The Future of Success (30 page)

In reality, how much you buy isn’t like how much you eat. Your body can absorb only so much, but there’s no necessary limit to how well you can live by purchasing goods and services. The voluntary-simplicity approach assumes that “needs” can be fairly easily distinguished from “wants,” necessities from luxuries. But beyond the bare minimum required to live, needs are entirely subjective.

Human beings don’t really need very much in order to survive—about 1,000 calories a day, including a certain mix of vitamins and minerals; a quart or two of water; enough wrapping to keep the body at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit; some exercise. As noted earlier, personal attention is helpful. So are antibiotics. Beyond this there are degrees of comfort. “That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1856.
⁶
Thoreau, the unofficial head of the nineteenth century’s “voluntary simplicity” movement, tromped off into the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived in a bare cabin on Walden Pond, eating whatever he could grow or trap. “Our life is frittered away by detail.         .         .         . Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!” he wrote. “I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand, and keep your account on your thumb nail.”
⁷

Beyond the bare minimum, what people “need” is relative to what most people in their society count on having. Necessity is an elastic concept, as is deprivation. “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” wrote Thoreau.
⁸
Someone can feel (and appear) deprived in modern America who would be considered well-off in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, a television is not exactly a life support system, but many people would put one on their list of necessities. A car is a necessity for many families, particularly where there are no buses or trams. Indoor plumbing qualifies, although upscale vacationers have been known to pay large sums of money to mountain outfitters to lead them to places where it doesn’t exist. Computers aren’t yet necessities, but they’re coming close—children who grow up in families without one are digitally deprived, and may end up economically disadvantaged.

Ironically, how much you think you need becomes greater the more you already have. Turn the question of how much you “need” on its head, and ask yourself how much extra income would free you from concern about money. Your answer probably depends on how much you earn. In one recent poll, a sample of AOL subscribers whose annual incomes exceeded $100,000 said they needed far more extra money in order to stop worrying about money than did people who earned less than $40,000. Higher-earners were five times more likely to say they had to have more than $90,000 extra each year than were the lower-earners.
⁹

A new magazine called
Real Simple
(another product emerging from the great maw of Time Inc.) is dedicated, according to its founding editor, “to helping you simplify every aspect of your life: your home, food, money, clothes, health, looks, work, family, and holidays.         .         .         . About getting rid of what you can and keeping what you have.”
¹⁰
The first issue—brimming with glossy ads for such bare necessities as Nieman Marcus pearls, De Beers diamond jewelry, Atencio sterling silver, Todd & Holland tea (a quarter pound for $56), Ralph Lauren sheets, and the Cadillac Catera—contains all sorts of handy suggestions for simplifying your life, like reducing the number of your credit cards and wearing plain woolen T-shirts costing $365.
Real Simple,
it turns out, isn’t about getting rid of anything. It’s about helping women with lots of money but little time unclutter their lives by buying a few exquisitely tasteful things.

I
F YOU THINK
cutting your costs of living will simplify your life, think again. Deciding on your “needs” doesn’t avoid the difficulty of making a hard choice, because the choice isn’t really between paid work and the rest of your life. It’s between one kind of busy-ness and another. The readers of
Real Simple
have the money to live as “simply” as they like, but most people don’t have that luxury. If you want to free up more time and energy for the rest of your life by working and earning less, then some of the things that now make the rest of your life easier or more pleasurable will have to be jettisoned, because you won’t be able to afford them. Thoreau’s luxury is my necessity. I don’t want to live in a cabin in the woods and trap my food, thank you.

If you read Thoreau’s journal, you’ll see he was busy all the time. In order to keep himself warm and adequately nourished without relying on anyone else or paying for things, he had to work extremely hard to do it himself. Thoreau didn’t have a family out there in his cabin, and as far as I can tell, he didn’t have many friends. It’s a wonder he had time and energy to write in his journal.

Simplicity isn’t simple. A college friend who settled in Vermont years ago with her family in pursuit of a simple life rises at 4:30 a.m. to start the chores, which end late in the evening. She and her husband don’t rely much on paid work to make ends meet, which means that they have to do almost everything for themselves.

