Moreover, unemployment is increasingly further concentrated in the long-term unemployed: those who have unsuccessfully sought work for more than six months accounted for 8.6 percent of unemployment in 1979 and 26.1 percent today. See Peter Schuck, One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 50, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release,” Table A12, last modified October 5, 2018, www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm.
Taken together, these effects entail that the share of prime-aged men in paid work today is almost 10 percentage points lower Than it was at the start of the Great Compression and that the decline in work rates since 1965 represents the disappearance of roughly ten million overwhelmingly mid-skilled jobs. Indeed, the work rate for prime-aged men was slightly lower in 2015, when the unemployment rate fell to 5 percent, than it had been in 1940, when unemployment was at 14.6 percent. See Eberstadt, “Where Did All the Men Go?”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2050 the male labor force participation rate will be nearly 20 percentage points below its 1950 peak and the female labor force participation rate will be nearly 6 percentage points below its 2010 peak. See Mitra Toossi, “A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950–2050,” Monthly Labor Review (May 2002): 22, Table 4. By comparison, the gaps between labor force participation rates for men and women were roughly 36 percentage points in 1970 and 26 percentage points in 1980. Data reported earlier revealed that prime-aged employed men in the bottom half of the income distribution work roughly 20 percent fewer weekly hours than they did in 1940. The combination of these two effects on average hours worked, across all working- and middle-class men, exceeds the male-female difference in labor force participation in 1980 and approaches the male-female difference in 1970.
scratch themselves or fidget: Ceylan Yeginsu, “If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.),” New York Times, February 1, 2018, accessed October 26, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html. See also U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “Ultrasonic Bracelet and Receiver for Detecting Position in 2D Plan,” Amazon Technologies, Inc., Applicant, Appl. No.: 15/083,083, March 28, 2016.
within twenty seconds of receiving them: See, e.g., O’Connor, “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm.”
with middle-class incomes but without college degrees: Between 1998 and 2015, the rate of suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related deaths grew over three times faster for middle-aged white men with a high school degree or less education than for men with a BA or more education, and this mortality rate grew over five times faster for uneducated than for educated middle-aged white women. See Case and Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity,” 415, using data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics System, 2018. The data collect suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 persons for white, non-Hispanic fifty- to fifty-four-year-old men and women, by their level of education. For men with a high school degree or less, this rate increased by 130 percent between 1998 and 2015; for men with a BA or more, it increased by 44 percent. For women with a high school degree or less, this rate increased by 381 percent; for women with a BA or more, it increased by 70 percent. See Case and Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity.” See also Joel Achenbach and Dan Keating, “New Research Identifies a ‘Sea of Despair’ Among White, Working-Class Americans,” Washington Post, March 23, 2017, accessed November 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-research-identifies-a-sea-of-despair-among-white-working-class-americans/2017/03/22/c777ab6e-0da6-11e7-9b0d-d27c98455440_story.html?utm_term=.3b4d0390d167.
And the core of Donald Trump’s support comes from voters with middle-class incomes but no college degrees. See Thomas Edsall, “The Not-So-Silent White Majority,” New York Times, November 17, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/the-not-so-silent-white-majority.html; Jon Huang, Samuel Jacoby, Michael Strickland, and K. K. Rebecca Lai, “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html. For a largely congruent analysis of the sources of Trump’s support using a massive data set of preelection Gallup surveys, see Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump,” SSRN working paper (November 2, 2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059.
“nonlinear relationship between earnings and hours”: June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, “Unequal Terms: Gender, Power, and the Recreation of Hierarchy,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 69 (2016): 15199. Hereafter cited as Carbone and Cahn, “Unequal Terms.”
“a flexible schedule”: Claudia Goldin, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter,” American Economic Review 104, no. 4 (2014): 1117.
