Leisure time study

March 12, 2007 10:29 AM

I'm so glad I'M not an Alpha. Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst have published a study (pdf) saying that Americans have more leisure time now than they did in 1965. And that most of these gains have gone to the poor.
posted by Trochanter (65 comments total)

This sets off the same warning bells I heard when I first read about "The Sceptical Environmentalist." Whether it's successfully refuted or not, it will be held up for twenty years as a rebuttal to concerns about the widening income gap.
posted by Trochanter at 10:32 AM on March 12, 2007

Haha. Trochanter, I was gonna post essentially the same thing.
posted by klangklangston at 10:37 AM on March 12, 2007

And that most of these gains have gone to the poor.

Being unemployed or underemployed gives you more spare time? What an amazing conclusion.
posted by IronLizard at 10:38 AM on March 12, 2007

See, the real trick to increasing your personal productivity is to redefine the things most of us normally consider leisure-time activities (going out to dinner, schmoozing with friends, going to sporting events, playing golf, etc.) as work. Then everyone else looks lazy by comparison.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:43 AM on March 12, 2007

"Hours worked" is not a great metric for who is and isn't making out like a bandit in the economy. Which is really a better deal: Working 60 hours a week and getting paid $500,000/yr or working 40 hours a week and getting paid $20,000/yr?

OMGTHERICHAREGETTINGSHAFTED
posted by DU at 10:44 AM on March 12, 2007

Oh man--and they include time saved by labor-saving devices. Well DUH: When prices for things like dishwashers fall from where only the rich reap the benefits to where everyone can, the poor suddenly catch up.
posted by DU at 10:46 AM on March 12, 2007

People who choose not to work long hours have more free time. Seems pretty reasonable to me. People just have different priorities. This makes sense to me, but I can imagine that to a different generation, this would be counter-intuitive. I remember reading some article about those health clubs in Manhattan that were so popular even up to the 60s and 70s (their heyday was the first part of the century, and the end of the 19th century). The cities powerful lawyers, doctors, and journalists, the most well-paid and influential, taking two or three hour lunches to go swimming and play tennis, or hit the sauna, or just take a nap. Maybe that's how it used to be, but not so much anymore. Seems like it's a more equitable scenario - work hard (or harder), get rich, but at a sacrifice to your personal/social life - work less, make less money, but with the benefit that you can spend more time with family and friends.
posted by billysumday at 10:46 AM on March 12, 2007

"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."

He's joking, right?
posted by uosuaq at 10:49 AM on March 12, 2007

It's definitely better to be poor. This is how an economist would break it down:

Industrialist:
Wakes 6:00 am.
Business meeting over breakfast 7:00 am.
.
.
Round of golf with clients finally ends at 8:30 pm.

Single Mom:
Wakes 6:00 am.
Feeds, dresses kids, takes them to school etc and arrives at work at 8:30 am.
Ends work at 5:00 pm, picks up kids from daycare/practice, makes dinner, cleans up, finally gets to sit down at 8:00pm.

Industrialist's working day: 13.5 hours.
Single Mom's working day: 8.5 hours.
posted by jimmythefish at 10:50 AM on March 12, 2007 [4 favorites]

I firmly believe that some of us (ie, me) should be paid just to be cute & witty people of leisure. That is the career I was born to have.
posted by miss lynnster at 10:52 AM on March 12, 2007 [6 favorites]

I firmly believe that some of us (ie, me) should be paid just to be cute & witty people of leisure. That is the career I was born to have.

Why don't people SEE that?
posted by Trochanter at 10:56 AM on March 12, 2007

So, over the last 40 years, the average person has to spend up to 30% less time on work-related stuff, while for the top earners, it has remained the same.

