Veblen emphasized that although the poor had worked from time immemorial, and the middle class had worked from the moment of its creation, matters had always been different for the elite. In fact, leisure constituted a fixed marker of social status, enduring from barbarian times through his own era. “The upper classes,” Veblen wrote, “are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations,” by which he meant not just factory work but rather all work that amounts to “a steady application to a routine of labor.”
Moreover, the rich avoided industry not casually or by default but affirmatively and on account of their self-conceit and sense of dignity. Even nonconformists or otherwise exceptional characters who embraced industry worked with a moderation that would perplex their counterparts today: Benjamin Franklin, for example, arose each morning to pose himself the question, “What good shall I do this day?,” but then, according to the daily schedule that he published in 1766, devoted no more than eight hours to work and fully four hours to “music, or diversion, or conversation.”
The leisure of the rich did not amount, in Veblen’s words, to “indolence or quiescence.” Rather, Veblen distinguished between two socially opposite employments. On one side, he said, lies industry, the drudgery of ordinary work, devoted to “elaborating the material means of life.” On the other lies the “non-productive consumption of time,” devoted to “employments to which a degree of honor attaches,” pursued to mark out social status. Veblen called activity of this sort exploit. Any number of activities might count as exploit, he explained, including in earlier times warfare, ritual, hunting (if done socially rather than to procure sustenance), public worship, and even public merrymaking. The elite, Veblen observed, devoted its leisure to exploit—so completely that the word leisure became identified with elite exploit.
By Veblen’s own era, the characteristic barbarian exploits—warfare and chivalric tournament—had been reduced or abandoned in the face of new social and economic forms. But, Veblen insisted, the leisure class retained an aversion to industry and an attraction to exploit as a social marker and indeed constitutive commitment. The social form remained the same, and only its content had changed. In place of barbarian ritual, the new leisure class cultivated useless erudition (in classical languages, for example), hobbies (newts and porcelain), refined and elaborate manners, and even the conspicuous archaism and difficulty of English spelling.
All these activities, Veblen observed, share with barbarian exploit that they demand immense time and attention, but produce nothing useful. By adopting them, the elite demonstrated incontrovertibly that it could afford leisure as the masses could not. And demonstrated leisure, coupled with an aversion to industry, established the elite’s social status. (Mere idleness, being too easily displayed by anyone, cannot perform this differentiating function.) By this means, the elite was constituted as a leisure class.
Veblen suspected that the leisure class was shrinking even as he identified it, and that it had perhaps entered its twilight. But the connection between wealth and leisure would outlive him and extend well into midcentury.
The leisure class survived the First World War (although fighting still counted as exploit, and many of its individual members perished in battle). In the 1920s, as Veblen archly remarked, even the uniform of the Wall Street elite—glistening top hat, patent leather shoes, and a walking cane—emphasized through its ostentatiously fragile shine that its wearers did not sully themselves with work. And whatever lessons the elite drew from the Great Crash of 1929 did not shake its open embrace of leisure. Shortly after Veblen’s death, following one of many Depression-era congressional investigations into the Wall Street crash, J. P. Morgan exhorted reporters that “if you destroy the leisure class you destroy civilization.”
Even the Second World War did not quite abolish the leisure class. Bankers, for example, actually kept bankers’ hours well into the twentieth century. Their typical day “began at ten and ended at three with an intermission for a three-martini, two-hour lunch.” As late as 1962, Martin Mayer could write in his classic Wall Street: Men and Money that “the banks close at three o’clock (though people can sneak in until three-thirty if they know the way), the exchanges shut down at three-thirty . . . people who work on the floors of the exchanges, members and employees, go promptly home . . . executives take a last look at the Dow Jones ticker and start heading home to the country.”
At “five o’clock,” Mayer continued, “the night lines are plugged into the telephone switchboard,” and the rest of “Wall Street goes home, lemmings marching to the subway.” At “around six-thirty the cleaning women arrive, and the lights flash on in the towers. By eight o’clock they are going off again, and by nine even the busiest of the brokerage houses has its accounts squared away and locks the doors for the night.” At midcentury, the cleaners were the hardest-working people on Wall Street.
