The Future of Success (25 page)

Many children suffer the same attention deficit as the elderly. Custodial child care is inferior to the kind that builds a relationship with the child. But again, you get the attention you pay for. The cost of organized child care ranges from $4,000 a year per child to $20,000. All of it is called “child care,” but the low end is fundamentally different from the high end. Low-end care may provide a safe environment but has fewer caretakers per child than at the higher end, the caretakers usually have less training, and they are more likely to leave for another job in a short time (because they’re paid less and are more overworked). For these reasons, children in low-end care have less opportunity to form relationships with their caregivers than do children in high-end care. These differences in the amount, quality, and consistency of care can have significant consequences for children later in their lives.
²⁵

The effects appear to continue until adulthood. One study looked at children from 111 poor black families in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all of whom, because of their poverty, were at risk of doing poorly in school, dropping out of high school, and creating another generation of poor children. The study began in 1972, when the children were infants. Fifty-seven of them, selected at random, were assigned to full-time child-care programs until they were five years old. The child care included a lot of personal attention in which the caregivers built personal relationships with the children. Ratios of child-care workers to children were very low (ranging from one for every three infants, to one for every seven four-year-olds); child-care workers had as much training as public-school teachers; almost none left or were replaced during the period; and they provided each child with a lot of intellectual stimulation and emotional support. The other fifty-four children in the study got nutritional supplements and some visits from social workers, to assure that they were healthy and safe, but no attention-rich child care. Once they reached the age of five, both groups of children attended comparable kindergartens, elementary schools, and high schools.

The study traced the children until they were twenty-one years old. Although they were treated no differently after the age of five, it turned out that, by their twenty-first birthdays, almost two-thirds of those who had received attention-rich child care were either still in college or in a good-paying job, while just 40 percent of the others were. The attention-rich child care had been costly—the equivalent of $11,000 a year for each child in today’s dollars.
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Given its long-term effects, you might conclude it is worth the cost. But the sad reality is that most families can’t afford it.

Affording good-quality child care is one problem; another is making sure children receive the attention that’s paid for. Toddlers don’t know enough to complain to their parents if they’re not, or if they’re being mistreated. The same is true, of course, for the elderly and infirm, mentally ill, or retarded. Lack of proper custodial care in nursing homes is exposed with sad regularity. Many nursing homes are parts of big for-profit businesses, and child care is also becoming a big business. For-profit businesses have to give shareholders a good return on their investments, possibly at the expense of investments in the quality of attention. Some parents who fret about this sort of thing when they’re at work now utilize innovations provided by trendy child-care centers: little Web-cameras mounted on the ceilings and walls of the centers that allow the parents to click open a little viewing box on one corner of their computer screens and watch their toddlers all day long.

THE NEW DIVIDE

If you (or your children) don’t have the right innate talents, education, and connections to make it into the creative sector of the economy—devising and selling designs, concepts, plans, strategies, deals, and insights—chances are that you (or they) will end up selling personal attention, because that’s the other arena where job growth is occurring. Yet you should know, if you don’t already, that most people who sell personal attention do not earn a great deal of money doing it. There are several reasons. First, by its very nature, personal attentiveness is a relatively unproductive service. It’s given one-on-one—and it entails giving
time
. In the hours it takes a software engineer, management consultant, or investment banker to create a product or change a service that may affect the lives of hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of people, the child-care worker, nurse’s aide, or personal trainer may have worked directly with a few dozen human beings.
²⁷

Second, even in a tight labor market, the supply of people giving personal attention is growing as fast as if not faster than the demand for it, thus keeping a damper on wages. Although there are shortages, from time to time, in specific attention-giving fields, such as nurses or aides for home health care, the overall supply of attention givers is relatively abundant. Some of these personal-attention workers are women who continue to enter the workforce to prop up their family’s finances. Many are new immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who are streaming to these shores. Some are people who are taking on more than one job or working longer hours because they need the money. Some have been displaced from their old service jobs as telephone operators, bank tellers, or retail workers by new technologies. Although most personal servers continue to be women, an increasing number are men whose former factory jobs have been downsized or outsourced out of existence.

