If the “creative impulse” is to be fully realized, it must somehow be reconciled with the world of paid work, as we see from the Wicker Park experience described in an earlier post. To repeat one more time, meaning in life comes from adopting and pursuing purposes about which we care passionately. For most of us a substantial portion of our waking being is taken up with paid work, something we must do in order to earn an income to supply the material instruments of life. If meaning comes from materialist ends, then the purpose of work would be to make money and all else wouldn’t matter. While earning an income is the predominant motive for working, the activity of work serves more functions than just merely a means to material existence.
For many of us, work is the social center of our lives. One of the most robust findings of happiness research is the importance of friendships for life satisfaction, and it’s at work where we develop many of our enduring friendships that spill over into our life as a whole. Work can provide more than just money and friends if we are lucky. Truly interesting work challenges our intellectual and physical abilities and causes us to enter into a state of active engagement—what psychologists call flow—where immediate feeling-state concerns evaporate. During the activity of such work, consciousness of pleasure or pain disappears, and it is only after the fact that a warm glow of satisfaction and accomplishment emerges. To top it off, work holds out the possibility of achieving those creative purposes that bring meaning to our life. It is not just the activity of work that matters to us, but the final purpose it serves as well. Of course not all work provides a full range of such benefits. Much work is tedious and boring, offers only limited opportunities for social interactions, and lacks a valued purpose. In such instances, work is undertaken for narrower ends. One could imagine a highly skilled hedge fund manager making millions of dollars but secretly believes the purpose of the work to be trivial or even socially destructive, or a poorly paid nursing home aide who finds the work itself to be tedious and stressful but believes it to be of high social importance.
The non-economic dimensions of work take on a special importance for post-materialist young professionals. They desire work that allows them to creatively apply their talents and skills to socially valuable undertakings and they want to do this in a socially interesting environment. The recently established General Assembly, a Manhattan incubator for web application and service businesses, fills the post-materialist bill for code-writing entrepreneurs who rent glassed-off office space abutting a common room where tenants can enjoy a cup of gourmet coffee while chatting with their fellow digital pioneers about their latest web successes and failures. A startup, Yipit, an aggregator and analyzer of daily internet commerce deals, began by renting space in the General Assembly, but after successfully generating revenue flows for its services, moved to its own home in nearby office space, Ping-Pong table included. We don’t normally think of New York City as a high technology paradise, but it now trails only San Francisco as a haven for digital startup capital. The blending of work and leisure in New York’s new high tech culture is evident in the new “techie fashion shows, techie reality TV shows, techie entrepreneurs on the Council of Foreign Relations, and techie scalpers hawking tickets outside the New York Tech Meetup, the industry’s premier (and perennially sold-out) monthly event.” New York’s “Silicon Alley” flourishes in part because of the decline of Wall Street as an attractive career path and the desire to avoid being a cog in a bureaucratic wheel and returning to the tradition of “craft work” where the final product of one’s efforts can be directly observed.
Such a vision of work in the new technology world may not apply universally. Zynga, a highly successful internet gaming startup, warranted a New York Times article with the title, “Zynga’s Tough Culture Risks a Talent Drain.” Frustrated workers complain about long hours, stressful deadlines, and a relentless tracking of progress and performance. Those who don’t measure up are quickly shown the door. The esprit de corp common to many internet companies has been replace at Zygna with an intense individualistic meritocracy, but without a serious dent in the company’s economic success. While Zynga may be an outlier in its extreme methods of work organization, intense internal competition amongst employees tends to prevail in the gaming industry. Apparently there is more than one way to skin the high technology organization cat. Not all startups fulfill post-materialist workplace desires.
Research for industrialized countries on how people feel about their working life finds that most are satisfied with their jobs, but that satisfaction is higher where the work is interesting and good relations with management prevail. Opportunities for working independently and good pay also play a role in work satisfaction but fall below the first two factors in importance. These statistical results provide backup for what Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) finds anecdotally in focus group conversations with “creative class” post-materialist young professionals. Post-materialists want in their work what most of us want—a degree of control, social connection, engaging activity, a sense of accomplishment, and a worthy purpose.
