9

Industriousness

In which evidence is presented that industriousness has declined among all white males, but mostly among Fishtown males.

EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN disdainful of Americans’ enthusiasm for work. “Americans live to work,” they say, “while Europeans work to live.” Many Americans have agreed, me among them, and felt sorry for Europeans.

Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living. Working hard, seeking to get ahead, and striving to excel at one’s craft are not only quintessential features of traditional American culture but also some of its best features. Industriousness is a resource for living a fulfilling human life instead of a life that is merely entertaining.

What Whites Said About Work

Beginning in 1973, the GSS showed a card to the person being interviewed and asked, “Would you please look at this card and tell me which one thing on this list you would most prefer in a job?” The card had these choices:

After the subject gave his first priority, the interviewer ascertained which were his second, third, fourth, and last priorities. The item was given in almost every survey from 1973 through 1994. Then the GSS dropped it for the next twelve years, perhaps because the answers had been so consistent. Among prime-age whites, the most popular first choice was always work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment,” getting an average of 58 percent of the votes in each decade. The two least-chosen first choices were always short work hours (averaging 4 percent) and no danger of being fired (6 percent).

In 2006, the GSS resurrected the question, and the results were startling. The 58 percent that had always voted first place to work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment” was down to 43 percent. First-place votes for short working hours more than doubled to 9 percent. “No danger of being fired” doubled to 12 percent, with another 13 percent ranking it in second place.

There is no reason to think that the 2006 results were a fluke. Unusual economic troubles don’t explain them—the national unemployment rate stood at a low 4.6 percent and GDP growth was a healthy 6.1 percent. The results are not a function of something peculiar about the 30–49 age group; they persisted when I looked at older and younger respondents. Still, it’s just one survey, and I wish we had corroborating evidence of such large changes in other recent GSS surveys. So I will leave it at this: We can’t be sure, but it looks as if during the last half of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, whites by their own testimony became less interested in meaningful work and more interested in secure jobs with short working hours. Furthermore, these trends applied to both Belmont and Fishtown. This is not the way Tocqueville or Grund described the American attitude toward work. In fact, the responses in 2006 looked downright European.

That’s what white Americans have been saying about work over the years. What have they actually been doing? It makes a big difference whether you are asking about men or women.

What Whites Did About Work: Men

Until recently, healthy men in the prime of life who did not work were scorned as bums. Even when the man was jobless through no fault of his own, America’s deeply rooted stigma against idleness persisted—witness the sense of guilt that gripped many men who were unemployed during the Great Depression even though they knew it wasn’t their fault they were unemployed.

The Unbelievable Rise in Physical Disability

That norm has softened. Consider first the strange case of workers who have convinced the government that they are unable to work. The percentage of workers who actually are physically or emotionally unable to work for reasons beyond their control has necessarily gone down since 1960. Medical care now cures or alleviates many ailments that would have prevented a person from working in 1960. Technology has produced compensations for physical handicaps and intellectual limitations. Many backbreaking manual jobs in 1960 are now done by sitting at the controls of a Bobcat. Yet the percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3 percent in 2010. Figure 9.1 shows the trendline in proportional terms, using 1960 as the baseline.

FIGURE 9.1. PROPORTIONAL CHANGES IN THE PEOPLE DEEMED DISABLED FOR WORK

Source: Social Security Administration, Annual Statistical Report on the Social Security Disability Insurance Program, 2010, Table 1.

This rising trendline is not produced by changes in the legal definition of physical disability or the pool of people who qualify for benefits. Both have been tweaked but not substantially changed since 1960. Increases in substance abuse don’t explain it (substance abuse is not a qualifying disability). Maybe some of the growth in the 1960s can be explained by disabled people first learning about the program. But the rest of the trendline reflects in part an increase in the number of people seeking to get benefits who aren’t really unable to work—an increase in Americans for whom the founding virtue of industriousness is not a big deal anymore.

Labor Force Participation

More evidence for the weakening of the work ethic among males comes from the data on labor force participation—the economist’s term for being available for work if anyone offers you a job. When the average labor force participation rate in 1960–64 is compared with the rate from 2004 through 2008 (before the recession began), as shown in Figure 9.2, white male labor-force participation fell across the entire age range.1

FIGURE 9.2. WHITE MALES NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE: 1960–64 COMPARED TO 2004–8

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to civilian white males ages 20–60.

