Redefining What It Means to Work Hard

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Jeff Haynes/Reuters Does Duke’s win over Butler show that success does not always derive from privilege or was it pure luck?

David Brooks: Gail, to wrench me out of my fiscal funk last week, you allowed me to talk about sports and sex, in the person of Tiger Woods. I want you to know how much that helped.

Today, I’m going to start off talking about sports, but I promise, we’ll soon be discussing social class.

Gail Collins: David, this is not the first time somebody has promised that a discussion of sports is going to quickly evolve into something else. This is always a prelude to a discussion of sports. Sometimes with an occasional oblique reference to quantum physics or the ancient Greeks. But go ahead, I’m resigned.

David Brooks: O.K. My first subject is Barack Obama. He is without question the best basketball player ever in the White House, except for Taft, of course, who was the Charles Barkley of his day. During the N.C.A.A. tournament Obama beat CBS’s basketball analyst Clark Kellogg in a game of P-O-T-U-S (the White House version of Horse). And then, being Obama, he said something very self-aware. He said that Kellogg (who was a genuine basketball star before going into broadcasting), only let him get close in the game because he didn’t realize that Obama might go on to win. That shows the president is wise to the wiles of flattery. Good for him.
Watch CBS News Videos Online

But then Monday he threw out the first pitch at Nationals Park. Atrocious. I don’t mean to be sexist, but the man throws like a Democrat. The gap between his basketball ability and his baseball ability is so wide as to be a threat to the nation. The fact that he did not have the wisdom to bring in a team of pitching consultants to help with his delivery is a sign of dangerous hubris. I have spoken to senior White House officials about the cancer on the presidency (his inability to get any kind of decent arm extension) and yet they have done nothing.

Gail Collins: I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it but I hate hate hate all that White House basketball-buddy stuff. Occasionally, I think about demanding that the president either stop playing or come up with a team that is more gender diverse. But you know, it’s been a tough year and I am not prepared to try to take his favorite relaxation away. I am just going to be cranky about it.

The opening day pitch made me kinda glad to see that there are sports he’s bad at. Although I guess we should have known that from the dreaded bowling moment in the primaries. Maybe I could demand that the president devote equal recreational attention to the national pastime. He could certainly find a trillion women in the administration who could play baseball at his level.

David Brooks: A few hours after that atrocity of opening day, Duke went on to beat Butler for the national championship. You should know that Duke is one of my alma maters. I am very generous in my definition of alma maters. I claim that affiliation with any school I went to, taught at, lived near (Villanova and St. Johns) or parked at.

Unlike 90 percent of America, I was rooting for Duke last night. This was widely cast as a class conflict — the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys. If this had been a movie, Butler’s last second heave would have gone in instead of clanging off the rim, and the country would still be weeping with joy.

But this is why life is not a movie. The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.

Gail Collins: I’m sorry, when the difference is one weensy basket, I’d say Duke won neither by privilege nor hard work but by sheer luck. But don’t let me interrupt your thought here. I detect the subtle and skillful transition to a larger non-sport point.

David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?

Gail Collins: It may be true that the more hours you work on average, the wealthier you are likely to be. But while it’s harder to quantify, I’m pretty sure that the work gets more and more pleasant the higher up the ladder you climb. Forty hours in a chicken-plucking factory feels a lot longer than 60 hours managing a large corporation.

David Brooks: Here’s the trickiest case of all. I don’t know if you saw Tara Parker-Pope’s piece in the Science section on Tuesday, but she reported on an interesting set of statistics. First, parents are spending more time with their kids today than in previous generations. Before 1995, mothers spent on average 12 hours a week with their children. By 2007, that number had leapt to 21.2 for college-educated moms and 15.9 hours for those with less education. Paternal time leapt from 4.5 hours to 9.6 hours, among the college-educated and from 3.7 to 6.8 among the less educated.

I was fascinated by how parental time correlates to education. Is it possible that college-educated parents are spending more time passing down their advantages than other parents? Could it be that the rich replicate themselves by dint of hard work and parental attention, on top of all the other less worthy advantages?

Uncomfortable questions.

Gail Collins: I totally agree that children whose parents are well-educated get a jump start in life. The fact that their parents spend so much time with them may be the least of it. They go to better schools. They’re encouraged to spend more time on homework and reading.

But there was lots of other interesting information in that article. One point was that the mothers get more time to spend with their children by doing less housework and cooking. However, the fathers get it by spending less time at work.

I’ve read other studies that suggest the younger generation of well-trained professionals is less willing than their parents to devote endless hours to their careers — they want a more balanced life when it comes to work, family and recreation. If that’s true, the rich aren’t going to keep their hardest-worker honors for very long. And their poorer brethren can go back to feeling morally superior.