Funny that the author compares this to the widening income gap, because I do not think anyone would complain much if the income of mentioned corporate vice presidents had also increased a mere 30% faster than that of the average joes.
posted by Cironian at 10:56 AM on March 12, 2007

I firmly believe that some of us (ie, me) should be paid just to be cute & witty plagiarists of leisure. That is the career I was born to have.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:59 AM on March 12, 2007 [4 favorites]

Share the wealth and I'll gladly share the leisure.
posted by nola at 11:01 AM on March 12, 2007

You know who else had more time than money? Hobos. They have all the fun, life on the open road, never paying for train fare, dinning alfresco, meeting colorful people.
posted by nola at 11:05 AM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

“...though everyone's a winner, the biggest winners are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder...”

Yeah, homeless people enjoy the freedom, the rough and tumble, the adventure...it's about the joy of living, not the shit we deal with: money, politics.
posted by Smedleyman at 11:06 AM on March 12, 2007

I firmly agree that some of us (ie, me) should be paid just to be cute & witty plagiarists of leisure. That is the career I was born to have.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:08 AM on March 12, 2007

I'd favorite MrMoonPie too, but I don't want to start a trend.
posted by hincandenza at 11:15 AM on March 12, 2007

Metafilter: cute & witty plagiarists of leisure
posted by metaplectic at 11:17 AM on March 12, 2007

So Ruben Bolling's Lucky Ducky was a sort of Joe Sacco-style documentary all along. Huh.
posted by gompa at 11:30 AM on March 12, 2007

The poor are very different from you and me.
posted by hal9k at 11:32 AM on March 12, 2007

This is like how the poor are fatter than the rich, here.
posted by grobstein at 11:46 AM on March 12, 2007

This idea is pretty whack.
And it's not a necessarily a matter of working more = making more money, we don't really live in that Horatio Alger fairey tale. The hardest working man I know is pretty damn poor.
posted by edgeways at 11:51 AM on March 12, 2007

It's great that the time women spend on household chores has decreased from 35 hours a week to 22. I feel more relaxed already.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 12:00 PM on March 12, 2007

I would like to see a study of how much people enjoy their jobs, relative to how wealthy they are. Work and leisure don't have to be entirely different things.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 12:04 PM on March 12, 2007

I'm leisuring right NOW!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 12:18 PM on March 12, 2007

I'd sleep more, but with my insomnia getting to sleep is hard work.
posted by davy at 12:19 PM on March 12, 2007

First of all, trading money for leisure is pretty simple. You just hire someone to work for you, and do things that you'd otherwise be doing: mowing the lawn, washing dishes, etc. Now that person has more money and less leisure, and you have less money and more leisure.

So what does it mean that high earners have less leisure? It suggests that people earning lots of money prefer the money they're getting to the leisure time they could be having by not earning it, whereas lower earners would rather the free time. This makes sense, because working for an hour is (definitionally) more lucrative for the rich.

On preview: hoverboards don't work on water, that's a neat variable to consider. If poor people's jobs have gotten less pleasant in comparison to rich people's jobs, that could lead to data like this too, it seems.
posted by goingonit at 12:20 PM on March 12, 2007

And I still spend ALL of that leisure time doing ridiculous things like reading through MetaFilter and NONE of it on my laundry.

How little leisure time do I need to have before I can hire a butler?
posted by grapefruitmoon at 12:51 PM on March 12, 2007

I'd like to see a detailed analysis of the assumptions underlying this study. Every source I've ever seen has claimed that the length of the average work week has been steadily creeping up every year in the US, so I just don't buy this.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:05 PM on March 12, 2007

I don't need a butler, but a house boy would be nice. Preferably one who's good at massage. And fetching cocktails.

It's hard work being a cute & witty woman of leisure...
posted by miss lynnster at 1:06 PM on March 12, 2007

The Ramey and Francis 2005 study that they cite comes to the exact opposite conclusion: that leisure time has been pretty much flat since 1900.

