AAK: What's this book about?

RR: It's about making a living and making a life, and why it not only seems to be but actually is getting harder to do both. Most of us are doing better, materially, in this new economy. Yet, we're also working longer hours and under greater stress. The deepest anxieties of this prosperous age concern aspects of our lives that can't be bought -- the erosion of family, our own inadequacies as spouses and parents, the difficulty of sustaining genuine friendships, the brittleness of our communities, and the challenge of keeping intact our own integrity.

A lot of people will recognize themselves in the book, because it deals with their everyday problems and concerns. But I think it is a reassuring book. I explain why all this is happening and why a lot of other people are experiencing the same things. And I provided some answers, some directions. I'm an optimist at heart.

AAK: Why did you write it?

RR: A few years ago I left the best job I've ever had (being a cabinet secretary) to come home and spend more time with my family. Before, I was seeing little of them. In fact, life outside my work had shriveled to a dry raisin. Then late one night I called home from the office to say goodnight to the boys (Adam, then age 14, and Sam, then 11). I'd missed seeing them five days in a row. Sam asked me if I'd wake him up when I came home. I told him it would be too late; I'd see him in the morning. He insisted. I asked why. He said he just wanted to know I was home, with them.

Even four years later I can't tell you exactly what happened at that moment, but I knew I had to leave my job. After I announced I was leaving, I got a lot of mail about my decision -- mostly supportive, but some people were troubled by it. Some women on the fast track were already battling a culture that told them they were sacrificing too much -- and here I was, they said, essentially telling people the same thing. Others complained that while it was easy for me to leave my job and find another one paying about as well while giving me more room for the rest of my life, they had to work long hours or the rent wouldn't get paid. So I was sending the wrong message to people like them, too. Still others wrote to inform me indignantly that I shouldn't think myself virtuous. Hard work was virtuous. Abandoning an important job to spend more time with my family was not. Maybe I should have expected that my career decision would carry symbolic weight. I had, after all, been Secretary of Labor. In fact, I'd had no intention whatsoever of sending a message about how people should lead their lives. Certainly I didn't think there was anything virtuous in the choice I'd made. But until that time I had been making a different one, implicitly. That was my problem. The wake-up call Sam requested was a wake-up call for me to make an explicit choice, and make it consciously.

The experience made me notice a lot of things I hadn't seen before, even though I'd spent most of my adult life examining work and the economy. It focused my attention on the struggles most of us are having over paid work and the rest of our lives. And it caused me to want to put together what I've observed about the large-scale changes occurring in the global economy with these small-scale personal dramas. This book is the result.

AAK: Hasn't balancing work and the rest of life always been difficult? What's changed?

RR: Sure it's always been hard. Both my parents worked six days a week when I was a kid. But it's harder now. Although the economy hasn't been this good in 35 years, Americans are working more intensively than ever. This past year, the average middle-income married couple with children worked a combined 3,918 hours -- about seven weeks more than they did a decade ago. It's not just the extra hours. Work is also more stressful, and more obsessive. Emails, mobile phones, home faxes, pagers, and the other wonders of modern technology can track us down anywhere, anytime. The commutes are longer. Many of us have to spend more time on travel.

AAK: But the economy is booming. Aren't people making more money than ever, and therefore able to relax more?

RR: Here's the strange part: the richer you are, the more likely it is that you're putting in long and harried hours at work. A frenzied work life may or may not make you better off, but being better off definitely seems to carry with it more frenzy.

There are three big reasons. First, steady jobs are disappearing, and more of our pay is linked to profits or performance. That means fewer of us can be sure what we'll be earning next year or even next month. So we've got to make hay while the sun shines -- work harder today against the possibility the work and income won't be there tomorrow.

Second, the economy is far more competitive than ever before. Buyers now have an extraordinary range of choice, and can switch to a better deal on a dime. The easier it is for buyers to switch, the harder we as producers and sellers have to scramble in order to keep every customer, hold every client, seize every opportunity, get every contract. Increasingly, we're either on the fast track at work, or the slow track. There are less gradients in between.

