earnings insurance | unemployment insurance | Washington | ever-better communications technology

"People are working much harder than ever before, even people who are paid rather well. My research and travels around the country since I've left Washington have revealed a striking pat-tern: The more money you make, very often the longer hours you're putting in. People with college educations who are in managerial or professional roles are typically putting in 50 to 80 hours a week - and that's not including travel. Travel is eating up more time than ever.

"We've gotten to the point where even though we are very prosperous overall as a nation, we are remarkably poor in terms of the quality of our lives outside work," Reich continues. "That's what the book is about. It tries to explain that paradox."

The Future of Success does that well - maybe too well. Reich's depiction of a steadily tightening noose, in the form of rising expectations, global competition, ever-wiser marketers, and ever-better communications technology, begins to assume the guise of inevitability after a while. That's not an image he does much to dispel. He discounts the more obvious time-management tools, as well as the whole movement toward simplification. Recounting his efforts to pursue these routes to achieving a more manageable success, he concludes they simply don't work.

What it's going to take, Reich says, is some seriously innovative social engineering. He's a fan of school vouchers, including progressive vouchers that would give even bigger tax savings to poor families who place their kids in private schools. He also suggests providing every American with a $60,000 nest egg, upon reaching adulthood, to spend on education, start a business, or sock into the market. He proposes earnings insurance as a better means than unemployment insurance to smooth income variations in a workforce composed largely of free agents who, while remaining employed, may have large fluctuations in earnings from year to year.