The differences weren’t large for men in their early twenties, and even those small differences are largely explained by increases in post–high school education that delay entry into the labor force. The differences were much larger for white males in their late fifties, but that’s not necessarily worrisome either. More men had pensions or savings that enabled them to take early retirement in the 2000s than in the early 1960s.

Why the Trendlines in This Chapter Stop in 2008

In the fall of 2008, the American economy went into a tailspin. Unemployment at the close of 2010 remained close to double digits. This has produced a spike in some of the indicators I discuss in this chapter, widening the gaps between Belmont and Fishtown. To simplify the interpretation of long-term trends, the trendlines are based only on data from 1960 through the March 2008 CPS data (collected before the downturn later in the year). I show the raw percentages for 2009 and 2010 so you can see the magnitude of the spike, if any, since 2008.

But what’s going on with the men at the center of our interest, white males ages 30–49? They’re supposed to be working. Most of them were—only 8 percent of them were out of the labor force in 2004–8. But that’s still more than three times the percentage of prime-age men who were out of the labor force in 1960–64.

If you believe in the importance of industriousness among prime-age males, there’s no benign explanation for the gap. I have already pointed out that disability and illness should have made the line go the other way. Nor can we blame increased unemployment that created discouraged workers—the average white unemployment rate in 2004–8 was actually a bit lower (4.5 percent) than it had been in 1960–64 (5.1 percent). A substantial number of prime-age white working-age men dropped out of the labor force for no obvious reason.

Whatever that reason may have been, it affected men with low education much more than men with high education. We cannot divide white males by combinations of occupation and education in this instance, because almost all of the people not in the labor force gave no occupation to the CPS interviewer. But we can divide males by the educational levels that qualify people for Belmont and Fishtown—a college degree for Belmont, twelve or fewer years of education for Fishtown. I also define the educational bottom 30 percent as of 1960, which consisted of everyone with nine or fewer years of education, and the educational top 20 percent as of 1960, which consisted of everybody with more than twelve years of education. The results are shown in Figure 9.3.

FIGURE 9.3. PRIME-AGE MALES WHO ARE NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE, BY EDUCATION

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to white males ages 30–49.

Throughout the 1960s, American white males of all educational levels inhabited the same world. Participation in the labor force was close to universal among the 30–49 age group.2 Four and a half percent of males in Fishtown with no more than a high school education were out of the labor force in 1960, compared to about 1 percent of those with sixteen or more years of education—a large proportional difference, but a small absolute one. By 1968, that difference had shrunk to 3 percentage points.

Starting in the 1970s and continuing up to 2008, white males with only a high school education started leaving the labor force. As of March 2008, 12 percent of prime-age white males with no more than a high school diploma were not in the labor force compared to 3 percent of college graduates.3 The bottom 30 percent tracked with the trendline of Fishtown, but at somewhat higher levels of labor force absence.

Why should the difference between Fishtown as a whole and the bottom 30 percent be so much greater for labor force participation than for marriage? The answer is that cognitive ability has a much stronger relationship with employability and job productivity than it does with marriageability.4 Fifty-nine percent of Fishtown prime-age males in 1960 had not gotten past eighth grade, even though they had grown up at a time when children were already legally required to remain in school until age 16. In the ordinary course of events, children finish eighth grade when they are age 14. Some extremely high proportion of those with no more than eight years of education had repeated a grade in elementary school or junior high, which is a strong indicator of serious learning difficulties. A society can have social and legal norms that lead almost everyone, at all levels of cognitive ability, to get married and stay married. But when men are competing for jobs, low cognitive ability carries a big disadvantage at all times, extending deep into the unskilled occupations.

Unemployment

Now we’re talking about men who are in the labor force but who report that they cannot find work. Mathematically, trends in unemployment are unrelated to trends in labor force participation.

