Arlie Russell Hochschild

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.' ”

I think we have a rawer version of capitalism and a more fragile community and family base than other nations. We are a more individualistic culture. From the Boston Tea Party on, we've had too little faith in government. ”

And we're in the middle of a 'perfect storm.' These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand. ”

Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free. ”

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus. ”

What is for sale, what is not? If we really think that making your apologies to your wife or reading a bedside story to your child are activities that we can pay a stranger to do, then, without moralising, what has happened to us? ”

Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden. ”

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier? ”

I really have this sense that time is passing, and it's important to do what you have wanted to do. ”

We think we're saving time with microwaves, cell phones, beepers, computers and voice mail, but often these things help us create the illusion of getting somewhere - and they foster a chain of constant activity. We're really just squeezing extra activity into every minute that we gain. ”