Nbadan
08-04-2006, 06:00 AM
Bye-Bye, Bootstraps
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 3, 2006
In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust bluebloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we’ve got this all bollixed up.
Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class — devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.
For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.
Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.”
Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent. Many of the men have disabilities. Others struggle to find work. But in a recent dinner-party-dominating article, The Times’s Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt describe two men who are not exactly Horatio Alger wonderboys.
Christopher Priga, 54, earned a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox but is now shown relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and a smoke while waiting for a job commensurate with his self-esteem. “To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” he said. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits.”
Alan Beggerow, once a steelworker, now sleeps nine hours day, reads two or three books a week, writes Amazon reviews, practices the piano and writes Louis L’Amour-style westerns. “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.
His wife takes in work as a seamstress and bakes to help support the family, as they eat away at their savings. “The future is always a concern,” Beggerow said, “but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it.”
Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.
Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.
But I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” defined theirs.
They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.
In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere.
David Brooks (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03brooks.html)
There are probably seven classes in this country--the Homeless, the Working Poor, the Lower Middle Class, the Upper Middle Class, the Must-Work Rich, the Do-Work Rich and the Idle Rich. It's the Must-Work Rich David Brooks writes about in his article because they are the hardest working segment of the rich.
The Must-Work Rich contains people like Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot. He makes $25 million a year for running a company that employs 375,000 people all over the planet. He's got a nice lifestyle with a big house and a Mercedes, but if he got thrown out of Home Depot, he's not in any position to just fall back on his assets and cruise just yet.
The Waltons of Arkansas are definitely Do-Work Rich. Say they got kicked out of Wal-Mart - they are sitting on enough of Sam's money that they wouldn't have to work another day in their lives if they chose not to. They work not out of fiscal need, but for psychological reasons.
I know there are people like Brooks describes. So do you. Look at the Wall Street banks. They're full of people who cannot stop working if they want to maintain any semblance of what they've decided is a normal lifestyle. Most corporate officers, Bill Gates and Dick Cheney excepted, are the same way. They NEED to work.
But there is still a Leisure Class. It's just that the Republican Party doesn't ever want to admit it, because it's a third of the GOP.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 3, 2006
In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust bluebloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we’ve got this all bollixed up.
Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class — devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.
For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.
Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.”
Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent. Many of the men have disabilities. Others struggle to find work. But in a recent dinner-party-dominating article, The Times’s Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt describe two men who are not exactly Horatio Alger wonderboys.
Christopher Priga, 54, earned a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox but is now shown relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and a smoke while waiting for a job commensurate with his self-esteem. “To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” he said. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits.”
Alan Beggerow, once a steelworker, now sleeps nine hours day, reads two or three books a week, writes Amazon reviews, practices the piano and writes Louis L’Amour-style westerns. “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.
His wife takes in work as a seamstress and bakes to help support the family, as they eat away at their savings. “The future is always a concern,” Beggerow said, “but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it.”
Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.
Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.
But I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” defined theirs.
They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.
In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere.
David Brooks (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03brooks.html)
There are probably seven classes in this country--the Homeless, the Working Poor, the Lower Middle Class, the Upper Middle Class, the Must-Work Rich, the Do-Work Rich and the Idle Rich. It's the Must-Work Rich David Brooks writes about in his article because they are the hardest working segment of the rich.
The Must-Work Rich contains people like Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot. He makes $25 million a year for running a company that employs 375,000 people all over the planet. He's got a nice lifestyle with a big house and a Mercedes, but if he got thrown out of Home Depot, he's not in any position to just fall back on his assets and cruise just yet.
The Waltons of Arkansas are definitely Do-Work Rich. Say they got kicked out of Wal-Mart - they are sitting on enough of Sam's money that they wouldn't have to work another day in their lives if they chose not to. They work not out of fiscal need, but for psychological reasons.
I know there are people like Brooks describes. So do you. Look at the Wall Street banks. They're full of people who cannot stop working if they want to maintain any semblance of what they've decided is a normal lifestyle. Most corporate officers, Bill Gates and Dick Cheney excepted, are the same way. They NEED to work.
But there is still a Leisure Class. It's just that the Republican Party doesn't ever want to admit it, because it's a third of the GOP.