Finally, personal-attention work is not especially valued by society. Traditionally, it was considered “women’s work”—most of it unpaid, much of it taken for granted by the men, children, and aged parents who received it free of charge. It was expected of women, assumed to be their responsibility if not their special calling. Women first ventured into the workforce as nurses, nuns, teachers, and flight attendants, giving personal attention in exchange for low wages. Black women eked out a bare living as maids and nannies within middle-class homes.
²⁸
Immigrant women have been heavily represented here as well, especially poor women from developing countries. Black and immigrant women are still the ones who give the kind of personal attention that’s hardest: lifting the infirm elderly into their wheelchairs, cleaning their sores, and emptying the bedpans.

More than two million people work in nursing homes in the United States—as nurse’s aides, dietary workers, and housekeepers. Most are women earning little more than the minimum wage, between $7 and $8 an hour in 2000. Another 700,000 people work as home health-care aides, or home aides, attending to the elderly, sick, or disabled at home. They’re also mostly women, with pay averaging between $8 and $10 an hour. Another 1.3 million people work in hospitals as aides, orderlies, and attendants, at about the same rate. There are 2.1 million registered nurses in the United States, who are paid $10 to $25 an hour. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts substantial increases in all these occupations.
²⁹
One out five new jobs in the coming decade will be in health services, and most will entail giving personal attention.

An estimated 2.3 million people in the United States are now paid to care for children. About half of them work in child-care centers, others in organized play groups, as nannies, or as helpers. In 1999, their median wage was $6.17 an hour, usually without benefits, which was less than that earned by funeral attendants ($7.16 an hour) or pest controllers ($10.25 an hour). Most child-care workers are women.

Half a million people are social workers, and 200,000 more are classified as “human-service” workers. All attend to individuals and families with severe problems. Their pay averages between $8 and $15 an hour. Most of the people who attend to the mentally ill, however, are police officers who pick them off the streets on cold nights and put them into shelters or arrest them for petty crimes, and the guards who then watch over them in jail. In New York City, as elsewhere, it is a crime to be homeless and sleeping in the street; the homeless can either spend the night legally in a city shelter (many of which are dangerous), or they can be arrested and spend the night in a city jail (many of which are dangerous).

People who bestow personal attention on diners and hotel guests are also paid relatively little, although the pay and the tips get better at the higher end. Housekeepers at New York’s Pierre Hotel begin at $11 an hour, and can earn up to $16 an hour, with two weeks of vacation and benefits.
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Limousine drivers are in greater demand as well, earning $10 to $25 an hour. And there has been a surge in valet-parking attendants, earning the minimum wage plus tips. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages now have forty-five listings under “Parking Attendant Services.”
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Also included among the fastest-growing occupations are personal trainers, exercise-class leaders, fitness instructors, massage therapists, manicurists, and others who firm up, poke, prod, pummel, knead, moisturize, and prune human bodies. Such jobs pay between $15 and $70 an hour. Top-of-the-line trainers or masseurs, who give exquisite attention to celebrity bodies, can earn more. In almost no case are benefits included. As noted, the number of personal coaches has been growing rapidly as well, with pay seemingly dependent on how much individual clients value the help.

I
N THE OLD
economy of large-scale production, the people who labored to produce the cars or television sets earned enough to buy them. Henry Ford famously argued that it made good business sense to pay his assembly-line workers $5 a day, a relatively large sum at the time, because they’d have enough money to buy the Model Ts they were turning out in large quantities. Similarly, service workers like bank tellers, telephone operators, and retail salespeople used the same services they supplied to the public when they themselves went to the bank, used the telephone, or visited the mall.

But increasingly, the tens of millions of people selling personal attention don’t earn enough to buy the kind of services they’re selling. So they’re opting instead for “no frills”—budget travel without much personal attention, take-out food, visits to a doctor only when absolutely necessary (many can’t afford health insurance), and care of children and the elderly that depends largely on relatives or friends. They don’t belong to a health club, travel in limos, or dine in fancy restaurants. They park their own cars.

