[Rhodes22-list] Leisure Time - Economics

Brad Haslett flybrad at gmail.com
Tue Mar 13 11:24:35 EDT 2007


Well folks, it is about time to go back to the beach and educate the
thousands of insensitive college women who have been parading around barely
dressed the last few days.  Don't they know that their behavior and lack of
clothing is offensive to certain men from other cultures?  There's so many
to enlighten that I've had to narrow my search to only the most egregious
offenders: long legged, big-breasted, no clothing larger than a string,
etc..  This is thankless work but I'll press on!

Found this article about leisure this morning interesting.  No wonder I'm
tired all the time!

Brad

-----------------------------------

The Theory of the Leisure Class
An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the
rich?
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Friday, March 9, 2007, at 1:23 PM ET

As you've probably heard, there's been an explosion of inequality in the
United States over the past four decades. The gap between high-skilled and
low-skilled workers is bigger than ever before, and it continues to grow.

How can we close the gap? Well, I suppose we could round up a bunch of
assembly-line workers and force them to mow the lawns of corporate vice
presidents. Because the gap I'm talking about is the gap in leisure time,
and it's the least educated who are pulling ahead.

In 1965, leisure was pretty much equally distributed across classes. People
of the same age, sex, and family size tended to have about the same amount
of leisure, regardless of their socioeconomic status. But since then, two
things have happened. First, leisure (like income) has increased
dramatically across the board. Second, though everyone's a winner, the
biggest winners are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

To quantify those changes, you've got to decide exactly what leisure means.
You can start by deciding what it's not. Surely working at your desk or on
the assembly line is not leisure. Neither is cleaning or ironing. But what
about standing around the water cooler, riding the train to work, gardening,
pet care, or tinkering with your car? What about playing board games with
your children?

Those are judgment calls, but it turns out not to matter very much what
calls you make. When professors Mark Aguiar and Erik
Hurst<http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf>combined
the results of several large surveys (including studies where
randomly chosen subjects kept detailed time diaries), they found that by *
any* definition, the trends are clear.

In 1965, the average man spent 42 hours a week working at the office or the
factory; throw in coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and commuting time, and
you're up to 51 hours. Today, instead of spending 42 and 51 hours, he spends
36 and 40. What's he doing with all that extra time? He spends a little on
shopping, a little on housework, and a lot on watching TV, reading the
newspaper, going to parties, relaxing, going to bars, playing golf, surfing
the Web, visiting friends, and having sex. Overall, depending on exactly
what you count, he's got an extra six to eight hours a week of leisure—call
it the equivalent of nine extra weeks of vacation per year.

For women, time spent on the job is up from 17 hours a week to 24. With
breaks and commuting thrown in, it's up from 20 hours to 26. But time spent
on household chores is down from 35 hours a week to 22, for a net leisure
gain of four to six hours. Call it five extra vacation weeks.

A small part of those gains is because of demographic change. The average
American is older now and has fewer children, so it's not surprising that he
or she works less. But even when you compare modern Americans to their 1965
counterparts—people with the same family size, age, and education—the gains
are still on the order of 4 to 8 hours a week, or something like seven extra
weeks of leisure per year.

But not for everyone. About 10 percent of us are stuck in 1965, leisurewise.
At the opposite extreme, 10 percent of us have gained a staggering 14 hours
a week or more. (Once again, your gains are measured in comparison to a
person who, in 1965, had the same characteristics that you have today.) By
and large, the biggest leisure gains have gone precisely to those with the
most stagnant incomes—that is, the least skilled and the least educated. And
conversely, the smallest leisure gains have been concentrated among the most
educated, the same group that's had the biggest gains in income.

Aguiar and Hurst can't explain fully that rising inequality, just as nobody
can explain fully the rising inequality in income. But there are, I think,
two important morals here.

First, man does not live by bread alone. Our happiness depends partly on our
incomes, but also on the time we spend with our friends, our hobbies, and
our favorite TV shows. So, it's a good exercise in perspective to remember
that by and large, the big winners in the income derby have been the small
winners in the leisure derby, and vice versa.

Second, a certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any
increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through
some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to
leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the
trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra
time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of
their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute
income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself
what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.
*Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of* Fair Play: What Your
Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of
Life<http://www.landsburg.com/>
*. You can e-mail him at armchair at troi.cc.rochester.edu**.*

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2161309/


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