominated the social landscape in the 1950s put a premium on teamwork, compromise, and fealty. To get ahead in the corporation, the “Organization Man” needed to work long hours and yet also conform to the “social ethic” of newly suburbanized America by “belonging.”He had to fit into the group, not outshine its members. The best way to fit in was to consume: to buy, buy, buy, even if on credit—something unthinkable to the nineteenth-century entrepreneur. But a new social ethic never totally eclipses the previous one—leading to tensions and strains in the economy and its accompanying culture.
Today, those midcentury tensions have been resolved, this time through redefinition: Leisure is work and work is leisure. Consumption is investment. A tax-deductible home equity loan is savings. And the salience of social connections does not indicate nepotism but rather social capital and entrepreneurial skill totally consistent with meritocratic ideals. The corporation has widened and flattened, resolving many of the tensions between sociability and hierarchy. Loyalty has been replaced by value: Indeed, you show your value within the organization through calculated displays of disloyalty—that is, by leveraging outside offers from other corporate suitors. Even our religion has undergone a transformation: Lately, the ideology of the Protestant Ethic has been stood on its head. Now the fastest-growing churches are those that completely reverse Weber’s formula. Rather than doing well economically in order to get a sign that
one is saved, a new breed of churches espouses an ethic that promises worldly riches if you find salvation. That is, in the Amway Church or Reverend Creflo A. Dollar’s 25,000-member Atlanta congregation, parishioners pray for salvation so that they can get rich.
But resolving the conflicts of midcentury America has exacted its own terrible price: the fragmentation of the self, not to mention alienation and anxiety among today’s professional classes—those Americans who earn lots of money but who need to work for it. The 24/7, dual-sex information economy in which they work—riddled with inequality between the rich and the very rich—has changed the way we do business, advance our careers, and navigate our personal lives. This socioeconomic restructuring has generated wide reverberations perhaps best illustrated by three discrete (if interrelated) phenomena: the economic red shift; the portable workshop; and the price culture. These three phenomena combine to create the Elsewhere Ethic that haunt Mr. and Mrs. 2009, giving rise to a sense of alienation among them and many of their professional colleagues. Let me explain.
Though, on paper, professionals in America are doing better than ever before, rising inequality in the top half of the distribution chain has created a sense of panic. I call this an economic red shift since it is not the high levels of inequality per se that are key, but the ever-rising trend that matters: From any link in the chain, it looks like everyone else is rushing away. We may be doing better and pulling away from those below us (perhaps that old college friend who is still struggling to find his calling), while the folks just above us on the income ladder are leaving us in their wake. Like the Doppler effect—the red shift in the galactic light spectrum that is induced by the expansion of the universe and can be observed from any point—an individual in the top half of income distribution appears, to herself, to be at the eye of an economic storm. This is equally true for those in the top 1 percent as for those just above the median U.S. income. This simultaneous dropping of the floor and raising of the ceiling is enough to induce a panicked, though rational, anxiety response: Work constantly.
Such a response is abetted by the fact that we can work constantly—in our personal portable workshop. I’ve borrowed this image from the medieval craftsman who fashioned products one by one in his own cottage industry. This craftsman set his own hours as he was paid for piecework. However, there were inherent limits to how much he could work. He needed raw materials. He needed light (so was generally confined to working during the day). And he needed customers (limited to a very local market). But today’s professional in the knowledge economy is uninhibited by pesky materials or the need to work with specific implements in a “shop.” She can work at any and all times, as long as she has an outlet to plug into and a decent wireless connection. In the flexible nature of the post-industrial economy this new professional shares the freedom of the medieval craftsman to draw up her own schedule, but she is driven by the economic red shift to work any and all hours, made possible by the portable workshop of the BlackBerry and the laptop.
Finally, we all live in a price culture, a world where those meals that used to be free on airlines now have an explicit cost. Many economists would say that pricing the formerly priceless is a step in the right direction since it enhances efficiency. Why should I subsidize the guy in the seat next to me when he asks for three extra bags of pretzels, and I am content with one? By making that cost explicit, I ostensibly get to pay a lower base fare. What’s more, pricing the formerly unpriced brings many once shadowy relationships out in the open. Where prices are not explicit, there lurks the potential for exploitation. Think about hidden fees in credit cards. The more explicit such costs are, the better informed the consumer is, and the more we can make good choices for ourselves.