Many of them can’t find a place to live within an easy commute of where they sell personal attention, because homes there are too expensive. People who staff the resorts, restaurants, and spas of Vail, Colorado, or Park City, Utah, for example, have to live so far away that even resort owners are becoming concerned. One survey calculated that an average worker in Vail, at $10 an hour, would have to hold down five full-time jobs in order to have enough money to live there. “In the service business, you want people who are warm, fuzzy, hands-on. If you ask people to commute 100 miles, it is not going to work out very well,” says Myles Rademan, a resort consultant based in Park City, which imports half its workforce every day.
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I suspect that few personal attendants actually commute a hundred miles each day, but the problem of transportation is real. The gardeners, health-care aides, massage therapists, and trainers who work in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the average price of a home is $1.1 million, necessarily commute in from the Bronx and similar low-rent districts.

The old monied class of the Gilded Age had servants from the other side of town, of course, and the servants cleaned rooms and drove carriages they never could have afforded themselves. But gradually large-scale industrialization changed all this, creating a mass market for mass-produced goods and standardized services while building a huge middle class along the way. That was one of the great achievements of modern capitalism, and it strengthened American society as well as the economy.

The emerging economy is not taking us backward, but it does seem to be moving us toward a new kind of social divide. The material well-being of most people is improving, to be sure. Jennifer, for example, could never have got her cut-rate airfare twenty years ago, because there wasn’t enough competition among airlines, or the technology, to slash the costs of air travel. And the Internet will be available to more people, allowing even home health-care aides to get excellent deals on all sorts of things they need, so their dollars will go further. But these advantages notwithstanding, the allocation of personal attention is likely to become even more sharply skewed in years to come—toward those who can afford to pay for it, away from those who can’t.

The way paid work is coming to be organized and rewarded in the new economy is inducing people to work longer and harder, and to sell themselves with ever-greater urgency. As a result, there is less room for families, which are being downsized and outsourced. Personal attention—once the province of spouses, parents, and the children of the elderly—is rapidly moving into the market economy, in which people receive the attention they can afford to buy. Ironically, the people who can’t afford to buy it, or buy very much of it, are coming to include most of those who are selling it.

CHAPTER TEN

UNCLE BILLY
[
emotionally, at breaking point
]: Mary did it, George! Mary did it! She told a few people you were in trouble and they scattered all over town collecting money. They didn’t ask any questions—just said: “If George is in trouble—count on me.” You never saw anything like it.

—It’s a Wonderful Life,
screenplay, 1946

T
HE FINAL CONSEQUENCE
of the emerging economy for our personal lives concerns the communities we inhabit. Communities used to pick up where families left off. Home schooling gave way to the local public school; the very sick moved from home to the local hospital; libraries and playgrounds provided access to expensive facilities few families could afford on their own. Think of a “community,” and you’re likely to picture a place where people look after one another—a traditional neighborhood, church, voluntary association, New England town meeting, frontier barn-raising, quilting bee, volunteer fire department, charity supper. The last scene in Frank Capra’s 1946 movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
typifies the American ideal: Just as George (Jimmy Stewart) is about to give up in despair, he finds he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, as they have always counted on his. They’re bound together in common cause and friendship.

Contrast this imagery to a more recently heard lament: Americans lack community. We’re no longer joiners. We don’t know the people next door. We “bowl alone.”
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Since most of us are working harder and selling ourselves with ever-greater gusto, no one should be surprised if we have less energy to spend with our neighbors.

But the view that we’re no longer joining with others is not quite correct, and it fails to account for the most important aspect of what’s happening. We’re still joining together—for child care, elder care, schools, health care, insurance, health clubs, investment clubs, buying clubs, recreational facilities, private security guards, and everything else that’s too expensive to purchase alone. But we’re not joining as participants; we’re joining as consumers. We’re pooling our financial resources to get the best deal.

The same advances in communication, transportation, and information technologies that are giving us wider choices of products and investments are giving us wider choices of whom to join and for what purpose. And as with other facets of our new lives, we can abandon the community we choose almost instantly and switch to another in pursuit of an even better deal. Like personal attention, communities are becoming marketable goods. We get what we pay for, and we pay not a penny more than necessary for what we get.

NEW GROUPS

Through most of human history, community members didn’t have much choice about whom they joined. They were born into their communities and usually died in the same ones. Some notably broke with theirs or were banished, but these partings were rare or traumatic. Even well into the industrial age, most people still congregated within extended families and clans that gave definition to city neighborhoods. Members of these communities stayed put for at least a generation or two.