Underlying trends in unemployment are obscured by year-to-year changes in the state of the economy. Figure 9.4 takes the state of the economy into account by expressing the unemployment rate for white males ages 30–49 in Belmont and Fishtown in any given year as a percentage of the national unemployment rate that year.5

FIGURE 9.4. MALE UNEMPLOYMENT AS A RATIO OF THE NATIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

Sources: IPUMS and Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sample limited to white males ages 30–49 in the labor force.

To interpret the graph, think of 100 percent as the success rate of the average person, of any age, race, or sex, who was looking for work in a given year. Anything below 100 on the graph indicates better than average success in finding work, while anything over 100 indicates worse than average success. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Fishtown men did a little better than the average person who was looking for work. That changed in the 1980s. For the most recent two decades, Fishtown men have done worse than the average person looking for work, and the overall trend has been up. Multivariate analysis yields results consistent with the portrait in the graph.6

Note that the unemployment ratio for the bottom 30 percent was far above that of Fishtown in 1960, but by 1968 was almost identical with Fishtown. Thereafter, the rise for the bottom 30 percent paralleled the rise in Fishtown as a whole.

Hours of Work

The virtue called industriousness means working hard as well as holding a job. “Hours worked per week” is our available quantitative indicator of working hard.

FIGURE 9.5. MALES WITH JOBS WHO WORKED FEWER THAN 40 HOURS IN THE PRECEDING WEEK

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to employed white males ages 30–49.

As a group, prime-age white males continued to work long hours throughout the half century, averaging around forty-five hours per week throughout.7 But a growing minority of them weren’t working a forty-hour week, as shown in Figure 9.5.

The increase in less-than-full-time work in Fishtown is notable, doubling from 10 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 2008. Since the rise continued throughout the hottest boom years of the 1990s, it is difficult to attribute the rise to an ailing economy in which men couldn’t find as many hours of work as they wanted.

A very different picture emerges for men who worked unusually long hours, as shown in Figure 9.6.

FIGURE 9.6. MALES WITH JOBS WHO WORKED MORE THAN 48 HOURS IN THE PRECEDING WEEK

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to employed white males ages 30–49.

In 1960, about a third of Belmont men reported working more than forty-eight hours in the week before the interviewer talked to them. But 23 percent of Fishtown men also worked long hours.

This is one of the rare measures on which nothing much changed in Fishtown over the next half century. Note the contrast between the stories for labor force participation, unemployment, and less-than-full-time work, all of which showed marked deterioration in Fishtown. Recall further that we are talking only about prime-age men who were employed and at work in the week preceding the interview—these trends are independent of the trends in labor force participation and unemployment. Despite the other indications of decay, the proportion of Fishtown men who worked long hours was still 23 percent in 2008, exactly what it had been in 1960, and 5 percentage points higher than the proportion of men in the bottom quartile who had worked more than forty-eight hours in 1960. Alongside diminished industriousness among some Fishtown men is another set of Fishtown men who were working as hard as ever in the 2000s.

Meanwhile, Belmont left Fishtown in the dust.8 By the end of the 1980s, almost half of Belmont men reported that they worked more than forty-eight hours in the preceding week. The percentage of hardworking Belmont men began to slack off in the 2000s, drifting down to 40 percent by 2008. But that still left a gap between the work effort of prime-age Belmont men and Fishtown men that was more than twice the gap that had separated them in 1960.

“It’s the Labor Market’s Fault”

A natural explanation for the numbers I have presented is that the labor market got worse for low-skill workers from 1960 to 2008. More Fishtown men worked short hours because they couldn’t get work for as many hours as they wanted; more of them were unemployed because it was harder for them to get jobs; more of them left the labor market because they were discouraged by the difficulty of finding jobs.

“Jobs didn’t pay a living wage.” In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for Fishtown men: pay. Recall Figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile. High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don’t explain why Fishtown men in the 2000s worked fewer hours, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive—an important proviso—falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Put yourself in the place of a Fishtown man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you’ve been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter’s helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter’s helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37.9 That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence—almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn’t work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

“There weren’t any jobs. So far, I have put the scenario in terms of 2009 wages. What about all the previous years when dropout from the labor force was rising in Fishtown but jobs were plentiful? The last twenty-six years we are examining coincided with one of the longest employment booms in American history, as shown in Figure 9.7.