Without specialization, all our lives would be far more squeezed than they are now. I specialize in teaching and writing. A few days ago, I used some of my earnings from teaching and writing to pay someone to repair the computer I’m now using to write on. Not only do I not trap my own food, but I also don’t repair computers. A system of specialized food processing and computer repairing is far more efficient than one in which everyone traps his own dinner and repairs his own computer.

It’s one thing to want to bake bread and trap small animals because you find these activities enjoyable, but quite another to do it because you have to if you want to eat. The same can be said for repairing computers. “Simplicity” offers no guide for how to find more time for what you want to do, unless you wish to spend more of your time doing the kinds of things you now pay other people to do for you more efficiently than you can yourself. The simple life based on homemade things is just too complicated for me, and probably for you.

B
Y ALL MEANS
, become more reflective about what you’re actually doing with your life as compared to how you’d like to live it. Reset your priorities. Manage your time better, if you can. Live on less money, if that’s what you want to do. Make new resolutions. Ask your spouse or partner to take on more chores around the house. Walk in the rain. Take a hot bath. Stop watching television. Use a personal coach. Buy inspirational books. Do any and all of this, and maybe you can get a life. But don’t bet on it.

We are personally responsible for the choices we make in life. But we operate within a system of incentives that make certain choices easier or harder. Seeking a “better balance” on our own, without reference to such incentives, overlooks the larger forces that are responsible for our being out of balance in the first place. Social choices frame personal choices. A full accounting of the choices before us, therefore, must also inquire into the choices we face together.

CHAPTER TWELVE

For to what purpose is the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition?

—Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759)

T
HOUGH
we cannot know for certain the shape of the future, many of the trends that will carry us there are already clear. Today we can see the emergence of a vibrant new economy brimming with innovations. In the near future, consumers will be able to get exactly what they want, from wherever, at the best price and value. And when a better deal comes along, they’ll be able to switch in the blink of an eye—or the click of a mouse. Investors will be able to shift their money instantly to better deals around the world. People whose services are in great demand will be able to move to better opportunities with exuberant ease. Jobs will be abundant, many of them exciting and well paid.

There is much in this picture to celebrate, yet there is also much that should at least give us pause. The economic dynamism we’re beginning to see also brings financial insecurity, work that’s more frenzied and intrusive, widening inequality of income and wealth, and greater social stratification—all of which is eroding personal, family, and community life. It seems an opportune moment to ask whether we are headed in the direction we wish to go—that is, to examine the social choices that lie before us.

BIG CHOICES

It may seem odd to use such language, to speak of the new economy in terms of social choices. The emergence of the global, high-tech economy seems largely out of anyone’s hands. One development seems to have sparked the next, without any clear decision having been made about consequences. No one explicitly decided that technologies of communication, transportation, and information would advance as quickly as they have. Or that these technologies would push the economy from large-scale production toward a wide array of innovative products and services, with easy switching to better ones. Or that this would in turn sharpen competition and spur more innovation, resulting in faster economic growth and terrific deals on all sorts of purchases. Nor, especially, did anyone decide to accept the downsides of all this progress.

Imagine that several decades ago a giant genie appeared in the American sky, offering the nation a big choice: “Either you keep the economic arrangements you have now, stay working as you are, or—do I have a deal for you! By the start of the next century, some of you will be extraordinarily rich, most of you will be better off in terms of what you can buy, and the economy will balloon. But that’s not all. [
The genie cackles.
] The other part of the deal I’m offering is this: Your jobs will be less secure, your incomes less predictable; there will be wider disparities of earnings and wealth; and your society will fragment. You will work much harder, and the rest of your lives will be tightly compressed. [
The genie cackles again.
] It’s your choice! Thumbs up or down in fifteen seconds! I’ll abide by the majority! [
The genie laughs again. His laughter grows louder and his face becomes larger until the laughter fills the air and his face fills the sky. And then everyone in America raises their hands in the air, thumbs up or down.
]

Knowing everything you now know, how would you vote? Is unprecedented prosperity worth the price? America never made the choice, of course. At least not directly—not in any way we understood ourselves to be making it.

