"I have such little time" is the new "I have too much email."

An article harkening back to when the Atlantic was a reliably interesting and well written magazine. From Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore by Judith Shulevitz. What is the trade-off between efficient productivity and social coherence and engagement?

Shulevitz starts off with an thumbnail history of a Soviet era effort to better manage worker's time. An unsuccessful effort as it turned out.

Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name. Nevertheless, Americans are imposing a kind of nepreryvka [a continuous workweek] on ourselves—not because a Communist tyrant thinks it’s a good idea but because the contemporary economy demands it. The hours in which we work, rest, and socialize are becoming ever more desynchronized.

Whereas we once shared the same temporal rhythms—five days on, two days off, federal holidays, thank-God-it’s-Fridays—our weeks are now shaped by the unpredictable dictates of our employers. Nearly a fifth of Americans hold jobs with nonstandard or variable hours. They may work seasonally, on rotating shifts, or in the gig economy driving for Uber or delivering for Postmates. Meanwhile, more people on the upper end of the pay scale are working long hours. Combine the people who have unpredictable workweeks with those who have prolonged ones, and you get a good third of the American labor force.

The personalization of time may seem like a petty concern, and indeed some people consider it liberating to set their own hours or spend their “free” time reaching for the brass ring. But the consequences could be debilitating for the U.S. in the same way they once were for the U.S.S.R. A calendar is more than the organization of days and months. It’s the blueprint for a shared life.

Well, that's one way to frame it.

Shulevitz makes the unexamined framing even more explicit.

Remember the old 9-to-5, five-day-a-week grind? If you’re in your 30s or younger, maybe not. Maybe you watched reruns of Leave It to Beaver and saw Ward Cleaver come home at the same time every evening. Today few of us have workdays nearly so consistent. On the lower end of the labor market, standing ready to serve has become virtually a prerequisite for employment. A 2018 review of the retail sector called the “Stable Scheduling Study” found that 80 percent of American workers paid by the hour have fluctuating schedules. Many employers now schedule hours using algorithms to calculate exactly how many sets of hands are required at a given time of day—a process known as on-demand scheduling. The algorithms are designed to keep labor costs down, but they also rob workers of set schedules.

This betrays a historical blindness that is extremely common. Many, many people talk about identified social problems or prospective solutions with a base reference, stated or not, to some idealized magical era which maps roughly to 1945-1970. Traditional nuclear families, full employment, rising incomes, etc.

The reality was much more mixed than that glossy representation. More than that, 1945-70 was nearly entirely anomalous. The US was the surviving market economy and for thirty years managed to dominate a world desperate for goods, food, and capital produced in America. Our hard adjustments in the 1970s represented an easing off of the war-time regulatory structures, a reemergence of real global trade and competition, and a return to social patterns less contorted by war time privations and disruptions.

We cannot return, indeed should not want to return, to the conditions that fed the prosperity of that twenty-five year glide path of increasing productivity.

We had more time back then because we had relatively so much more money than we had had and because the war-time regimentation of the economy (price controls, control of hours, coordination of markets, etc.) protected us from the full opportunities to be dramatically more productive.

The burden we bear today is that we are inconceivably richer across the spectrum of measures than at anytime in history. All of us, from top to bottom quintile.

Our bottom quintile households in terms of income, live better material lives than the top quintile in 1950. Across the board, in terms of longevity, health, capital goods ownership, access to personal transportation, etc.

How did we become so much richer? We opened up free trade and raised our production game in order to compete with the best in the world. We reduced our regulation of the economy in terms of price controls, capital controls, lending practices, etc. It made us more productive, richer, and presented us with more choices.

And one of those choices is how much richer (more productive) do you want to be at the expense of social time, or more precisely, old social time conventions?

Want to have maximum income in a prosperous but rapidly evolving and always uncertain globally competitive economy? Then invest in your education, postpone family, and then be prepared to work long hours over numerous years. The pay-off is huge. If you are willing to do what is required.

Of course everyone would nominally like more time while keeping all their income prospects intact. But that is not an option available to anyone without inherited wealth.

Shulevitz is missing out on that context. She goes straight into frightening stories of middle and upper middle class stories of time constrained and over-worked parents. She elaborates on all sorts of technical work arounds and apps to help mitigate busy schedules.

This strikes me as an anthology of status-signaling gripes akin to those in the late 1980s to do with email. People complained incessantly about the challenge of staying on top of e-mails. All it was was an opportunity to try and create an impression of importance. "I have such little time" is the new "I have too much email."

There is a subtle classism to Shulevitz's article as well. It is very much told from a top two quintiles perspective.

This is also a common blindspot to so many critiques. For example, it is not uncommon to hear about how little opportunity there was for women to work before the 1960s.

Which is nonsense. There were dramatically fewer opportunities for upper class women to work - that is true.

But women worked, they worked hard and they worked incessantly. On the farms, in service, in the textile mills, in retail. It is as if much of our privileged story-telling is blind to everyone in the bottom four quintiles of income before the post-war era.

If you were in the top quintile, you might have time. Everyone else worked. And all those wonderful meals together and shared family and friend events? To a degree true and to a degree necessary. Before any of our modern connectivity and support programs, you had better have close ties within the family, within the community, within the church. Without them, you had no safety net. Yes, it was rewarding to spend time with one another and much of that was spent under the auspices of cultural tradition, but the traditions existed as a mask over necessity.

In many ways this article is asking a wonderfully provocative question which we should, societally, be talking about more. In an uncertain and fast-evolving world of high productivity where our economy is structured to give everyone the greatest opportunity to develop their skills, talents and capabilities, in the fashion which is most rewarding, should we consider spending more time on non-monetary relationship building and less time on productivity enhancements.

The revealed preference of just about everyone is that they would rather spend more time taking more income-accruing chances and building up greater stockpiles of wealth.

I am pretty certain that is not the right answer; I am pretty certain that we should spend more time investing our time into our communities and relationships; I am pretty certain we have eroded and denigrated many of the cultural institutions and practices that once made it easier to do those things.

Is there a policy out there that fixes any of this? No. I don't think this a government or policy fix. We have to anticipate an emergent order solution at the societal level.

As for Shulevitz, her examples of where this might emerge are disheartening and betray the class blindness.

Reform is possible, however. In Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco, “predictive scheduling” laws (also called “fair workweek” laws) require employers to give employees adequate notice of their schedules and to pay employees a penalty if they don’t.

Our three cities most notable for income inequality, generational poverty, social dissolution and family/community disintegration.

I am pretty certain that anything New York and San Francisco come up with will only enhance the well-being of the most privileged at the expense of everyone else.