FIGURE 9.7. NATIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE AND DROPOUT FROM THE LABOR FORCE AMONG MALES WITH A FISHTOWN EDUCATION

Source: IPUMS, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor force sample limited to white males ages 30–49 with no more than a high school diploma.

From 1960 through the early 1980s, changes in Fishtown male dropout from the labor force moved roughly in tandem with the national unemployment rate. But after the mid-1980s, the argument that “there weren’t any jobs” loses force. Unemployment went down, but dropout from the labor force among white males with a Fishtown education continued to increase. During the fourteen years from 1995 through 2008, no year had higher than 6.0 percent unemployment, and the median was 5.0 percent. For mature economies, these are exceptionally low unemployment rates. But those who remember these years don’t need the numbers. “Help wanted” signs were everywhere, including for low-skill jobs, and the massive illegal immigration that occurred during those years was underwritten by a reality that everyone recognized: America had jobs for everyone who wanted to work.

Inside the black box. Citing macroeconomic conditions leaves us outside the black box. What was going on with these men who were no longer employed or were not even looking for work? You will get some vivid examples of what was happening in the real Fishtown in chapter 12. Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst gave us another kind of look inside that black box with their analysis of American time-use surveys from 1965 through 2005. “Time-use surveys” ask respondents what they did on the previous day, separated into fifteen-minute increments. At the end, the entire day is accounted for. The answers for any one respondent might be atypical of how that respondent usually spends his day, but large samples of such days permit profiles of how various demographic groups spend their time. The Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan conducted such a survey in 1965–66, the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland conducted one in 1985, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted annual time-use surveys since 2003.10

Aguiar and Hurst document what they call an increase in “leisure” that primarily affected men with low education. In the first survey, in 1965–66, men with college degrees and men who had not completed high school had nearly the same amount of leisure time per week, with just a two-hour difference.11 They were only an hour apart in 1985. Then something changed. “Between 1985 and 2005,” Aguiar and Hurst write, “men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours per week, while men who had completed college decreased their leisure time by six hours per week.”12

When Aguiar and Hurst decomposed the ways that men spent their time, the overall pattern for men with no more than a high school diploma is clear. The men of Fishtown spent more time goofing off. Furthermore, the worst results were found among men without jobs. In 2003–5, men who were not employed spent less time on job search, education, and training, and doing useful things around the house than they had in 1985.13 They spent less time on civic and religious activities. They didn’t even spend their leisure time on active pastimes such as exercise, sports, hobbies, or reading. All of those figures were lower in 2003–5 than they had been in 1985. How did they spend that extra leisure time? Sleeping and watching television. The increase in television viewing was especially large—from 27.7 hours per week in 1985 to 36.7 hours in 2003–5. Employed men with no more than high school diplomas also goofed off more in 2003–5 than in 1985, but less consistently and with smaller differentials.14

To sum up: There is no evidence that men without jobs in the 2000s before the 2008 recession hit were trying hard to find work but failing. It was undoubtedly true of some, but not true of the average jobless man. The simpler explanation is that white males of the 2000s were less industrious than they had been twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago, and that the decay in industriousness occurred overwhelmingly in Fishtown.

“It’s Because They Didn’t Marry”

It makes sense that women would choose mates who have already exhibited evidence that they will be successful economically, and social scientists have demonstrated that this is in fact a statistical tendency: Men with high earnings are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced.15 But there’s another possibility: Married men become more productive after they are married because they are married. Economist Gary Becker predicted this outcome in A Treatise on the Family because of the advantages of role specialization in marriage.16 George Gilder predicted it even earlier, in Sexual Suicide, through a more inflammatory argument: Unmarried males arriving at adulthood are barbarians who are then civilized by women through marriage. The inflammatory part was that Gilder saw disaster looming as women stopped performing this function, a position derided as the worst kind of patriarchal sexism.17 But, put in less vivid language, the argument is neither implausible nor inflammatory: The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus, and get to work.