Finally, to stay competitive, every company has to cut costs and add more value. If you're in a routine job that can be done more cheaply by a computer or by a lower-wage worker elsewhere around the world, your wages and benefits are heading south. That means you and your spouse have to work harder just to make ends meet. On the other hand, if you're a creative worker whose innovative skills are in demand, you're pulling in more money than ever (top law firms have upped their starting pay to $125,000; top investment banks, to $135,000; and if you're in a high-flying dot-com, even higher). So why are you working harder, too? Because any decision not to work so hard means a greater-than-ever sacrifice in your potential income. Look: the new economy is creating terrific products and services, great opportunities, and wonderful deals. This is all to our unambiguous benefit. But we're not just consumers and investors. Most of us also work for a living, and we also exist in webs of relationships -- family, friends, neighbors. The new economy is making it harder for us to live these other roles.

AAK: You say "geeks" and "shrinks" will prosper most in the new economy. Who are these people?

RR: When I write about "geeks" I'm not referring just to computer jocks. I'm also talking about inventors, artists, and creative people of all kinds who see new possibilities in any medium. "Shrinks" represent the other half of the entrepreneurial brain: I call them "shrinks" because they have the ability to infer what people would want if it were invented. They're not like the old sales and marketing people who tried to persuade consumers to buy something already available; "shrinks" have to imagine possibilities just as much as "geeks" do.

The geek draws on his endless fascination with a medium -- a technology, a science, a visual art, a literary form, a system of symbols. The shrink draws on her fascination with people -- their aspirations and fears, their yearnings and needs, their unexamined assumptions. The shrink is empathic where the geek is analytic. The geek understands it -- the possibilities for novelty within a given thing. The shrink understands them -- what they could possibly want or need.

The new economy rewards creative geeks and shrinks because competitive advantage turns increasingly on innovation, instead of stable large scale, as it did in the industrial economy of the 20th century. And geeks and shrinks are the sources of innovation.

AAK: What about everyone else? Where do they fit in?

RR: Most professional, managerial, and technical workers -- people who have four-year college degrees or more -- are turning into creative workers, geeks and shrinks. They have to if they're to make the most of their talents and abilities (and also keep their jobs, or ascend the ladder).

The old industrial workers -- manufacturers, assembly operators, high-volume service workers -- are disappearing. Computers, robots, and digital information systems are doing their jobs faster and cheaper.

Meanwhile, there's a growing demand for personal attention -- and people who provide it. Computers can't provide it because the attention has to be from a real person. And workers in other countries can't, because it's got to be done in person. So we're seeing ever-larger numbers of personal advisers, trainers, coaches, pamperers, hotel staff, recreation specialists, health club staff, massage therapists, specialist retailers, restaurant personnel, hospital aides, nursing-home aides, and home health-care aides. Meanwhile, the modern two-income family is out-sourcing much of what women used to do inside the home but now don't have time to do: child care, elder care, food preparation, and the like.

AAK: You argue that loyalty is becoming obsolete in the new economy. Why?

RR: Loyalty made economic sense in the old industrial economy, based as it was on economies of scale -- long runs of identical products. Then, companies needed predictability, and competition was muted because three or four big companies dominated every major industry. As a result, blue-collar workers remained with their firms for most of their lives, often retiring at age 65 with a pension; and white-collar employees gradually ascended the corporate ladder. Layoffs occurred only during down-turns in the business cycle; when the economy turned up again, people got their jobs back.

Now, competition turns on innovation rather than scale. Consumers and investors have far greater choice. New technologies are giving them access to great deals, from anywhere. In order to respond, companies have to be highly flexible. They can't be loyal to employees when it's more profitable for them to downsize. And they feel no qualms about "poaching" talented geeks and shrinks from their competitors. Young people don't expect the companies they join to be loyal to them, and don't feel loyalty in response. Increasing numbers of people are "free agents," loyal to nothing except their own careers.

