Working for the Rat Race

"Being concerned with one's relative position rather than one's absolute position is not irrational or merely motivated by envy. In order to retain your relative standard of living, you need to keep up with the purchases of others in your income bracket. Retaining your relative position also ensures that you don't send the wrong signals when a client comes over for dinner. Houses, cars, clothing—they all help send those signals. And because the rich in this country keep getting richer, we're caught in what Frank calls 'expenditure cascades' in an effort to keep up with them. Their purchases raise the bar for the group right below them, which in turn increases the needs of the next income set, and so on.
"This makes the purchase of positional goods more pressing and urgent than non-positional goods. And so they 'crowd out' their less context-contingent cousins. People want to spend less time at work, but they also want to retain and improve their standard of living relative to their neighbors—and the latter triumphs, time and again."

Ezra Klein in the Los Angeles Times details why Americans feel compelled to work longer hours.