In fact, societies
do
make all kinds of choices about their economic arrangements, whether we recognize them as such or not. The “free market” doesn’t exist in a state of nature. It wasn’t created by God on any of the first six days, nor is it maintained by divine will. It is a human artifact, the shifting sum of a set of judgments about individual rights and responsibilities. What’s mine? What’s yours? What’s ours? How do we define and deal with actions that threaten these borders—theft, force, fraud, extortion, or carelessness? What should we trade, and what should we not? (Drugs? Sex? Babies? Genes? Votes?)

The answers are not found in logic or analysis alone. Different cultures, at different times, answer them differently. The answers depend on the values a society professes, the weight it places on solidarity, prosperity, tradition, piety. As a culture accumulates its answers to these questions, it creates its version of the market. To the extent that political rhetoric frames the issue as one grand choice—between government and market—it befogs our view of the series of choices about the wisest and fairest of an endless set of alternative ways to structure the rules of ownership and exchange. The absence of such rules is not a free market, it’s no market at all. Just look at Russia.

The evolution of our economy has depended not only on innumerable clever and hard-working people—there are clever and hardworking people all over the world—but also on countless decisions about commercial contracts, the organization of banks and securities markets, what’s taxed and what’s not, patents and copyrights, antitrust, labor, zoning, and international trade (to name only a few pertinent areas). None of these decisions turns on whether the government should “intervene” in the market, but on how the market should be organized. It’s impossible
not
to make these sorts of decisions. A failure to decide simply forces a reliance on prior decisions, or else creates uncertainty in areas where prior decisions offer no clear guidance.

What criteria should frame these and other market-making choices? Judges, legislators, editorial writers, and average citizens alike typically form their opinions on the basis of what alternative best promotes economic growth or best advances the well-being of consumers by lowering prices and generating better products. Or they decide on the basis of fairness. But in addition to growth and equity, they might also consider the likely consequences of such choices for the overall character of our lives. They might ask, for example, which arrangements best promote economic security, personal integrity, strong families, and good citizenship.

THE BIG CHOICES OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA

At the start of the industrial era, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Americans faced a dilemma roughly comparable to the one we face today. The emerging industrial economy posed enormous advantages in terms of cheaper and better products. Large-scale production, based on the new technologies of that era, put appliances, cars, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils, processed foods, and a lot more within the reach of a growing middle class. But these advantages came at a price. Before then, we had been a nation mostly of small towns and self-contained communities whose economies were largely based on farming, and whose inhabitants knew one another well as friends and neighbors. Within a half-century, America was transformed into a society of large cities teeming with immigrants and the poor, of giant corporations and trusts, of widening disparities of income and wealth, and of big factories employing thousands of wage workers.

No genie asked Americans to decide if the benefits of industrialization were worth it. Instead, Americans of that era made innumerable personal choices about how they would lead their lives, based on the attractions as well as the repulsions of the new industrial order.
¹
Would they leave the farm for the factory, the town for the city? Would they abandon what was comfortable and familiar in favor of what might yield a higher standard of living and would surely be more interesting? Would they encourage their children to do so?

It didn’t end there. These personal choices also informed the
public
choices of the era. For example, technology expanded the scope of valuable production by nimble-fingered children, posing a starker choice than the farmwork children had always done before. Was childhood to be preserved for learning and play, or was it to be devoted to factory production? The choice could have been left to individual families, and for several decades it was. Some families chose the factory for their young children. But in time, the nation as a whole decided against child labor.

There was also a widespread belief that industrial workers needed better protection. The nation became appalled by sweatshops, in which young men and women worked long hours in unsafe conditions for little pay. Laws were passed that set minimum wages and maximum hours, with time and a half for overtime; that recognized unions and required collective bargaining; and that guarded worker health and safety through building codes, sanitation codes, and mining regulations.

As the new industrial order exposed working Americans to new kinds of economic uncertainties, there was a perceived need for social insurance—against injuries on the job, unemployment, the untimely death of an employed spouse, and inadequate retirement savings.