AAK: You say personal connections are more important than ever for getting ahead. But wasn't the Internet - with it's job boards and postings - supposed to make personal connections less important?

RR: That's one of the great ironies of the new economy. All of us are deluged with so much information that we're more dependent than ever on recommendations from people we trust. The people who do the hiring are overwhelmed with Internet postings and blast faxes. They have to rely on personal recommendations to guide them through all this noise. (The one very large advantage of attending a prestigious university is the wealth of connections it generates -- parents of friends, and friends of parents' friends, who help the young person get a good summer job, an excellent first job, and then, later, clients and customers.)

It's analogous to the rational response to junk mail, junk faxes, and junk email. I don't know about you, but I get more junk than ever. Now I don't even open a letter unless I recognize who it's from, and it's personally addressed. The easier it is to reach me, the more I use personal connections as filters.

So it is with the whole economy. All of us are relying to a larger extent on connections and recommendations from people or brands we know and trust.

AAK: What's the consequence of all this for families?

RR: Families are shrinking. Take a snapshot of a typical group of people living together in the early 1970s, and compare it with a snapshot of a typical household today. There's a huge difference. The percent of married people with children plummets from 45 to 26 percent. Unmarried people without children soars from 16 to 32 percent. A generation ago we watched family sit-coms like "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver;" now we watch "Ally McBeal" and "Friends."

The birthrate among married women has fallen off a cliff (from 98 births per 1,000 married women twenty years ago to 80 today). Even women who plan to have children are delaying. Teenage births have dropped to their lowest level on record. The reason: women at the lower end of the income ladder now have to go to work, since male wages at the lower end have been dropping. And women at the higher end now sacrifice more pay than ever by not working. For them, it's either fast track or slow.

Marriage is on the way out, too. Americans are less likely to marry than at any time since statistics on marriage were first tallied more than a century ago. Why? Because many men no longer represent very good deals. At the same time, women no longer have to marry to have some economic security. (Obviously, most people don't consciously think about marriage and kids in these cold-blooded economic ways. But they're very real factors.)

AAK: You argue that the new economy has created a "sorting mechanism" that widens the gap between rich and poor. What is it, and how does it function?

RR: The wider choices and easier switching to better deals carries over into where we live, how we live, where our kids attend school and college, other public amenities like parks and police, and even health and retirement insurance. It's simple logic: Someone who buys into one of these "communities" obviously wants the best value. Unless your motive is charitable, there's no sense joining a community composed of a lot of people who are more costly and needy than you, because you'll end up subsidizing them. And it's irrational for a group to go out of its way to attract members who will be a drain on it, or to provide benefits that will likely attract such people. The wider the choice, and the greater the ease of switching to something better, the more efficient the sorting mechanism becomes.

Residential communities have become commodities -- marketed, evaluated, and purchased like any other. Private residential communities exclude large families needing a lot of schools and social services by charging hefty prices for homes and high ownership fees and by strictly limiting the number of bedrooms in each unit. Upscale towns do it by requiring two-to-four- acre plots for each home and prohibiting multi-family housing. As a result of this sorting, poorer kids who require a lot of attention from good teachers are increasingly bunched together with other poorer children who also need a lot, within schools that have relatively few resources to begin with. Universities are competing with one another for high-school "stars," who themselves are shopping for the best deal on merit scholarships. And the healthiest and wealthiest are seeking to opt out of broad-based social insurance.

No one designed the system this way, nor intended this result. It's the product of a large number of separate decisions by individuals seeking to do the best for themselves and their loved ones, in a new economy in which it's easier than ever to get the best deal. In fact, the sorting mechanism further increases the pressure to earn as high an income as possible -- which buys you and your family memberships in excellent communities with good schools, streets, and amenities.