A “winner take all” society therefore arises: Frank and Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society.
less to gain from clawing up one: Throughout the Great Compression—in the three and a half decades between 1946 and 1980—average annual incomes grew most rapidly at the bottom of the income distribution and then grew steadily less rapidly as incomes increased, right up to and into the 99th percentile. The median worker enjoyed almost precisely the average rate of income growth. All these data come from Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018 (World Inequality Lab, 2017), https://wir2018.wid.world/. They are elegantly organized by David Leonhardt (using figures by Jessica Ma and Stuart A. Thompson) in David Leonhardt, “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart,” New York Times, August 7, 2017, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html. Hereafter cited as Leonhardt, “Our Broken Economy.”
at the very top rungs: In the years since 1980, income growth has shifted up the distribution. Between 1979 and 2007, the only income group to capture a rising share of total national income was the top 1 percent (even the rest of the top quintile—the next 19 percent—suffered a declining income share). See Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income,” Figure 2. By roughly 1990, incomes were growing fastest in the top 1 percent of the distribution, and by roughly 2000, incomes were growing steadily faster as incomes increased, fully inverting the midcentury pattern. (Today, the average income growth is not reached until nearly the 90th percentile of the income distribution.) Finally, in the three and a half decades between 1980 and 2014, incomes at the 99.999th percentile grew nearly three times as fast as incomes at the 99th percentile, and only the richest one-twentieth of 1 percent enjoyed the same income growth that the poorest Americans experienced in the Great Compression.
All these data come from Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018 (World Inequality Lab, 2017), https://wir2018.wid.world/. See also Leonhardt, “Our Broken Economy.”
on his children: I owe this formulation to Gemma Mortensen.
rat-race equilibrium: George Akerlof, “The Economics of Caste and of the Rat Race and Other Woeful Tales,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90, no. 4 (November 1976). See also Alan Day Haight, “Padded Prowess: A Veblenian Interpretation of the Long Hours of Salaried Workers,” Journal of Economic Issues 31, no. 1 (March 1997): 33–34. Hereafter cited as Haight, “Padded Prowess.”
cannot be measured directly: Haight, “Padded Prowess,” 33–34.
use long hours as a proxy: See Golden, “A Brief History of Long Work Time,” 221, citing James Rebitzer and Lowell J. Taylor, “The Consequences of Minimum Wage Laws: Some New Theoretical Ideas,” Journal of Public Economics 56, no. 2 (1995); Linda Bell and Richard Freeman, “Why Do Americans and Germans Work Different Hours?,” in Institutional Frameworks and Labor Market Performance, ed. Friedrich Buttler et al. (London: Routledge, 1995); Samuel Bowles and Yongjin Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours: Was Thorsten Veblen Right?,” University of
Massachusetts Economics Department Working Paper no. 62 (2004), hereafter cited as Bowles and Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours”; Robert Drago, Mark Wooden, and David Black, “Who Wants and Gets Flexibility? Changing Work Hours Preferences and Life Events,” ILR Review 62, no. 3 (April 2009).
less effortful or productive workers: Golden, “A Brief History of Long Work Time,” 221.
a reduction in vacation actually taken: See Jessica Stillman, “This U.K. Company Offered Its Employees Unlimited Vacation Time. It Was a Total Failure,” Slate, June 14, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, https://slate.com/business/2015/07/unlimited-vacation-time-this-company-tried-it-and-it-was-a-total-failure.html.
countries with greater economic inequality: See, e.g., Bowles and Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours,” 10–13.
longer work hours in the United States: See, e.g., Bowles and Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours,” 12–13. For purposes of this analysis, inequality in the two countries was measured by the ratio between the 90th and 50th percentiles in the income distributions.
within-industry income inequality: Kuhn and Lozano, “The Expanding Workweek?,” 336. See also Daniel Hecker, “How Hours of Work Affect Occupational Earnings,” Monthly Labor Review (October 1998); Linda Bell and Richard Freeman, “Why Do Americans and Germans Work Different Hours?,” NBER Working Paper No. 4808 (July 1994), www.nber.org/papers/w4808. The same point is noted in Bowles and Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours.”
these perverse incentives: The precise estimate was 44.5 percent. Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor, “Rat Race Redux.”