These communities provided their members some security and care. Yet they often did so at the price of boredom and stifled opportunity. One of history’s crowning achievements has been to give people a
choice
of community. An unprecedented share of Americans (and citizens of other modern nations) now enjoy the freedom to escape the communities they were born into. They can choose whom they join with, and then switch to another group if they wish—another residential community, spa, health plan, child-care center. They can abandon their cyber-communities with a click. As choice replaces random fate, surely community life will be richer, more harmonious, and happier. How could it be otherwise?

For one thing, membership in the older communities extended to many facets of a member’s life. There were many different arrangements, of course, but mutual obligations and benefits tended to come in a big bundle: production, defense, care, nourishment, parenting, entertainment, and spirituality. As a participant, you contributed no less to the bundle than was expected of you, and extracted no more than you were expected to take. Clan members produced for the clan and took care of one another’s children, sick, or elderly.

By contrast, the new communities offer highly specific benefits. You pick a community for exactly what you want from it. As with other aspects of your new life, you shop for the best community you can afford. Because exit is so easy and the benefits are so targeted, these new communities don’t require nearly as much commitment as the old did, nor do they offer the same security to members who might need to depend on one another in a pinch. Sure, you develop friends in a child-care group, but you don’t have to reveal as much about yourself along the way, and you can end the friendship instantly, as can they.

Here’s the real catch. Given the range of choice and ease of switching, we’re sorting ourselves into communities of people with roughly the same incomes, the same abilities, the same risks, and the same needs. Where we live has more to do with how much we earn than ever before. It’s Vail and Greenwich versus the communities who attend to them—but on a much larger scale. People who are most buffeted by the new economy—whose incomes have eroded the most, whose earnings are the most precarious—are ending up together in the same poor communities.
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Their schools are among the worst. They have less medical attention. Their insurance is more costly. Even when they pool what they can afford, the parents of toddlers still can’t raise enough for good-quality day care. This sorting process started years ago, but it’s become far more efficient, just when the people who are being sorted away into neglected communities need help the most.

THE SORTING MECHANISM

To understand what is taking place, you have to understand the sorting mechanism. All other things being equal, someone who buys into a community wants the highest return on his or her investment—the best value, best service, most enjoyable and stimulating peers, largest amount of prestige their money will buy. Those already
in
likewise want the highest return on every new member—people who will contribute as much as if not more than they, and who make minimum demands on the common pool of resources. Unless your motive is charitable, there’s no sense joining a community composed of a lot of people who are more costly and needy than you, because you’ll end up subsidizing them. And it’s irrational for a group to go out of its way to attract members who will be a drain on it, or to provide benefits that will likely attract such people.

When a friend recently landed a job at the University of California at Los Angeles and his wife got a job in a financial firm in downtown Los Angeles, the two of them toured many different communities within a fifty-minute commute for both in order to find a good place to live. After they narrowed their pick of community, they examined a variety of condominiums and cooperatives. They finally settled on the best deal they could afford—within a condominium complex possessing its own security guards, maintenance crew, modest recreation facility, and even broadband Internet connection, in a neighborhood that was safe and attractive and contained a good elementary school for their daughter. In making their decision, they naturally considered the price of the condominium and the monthly fee that went along with it, as well as local taxes. They didn’t consciously seek to live in a community containing few poor people whose children would need extra instruction in school and whose overall family needs would require more social services and hence higher local taxes to pay for them. And they didn’t intentionally choose a condominium complex whose price would screen out poorer people with larger families that might use up more of the common amenities. They simply tried to find the best deal for their money. They had a lot of information and a wide array of choices (townships with different tax bases, private residential communities with different monthly fees).

The wider the choice and the greater the ease of switching to something better, the more efficient the sorting mechanism becomes. Individuals try to get into groups offering them the best deals—not only the best cities or townships and the best private residential communities they can afford, but also the best universities, primary and secondary schools, child-care centers, nursing homes and elder-care centers, insurance pools, professional partnerships, and companies. And such groups compete to attract the most desirable members—those who can contribute the most and demand the least. As a result, the most desirable end up clustering together, sometimes nationwide, even worldwide. And with ever-greater efficiency, they exclude those who are less valuable or more needy. The
next
most desirable cluster together as well, and exclude those who are more costly than they. And so on, down the line.