AAK: So why not just slow down and get a life? Didn't you yourself down-shift out of a frenzied job? Why can't anyone?

RR: By all means set your priorities carefully. Discover what's important to you and compare those priorities to what you actually spend time and effort on. Try to manage your time better. Simplify your life, if you can. There's no end to audio programs, books, seminars, lectures, and groups that preach the gospel of down-shifting.

But don't be fooled: It's harder to do than ever before. I left Washington to spend more time with my family, and yet even after returning home I still got caught up in work. In the new economy, our earnings can rise very high or fall very low; we have no way of knowing in advance how high or low we'll go, or of predicting what opportunities will come along, and when. We may not have the opportunity in the future; or we may fall off the fast track and on to the slow; we may already have fallen woefully behind; or we would sacrifice too much income if we failed to work as hard.

We're personally responsible for the choices we make in life. But we operate within a system of incentives that make certain choices easier or harder. Seeking a better balance on our own, without reference to such incentives, overlooks these larger forces that are responsible for our being out of balance in the first place. Social choices frame personal choices. A full accounting of the choices before us, therefore, must also inquire into the choices we face together.

AAK: What choices do we face together? What should we be urging our next president and congress to do?

RR: Over a century ago at the start of the industrial age the nation decided that we had to do certain things in order to eliminate the excesses and temper the injustices of what was then a new economy. We didn't want to stop the economy; we rejected "Ludditism" or protectionism. Instead, we passed laws barring child labor and unsafe workplaces, we created the 40-hour workweek with time and a half for overtime and unemployment insurance, we built high schools that went all the way through 12th grade, as well as kindergartens, we created a Federal Reserve Board, a progressive income tax, and Social Security.

The new economy creates new challenges. Many of the old solutions no longer work. Unemployment insurance, for example, is less relevant, because most people who lose their jobs won't ever get them back. They'd do better with "earnings insurance" that pays half the difference between an old job and a new one that pays less, at least for several months until you can retrain or relocate for a better job.

Schools need to be open all day, and available to 3-and-4-year olds. The children of working parents need it. And anyone who takes time off to be with their infant under 3 should get half the median wage, in recognition of the importance of parents taking care of their children. If they use child care, the cost should be a deductible business expense from income taxes. To help reverse the sorting mechanism, kids from poor families should get big vouchers -- worth $10,000 to $12,000 a year -- which they can cash in at any certified school that meets standards. High-income kids should get smaller vouchers, $2,000 to $4,000. That way, schools in wealthier suburbs will have a strong incentive to recruit some poor kids, in order to better meet the budget. I include a lot of other ideas in the book -- ideas that are neither conservative nor liberal. The point of all of them is to ease the transition of our citizens to the new economy, and allow them to live full and balanced lives. That's a worthy goal for a nation more prosperous than ever before.

AAK: Have you now found more balance in your own life?

RR: Adam is now in college; Sam, in late adolescence. Had I not returned four years ago I'd have missed seeing much of them before they left home. I don't know that they would have suffered much by my absence, but I'm certain I would have been far the worse for not being around. Yet I can't help but think that I should, and could, have been around even more.

Shortly after I returned from Washington, Adam was running a big cross-country race. I was determined not to miss it. After all, I'd left Washington to spend more time with the boys. Then a week before the race, I got a call from someone asking if I'd help on a project in another city. The project was to begin the same morning as the race, and it couldn't wait. If I missed the start of it, I might as well not join up. The sum being offered in payment was generous. These kinds of offers are rare. Until I received the call, I was happily looking forward to the race. Now I was in a quandary. There was no way I could both see the race and do the project. I ended up turning down the project and going to the race. I wish I could tell you I had no regrets, but not a few times that Saturday I thought about what it was "costing" me to go to Adam's race. Before the offer, the cost was zero. Now it seemed a considerable sum.