Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

Like many yuppies, I’m proud of being efficient. I write from six to nine every morning. Between nine and ten-thirty I have breakfast and commute to work. From ten-thirty until six or seven in the evening I’m in the office. At night I read, prepare manuscripts for submission and work on projects for a small publisher whom I help out on a volunteer basis. Everything, even art, is precisely scheduled. In my writing I take aim at the conformism of contemporary society, yet my life exemplifies, if not conformism, then a certain worshipping at the altar of middle-class values such as diligence and productivity. “Live like the bourgeois,” Gustave Flaubert counselled writers tempted by the Romantic image of the artist as dissolute vagabond and eternal outsider. The advice has some merit. As Gabriel García Márquez, having starved in Paris as a young man, told fellow writers in later years: “You write better when you’ve had a meal.”

The problem is that the cost of the meal keeps rising. The bourgeoisie that Flaubert knew was a more leisured class than are harried twenty-first century yuppies, who are dependent for employment on institutions that face constant compression before the demands of efficiency, or companies straining to maximize profits. In my office, sixteen full-time employees now deliver the same programs, plus a couple of new ones, that were delivered by twenty-four full-time employees four years ago. This means that my efficient daily schedule now applies not only to weekdays but also, during much of the year, to at least one day during the weekend. This crunch is impossible to avoid because, as those who promote these ideologies keep telling us, it does not originate in a particular office or institution, but in the structures of globalized finance.

The changes wrought by these structures have replaced that comfortable, easy-to-despise clique,