But I also note the following paragraph:
"One result is that even with the same work hours and household duties, women with higher incomes report feeling more stressed than women with lower incomes, according to a recent study by the economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee. In other words, not only does more money not solve our problems at home, it may even make things worse."
I don't suppose the article looked at anything about the gender gap in housework or WHY all this wealth does not relieve the housework gender gap in particular.
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 7:16 AM, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [This guy has a convoluted way of making a point --
> income inequality is bad, ultimately, but he takes the
> scenic route to get there -- and I'd love to see where
> he gets some of these numbers. If the rich *do*
> complain more about stress than their middle class
> counterparts, as the writer says, I will gladly
> relieve them of that stress, and can give details of
> my PayPal account to anyone interested in this sort of
> stress relief. No one is holding a gun to anyone's
> head to force them into being wealthy, I don't think?
> -B.]
>
> -----
>
> September 2, 2008
>
> Op-Ed Contributor
> Rich Man's Burden
> By DALTON CONLEY
>
> [...]
>
> But what's different from Weber's era is that it is
> now the rich who are the most stressed out and the
> most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the
> first time since we've kept track of such things,
> higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage
> earners do.
>
> [...]
>
> One result is that even with the same work hours and
> household duties, women with higher incomes report
> feeling more stressed than women with lower incomes,
> according to a recent study by the economists Daniel
> Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee. In other words, not only
> does more money not solve our problems at home, it may
> even make things worse.
>
> [...]
>
> The result of this high and rising inequality is what
> I call an "economic red shift." Like the shift in the
> light spectrum caused by the galaxies rushing away,
> those Americans who are in the top half of the income
> distribution experience a sensation that, while they
> may be pulling away from the bottom half, they are
> also being left further and further behind by those
> just above them.
>
> And since inequality rises exponentially the higher
> you climb the economic ladder, the better off you are
> in absolute terms, the more relatively deprived you
> may feel. In fact, a poll of New Yorkers found that
> those who earned more than $200,000 a year were the
> most likely of any income group to agree that "seeing
> other people with money" makes them feel poor.
>
> Because these forces drive each other, they trap us in
> a vicious cycle: Rising inequality causes us to work
> more to keep up in an economy increasingly dominated
> by status goods. That further widens income
> differences.
>
> [...]
>
> Dalton Conley, the chairman of New York University's
> sociology department, is the author of the forthcoming
> "Elsewhere, U.S.A."
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>