I have no idea which study has the better methodology but I find it amusing that the authors of the study posted include sex in the category of "Personal care" (Appendix Table A2, pg 51).
posted by euphorb at 1:17 PM on March 12, 2007

I'm not sure if this is particularly surprising, or should be controversial. Sure, there are plenty of poor people who work long hours in hard jobs, but there are also plenty of "poor" people who are actually 23 year olds with few expenses who work just enough to get by and pay for beer. A lot of poor people are poor because they just don't value being rich that much, especially in a country where the poor can still have plenty of food, a car, an a decent apartment/a house in many areas.

I would like to see a study of how much people enjoy their jobs, relative to how wealthy they are. Work and leisure don't have to be entirely different things.

I'd think the wealthy would be split on the extremes, with some(mostly older) people loving their jobs and many hating them. It's not like every rich person spends their days playing golf with clients and calling it work. A lot of them are like young associates in big law firms, working 80 hours a week doing stupid work that wastes their skills. It's a terrible job, but it pays pretty well.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 2:00 PM on March 12, 2007

Bulgaroktonos: maybe there's an uncanny valley of wealth for those "young associates". They're working too hard for a not difference-making amount more than average. I.e., they aren't filthy rich in the never have to work and live on a huge private estate kind of way, they're just "making 2x the Joneses household income, and thus driving nicer cars and possessing larger TVs". For those people, the happiness is quite illusory: they work a lot more, but they aren't actually living a different life, just a shinier one.. So the graph of income -> happiness might have a dropoff at a certain point of upper middle class, before shooting right back skyward when you get into the "could safely quit anytime and still live a life of luxury for the rest of their days" range.

That said, the FPP article is retarded.
posted by hincandenza at 2:26 PM on March 12, 2007

So, over the last 40 years, the average person has to spend up to 30% less time on work-related stuff, while for the top earners, it has remained the same.

If this is true, I have to wonder if there is a similar shift in overtime being phased out for lower-paid workers, or more of the lower-paid jobs going to salaried employees (kind of the same thing, I know) -- certainly I wouldn't work extra hours for no extra money unless I knew I'd get something out of it (like fast-track to being a top-earner) and I'd always put in a few extra hours if I got paid for each and every one.
posted by davejay at 2:26 PM on March 12, 2007

This isn't surprising.

My high school friends and I all came from very similar backgrounds in the rural northwest. For whatever reason, I worked harder in high school, got into a good college, worked hard there, got into a good graduate school, and will shortly be making 4-5x as much as my high school friends.

They seem to have had a good time slacking off, drinking beer, and smoking pot, though. I doubt either of us is eager to trade places with the other.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 2:26 PM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

A lot of poor people are poor because they just don't value being rich that much, especially in a country where the poor can still have plenty of food, a car, an a decent apartment/a house in many areas.

I think you all might need to read this.
posted by Deathalicious at 2:30 PM on March 12, 2007 [3 favorites]

As a life-long slacker and underacheiver, I agree with the thesis of the article, but not the evidence or methods he used to arrive at his conclusions - which as others have noted smack of nearly fatal ignorance.

While I honestly would not enjoy being a rich, type-A alpha male with way too much worry about materialism - being poor is no walk in the park, either.

While decadently luxurious compared to much of the world, I don't think that the author of the article - nor any of the de-leisured "rich" folk he refers to - have any clue or concept of what it's like to have to decide between a 40 cent can of beans and a 80 cent can of beans that probably taste better. (Decadently luxurious in that not only do I have a choice, but I actually have 40 cents for a can a beans and a place to cook them.)

However.

I have no debt. I can leave everything behind and just start walking at any time. Everything I own can fit in a minivan, and if I really wanted to I could get it down to two large bags and still be happy.

And for the most part I'm happy. Often hungry, often worried, but often deliriously happy. There's so much art and music, beauty and magic I would have missed out on if I haven't willfully and consciously approached and crafted this crazy mixed up life.

Now, I wouldn't mind having a giant bank roll handed to me, but I'm not going to sell my soul and my life to get it. I would use it wisely, invest it consciously and be very generous with it, and there would be much rejoicing.

