She gives a short, mirthless laugh. “It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. And it’s much worse in a real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.” She gestures though the windscreen at the field and the bus stop and a man walking his dog, but I know what she means.

That’s from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a very entertaining and well-constructed novel that I just finished reading. It belongs to the genre of coming-of-age stories in which the appealing male hero realizes that other people also matter and that happiness will require commitment. Compare and contrast James Atlas’ The Great Pretender, Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, or all the early Phillip Roth.

What struck me, though, was the age of Hornby’s protagonists. These people are turning into adults in their mid-thirties, not their early twenties like Portnoy. Come to think of it, that’s not a surprising phenomenon. We’re living longer, women can safely bear children later, and there are impressive returns to education–including not only school and college, but also such educative experiences as internships, living abroad, and experimenting with jobs. Under these circumstances, people who can delay do delay all the irreversible markers of adulthood.

Laura says to Rob in High Fidelity, “You’ll keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You’d be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you’d be thinking, well, at least I’ve kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing something I couldn’t back out of.” She’s describing Rob’s amusing character flaw, but it’s more than that–not just a personal trait, but a consequence of investing in people’s “human capital” for the first four decades of their lives so that they can produce economic goods and children for the next three decades before comfortably retiring.

Overall, I think this is progress. People are developing their own rational autonomies by learning and experimenting before they make critical decisions about work and family. One drawback, obviously, is inequality. While some take a decade after college to explore their options, others have left school at 16 and have few choices at all. Hornby’s novel is not really about inequality, but it is about the ethical dimension of delaying adulthood. What makes it time to start the real business of life? How should one treat other people during the period of exploration? (I’d say that no 16-year-old owes any friend or romantic partner a lifelong commitment, but I feel differently about a 30-year-old. Why?) What are the appropriate purposes of exploring one’s options?

I spent Tuesday in Dayton, a city that I have visited several times each year since 1987. I go there to work with the Kettering Foundation, but the city reminds me of my hometown of Syracuse, NY–also a former manufacturing city that once depended on automotive plants. As we drove past the big GM plant in Moraine, OH (where shifts have recently been cut), the driver of my shuttle told me that he had worked for decades at Dayco, an auto parts manufacturer. Dayco was bought out and, according to my driver, the new owners got rid of everyone over 50. So now he drives a shuttle bus for $7/hour plus tips but no benefits. He works seven days a week and sometimes has to sleep in the airport if a late flight is badly delayed. He looked at least 60 years old.

It’s not an unusual story, but it’s a story worth telling and retelling. (By the way, tip your driver.)

Just a few recent items from my inbox that reflect that creativity of the movement for civic renewal:

1. Warrior to Citizen: The Center for Democracy & Citizenship at the University of Minnesota has formally launched its effort to help returning veterans reintegrate into civilian life. The emphasis is not on services, therapy, or sympathy. Instead, the Warrior to Citizen campaign recognizes that veterans have skills and knowledge that they can use for the benefit of American communities, if they are treated as assets. The coalition includes military and veterans’ organizations, higher education, mayors, and 250 priests, among others.

2. Resident Leaders: The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University is placing experienced undergraduates in dorms specifically to help first-year students engage in their communities. They join the traditional residential assistants (RAs) who help with academic and personal matters.

3. The Whole Child: The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), which is a huge membership organization, has launched a campaign to fight the narrowing of the US curriculum and to defend arts, civics, service, and other crucial aspects of education that are at risk of disappearing from our schools.

Nelson D. Schwartz, the New York Times, August 26:

Although corporate jets tend to use smaller airports in the New York area, it’s possible that a crowded 737 might have to wait for a tiny Gulfstream to take off in Miami or at Dulles, outside Washington.

The users of corporate jets defend this practice, saying they deserve equal takeoff rights. “On a business flight, you might have people going to Wall Street from companies who are creating jobs and generating billions of dollars in commerce,” Mr. [Steve] Brown [of the National Business Aviation Association] says. “People on a commercial flight might be going on vacation or going to New York to go to the theater.”

The old populist and socialist reply was: Workers make things of value. Those who boss them around or make profits from investments are just skimming off the top. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever” (1915):

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid

* * *

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.

We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.

It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.

According to the labor theory of value, those people sitting in the Gulfstream jets are “idle drones.” The ones who wait in coach class (or those who cannot afford to fly at all) are the people who create all value. Pope John Paul II seemed to agree; see On Human Work (Laborem exercens) of 1981.

But the labor theory of value is problematic, because clearly the people in the Gulfstreams “work,” even if all they do is make decisions about where to invest. Their work can have an enormous influence on the products of the economy. If affecting output is a measure of how much they work, then it is they who build the cities and dig the mines.

And they are enormously well paid for their pains. Corporate executives take home about 400 times as much pay as average workers. They use some of that pay, as well as their leverage over corporate resources, to obtain conveniences, such as flying in corporate jets that use public runways. And they feel important and worthy, as Mr. Brown of the National Business Aviation Association implies.

If one’s work is to make decisions, there is no doubt that one’s impact is consequential. But the consequences can be negative instead of positive. To paraphrase Mr. Brown, those people on the Gulfstreams might be flying to Wall Street to make boneheaded decisions that cost jobs, or selfish decisions that benefit them at the expense of their workers. Their risk is very limited; their expected gain is enormous.

Further, we might wonder whether their salaries and perks are worth the cost. Imagine that a corporate executive adds $10 million to the company’s bottom line by making a good decision. Does that mean that the company needs to pay him $10 million to obtain his services? Not if the decision was basically determined by the facts, in which case anyone with appropriate technical skills could have made the same call. Not if the decision was basically lucky, in which case the company could have flipped a coin. And not if the decision was determined by many of his underlings’ input.

The theory of markets suggests that companies in a competitive environment will never overpay for decisions, any more than they will overpay for crude oil or real estate. But that ignores the possibility of very systematic bias among the whole class of decision-makers, who are likely to overestimate the impact of their own brains and underestimate the importance of the people who work for them. Labor Day is for the folks in coach, and those who never fly at all.

Time Magazine’s editor, Rick Stengel, makes the case for a large-scale but voluntary national service program in an editorial that accompanies a whole cover issue on service and volunteering. It’s a useful contribution because:

It’s a concrete policy recommendation that would respond to a widespread feeling that our communities and democratic institutions have weakened dangerously. Stengel assembles rather specific ideas for federal service programs.

Stengel wisely builds on our experience with existing projects. Domestic service goes back to the New Deal, but the most immediately relevant programs are part of AmeriCorps, which was founded in the Clinton years

Stengel wisely recommends a voluntary program. He writes, “Americans don’t like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. [The new programs] would be based on carrots, not sticks.” I would add another reason. It is crucial to offer high-quality programs, and we’ll need to build those incrementally. A universal requirement would doom many young people to poor programs, with counter-productive results.

Service opportunities for people in their twenties would help them navigate an increasingly long and difficult transition to adulthood.

Service has potential appeal to conservatives and liberals, and it’s a big enough idea that it could help to define a campaign or party.