Long work hours also correlate not just to within-industry wage inequality but also to across-industry wage inequality. This suggests a direct impact of competitive status seeking on work effort. Bowles and Park, “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours,” 16.
take delivery of furniture: Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs,” 52.
“if someone sends you a message”: See Laura Noonan, “Goldman Sachs Attempts to Woo Junior Bankers with Swift Promotions,” Financial Times, November 5, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/7af51792-83e4-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd.
“stories of lawyers”: Rhode, Balanced Lives, 17, citing Meredith Wadman, “Family and Work,” Washington Lawyer, November/December 1998, 33; Deborah L. Rhode, “Gender and Professional Roles,” Fordham Law Review 63 (1994); and Keith Cunningham, “Father Time: Flexible Work Arrangements and the Law Firm’s Failure of the Family,” Stanford Law Review 53 (2001): 987. Nearly three in four lawyers report that they cannot successfully balance the demands of their work with their personal lives. Rhode, Balanced Lives, 11, citing Deborah L. Rhode, In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10; Cameron Stracher, “Show Me the Misery,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2000, A31; Carl T. Bogus, “The Death of an Honorable Profession,” Indiana Law Review 71 (1996): 926; and Catalyst, Women in Law: Making the Case (2001), 9, executive summary available at http://womenlaw.stanford.edu/pdf/law.inside.fixed.pdf.
shifting family funerals to make meetings: Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs,” 49–50.
A financial services executive participating in a focus group on elite overwork reported that he had lost the trust of his wheelchair-bound father by breaking too many promises of weekend visits. In another focus group from the same study, the teenage daughter of a partner at a major accounting firm reported that her father, who had promised he would spend more time at home once he’d made partner, instead had only increased his work hours: he was, she said, “gone when I get up, and not back when I go to sleep.” The daughter regarded this as normal, as all her friends’ fathers worked similar hours. Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs,” 53, 58. A senior banker at JPMorgan similarly refused to allow a vice president a few hours off to attend his daughter’s first dance recital, saying simply, “Don’t worry—I haven’t been to any of my kid’s baseball games.” Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), Chapter 14.
Parents appear to try to compensate for such behavior by spending their income on their children. But it is not clear that the children even want all the gifts that they receive. According to work by one child psychologist, for example, preschool-aged children on average ask for 3.4 toys for Christmas but receive 11.6. The study was conducted by Marilyn Bradford and is cited in Hochschild, The Time Bind, 217.
“happy guy in college”: Ho, Liquidated, 89–90.
“eager and energetic”: Leslie Kwoh, “Hazard of the Trade: Bankers’ Health,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204062704577223623824944472, citing Alexandra Michel, Transcending Socialization: A Nine-Year Ethnography of the Body’s Role in Organizational Control and Knowledge Worker Transformation (2011), http://alexandramichel.com/ASQ%2011-11.pdf. Another study reports that more than two-thirds of overworked professionals do not sleep enough. Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs,” 54.
just the first half of the 1980s: Schor, The Overworked American, 11.
260 annual days of sunshine: Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “Is Silicon Valley Bad for Your Health?,” Fortune, October 23, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, http://fortune.com/2015/10/23/is-silicon-valley-bad-for-your-health/.
“personal matters”: See Laura Noonan, “Morgan Stanley to Offer Paid Sabbaticals to Retain VPs,” Financial Times, June 2, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/d316dc38-28d2-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89. Hereafter cited as Noonan, “Paid Sabbaticals to Retain VPs.”
required analysts to take Saturdays off: See Olivia Oran, “Goldman to Summer Interns: Don’t Stay in the Office Overnight,” Reuters, June 17, 2015 accessed November 18, 2018, www.reuters.com/article/us-goldmansachs-interns/goldman-to-summer-interns-dont-stay-in-the-office-overnight-idUSKBN0OX1LA20150617, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Reflections on Stress and Long Hours on Wall Street,” New York Times, June 17, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections-on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html.
not perceived as “weak” for taking time off: See Noonan, “Paid Sabbaticals to Retain VPs.”