But I pretty much do all that now, while poor, and there's plenty of rejoicing. And no love lost on little green pieces of paper.

And all told, there's something incredibly liberating about knowing that not only can you walk away from it all, that the material possesions you have aren't anywhere near as important as yourself and your mind, but that you also have the skills and knowledge to continue your life as you want to live it nearly anywhere in the world from scratch.

And that's something of a little piece of zen-Satori I recieved recently. It's profoundly liberating and freeing.
posted by loquacious at 2:37 PM on March 12, 2007

Yes, Deathalicious, there are people who are that poor, but not everyone we put below the poverty line or some other arbitrary indicator of poorness is living that life. Almost half of people below the poverty line own their homes. 90% have food security, around the same percentage that own color TVs. Most have microwaves, many have clothes dryers. Yes, some people have hard lives, and they should be helped. Still, let's not lets not be overdramatic about things. Life, even for the poor, is pretty good in America.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 2:41 PM on March 12, 2007

Lordy, lordy, we's got color TVs! Praise Jesus! Guess that means that complaints about health care, job opportunities, death rates, education levels and income are all out the window, 'cuz we gots the color TVs!

As for leisure time, I've looked for subsidized health and/or dental care a couple of times and found that the nearest state agency is only three hours away by bus! Rich people don't know what they're missin'!
posted by klangklangston at 3:14 PM on March 12, 2007

As someone who's spent the day sitting on the couch drinking beer and getting paid for it via unemployment insurance, I can't really deny that I have more leisure time (due to left-wing labor policies, thank you very much), I hasten to remid this guy that time off don't buy groceries.
posted by jonmc at 3:19 PM on March 12, 2007

Thats me boss I got nothing but time. I got no place to be. Don't make me no nevermind , I'll be here killing time before time kills me.
posted by nola at 3:30 PM on March 12, 2007

"..standing around the water cooler, riding the train to work..." ...is "leisure time?" In what universe? I certainly don't consider my 1+ hour commute as "me time!" On the other hand, I work with people who make 3 times my salary, and I have yet to see them do anything that I consider work. No wonder they never go home.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 4:17 PM on March 12, 2007

I just finished reading the book "Nickel and Dimed" and got a very different picture of poverty. Before anyone believes a word of this article I recommend one of two things:
1. Find the methodology for this study, which is not in the article
2. Read this book

I suspect that the conclusions of the article may be true for the lower middle class and the unemployed (in some twisted sense of leisure), but not for the working poor.
posted by gregv at 4:20 PM on March 12, 2007

"..standing around the water cooler, riding the train to work..." ...is "leisure time?" In what universe?

It's hardly work time, is it? On the train to work you can listen to music, read a book, contemplate the universe etc. At the water cooler you gossip and chat with co-workers. Neither activity is productive work. You have to draw a line between work and leisure somewhere, and surely these two examples fall on the leisure side.
posted by Aloysius Bear at 4:34 PM on March 12, 2007

Aloysius Bear: bollocks. The notion that productive work is limited to the duration between when your ass meets chair (or hands conveyor belt or whatever) is, at its least pernicious, inaccurate. Mostly it's nuts. If you work with people then that time spent around the cooler keeps you working as a team, aware of one anothers' needs, priorities, and capabilities. Is that its only function? Clearly not, but classifying every minute of the day into productive and non-productive is an industrial-age fantasy, especially in a current-day office or team-oriented business where the product isn't a widget but a functioning service or process.

As for the train - would you be making that trip if work weren't at one end of the commute? No. Hence, it ain't free time. You may choose to use it for work or not, but it's not leisure by any stretch.
posted by abulafa at 5:22 PM on March 12, 2007

"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."