Not everyone played along, of course. In the 1950s, for example, hard-charging takeover artists targeted firms led by the idle rich—as one of them put it, the “third-generation Yale man who spends his afternoons drinking martinis at the club.” But these corporate raiders who threatened the leisure class were “treated as uncouth ruffians,” censured by government investigators, and threatened with legislative sanction. Even in the breach, norms reaffirmed and enforced the facts of life among the leisured elite.
Midcentury Wall Street, moreover, was not unique or even distinctive in its taste for leisure. The corporate raiders just mentioned took aim at firms run by comfortably lazy managers who, as one contemporary observer noted, behaved as if they were gentlemen of independent means. The captains of midcentury industry came to work “dressed in a suit cut for the club rather than the factory; occupied an office which looked like a drawing room, with no sign to be seen of anything so vulgar as a digital computer.” They even “nourished themselves from a cocktail cabinet just like the one at home.”
Elite professionals worked similarly short hours through midcentury. The American Bar Association’s 1962 assumption that lawyers would bill only thirteen hundred hours per year reflected long-standing conventional wisdom. And as late as 1977, the American Bar Association Journal published an essay on “Financial Planning and Control for Lawyers” in which a hypothetical firm’s average lawyer billed only fourteen hundred hours in a year. These are only anecdotes, of course, and systematic data on the bar were not kept at midcentury. But any number of others report similar hours. Even applying the rule of thumb that a lawyer must work about a third more hours than she bills, this amounted to slightly over thirty hours a week in the office. Not quite bankers’ hours, perhaps, but hardly onerous.
These narratives of elite sinecure would be unrecognizable today. The epidemic of elite effort introduced earlier is substantiated by countless vivid narratives and reams of data.
Young investment bankers now work 80 to 120 hours a week, often arriving at work at 6 a.m. and not leaving until midnight. In a story familiar to anyone in the business, an analyst at an investment bank once reported working 155 hours in a single week, which left him with only 13 hours to devote to the rest of his life, including sleep. A standard “disciplinary joke” among young investment bankers is that they will be lucky to get any day off besides their wedding day. Nor do the hours necessarily improve with seniority. Morgan Stanley’s “top dealmaker” once bragged that he had “the stamina to work 12 hours a day regularly and 20 hours at a stretch on deals, catnapping on his office couch.” Bankers’ hours have given way to the ironically named “banker nine-to-five,” which begins at 9 a.m. on one day and runs through 5 a.m. on the next.
Elite managers, who occupy the core of the real economy, have experienced similar increases in their hours. Amazon’s “purposeful Darwinism” and “unreasonably high” expectations mean, as its founder Jeffrey Bezos once explained to shareholders, that you “can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose [just] two out of three.” T
o implement this ideal, Amazon runs “a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff”—a kind of panopticon monitoring that aims to cull less productive workers. Amazon also imposes itself on managers at effectively all hours, for example by sending emails after midnight and following up with text messages asking why they have not been answered. The firm is not alone in this approach. Apple, for example, has required executives to check email throughout vacations and until 2 a.m. on Sunday nights.
More generally, the comfortable, clubbable “third-generation Yale men” who managed large corporations at midcentury have long since been driven out by the imperatives of efficiency and the corporate takeovers through which these efficiencies have been wrung out of American firms. Managers’ hours grew steadily over the second half of the twentieth century. By 1990, managerial workloads had increased sufficiently to cross over the regulation forty-hour week, from sinecure to hard slog. The average hours of senior executives at Fortune 500 and Service 500 firms exceeded fifty-five per week, and 60 percent of CEOs worked over sixty hours per week. Moreover, 62 percent of CEOs reported that their immediate subordinates’ hours had increased over the course of the 1980s.