incrementally less and less well-being: This is only more true when the extra income gets spent on superfluous extravagances, in mutually destructive status competition. In some instances—for example, housing in elite urban neighborhoods or art or antique furnishings—rising incomes and wealth among the rich principally drive up prices for a fixed supply of goods. Increased top incomes yield literally just paper gains, as the rich simply consume the same goods that they otherwise would, but at inflated prices. The top 1 percent of households today receive roughly twice and the top one-tenth of 1 percent roughly four times the income (measured in constant dollars) that they received in 1970. See “Income Inequality, USA, 1970–2014,” World Inequality Database, accessed October 16, 2018, http://wid.world/country/usa/. But one cannot credibly say that they enjoy twice or quadruple the material well-being overall on this account, or indeed that their greater incomes make them materially better off at all.
experience of elite overwork: Nor are these reports artifacts of an unreflective focus on hours at the cost of neglecting the fact that longer hours yield greater incomes. When elite law firm associates were given a hypothetical choice among decreasing hours at their current incomes, increasing incomes at their current hours, and increasing both incomes and hours, nearly two-thirds chose to decrease hours and only one in ten preferred to increase both hours and incomes. See Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor, “Rat Race Redux,” 338–39. Perhaps these preferences merely reflect the fact that the associates were working optimally so that their hours and incomes had just reached the point at which the diminishing marginal utility of income caused them to begin to prefer leisure over greater pay and more work. But the preference fo
r reducing hours did not grow with the associates’ incomes. This suggests that the associates in the study were overworked and in a rat race, rather than working precisely their preferred hours. See Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor, “Rat Race Redux,” 339. Notwithstanding their preferences for marginal leisure over marginal income, lawyers have seen a steady parallel rise in pay and hours. One further reason behind this trend bears mention. Between 1970 and 2000, “associate compensation [at large law firms] increased 1000% . . . while billing rates . . . increased only 400%.” Law firms, it seems, “paid for the higher salaries by increasing billable hours rather than charging higher rates.” Associate preferences for reducing hours even at the cost of lower salaries have not translated into law firm behavior. See Schiltz, “An Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession,” 900, citing William G. Ross, The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing by Attorneys (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1996), 2, and North Carolina Bar Association, Report of the Quality of Life Task Force and Recommendations (1991), 11–12.
Other surveys replicate these results. According to the American Bar Association, “In recent surveys, most men as well as women indicate a willingness to take lower salaries in exchange for more time with their families.” Deborah L. Rhode, “Balanced Lives for Lawyers,” Fordham Law Review 70 (2002): 2212, citing Family and Work Institute, National Study of the Changing Workplace, a study involving some twenty-eight hundred workers that found that workplace flexibility and family support was the second-most-significant factor in job satisfaction, after job quality. Nearly two-thirds of all workers would reduce their workweek by an average of ten hours. Steven Ginsberg, “Raising Corporate Profits by Reaching Out to Families,” Washington Post, April 19, 1998, H7; Sue Shellenbarger, “Study of U.S. Workers Finds Sharp Rise Since 1992 in Desire to Reduce Hours,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1998, A10. For discussion of the generational shift in priorities within law and accounting firms as young men as well as women express greater desire for time with their families, see Douglas McCracken, “Winning the Talent War for Women: Sometimes It Takes a Revolution,” Harvard Business Review (November–December 2000): 159, 161; Bruce Balestier, “‘Mommy Track’ No Career Derailment,” New York Law Journal, June 9, 2000, 24; Terry Carter, “Your Time or Your Money,” ABA Journal (February 2001): 26. One survey by Harris Interactive and the Radcliffe Public Policy Center found that almost three-quarters of men in their middle thirties, compared to only a quarter of men over sixty-five, would be willing to take lower salaries in exchange for more time available for their family. Kirsten Downey Grimsley, “Family a Priority for Young Workers: Survey Finds Changes in Men’s Thinking,” Washington Post, May 3, 2000, E1. See generally Bruce Tulgan, The Manager’s Pocket Guide to Generation X (Amherst, MA: HRD Press, 1997).
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