We Can All Do Better (11 page)

New Yorkers normally pull together in a crisis—a blackout, a transit strike, a blizzard—but September 11 created a deeper response: People seemed more open, more vulnerable, more interested in their fellow citizens. They prayed together, stood on street corners holding one another. They looked to one another to make sense of what had just happened. And they weren't all New Yorkers or New Jerseyans. Responders came from all fifty states. Oklahoma City EMT workers who remembered digging bodies out of the rubble of their own terrorist
event on April 19, 1995, offered the full spectrum of their resources to New York as soon as they heard about the towers falling. Firefighters and EMT workers drove from Long Island and Westchester County, and from Bridgeport, Connecticut; Eureka, Pennsylvania; Brockton, Massachusetts. The tragedy called out the goodness of people in a special way. The target of anger was clear: Al Qaeda. The source of the empathy was more elusive.

At moments filled with collective emotion, hierarchies disappear, ethnic stereotypes fade, the walls of fear and suspicion crumble. What is left is the humanity we have in common. Too often, that humanity is masked by the pursuit of material things, the worrying about what other people think, the grind of events to make an A, to make a living, to move up the ladder. Often we lose sight of our human connection. The challenge is to access every day the energy and empathy that fuels our capacities in a crisis. The result would be the making of a different society—one that the stories of the shoeshine man in Pittsburgh, the welcome lady in Phoenix, the freeway patroller in San Diego, the Walgreens executive in South Carolina, the running coach in North Carolina, and the mother in the Chicago suburbs tell us exists even now, if we simply look around. The citizens who speak on
American Voices
are not all that unusual; they are just in touch with their deeper, altruistic selves—selves that lie in each one of us. That goodness can occasionally be called forth by a leader or by a tragedy, but we will have truly changed our world when we can summon it ourselves every day, in our work and in our lives.

A friend of mine, who is a middle-aged female boxer, recently toured boxing programs in East Africa for the World Boxing Council. In the middle of her trip, she sent me the following e-mail:

I look into a young athlete's eyes and I see neither politics, philosophy or religion, just sweat, determination and the joy of the game. A young girl in a burka ushers me into the arena, grasping my arm tightly, because I've come to root for her team. That's who I am to her. Not a Jew, not an American, not an outsider—just a fan . . . and we sit together screaming until our voices disappear.

My friend's e-mail reminded me that sports are universal and carry lessons that can help us reboot our economy. The relationship among members of a winning team offers us a way to think about the connections between ourselves as citizens and what it takes to succeed as a country in the twenty-first century. At some point, it dawns on a member of a team that by helping his teammates he helps himself. Unselfishness begets unselfishness; the result is a stronger whole. Ten years from now, no one will remember who led the NBA in scoring in 2012; they will want to know what team won the championship that year. If you want to be a member of a championship team, you have to care about your teammates. The same is true of our military, whose members are willing to die for their comrades-in-arms. Such fellow-feeling rests in all of us and will emerge if we call on it. We are our brothers' keeper.

Increasingly, businesses find that unselfishness boosts productivity. Five people with different skills, working together as a team, will produce more creatively and efficiently than five people toiling alone in a hierarchy. Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler points out that the Pareto principle—aka the 80:20 rule, and named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto—holds that “80 percent of the effort or output comes from 20 percent of the people” and adds that “the best way to get that remaining 20 percent out of the other 80 percent of people is to allow them to contribute small amounts. . . .”
¹
Or, as
my friend Len Riggio, the Chairman of Barnes & Noble says, “Every human being has a touch of genius. You just have to find it.” The 80 percent, in other words, can be valuable members of the team, even if the 20 percent does most of the playing. To some, the guy who sits on the bench doesn't have a role in his team's victory. But the substitute player's effort every day in practice can keep sharp those who do play. His willingness to take a foul, carry the bags, tell a joke, never be late, can also contribute to a winning effort. A grouser can hurt a team, but one who overflows with good spirits can help create a championship atmosphere. We cannot develop our full potential as a country if we don't see that collaborative teams of diverse individuals with hard-earned, unique skills maximize chances for individual success. As Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, and Chairman of Get American Working!, puts it, “This new world will be a global team of teams, teams that come together in varying combinations, scales, and intentions, as the need requires. The faster things change, the more the world will need this giant, fast-moving kaleidoscope of teams. A team is a team only when all its members are players; and in a world defined by escalating change, they can only be players if they can contribute to change.”
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Major firms increasingly recognize that to foster their employees' talent and loyalty they must not only offer pay and benefit incentives but also take the nonmaterial aspirations of their workers into account. As the Walgreens executive I interviewed discovered, most employees want to see their companies behave admirably. Devising human-relations strategies to promote group solidarity and develop the whole person is in a company's long-term interest. Corporations that promulgate a set of values and care about their reputation for ethical behavior will enhance their success. Or, as Dov Seidman, the chairman and CEO of LRN (a company that helps businesses develop ethical corporate cultures), says: “How a company does things will
be as important as what they do.” All kinds of companies today seek to make money by doing good. Using the accountability of market thinking and applying it to solve society's problems touches a deep idealism in young people today. Wikipedia, open-source coding of software, and online organizations such as Kiva and Meetup exist because people realize that they can be fulfilled and successful by being unselfish.