This would all be fine and dandy if there were no transaction costs—that is, costs inherent in just enforcing such fairness and efficiency. And it would be okay if it stopped at lousy airline food and other “stuff.” But pricing the formerly priceless has spread to every nook and cranny of our lives, thereby eroding other sorts of economies. When we move to price marriage (through divorce settlements or prenups) or physical comfort (by paying masseuses) or even a friendly ear (through psychotherapy), we destroy the desire, need, and ability to exchange such “priceless” things through nonmarket channels, and we thereby add to our sense of alienation from one another. Of course, sometimes these market-based relationships can expose us to folks we might not otherwise have met; and these contacts can, in turn, evolve into nonmarket relationships: The buyer for a large department store ends up marrying the sales rep for the fashion designer. Wonderful! The patient runs off with the therapist. Wonderful? Besides obvious conflicts of interest, one problem with working backward from market to nonmarket relationships is that intimacy and trust can be very difficult to construct on the foundation of an erstwhile business relationship—not to mention the havoc to professional norms that office romance often wreaks.
This pricing also feeds into the paradoxes of an economy that produces no material goods—a “stuffless” economy—since we really can’t know how price relates to value for many services. That’s thanks to two factors. First, many things we buy today have zero marginal cost. For example, when I download an audiobook from Audible.com, the additional (or marginal) cost to Audible or the publisher is close to nil as compared to a physical copy of a book, which costs additional paper, binding, printing, and shipping. Classic economic theory tells us that price should equal marginal cost in a competitive market. Of course, there has never been a pure market as described in Econ 101; but only in this totally dematerialized product setting do we approach a situation where the marginal cost of selling one more of something truly approaches zero. The price-value ratio, then, seems elusive. But, at least on the retail side, we can assess how much we enjoyed the product and how much use we got out of it.
However, the situation is even worse for big corporate transactions. Here the problem relates to the second factor: a difficulty in assessing the impact of a service purchased. By way of example, I was recently on an American Airlines flight when the flight attendant announced all the snack items for sale (items which, of course, used to be free). She wrapped up her soliloquy by declaring that now, “American Airlines is happy to accept American Express or other major credit cards.” Clearly, Amex and AA had struck some sort of deal: American Express was paying the airline some undisclosed amount to be singled out in the credit card announcement. How many memos must have gone back and forth to cut that deal? How many billable attorneys’ hours? How many training sessions for the flight staff?
And how much should Amex have paid for this privilege? Should they have gotten a discount since the first word of their brand is also the first word of American Airlines and thereby reinforces—albeit in a subtle way—the host company’s image? In order to know the value of the deal, they would have had to know how much the marketing campaign increases their business. Impossible. No focus group or statistical model will tell Amex how much worse or better their bottom line would have been in the absence of this marketing campaign. Ditto for the impact of billboards, product placement, and special promotions like airline mileage plans. There are simply too many other forces that come into play to be able to isolate the impact of a specific effort. Ditto for most of the symbolic economy.
It is ironic that in this age of markets and seemingly limitless information, we can’t get the very answers we need to make rational business decisions. Value is elusive in our economy. Often we are just guessing. So our own worth is therefore elusive, too. Anxiety about that worth is thus a rational response, as is our suspicion that we may be frauds. The real estate agent knows that a savvy consumer can see the same listings online that he has access to and must constantly justify his “value added.” The lawyer knows that 99 percent of the contracts she draws up are themselves 99 percent boilerplate language, and in a pinch the paralegal who typed it can actually double-check it and file it in court, for that matter. The M.D.-certified op
hthalmologist knows that the immigrant, community-college-educated technician could probably manage computerized Lasix eye surgery as well as he could, if not better (and, in fact, does perform much of the procedure). The anxious college professor knows how much she doesn’t know as she stands up to give her lecture. To top it off, she also worries that everything she does know her students can find fairly easily with the help of Wikipedia, Google, iTunes U, and a little entrepreneurial spirit. And the public affairs officer of the major corporation knows that all her job boils down to is the hocking of exclusives that are created by generating false scarcities of information— something that she could impart to her replacement in about fifteen minutes.
This constant fear of being exposed, cut out, or outsourced, and thereby having one’s “capital” rendered valueless, is the principal pathos of the era. Not everyone suffers from it. But we can all recognize it in people around us; it is so rife that the Harvard Business Review devotes articles to dealing with fraud anxiety among executives. “Many skilled, accomplished executives fear that they’re not good enough—impostors about to be found out,” Manfred de Vries writes in the HBR article that was voted third best for 2005. “By undervaluing their talent, are they ruining their careers and companies?”1 When you can’t assess yourself, when you’re unsure of your place in the world, what you end up feeling is alienation, a sense that we have lost control over the rhythm and content of our daily lives—not to mention a nagging feeling that we need to be somewhere else.