Indeed, senior executives commonly insist that the capacity for massive work constitutes one of the selection criteria for their jobs. A senior manager at a Fortune 500 firm recently observed that “the members of the Management Committee of this company aren’t the smartest people in this company, we’re the hardest working. We work like dogs. We out-work the others. We out-practice them. We out-train them.” The same manager applied a similar work requirement even below the top: “I don’t think we can get commitment with less than fifty or sixty hours a week. That’s what other corporations are doing. To be competitive, that’s what we need to do. In my gut, I can’t believe we can do it very differently.” The Harvard Business Review’s survey of extreme jobs validates the manager’s intuition. According to the survey, “62% of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35% work more than 60 hours a week, and 10% work more than 80 hours a week.” Nearly a quarter of the highest earners surveyed qualified for the Review’s most extreme job classification and worked “even more punishing” hours: “The majority of them (56%) work 70 hours or more a week, and 9% work 100 hours or more.”
Elite professionals have also ratcheted up their work hours. Medical residents now work such long hours that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has sought, with limited success, to restrict them to eighty working hours per week, averaged across four weeks. Lawyers’ hours are similarly extreme. For example, between 1984 and 1990 the percentage of lawyers working over fifty-five hours per week more than tripled, and the share working more than two hundred hours per month increased by nearly half. And by the mid-1990s, fully 70 percent of associates in a study of lawyers from a large northeastern city worked at least half a day in an average weekend, and over 99 percent worked on weekends during busy periods. Today, “work weeks of more than 60 hours are routine in many practice settings, and 40-hour weeks are considered part-time schedules.”
Often, lawyers must work longer hours still. An anonymous lawyer recently described a “busy day” as running from 7 a.m. one morning to 3:45 a.m. the next, with every hour packed with in-person meetings, double-booked client telephone calls, and between fifty and one hundred new emails. A “not-busy” day begins at 9:30 a.m. and ends at 8:45 p.m., with no break save for ordering—not eating—lunch. Elite firms, moreover, expressly embrace and even insist on such single-minded devotion to work. An associate at one large firm reports receiving an email from his boss commanding, “When you wake up in the morning, you don’t brush your teeth, you look at your phone.” Once again, seniority buys no relief from long hours. The leader of another major firm was equally blithe about partner hours, saying that “the only quantitative requirement of partners . . . was to spend between 2,500 and 3,000 hours per year either billing clients, developing business or otherwise improving the firm’s practices.”
The epidemic of effort has reached into even the most seemingly idiosyncratic precincts of the elite, which were once formally reserved for exploit. The greatest athlete in the world at the turn of the twentieth century—a gentleman amateur named C. B. Fry—missed the 1900 Paris Olympics because he did not know that they were happening. And as late as the 1980s, John McEnroe famously resisted practicing. Today, McEnroe’s approach is unthinkable. Professional athletes train much, much harder and longer: Olympians prepare single-mindedly over many years; Rafael Nadal practices nearly seven hours a day. Nor are athletes exceptional. Top chefs, another once-quintessentially amateur group, now answer the demands of competitive restaurant reviews by working eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks. Celebrities today must also work intense and long hours. Supermodels, as one recently observed, “all train like it’s the . . . Olympics.” Even pure celebrities—who are famous only for being famous—constantly and effortfully cultivate their fame.
Overwhelming, systematic evidence confirms these reports and demonstrates that the past five decades have seen a revolution in elite work habits.
In what has become known as the time divide, workers have shifted away from the median forty-hour workweek and toward the extremes on either side, so that growing shares of the population now work fewer than thirty hours or especially more than fifty hours per week. According to one measure, the share of male employees working more than forty-eight hours a week increased by roughly half between 1970 and 1990. Another measure reports that the share usually working more than forty-eight hours per week rose by half again between 1980 and 2005. The trend is particularly pronounced at the extreme of hard work. Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of couples (both without and with children) who jointly worked over a hundred hours per week increased by roughly half. The same period naturally produced a reciprocal divergence in time allocated to work’s mirror image, leisure: the gap between hours spent in leisure by those at the 90th and the 10th percentiles of the leisure distribution increased by fourteen hours per week between 1965 and 2003.