Economic inequality rose rapidly with industrialization. What was the newly industrialized nation to do? It seemed clear to reformers that success within the new industrial order required education beyond eighth grade. The “high-school movement” of the first decades of the twentieth century extended free public schooling through the twelfth grade, and required children’s attendance until they were sixteen. Kindergartens were added as well.

In 1913, a federal income tax was initiated, and it became steadily more progressive in subsequent decades. By 1950, the highest job compensation listed in the public records of the Securities and Exchange Commission—$626,300 in 1950 dollars—was paid to Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors. The federal income tax on this sum (had GM paid it to Wilson in one lump) would then have been $462,000, leaving Wilson with just $164,300.
²

Debate also raged about how to preserve and protect the habits of citizenship from the large industrial combinations that appeared to threaten it. Woodrow Wilson feared that the giant companies would erode the moral and civic foundations of American democracy unless the combinations were broken up. Theodore Roosevelt argued that a better means of keeping the advantages of large-scale enterprise while minimizing its dangers was to regulate it.
³
“Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law,” Roosevelt declared. “The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.”
⁴
In the end, the nation settled, as it often does, on a compromise: Antitrust laws were to be enforced in moderation, and regulatory agencies were to set rules in consultation with industry. Other nations enacted similar laws.

All these debates were, in effect, about how to achieve as much of the benefits of the new order as possible while eliminating its excesses and tempering its injustices—that is, how to attain a new social balance.

The laws, rules, and social conventions appropriate to the nineteenth-century preindustrial economy were mostly irrelevant to the new challenges of a national economy organized around wage work and dominated by giant companies. Yet it was impossible to know the path industrialization would take. The nation had to make choices based on the best information at hand, hunches about the future, and its own enduring values.

Now, we must do so again.

THE BIG CHOICES OF THE NEW ECONOMY

We are now moving rapidly into a new economy and a new society in which some of these older choices are less helpful, or obsolete. As I have noted in preceding pages, many of the regulations designed to control big corporations have been discarded because economies of scale are no longer necessary, and smaller entities can now compete effectively with large enterprises. Trust-busters are now less concerned about mere size or dominance in a given market—the economy is changing so quickly and so much of it is exposed to global competition that such static concepts are becoming irrelevant—than about “excessive stickiness,” where firms gain dominance over a standard for interconnectedness, such as Microsoft’s operating system. There are related debates over the future of intellectual property: Should patents be granted on genes? On business methods like one-click Internet sales? Should copyright protection be granted on mathematical formulas? on methods for cloning?

It’s also dawning on many that, as I’ve also discussed, laws placing responsibilities on employers for wages, hours, working conditions, collective bargaining, and other aspects of employment do little to help the growing numbers of contract workers, contingent workers, freelancers, e-lancers, commission-sales workers, managerial and professional workers, and everyone else selling their services directly in the new economy. In many parts of the economy, it is becoming difficult even to determine who’s the “employer” and who’s the “employee.”

Similarly, the old systems of social insurance were designed for large and stable groups of people who didn’t know what sorts of risks they faced individually. But the sorting mechanism is now giving wealthier and healthier citizens better private alternatives. As a result, many of the wealthier and healthier are seeking to opt out—and leave the poorer and sicker behind. There is an intensifying debate about whether Social Security should be privatized, and whether Medicare should be turned into a system of reimbursable “individual medical accounts.” There’s also a growing debate about group health insurance—how the groups are picked, and what happens to older or sicker people who can’t get in.

Finally, as Americans self-segregate according to income, the sorting mechanism is undermining communities. Schools, parks, public recreation, libraries, and other amenities in poor and working-class areas that depend largely on local property taxes are being shortchanged. The old reliance on local funding was more appropriate when towns were composed of both rich and poor, but it is generating vast inequities today, when rich and poor are more likely to live in separate towns. The problem extends beyond financing. The schools children attend and the communities in which they are raised are critically important to their futures. Large concentrations of poor and near-poor are compounding the barriers they must overcome. Socially isolated at a time when connections count more than ever, economically segregated when career paths are blurring and manufacturing jobs disappearing, bereft of role models and social supports in a system that depends on both, young people in poor communities have limited means of gaining footholds in the new economy.