Then, in the late 1980s, economists began to identify what became known as the “marriage premium,” whereby married men make 10 to 20 percent more money than unmarried men, even after controlling for the usual socioeconomic and demographic factors. The puzzling thing about the marriage premium (if you do not agree with either Becker’s or Gilder’s argument) is that it cannot be a simple case of women choosing to marry men who are already more productive—the marriage premium occurs after the wedding vows have been taken. And so the technical literature has been filled with debates about why this marriage premium comes about—is it something about being married that produces the effect, or is the marriage premium the result of women seeing potential in men that they are going to fulfill, even if they haven’t already done so while they are single?

The note on this page gives you some of the most important sources for following the debate.18 What we can say for certain is that married men in the CPS behave far differently with regard to the labor force than unmarried men. Put plainly, single prime-age males are much less industrious than married ones. Both the decline in marriage and the increased detachment from the labor force in Fishtown cannot be understood without knowing that the interaction exists.

Participation in the labor force. Prime-age men are much more than three times as likely to be out of the labor force if they are unmarried, and this was true throughout the entire half century from 1960 to 2010 for both Belmont and Fishtown males. Using an analysis that controls for the year and the unemployment rate, unmarried white males ages 30–49 with a college education were 3.6 times more likely to be out of the labor force than their married counterparts in 1960 and 3.5 times more likely in 2010.19 Among those with no more than a high school diploma, the comparable ratios were 3.9:1 in 1960 and 3.7:1 in 2010.

Unemployment. The unmarried-to-married unemployment ratio for men was close to identical in 1960 and 2010. Among those with a college education, 2.9 times as many unmarried men were unemployed in both 1960 and 2010. Among those with no more than a high school diploma, the comparable ratio was 2.3:1 in both years.

Men who worked fewer than forty hours per week. Limiting the analysis to men who held jobs—an important change in the sample—unmarried college-educated men were 1.5 times as likely as married college-educated men to work fewer than forty hours per week in both 1960 and 2010. For men with just a high school diploma, unmarried men were 1.7 times more likely to work fewer than forty hours a week in 1960 and 1.6 times more likely to do so in 2010.

The meaning of all this is that the labor force problems that grew in Fishtown from 1960 to 2010 are intimately connected with the increase in the number of unmarried men in Fishtown. The balance of the literature suggests that the causal arrow for the marriage premium goes mostly from marriage to labor force behavior—in other words, George Gilder was probably mostly right. But some causation goes the other way as well. In the 2000s Fishtown had a lot fewer men who were indicating that they would be good providers if the woman took a chance and married one of them than it had in 1960.

What Whites Did About Work: Women

Detecting changes in industriousness among American women is impossible unless you assume that a woman working at a paid job is more industrious than a full-time mother, which is not an assumption that I am willing to make. But the story of the deterioration in male industriousness in Fishtown would be incomplete without knowing what happened to women as well.

America experienced a social and economic revolution from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. The percentage of white women in the labor force rose from 40 percent in 1960 to 74 percent by 1995. In the fifteen years after 1995, little changed, with the percentage hitting its high of 75 percent in 2000 and standing at 70 percent in 2008.20

Who Joined the Revolution and When?

The revolution occurred similarly for many different kinds of women. Once again, I must divide whites ages 30–49 by educational level instead of dividing the sample into Belmont and Fishtown, for the same reason that applied to males out of the labor force. I begin with married women, shown in Figure 9.8.

FIGURE 9.8. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION AMONG MARRIED WOMEN BY EDUCATION

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to married white women ages 30–49.

The short story is that married women in Belmont and Fishtown behaved similarly, starting out within 6 percentage points of each other in 1960 and ending up within 7 percentage points of each other in 2008. Married women in both neighborhoods roughly doubled their labor force participation. It was a revolution indeed, transforming the labor force participation of married women. Creaming had a trivial effect.

Now turn to single women, who exhibit the different pattern shown in Figure 9.9.

The gap between Belmont and Fishtown unmarried women was already wide in 1960, and the feminist revolution made little difference subsequently. This is not surprising in the case of college-educated unmarried women, more than 90 percent of whom were already in the labor force in 1960. For unmarried women with no more than a high school education, labor force participation never got higher than 83 percent. After its peak in 1986, the rate in Fishtown declined, dropping to 74 percent in 2008, slightly lower than it was in 1960.

