On topic: Are we working for our daily bread?

Studs Terkel suggested that, 'Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Terkel came up with this proposition while talking to people for his now-famous 1974 oral history, 'Working.” But is he correct? Do we really seek more from our jobs than a paycheck?

And if we do, is such a goal attainable?

Here are some items, ripped from today's headlines, to consider as we try to find our way to an answer.

A recent BBC News story contends one in nine Americans puts in at least 50 hours a week at work.

Yet the national jobless rate, last I checked, is 6.1 percent. Unemployment is lower than it was before the Great Recession began, but it's still not anything that warrants a parade.

The Washington Post claims today's so-called labor force participation rate - folk who hold a job or looking for a job - is 62.8 percent. It was 66 percent before the recession.

Now mesh those numbers with a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers, the agency that guides the White House on economic matters. It says lots of folk have given up looking for work.

Some former workers retired, or we're close enough that when they lost their job they decided to call it a day and dig out the fishing pole.

The council's report contends there are those among the formerly employed would take a job if they could get one. But some can't get back in the work force because their skills have atrophied.

Or, for others, employers have concluded, correctly or otherwise, that's indeed the case, and they - the companies - don't want to pay for training to refresh those abilities.

For many would-be workers, it's been like a perverse game of musical chairs: Every time the melody stops, there have been fewer chairs.

Whatever the case, here's another bit of information to add to the mix: Our nation's gross domestic product - a mysterious calculation at best, I admit - has been less than stellar.

This year's first quarter, by all accounts, contracted at an annual rate of 2.9 percent. That's the fiercest drop in five years.

The second-quarter's rate, released this past Wednesday, was up at tad, at a seasonally adjusted 4 percent.

Tying much of this together, J.P.Morgan has calculated that U.S. productivity has

dropped by 0.4 percent since the past year.

The experts are none to thrilled. New York Times correspondent Neil Irwin pointed out last month that '…

the brutal math of GDP means that the nation now looks consigned to another year of sluggish growth at best - and that's true even if there is a pickup over the remainder of the year.”

The Economist magazine politely calls our economy lumbering, as in it likely 'will continue to lumber along at an underwhelming pace.”

These jarring stats, this gloomy conjecture. They're enough to make your head hurt.

I'm not an economist. But I think it all means that, as a nation, fewer people are working more hours while producing less. Maybe.

Carlos Slim - not only the richest person in the world but possessor of possibly the coolest name, so he must know something - conjectured a couple weeks ago that this reduced work force will continue to labor into their 70s but - get this - for 11 hours a day, three days a week.

That would seem to leave scant growing space for Terkel's optimistic goals of 'meaning” and 'astonishment.”

Yet there is this, and it's another quote from Studs: 'Einstein said everything had changed since the atom was split, except the way we think. We have to think anew.”

So if we continue to apply our collective brain power toward innovative and better ways to do our jobs and run our companies - from the clerks in the stock room up to the elected and appointed policy-making potentates in our capitals - and if indeed we do strive for more from work than merely our daily bread, then just maybe Terkel is right.

Or he will be.

'Michael Chevy Castranova is Sunday editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com