What crap. Everyone is credited the same 24 hours in a day. Nobody can earn ten or a hundred times more than anybody else. Not so, obviously, with income.
Progressive taxes distribute some of the income of high earners to low earners, but still leave the high earners with more.
This is nonsense.
posted by bystander at 5:27 PM on March 12, 2007

abulafa, to make the model of substitution between work and leisure tractable, the paper's authors had to draw a dividing line between work and leisure somewhere. This doesn't mean that this dividing line is 100% accurate, and nowhere do the authors claim that. It's a simplifying assumption that makes the model practical to analyse — a model with no simplifying assumptions would be no less complex and intractable than the real world, which would defeat the point of having a model in the first place.

Note this paragraph from the paper:

Given that some categories of time use are easier to categorize as leisure than others, we create four distinct measures of leisure. Our measures range from the narrow, which includes activities designed to yield direct utility, such as entertainment, socializing, active recreation, and general relaxation, to the broad, namely, time spent neither in market production nor in non‐market production. While the magnitudes differ slightly, the conclusions drawn are similar across each of the leisure measures.

posted by Aloysius Bear at 5:43 PM on March 12, 2007

I think the value of the study is the way it can focus our thinking on wealth redistribution. If we learn that the wealthy work harder, on average, than the less wealthy, that's useful information.

Nobody is suggesting that all poor people are lazy or that all wealthy people are self-made. However, there does seem to be something unjust about taking money from the hard working and giving it to the less hard working, and if it turns out that some people are less well off simply because they prefer to work a mere forty to forty-five hours per week, then I don't think such people should be entitled to much help.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 6:26 PM on March 12, 2007

If we learn that the wealthy work harder, on average, than the less wealthy, that's useful information.


Not really. Especially not if the very wealthiest--some percentage fewer than 1%--actually don't work harder, but merely take in the lion's share of the reward from the upper 50% who do work harder. Remember, the vast majority of the wealth in this country is in the hands of less than 1%. This study does not, as far as I can tell, say anything about how hard that group works. To me, it just says, the middle class and the working class are most likely getting royally screwed by people who consider networking a more valuable skill than engineering.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:38 PM on March 12, 2007

saulgoodman, I don't think you're disagreeing with me.

If it turns out that the top 50% works harder than the bottom 50%, but the top 1% barely works at all, obviously we should distribute away from the top 1% but maybe go a little easy on the hard-working members of the top 50%.

I'm just objecting to the "upper middle class" (who are often wage slaves as much as anyone else) being rolled together with the "rich."
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 6:47 PM on March 12, 2007

there does seem to be something unjust about taking money from the hard working and giving it to the less hard working,

which is basically why capitalism is so terrible
posted by eustatic at 6:54 PM on March 12, 2007

You're going to have to flesh that out a little, eustatic.

By "taking" I'm not referring to mutually consensual transactions.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 6:59 PM on March 12, 2007

I'm just objecting to the "upper middle class" (who are often wage slaves as much as anyone else) being rolled together with the "rich."

I definitely agree. The middle-to-upper middle class people I know do tend to work very hard. They're also typically saddled with large amounts of debt.

In a well-tuned economy, the fact that they're the hardest working (and by extension, most productive) members of society should mean they don't have to go into debt at all.

But the current system is actually debt-based, and penalizes lack of credit history! But I digress...
posted by saulgoodman at 7:05 PM on March 12, 2007

If leisure were a commodity to compare it would need rate per hour. For most people who aren't allowed to earn overtime it is measured in movie or drink hours, contrasted with skiiing or golf hours for people who work their own hours.
posted by Brian B. at 8:00 PM on March 12, 2007

This study is beyond stupid.

And Aloysius, you're not serious, are you? A simplifying assumption that makes the model easier to analyze? It's an assumption that overdetermines the result, aka perspectival bias.

Although, if by "easy" you mean, "lets them say what they want to say," well, then, sure, I agree with you.

