Talk to people about their work today and most will tell you they're working harder and longer hours than they did several years ago. Ask them about the terrific deals they've gotten and the variety of custom-made products available to them, and they'll probably glaze over with that dizzy look they get when they're pleased as punch.

These mixed signals about the economy and contemporary marketplace are at the heart of Robert Reich's brilliant and thought-provoking book The Future of Success. The former Clinton administration secretary of labor and author of The Work of Nations reveals that the average adult working American now puts in almost 2,000 hours a year for pay. That's two weeks more than he or she worked twenty years ago. And it's 350 more hours of work than the typical European.

Those who earn the highest salaries are on call all the time and use their home computers as work stations. In addition to the hours spent at the workplace, many are required to go away from home for business trips, corporate conferences, and retreats. Reich concludes that the "rewards of the new economy are coming at the price of lives that are more frenzied, less secure, more economically divergent, more socially stratified. . . . As wondrous as the new economy is, we are losing parts of our lives to it — aspects of our family lives, our friendships, our communities, ourselves."

With an abundance of colorful illustrative material, Reich maps out many of the incredible new developments in the Internet-driven marketplace with its spirit of innovation, its mix of geeks and shrinks, its low estimate of loyalty, and its gung-ho hyper-competition. To succeed in this wild and weird world, individuals have to become masters at self-packaging and self-promotion.

One of the most interesting chapters, titled "Paying for Attention," charts the businesses built upon pampering the rich. The well-heeled affluent individual can afford the intricate, up-close and personal attention of a private trainer, masseur, and financial consultant. The rest of us squirm in coach class where there is little or no service given. The one thing our machines can't provide is attentiveness. And in today's hassled milieu, this becomes a commodity to be sold.

Robert B. Reich's The Future of Success challenges us to ponder the costs and the benefits of work, technology, and the financial engines providing us with so many choices in our forward-surging economy. In the closing chapter, he suggests three conversations we can begin about the new economy and its effects upon our society. And just in case you are too hard-pressed to read this book, you can listen to it in your car and on the train; it is available from Random House Audio-books as a six-hour abridged version on five CDs ($29.95, ISBN 0-375-41722-2).