It is my case that there have been certain key economic goods which, throughout history, have been particularly significant in giving tremendous boosts to the economies in which they were available because they added to, or consolidated, the social status of the initial customers.
It is not my main case that economic growth is coming to an end. This has been derived from my hypothesis, but it seems likely to me. The reason is that the class which initiates the consumption of key economic goods -- status goods -- seems to me to have too little time left in their working week to use and display those goods, even if some were to appear in the market place (which I can't see just at the moment -- the only ones I can see are embellishments/replacements of existing goods).
The class that initiates the consumption of status-dominated goods has plenty of money -- or, sufficient money, anyway -- but is working too long a working week. However, if the initiatory class, such as the lawyers below, reduce their working week they will have less income and reduce the chance of a new status good taking off and boosting the economy. While the poor are into a poverty trap, the professional better-off are into a time-trap. I see no way out of it unless huge changes are made in our educational, social and working structures. How all this will happen, goodness knows, but one thing is certain: we will be forced into it by circumstances, not by choice or by voting for one enlightened political party or another.
Keith Hudson
<<<< LAWYERS ARGUE THE CASE FOR A LIFESTYLE REVOLUTION
Patti Waldmeir
These are tough times for lawyers. Not because of the economy - because of the holidays. According to the American Bar Association, most US lawyers in private practice work 60 hours, or often much more, nearly every week. A mere 40-hour week is considered "part-time". Anything less is simply unpatriotic.
But lawyers who work 12-hour days do not bake Christmas cookies. They scarcely have time to buy them. Santa will be lucky, in such households, if he gets a stale ginger biscuit beside his glass of milk.
This cult of overwork -- the cult that raised me, and so many of my middle-aged contemporaries - now has a recruitment problem. Younger Americans are unaccountably demanding a right to life after work. Older lawyers may still be happy to service the jealous mistress. But younger ones, male and female, have begun to look for love elsewhere.
The statistics are everywhere more than half of recent US college graduates say their highest professional goal is "attaining a balance between personal life and career". That may be the impossible dream but it is the kind of fantasy that earlier generations would not have dared to utter. And even those who have once embraced the law are increasingly forsaking their mistress for "lifestyle reasons", such as the right to glimpse their children awake on weekdays, or the right to refuse to bake Christmas cookies.
Recently, a small cell of lifestyle revolutionaries met in the parish hall of a Washington, DC, church, to plot a new path to work/life harmony.
Struggling to hear above the chorus of burbling babies and tetchy toddlers who had accompanied their mothers to the hall, the "Lawyers at Home" forum of the capital Women's Bar Association took instruction on "alternative work schedules", or the art of working less without sacrificing your career.
Their quest is as old as the feminist revolution. They want to have it all the job, the children, the home-baked cookies. But these young mothers - unlike my own generation of menopausal revolutionaries - are not just demanding the right to work like men. They are asking much more the right to work like mothers - less intensely, less pathologically and just generally less.
Some make a moral case for their holistic vision that children have a right to see their mothers occasionally, even if the matriarch is a lawyer. But this case, of course, is easily rebuffed the child whose mother stays at home does not have his rights violated.
Luckily there is also a business case for a lifestyle revolution in the law and it was made in the church hall that day by Cynthia Thomas Calvert, of American University's Program on WorkLife Law (sic). According to her, younger lawyers are leaving law firms in droves, often largely for lifestyle reasons - and many of them are men. "This is not a women's issue, it's more of a generational issue," she says. "It is the Baby Boom partners vs the Generation Xers."
But the discontent of the Xers costs money Calvert says each second- or third-year associate costs between $200,000 (£114,000) and $500,000 to replace (including recruiting and training the departing lawyer and his or her replacement). And there are other costs too loss of institutional knowledge; loss of clients; and the loss of morale and productivity that comes with high attrition. What is more, most of those who choose life over law do not leave the profession altogether they move to government jobs, or to in-house law departments, where they will scarcely be likely to hire the firm that disappointed them in the first place.
Ironically, the same law firms that are losing so many young lawyers also have the means to keep them. According to recent figures from the American Bar Association, some 95 per cent of firms allow attorneys to work part-time, but only 3 per cent of lawyers actually do so.
Why? Partly because we matriarchs think the youngsters should suffer as we did we could not have it all, so why should they? Lawyers who work part-time say they are often resented, stigmatised and denied promotion. They can have it all - but only at a high price.
But in a world where half of all law school graduates are women -- and where most women eventually become mothers -- law firms that insist on more than 60 hours a week end up alienating a big part of the workforce. The younger generation of mothers does not want to work like the older generation of fathers leaving home before the children are up and returning only when they are safely in bed.
They think it ought to be possible to work for part of the day, or part of the week, or part of the year, not as a moral imperative but as a business proposition. New clients can be found on the playground just as well as on the golf course "Kids are such a great ice-breaker," says Cynthia Calvert. And existing clients hate changing lawyers so much that they may be willing to accept one who is not available every moment of every day, as long as they can be sure she will remain with them for some years.
This is not just about children. It is about life. The youngsters are right to remind us that it is not healthy for women to work like men. Nor is it healthy for men to work like men. Americans have long had a pathological relationship with work, nowhere more so than in the legal profession. Fixing that is not a women's issue - it is one for all of us.
Financial Times -- 15 December 2003 >>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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