Can we all do better?

O
ne of Americans' bedrock beliefs is in the inevitability of economic progress—the conviction that children will have a higher standard of living than their parents. America has always been a great place to be poor, because someone who is poor today could become prosperous tomorrow. Many real-life examples of people of modest origins becoming rich have embedded themselves in our collective psyche. The belief has been that there is no limit to achievement in America. Anyone can become successful. And success properly has its reward. No one begrudges wealth if everyone is moving up. The key is ambition and hard work—the desire to make something of yourself and the commitment to making it happen.

The past thirty years have called this upward mobility into question. The wealth of a very small group of CEOs, Internet investors,
investment bankers, private equity partners, and hedge-fund managers reached mythic proportions. Meanwhile, an alarming number of Americans continued to struggle to make ends meet. The last decade in particular has been a lost decade for middle-income families. Median household income adjusted for inflation fell to 1996 levels in September 2010.
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To maintain even their current income, middle-class families need two wage earners. In the 1960s, only 12 percent of married women with young children worked; by the late 1990s, that figure had risen to 55 percent.
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According to the Census Bureau, in 2010, 46.2 million people lived below the poverty line ($22,350 per year for a family of four)—the highest number in the fifty-two years that the bureau has published the statistic.
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(Another shocking statistic: 27 percent of all African Americans live in poverty.)
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The percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck in August 2011 was 42 percent, according to an annual survey by the job-search company CareerBuilder. That means 66 million of us live one pink slip away from economic catastrophe.

Harvard economics professor Lawrence F. Katz offers a clear analogy of what has happened.

Think of the American economy as a large apartment block. A century ago—even 30 years ago—it was the object of envy. But in the last generation, its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. The broken elevator is what gets people down the most.
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For the next half decade, a large number of Americans face the prospect of lower wages and fewer benefits, the fear of being laid
off, and lives of much greater insecurity. Ask the insurance accountant who hasn't gotten a real raise in ten years, the airline employee who lost her healthcare coverage when her company merged with another, the call-center operator who lost her job to a counterpart in India, the recent college graduate buried under a mountain of educational debt. Ask the families who can't afford to send their children to college. Ask soldiers who went on the unemployment rolls when they returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. Ask all of them how secure they feel, and the answer would be, “Not all that much.” If that kind of insecurity lasts, it will put a damper on our fabled American optimism.

Many American families don't eat out, go to a movie, or take a vacation. They observe a strict budget. Every day is a struggle to survive. They scour the newspaper for coupons that will give them a discount at Walgreens or Target. Some even go dumpster-diving next to the supermarket, looking for day-old bread. They rent living quarters from relatives, cancel the cable TV, plant a garden if they can, use as little as possible of the heat in winter or the air conditioning in summer.

If income has been essentially stagnant, why wasn't there a political explosion years ago? Because we didn't notice. When the income from two jobs wasn't enough, families turned to the home-equity loan, in which you borrow against the value of your house, which in many cases represents your main investment. As housing prices rose beginning in the mid-nineties, millions of people borrowed billions of dollars against the increased equity value in their houses and spent the money on consumption. Since 2007 when the housing bubble broke, the value of homes has dropped, on average, 26.5 percent and more than twice that in some places.
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In 2010, 23 percent of mortgages were underwater—that is, owners owed more to the bank than their homes were worth.
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In such a financial tsunami, home-equity
loans have screeched to a halt. In 2006, the peak year of housing speculation, banks made home-equity loans and lines of credit totaling $430 billion. After the first nine months of 2009, that figure had dropped to $40 billion.
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Americans are cash-constrained and credit-starved. Millions of them feel stuck, plagued with an eerie feeling that neither they nor most likely their children will ever be able to put their feet on the next rung of the economic ladder. Their circumstances generate incredulity and fear. When they look at the seemingly privileged political class, they get angry. When they look at the titans of Wall Street, they go livid.

For thirty years, neither Republicans, who occupied the White House for nineteen of those years, nor Democrats, who occupied it for eleven years, have been able to alter the downdraft in American lives, which has persisted with the exception of a few years in the 1990s. Yet millions of people have seen their taxes go up. Local property taxes have gone up. State taxes have gone up. Social Security and Medicare taxes have gone up. The middle class has been hit hard.

People don't see what they've gotten for their taxes. Roads are deteriorating—just compare a ride from JFK Airport to Manhattan with a ride from the Shanghai airport to the city's Pudong business district. People fear that, even if their sons or daughters do well in high school, college will remain unaffordable. Those without health insurance fear getting sick. Those with health insurance know that many doctors, driven by the requirements of insurance companies, won't give them the time and attention they need. Or they can't find a doctor who accepts Medicare or the health insurance they do happen to have. As for pensions, who can afford to save, with income strained to pay just for living day to day? For years, employees thought they'd have a guaranteed retirement income. Then the
company washed its hands of responsibility, ended its defined-benefit plan, and replaced it (if you were lucky) with the contribution of a little money each year into a fund that the employees could invest themselves (whether they had investment experience or not). In 2008–2009, most people with 401(k)s saw their pension assets crater and didn't know where to turn.