FIGURE 9.9. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION AMONG UNMARRIED WOMEN BY EDUCATION

Source: Author’s analysis of IPUMS CPS.21 Sample limited to unmarried white women ages 30–49.

Whereas there was little creaming effect among married Fishtown women, there was a big one for unmarried ones—that is, the bottom 30 percent of unmarried women were much less likely to be in the labor force in 1960 than unmarried Fishtown women as a whole. Why the difference? Part of the explanation lies in the very different expectations that married and unmarried women had to meet. In 1960, a married Fishtown woman wasn’t expected to work outside the home if she didn’t have to, and two-thirds of them weren’t trying to do so. Married Fishtown women with no more than eight years of education could be in the labor force at about the same rate as their better-educated married neighbors and still have a low rate of labor force participation. The labor force participation rate of unmarried women in the bottom 30 percent was 62 percent, much higher than the 31 percent rate for married women in the bottom 30 percent. It just didn’t look good in comparison with better-educated unmarried Fishtown women.

Another part of the explanation probably lies in the way that women ended up being single. In an age when marriage was a paramount social norm and unmarried women were still called old maids after a certain age, almost all Fishtown women wanted to get married and almost all of them succeeded. The reasons that some women failed were likely to be correlated with personal qualities besides low cognitive ability that hindered them in the labor market.

Women Working Full Time

Women with jobs have never worked as many hours as men.22 The demands of child care are a major reason for the lower hours—women with children under age 5 worked an average of thirty-three hours. But they don’t explain everything. Even women with no children of any age worked an average of forty hours in the week preceding the CPS interview, compared to the male average of forty-five.

The trends in hours worked showed clear differences and divergences among classes. For women working more than forty-eight hours, the pattern looked almost exactly the same as the one for men: increases for Belmont, flattening in the 1990s and then dropping slightly in the 2000s, with a nearly flat trendline for Fishtown. But a better way to get a sense of the change in working hours among women is to use the forty-hour standard. Over the period 1960–2008, what proportions of working women were employed full time by the traditional definition of a forty-hour week? The answer is shown in Figure 9.10.

FIGURE 9.10. WORKING WOMEN AGES 30–49 WHO WORKED 40 OR MORE HOURS IN THE PRECEDING WEEK

Source: Author’s analysis of IPUMS CPS. Sample limited to women with jobs who worked in the week preceding the interview.

In 1960, 64 percent of Fishtown working women worked at least a forty-hour week, conspicuously more than the 50 percent of Belmont women. By 1983, that gap had completely closed. Thereafter, a working woman in Belmont has been modestly more likely to work forty-hour weeks than a working Fishtown woman. One telling feature of the graph: In 1960, the top 20 percent included many women who weren’t college graduates, which probably accounts for the gap between the working women of Belmont (all of whom were college graduates in 1960 or married to college graduates) and the working women of the top 20 percent.

Adding Up the Pieces

In 1960, a normally industrious American family had at least one adult working at least a forty-hour week. If that wasn’t the case, and the family wasn’t wealthy, something was probably wrong—someone had been laid off, was sick, or was injured. Figure 9.11 summarizes how that norm changed from 1960 to 2010.23

FIGURE 9.11. FAMILIES IN WHICH THE HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD OR SPOUSE WORKED 40 OR MORE HOURS IN THE PRECEDING WEEK

Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to unmarried persons designated as the head of household and married couples, and to whites ages 30–49. In the case of married couples, the household was scored as “yes” if either the husband or wife worked 40 or more hours in the preceding week.

In effect, the graph adds up the separate divergences among both men and women on labor force participation, unemployment, and hours worked. It portrays a divergence between Belmont and Fishtown nearly as great in aggregate as the change in marriage. In 1960, 81 percent of Fishtown households had someone working at least forty hours a week, with Belmont at 90 percent. By 2008, Belmont had barely changed at all, at 87 percent, while Fishtown had dropped to 60 percent. And that was before the 2008 recession began. As of March 2010, Belmont was still at 87 percent. Fishtown was down to 53 percent.