Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Eco

Dalton Conley is a researcher with a soul! He connects with today's busy families to ask the question, "Are you feeling like you should be elsewhere?" We are so busy we feel guilty that we are not spending enough time at anything we do. Conley helps us understand the trends that create the feeling so we can assess our own answer to the acceleration of our pace in life. Obviously we can not increase the time we have, but must consider how we allocate it to family, work, social life, volunteering, and ourselves. Since we can not return to a bygone age, Conley says we must "blend and bend" among the many roles we play. His insight into consumption and investment and the maddening incentives we use to induce certain behaviors, is cause to pause, if even for a moment. Conley addresses the broader social issues as well -- taxes and social policy and how they impact society. If you want to reflect on how we got to where we are -- "elsewhere, USA" -- take his book with you on your next "short vacation weekend". Sheryl Dawson Total Career Success Author Job Search: The Total System (3rd Ed)

After briefly examining in the Preface differences between and among three generations in his family, Dalton Conley acknowledges that even when he and his wife are together ("here" so to speak),"we are never quite all here. There's always some distraction." Many others (I among them) have probably made the same observation, given all of the demands for our attention each day to focus on someone or something elsewhere. Conley adds, "It'd all enough to drive one bonkers. And sometimes I think that is what's happening. Not just to me, but to lots of folks around me. That rocking chair in my grandparents' house sounds real nice about now. But I can't seem to find it in this Elsewhere Society in which we live." In the Introduction that follows, Conley examines the life shared by those who live in that society. He notes that significant changes have occurred in three areas (i.e. the economy, the family, and technology) and that a new breed has evolved, the intravidual, who has "multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...In short, for many of us, intravidualism has displaced - or at least competes with - individualism." In Conley's view, we are now centrally involved in a "perfect storm" of economic and household forces. "If not an earthquake in the social landscape," it is nonetheless analogous to global warming as "socioeconomic trends (and the new breed of person they have engendered), in their slow and steady development, have invisibly crept upon us like rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere." In the chapters that follow, Conley provides what he characterizes as "the first-edition guidebook to this new world we have created." Others have their reasons for holding this book in high regard. Here are two of mine. First, I commend Conley on focusing so specifically on all manner of socioeconomic trends but he goes much further than that, attempting (with inevitably incomplete results) to explain their causes as well as the nature and extent of their impact. However, keep in mind, his purpose is to offer a "first-edition" contribution to our understanding of the core issues, not a combination of information and analysis that is definitive. As he suggests, there are no boundaries whatsoever in the Elsewhere Society. Many (most?) of its inhabitants "function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals)" without having, until now, any guidance. I also admire this book because it provides a framework within which Conley and others - combining the skills of explorers, cultural anthropologists, and cartographers -- can now concentrate on filling in the details of a map of "this new world we have created." Despite what the book's title may suggest, it is not a world limited to the U.S.A. Conley indicates in the concluding Author's Note, "It's the job of the sociologist to show us how, in the words of C. Wright

Preface: This book was penned before the recent market crash. Clay Shirky's 'Here Comes Everybody' was the best book that I read in 2008. Dalton Conley's 'Elsewhere, U.S.A.' may prove to be the best book that I read in 2009. [And it's only February 1st!] [Interestingly enough, both Clay Shirky and Dalton Conley are both affiliated with NYU.] The two central questions that Dalton Conley raises and attempts to answer are these: Given that: - When Mr. 1959 (depicted in William Whyte's 'Organization Man') attained a dignified level of professional success (i.e. established one's own dentistry practice, become a vice-president at a tire company, etc.), he often parlayed the accompanying level of income and wealth into more leisure time for he and his family. - Whereas when Mr. (or increasingly Mrs.) 2009 attains a comparable level of professional success (i.e. rises to the rank of marketing executive for a multinational corporation, joins a prestigious law firm, etc), he (or she) increasingly does *not* parlay the accompanying level of wealth into more leisure time. Instead, he or she winds up working more hours with more economic anxiety. - How and why did this happen? - What are the ramifications of this change? Throughout, Conley asserts that it was not one thing, but many that led us to this economic reality: Here are just a few: - Rising economic inequality between high and low wage earners, and self-imposed pressure to "keep up with the Joneses" in a post-materialist society. - Technology that enables a 24x7 work week. - Females earning more and remaining in the work force for longer spans of time. - A lower marginal income tax rate for the top bracket. - A greater recognition of the opportunity cost associated with "not working". At the book's conclusion, Conley cautions the reader that it would be unproductive to use one's entire energy to rally against our new reality. In fact, Conley never labels the new reality as universally bad. Instead, he urges the reader to recognize the tradeoffs between what once was and is today.

Dalton Conley's *Elsewhere, USA* is an impressive narrative of a shift from a snapshot of life in 1950s America to a new "normal" insanity for the professional class today, one that we know is there but have never stopped to think about, perhaps because, as Conley says, we're too busy scrolling our Blackberries or distracted by the screaming billboards that have colonized public space and even childhood imaginations (his kids trade Pokemon cards, not football cards). After pointing out the big picture changes, the book tells us how this happened. Conley explores several possible causes for a cluster of outcomes that make the rich, professional family today different from their counterpart a half century ago. I don't know how he does it, but Conley manages to synthesize a tremendous amount of information into an extremely readable and entertaining book. From newspaper headlines to scholarly monographs to frequent illustrations from his own experiences, and those of his friends and family, Conley makes the desolation of contemporary life for upper class Americans with status anxiety a very fun read. I especially liked the description of how his sister and brother-in-law installed a nanny-cam and discovered their nanny beating their one year-old son, an excellent illustration of Conley's larger argument about how technological and demographic changes -- as he puts it, women's increased participation in the workforce and increased earnings -- have converged to produce the changes he documents, often with great wit. My quibble with the book are a small number of passing dismissive references to "left" analysis of these changes. One sentence that bothered me was where he attributed rising inequality in wealth to technological changes, and not, 'as the left would have it, tax policy'-- I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the book in front of me. (The two are not mutually exclusive, of course.) Anyway, my own left politics make me sensitive to a tone that others will no doubt appreciate. Bottom line: fun book that has a lot of information.

Offering a thorough explanation as to why, in the times we are in, higher pursuits of knowledge and creativity have been replaced by pursuits of monetary gain and superficial trivialities, /Elsewhere U.S.A./ gives insight into our deteriorating culture and selves. Conley has observed and recorded, over his years as a sociologist, how people's lives have become not so much lives, but, rather, muddled streams that go and go and go, but never get anywhere. Serenity, as explained in /Elsewhere, U.S.A./, has all but disappeared, and has been replaced by constant action, much of it pointless. Even when we settle down and rest for the evening, we still may as well be clocked in at the job, for we are still working--on a laptop, on a Blackberry, on an iPhone--we are still going and going, but not getting anywhere. We never get anywhere, we never get to the place where we can put work down and just spend time with the family. We never get to the place where we can stop going. In a sobering and fearlessly honest account of our lives, of your life, Conley shows us that even though we're always busy, we're never really doing anything; He also shows us why we act in that manner. A must-read for any busybodies (and, even though one might like to think otherwise, that is the majority of us) that wish to calm their lives down, /Elsewhere, U.S.A./ can provide the Stop Sign that is so desperately needed on the road of life.