Despite feeling satisfied with their work, some Americans are unhappy about the amount of hours in a year they actually spend on the job. About 37 percent want to work fewer hours, around 22 percent want to work more, and the rest are content with their time on the job. High incomes and a college education results in a preference for reduced working hours, contrary to anecdotal reports of creative class satisfaction with long hours. Young people at Google and places like it may be happy with periods of long work hours in a fun work environment, but they are unlikely to want this for the whole of their working lives. The statistical reality is that a post-materialist attachment to the quality of work itself leads to a desire for fewer hours, while, unsurprisingly, a belief in the importance of earning a high income results in a desire to work more hours. Materialists want more hours, post-materialist want fewer. Liking work doesn’t necessarily mean you want long days on the job.
The one odd quirk in American work time preference studies occurs for working families. Working parents, who more than others face a time-bind in their daily lives due to family responsibilities, ironically desire more hours on the job. One explanation is simple and compelling—a need for higher income to meet the costs of raising a family. Another explanation is a little unexpected—a desire to escape the impositions of family existence. Despite our love for children, parental life satisfaction declines during the child rearing years according to happiness researchers. While we love our children, work at times can be a respite from the challenges of parenting.
A comparison of the U.S. and European experience with work offers up a more deeply puzzling result about American work time desires. Europeans and Americans worked about the same number of hours in a week per person back in the 1970s, but since then the hours worked has declined dramatically in Europe but not in the U.S. Today the French and Germans work about three-fourths of the average annual hours of Americans. Around a fourth of these lower hours derive from a shorter normal workweek and the rest from a combination of more holiday and vacation days and lower workforce participation. While real income growth follows a comparable path in the U.S. and Europe, Europeans have chosen to take economic gains in the form of fewer working hours and more leisure while Americans have not.
Surveys find that Europeans experience an increase in life satisfaction as their hours of work decline. By contrast the more Americans work, the proportion reporting themselves to be “very happy” rises slightly, while the more Europeans work, such a report declines markedly. Europeans clearly prefer to work fewer hours and spend more time seeking their satisfactions elsewhere. Americans by contrast find happiness in working more hours rather than fewer. Europeans place more value on the quality of work than Americans, while Americans value the economic results of work more than Europeans. Europeans apparently trade off the satisfactions of work against those of leisure while Americans balance the virtues of leisure against earned income. Income wins out for Americans and leisure for Europeans. As one researcher puts it, “Americans live to work while Europeans work to live.”
In looking at the data on post-materialist values, one would think Americans would be just like Europeans in their working-time desires. The proportion of Americans holding post-materialist values sits in the same ballpark as Europeans. Why don’t Americans express their post-materialism in a preference for fewer working hours just like Europeans? While some Americans want to work less, the majority are either content with their working hours or want to work more. This is a puzzle precisely because of a comparable prevalence of post-materialist values in both the U.S. and Europe. The answer to this puzzle may well lie in a historically ironclad connection between employment and access to health insurance in the U.S.
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A key barrier to shorter hours in the U.S. economy not found in Europe has been the way in which health insurance is delivered. In most European countries health insurance coverage is universal and funded largely through government. In the U.S. health insurance for most is tied to full-time employment and the cost is partially funded by employers as a benefit. The very poor receive health insurance from the government through Medicaid and the elderly from Medicare. Because American employers provide very limited health insurance benefits to part-time workers, many would prefer to have full-time work simply to obtain health insurance at a reasonable cost. Buying health insurance in the U.S. on one’s own, until the recent passage of the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), has been a costly proposition. Given that health insurance benefit costs vary with the number of workers and not average hours worked, employers can often save money by hiring fewer workers at longer weekly hours to meet a given product demand. In short, the U.S. health insurance system creates a bias towards a longer average workweek and against part-time jobs with health insurance benefits. In Europe, part-time work can be chosen without sacrificing access to health insurance because its availability is assured by government, but in the U.S. few part-time jobs offer affordable health insurance.