And if we're really going to measure leisure by whether or not its productive, it might be useful to have an enabling leisure category, aka as the work needed to do work. Laundering your suits or uniforms, repairing your commuter vehicle, and so on. Certainly not things one chooses as their leisure.
posted by hank_14 at 8:16 PM on March 12, 2007

Hey, here's one of those awesome examples of poor people and their rad leisure time.
posted by hank_14 at 8:20 PM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

About 10% of Americans (35 million) experience food insecurity, but 13% of children do. And 35 million is a awfully high number of people.

hank14 - your link is frightening. Thank you for posting it - we all need to realise what is at stake.
posted by jb at 9:21 PM on March 12, 2007

Anyone who *works* for a living is still within the working-class, and is taxed accordingly. In fact, the heaviest tax burdens fall upon the "working rich." Where the taxes do not fall, and where we've grown a new aristocracy, is in the realm of capital gains and passive income, not to mention corporate taxes. We should not make our working class pay - out of their ordinary income - the tab of eight years of irresponsible ruling-class gambling.

However, this is only half of the problem. We need to address the wellspring of our tax burden, which is overwhelmingly our military spending. It has become a protection racket. As an investment, how has the last trillion dollars worked out? Why are we still hitting the craps table?
posted by kid ichorous at 11:15 PM on March 12, 2007

My previous ranting doesn't make too much sense out of context - it was my reaction to the close of the article, so here's the connective tissue:

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

The problem is that a "redistributive" taxation is already in effect - the ultra-rich are taxed less, at the expense of both the working rich and working poor. What this might mean for our economist's example is that the top one percent earns more *and* works less, but that the next nine percent of "rich" folks make up the balance in overtime and reduced take-home earnings.

In this case, it's not the poor who owe the rich any ridiculous "leisure debt." It's the top one percent who owes the rest of the market.
posted by kid ichorous at 12:06 AM on March 13, 2007

Read the paper (not the article), hank_14.

They construct four different measures of leisure, from narrow to broad. At least one of the definitions of work includes the things you mention (laundry, repair etc).

As the quote in my previous comment shows, for each of the measures of leisure they came to the same conclusion.

Given they come to the same conclusion for narrow and broad definitions of leisure, where is the bias?
posted by Aloysius Bear at 2:55 AM on March 13, 2007

Ok, let's look at the study. In 2003, the difference between core market work and total market work, excluding non-market work (the kind I alluded to previously), is the difference between 29.82 and 33.01, which is a difference of 3.19 hours, or roughly 191 minutes a week.

Now, total market work, which according to their data is 3.19 hours of more work time than "core market work," measures things like: "any time spent on other work-related activity, including commuting time, formal breaks at work, time spent searching for a job, etc." One wonders what etc. entails, but whatever, let's just assume there's more to total market work than just the three items listed.

It does not include food prep, car repair, or anything that enables work, as that falls under non-market work.

Now, let's take the average commute time (available here, which is 26.5 minutes, and assuming only 5 days of work (which I think is dubious and underestimating, but whatever) that's 132.5 minutes, which leaves us with approximately 58 minutes for eating during your workday, talking at the water cooler, or taking a leak. In a five day spread, that would give you a whopping 11.7 minutes per day to eat, drink, piss, and crap.

Does anyone think these are valid numbers, when a small bout of constipation, or breathing between bites of food, clearly vitiates the data? Can we call bullshit on the study yet?

And thanks Aloysius, for recommending I read the actual study. I hadn't realized what an outright fraud it was.
posted by hank_14 at 4:32 AM on March 13, 2007

Economists discover concept of opportunity cost. Film at 11.
posted by Ynoxas at 8:26 AM on March 13, 2007

Metafilter: More leisure time now!
posted by beelzbubba at 9:46 PM on March 13, 2007

At the water cooler you gossip and chat with co-workers. Neither activity is productive work.

Sorry for posting this WAY after this discussion went stale, but I have to disagree on this point. Water cooler gossip is essential for a productive company, because it serves not only to bind people together as a more productive team, but also because it can also serve as a channel for knowledge sharing which is becoming increasingly important. I wrote my dissertation on knowledge sharing so trust me when I tell you that even when it looks like nothing is happening, something is happening.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:50 AM on March 20, 2007