The Future of Success
Robert B. Reich Alfred A. Knopf. New York 2001

We very much admire Robert Reich and we thought that a very great deal of this book was thrillingly good. Without a quibble, we recommend it. For you will not easily find a better effort at explaining the strange swirl of our times : new economy, new jobs, rising incomes, lower prices, fun for some and grief for others….. Though we had to wade through a little verbal porridge from time to time, we more or less read The Future of Success in one sitting. It is that good.

And maybe, by now, you can hear the BUT! coming towards like the bill in a restaurant where there is just too much velour in the banquettes. So let's get down on it.

Let's bring you this quote from the opening to Chapter Eleven (US edition) :-

"Many of us worry about the erosion of family, about our own inadequacies as spouses or parents; about the difficulty of sustaining genuine friendships; about the brittleness of our communities; and about the challenge of keeping intact our own integrity".

Rippling through the whole book is this tone of severe moral discomfort. It is a very strong leitmotif : anxiety is good (we nearly wrote "god"); decline is probable; trouble is imminent and probably immanent too. It is as if the future is creating even more contradictions than the past : lots of wealth but lots of inequality; better homes but weaker families; less drudgery but more time pressure; more consumption but less happiness. It is a song sung loudly throughout contemporary American academic life. (Reich is a professor at Brandeis).

We will return to the BUT! presently. Many UK commentators of the "peace-and-plenty" or "age of contentment" schools of modern socio-economic analysis will, meanwhile, find a lot of excellent fodder in The Future of Success. The chapter called "The age of the terrific deal" is as good a discourse on the superabundance of consumer power in today's market economy as they will have read. For virtually all producers and marketers, it is very hard these days to escape competitive exposure for long. Highly informed consumers can rumble high prices and low quality just too easily.

The trouble, as Reich goes on to stress, is that consumers are also workers. Just as so many of us gain while shopping downtown or online, so many of us have to work and train really hard to keep our businesses in the van of success. The rate of technological and commercial innovation is all too literally breathtaking : companies and brands are racing to deter consumer promiscuity. But why should a consumer stay loyal when a better deal may a click or a call away? Remorseless pressure on price spells remorseless pressure on employees to keep improving the offer.

All this can lead to powerful new tensions. Viz :

"We're not aware that we're demanding wage cuts and fighting unions, but that's often the effect we have when we choose the cheapest product or service. Companies can't pass on to us and to other consumers wage increases in the form of higher prices as easily as they could in the old industrial economy".

But (BUT!) even Robert Reich has real difficulty in proving, whatever the power of his analysis of market modernisation and socio-cultural change, that the personal tensions of our times are greater, deeper, more disturbing than before. In the Chapter called "The lure of hard work", he does his own case not very much good by conceding that "some researchers don't even agree that Americans are working longer hours". And later : "Some contend that we actually have more free time than we used to". (Well, which is the true story?).

And listen to him struggle to clinch a point about families. He wants to prove that too much paid work is corrupting home life :-

"Substantial public attention has been focused on the dwindling time (sic) parents give to their children. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, American parents now spend, on average, twenty two fewer hours each week (sic) with their children than did parents thirty years ago. But…in fact, there's evidence that mothers in 1998 were spending about as many waking hours (sic) with their kids as did mothers in 1965, while sleeping less. ….. Other aspects of life are being pushed out as well - friends, spouses and partners, voluntary work in the community, housework (sic)….".

In basic research terms, all this - and there is plenty of this kind of material to be found here - is simply not a knockout blow. And all the little concessions and afterthoughts that litter the argument make the reader suspect that Reich feels this himself. There just is not enough evidence to allow him to make the "many of us worry…" claim with which we opened this notice. Of course, it is just plain common sense to test your lifestyle for the happiness it is or is not bringing you. Of course, friendships are vital. But these are universal and timeless truths about the spiritual life. Is our moral order really further off the rails than it has been in the past? Proof, please!

Robert Reich is clearly a humanist and a progressive. He wants all good things - sensitive bosses, good pay, strong families, well-raised children, healthy communities - for his fellow Americans. But I wonder if he feels really comfortable with the gear-change into lifestyle advice - a kind of intellectual Oprahism - with which he closes his book. ("Reset your priorities. Manage your time better if you can. Live on less money…"). With all his mental resources, he should surely confine himself to telling it like it is. The fact is that many do not necessarily share all his anxieties - largely, in this case, because he has not been able to prove that they have a real foundation in American life. There is a terrific amount of really good analysis on display here. But Robert Reich wants to see gloom where others - looking back down the last decade of US growth and development - might be equally justified in seeing a kind of glory.