Rising income inequality coincides with rising inequality in labor and a mirror-image trend in leisure. Moreover, income inequality and the time divide turn out to be closely correlated, and indeed intertwined, so that the same people who capture rising incomes also provide rising labor (and enjoy falling leisure). The increase in long work hours has been concentrated among highly paid and highly educated workers and the increase in leisure among low-paid, less educated workers. The match between high weekly earnings and long weekly hours was closer in 2000–2002 than in 1983–85. The rich, that is, disproportionately work the long hours, and the rest disproportionately work the short ones.
Studies that focus on the extremes of work effort tell a still more startling tale. For example, between 1979 and 2006, the share of workers from the top quintile of the wage distribution who averaged over fifty hours worked per week nearly doubled (from less than one in six to nearly one in three), while the share of long-hour workers from the bottom quintile of the wage distribution fell by almost a third (from a little over one in five to roughly one in seven). In 1979, a prime-aged working man whose hourly wage put him in the top quintile of the distribution was roughly two-thirds as likely to work more than fifty hours in a typical week as a prime-aged working man from the bottom quintile. By 2006, the top wage earner was over twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom wage earner. In other words, in the roughly three decades since the end of the midcentury, the relationship between high income and long hours reversed. Trends in leisure, moreover, again mirror those in labor. Between 1965 and 2003, men with less than a high school education enjoyed an increase of roughly ten hours of leisure per week, while men with at least a college education experienced no gain or even a slight loss of leisure. (Strikingly, the elite lost leisure even as new domestic devices and other gadgets considerably increased the share of time available for leisure outside market work.)<
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The connection tying high wages and education to long work hours and falling leisure is less pronounced although still notable for women. But working women are often second earners in two-earner households, and the connection between joint household work effort and income could hardly be more pronounced. By the early 2000s, 75 percent of households in the top quintile of the income distribution had two or more earners working outside the house, compared to only 5 percent of households in the bottom quintile. And over 80 percent of women with college degrees but only roughly 50 percent of women high school dropouts worked outside the home.
This gender dynamic creates an especially stark contrast between today’s rich and Veblen’s leisure class. Veblen observed that long after the elite male worker had been forced to relinquish his leisure status and was “reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry,” economically elite women, and especially wives, continued to abjure labor outside the home and to arrange the domestic sphere in a style designed to broadcast that they, at least, retained the leisure their husbands had lost. The rich man’s nonworking wife was, at midcentury, the final expression of elite exploit, the last bastion of the leisure class. Today, this pretext has been abandoned.
The association between income and industry runs right up the scale, all the way to the very top.* Workers in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution work much shorter hours today than they did in 1940—roughly 20 percent fewer. Workers in the next 30 percent of the distribution (who lie between the 60th and the 90th percentiles) have worked effectively constant hours over this period (although their hours have fallen since the turn of the millennium). Then, moving up through the top tenth of the income distribution, increasingly elite cohorts have seen greater increases in work hours relative to the cohorts below. The top 1 percent in particular increased its work hours by more than any lower-income cohort throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Uniquely, this cohort also continued to increase its work hours even in the 2000s. The cumulative effects of this trend are large—indeed enormous. In 1940, a typical worker in the bottom 60 percent worked nearly four (or 10 percent) more weekly hours than a typical worker in the top 1 percent. By 2010, the low-income worker devoted roughly twelve (or 30 percent) fewer hours to work than the high-income worker. Taken together, these trends shift the balance of ordinary to elite labor by nearly sixteen hours—or two regulation workdays—per week. These precise numbers and ratios should be taken with a grain of salt. But the basic story that they tell is robust, including variations in how data on work hours are collected.
The Meritocracy Trap Page 12