I’ve made it sound like a cold calculation—colder and more calculating than it usually is—in order to reveal a logic that’s just under the surface of society, and likely to become ever more apparent as choices widen and information improves, and it becomes easier to switch to better deals. Few people employ the sorting mechanism consciously. It is, rather, the consequence of a large number of rational personal decisions.

RESIDENTIAL SORTING

Begin with the decision my friend and his wife made about where to live. In a world of wider choices and easier switches, more people like them are making such decisions according to how much they can get for their money, and implicitly choosing not to subsidize people who are likely to contribute less to, or use up a lot more of, common resources. As residential communities have become commodities—marketed, evaluated, and purchased like any other—it’s easier for buyers to get just what they want. And sellers have stronger incentives to offer just such deals.

Local services in
private
residential communities—the fastest-growing part of the U.S. housing market—are supported by membership dues. Such services in exclusive
public
townships, like Vail or Greenwich, are financed by local property taxes. But private or public, the sorting mechanism is essentially the same. Private residential communities exclude large families that need a lot of schools and social services, and whose children may be noisy or engage in petty crime, by charging hefty prices for homes and high membership fees and by strictly limiting the number of bedrooms in each unit. Upscale townships do it by requiring two- to four-acre plots for each home and prohibiting multifamily housing. Despite Vail’s labor shortage, its residents don’t want low-income housing that might threaten their property values. The only affordable housing that hasn’t drawn complaints is situated in an old gravel quarry on a flood plain, forty-five miles away.
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“Citizens’ movements” against state and local taxes have been spearheaded by private homeowner associations whose members see no reason why they should pay to support families outside the gates when members are getting everything they need inside, through their dues. In 1990, the New Jersey legislature defused one such revolt by agreeing to reimburse residents of private communities the taxes paid for public trash collection, snow removal, street lighting, and other public amenities because those residents were already paying for them privately. In other words, homeowners would pay only for what they got and no longer subsidize other communities needing more.

Depending on which is the more efficient means of sorting, private residential communities can morph into public townships, and vice versa. On March 24, 1999, the Leisure World retirement village in Orange County transformed itself from a gated community into one of California’s newest municipalities: Laguna Woods, whose average citizen is seventy-seven years old. The change allows residents to keep more of their tax dollars for themselves, paying only for the swimming pools, tennis courts, riding stables, and lawn care within the new city’s boundaries rather than spending money on schools and social services for children in the rest of the county.

I once described this as the “secession of the successful,” but in recent years the sorting mechanism has extended further down the economic ladder. As the proportion of married-with-children households continues to shrink and that of elders rises, more school districts contain larger concentrations of older people who vote for lower taxes and lousy schools rather than the opposite combination. Meanwhile, American cities are creating all manner of “special service” districts for middle-class residents and business owners willing to pay assessments for more trash collection, cleaning, and police—so long as the extra services are performed solely inside the district. Exclusive communities are even becoming exclusively wired. In the not-too-distant future, they’ll link all their households, schools, retail stores, and offices to single giant high-speed networks—allowing teachers to communicate more easily with parents, businesses with their employees, and everyone with their town officials.
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Gated communities used to be just for the very rich, but now middle-income home buyers want in. In 1970, the nation had more public police officers than private security guards; now it hires three times as many private guards as public ones—in California, four times as many.
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The secession of middle- and lower-middle-income families is also leading America back toward racially segregated neighborhoods. The probability that a black student will have white classmates dropped during the 1990s. You can spot the trend in most of the nation’s large metropolitan areas. At the start of the nineties, about 10 percent of Chicago’s neighborhoods could still be described as integrated (with black families constituting 10 to 50 percent); by the middle of the decade, less than 3 percent.
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SCHOOL SORTING

As the stakes in getting a good education continue to rise, parents more aggressively seek the best education they can afford for their children. And the best deals are where
other
students are at least as intelligent, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating—and less likely to use up the scarce attention of teachers by being troublesome or needing a lot of extra help.