The health insurance issue takes on special importance for a key subgroup of the creative class, the starving artists. Many artists are self-employed in the U.S. and lack access to affordable health insurance. Many also supplement their income from part-time work that lacks health insurance benefits. The health insurance problem forces many American would-be artists to seek full-time work in other fields. Because European artists don’t need to worry about health insurance costs, they experience greater flexibility than Americans in combining their artistic efforts with other kinds of work to supplement their incomes. Until Obamacare, anyone who truly wanted to work part time in the U.S. had to contend with a lack of health insurance on top of low pay.
As the Dutch have demonstrated over the past 30 years, part-time work needn’t be marginalized and relegated to a lower economic status than full-time work. The Dutch have adopted government policies that require equalized hourly pay and access to benefits for equivalent part-time and full-time work. Dutch workers also have a right to request reductions in their individual working hours with proportionate reductions in pay. Since the introduction of these reforms, the share of part-time work in the Dutch economy has increase dramatically and the hours worked per capita has decline significantly as well. The share of part-time employment in the Netherlands exceeds that for all other European countries, and the Dutch seem to be perfectly happy working less than others. Unlike American part-time workers, very few Dutch desire a shift to full-time employment. All this has been accomplished alongside economic growth and declines in unemployment.
The U.S. has considerable distance to go before equalizing the status of full- and part-time work, but, with passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, part-time work in the future will look more attractive to Americans. Under the Act, anyone is able to acquire health insurance policies on government-run exchanges without having to worry about denial for pre-existing medical conditions. Because the cost of such policies are to be subsidized for those with limited incomes, obtaining affordable health insurance coverage as a part-time worker is now much easier. The new health insurance reforms will benefit artists and others who seek satisfaction of their creative impulses outside of conventional full-time work and desire part-time employment to help satisfy their material needs.
Affordable health insurance will increase the appeal of lower paid but more creative work, and this will in turn increase the attractiveness of compact urban neighborhoods for those who choose to pursue a post-materialist path to meaning. If full-time work were necessary for health insurance, the higher income that comes with it will make a spatially expansive, consumption-oriented life in the suburbs feasible. If you makes a lot of money in less than fully satisfying full-time employment required for health insurance, then you might as well spend it on the pleasures of a comfortable house in the suburbs and the convenience of a luxury motor vehicle. But if conventional full-time work is no longer needed for health insurance, and the pursuit of one’s true passion becomes possible through less remunerative activities, then the likelihood of a turn to a more affordable way of life in a spatially compact setting will increase. We have already laid out key post-materialist attractions of high density urban living, such as access to lively neighborhoods, entertainment and the arts, good cuisine, and interesting architecture, but for those on a limited budget other features matter as well such as the ability to find affordable housing, use public instead of private transportation, and substitute public for private space. Life in compact cities is lived more in public arenas, such as parks, squares, libraries, and coffee houses, instead of in spacious suburban houses and big backyards. Entry to public spaces normally costs little while the ownership of private space can be expensive. Getting around densely packed cities by mass transit, on foot, or by bike is often more convenient and certainly less expensive than by motor vehicle. Post-materialism as a way of life is available not just to affluent young professionals in urban centers, but, as artists have demonstrated, for those willing to give up income in order to satisfy deeply held creative urges and values. Artists and others who seek a less materially oriented way of living have been at the forefront of carving out an affordable urban niche by revitalizing deteriorated, older central city neighborhoods. If one doesn’t have to face excessive costs for access to health care, then the adoption of a truly post-materialist form of life will be significantly eased and compact living will be given a boost.
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