Do It Yourself and Time Poverty

“That’s only part of the story.” That’s what I thought as I read a fascinating book.

Titled “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time – and How to Fix It,” (Harper Collins, $32 hardbound), and written by Atlantic staffer Annie Lowrey, the book provides example after example, at federal and state levels, of the frustrations we face doing just about anything that requires dealing with governmental regulations and procedures.

Very true.

But it’s only part of a trifecta of trends that have driven most Americans into serious time poverty. We’ve been hit by three distinct forces:

• The transfer of work once done by corporations to consumers.
• The failure of corporations to share productivity gains with workers.
• The increasing bureaucratization of daily life by government.

Let me explain.

The Working Consumer. In 1964 it was impossible to pump your own gas at a gas station. Today, New Jersey is the only state that doesn’t allow drivers to pump their own gas. The change saved time and payroll at the nation’s gas stations. They could eliminate employees that pumped gas by letting consumers do it.

Today, it would seem unnatural not to pump our own gas. I got to the point where I was annoyed if I pumped my gas and the pump told me to go inside to get a receipt. The gas station was wasting my time.

But that was just for starters. Today, many consumer purchases require different degrees of assembly that are both difficult and time consuming. We now “save time” by self-checkout at a multitude of supermarkets, not to mention ordering by app at fast-food and other convenience places. People are disappearing from commerce because we’re doing more of the work.

The Underpaid Worker. Discussions of when the American middle class started drawing short straws usually point to the 1970s or 1980s. That’s when inflation outpaced wages. It’s also when rising employee health care costs started to squeeze wage gains. And how about the decline of unions? Or outsourcing that caused workers to worry about keeping their jobs rather than advancing to higher incomes?

A new book, “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There,” lays this change out in amazing detail. Written by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, two economics professors, the book details the amazing growth of pass-through corporations and how the owners have, as a group, taken about 83 percent of the productivity and profit gains for themselves, leaving only 17 percent for most workers.

(Note: Before you think this is some kind of commie-pinko drivel, you should know that the authors explain that this sometimes has an entirely rational explanation. In many high-level professional firms, for instance, the owner generates the revenues, and they are likely to disappear the day the owner leaves. However you slice it, broad figures from other sources clearly show that workers are getting less of the gains in productivity while the owners of capital are getting more. The Economic Policy Institute, for instance, indicates that while worker productivity has increased 93.7 percent since 1979, hourly pay has risen only 32.7 percent.)

The net result is that rank and file workers are getting squeezed. But the squeeze doesn’t end with corporations.

 The Bureaucratization of Daily Life. In “The Time Tax,” Lowrey cites a study estimating that we collectively spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms. If that were translated into a “Department of Bureaucracy,” she writes, the department would need 5.9 million employees, making it “four times the size of the active-duty military.”

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. While the corporate sector has worked hard to make purchasing transactions altogether too easy (think unwitting subscriptions, near instant deliveries, etc.), our government makes transactions more complicated. Skeptics can count the number of pages in their income tax return.

The Stick May Beat Your Body, But the Carrot Beats Your Mind

 Ironically, this squeeze was predicted in 1970. That’s when economist Staffan B. Linder’s “The Harried Leisure Class” (Columbia University Press) was published. In it, Linder suggested that our material consumption was self-limiting because the ownership of goods required some time to use them and, also, to take care of them.

The bottom line was that as work productivity rose, the time for using and taking care of stuff crowded out the time to work.  Here, from his book, is what that looks like.

A less conceptual way to understand this is to realize that there is no need to own two waterski boats because you can ski behind only one boat at a time.

One result is storage units as a growth industry. We keep buying stuff that we don’t use. So millions of people pay monthly storage bills.

Lindner’s model, however, overlooked something. If your income comes from capital, it can outrun having to put in work time because “your people” do it. You have leisure. But you’re not harried.

So Who Gets to be Harried?

The people who are harried fall into two categories. The obvious member of the harried leisure class is a professional whose income stops when he or she stops working. The high-level dentist whose income depends on the number of root canals done has the little-used yacht in Fort Lauderdale. The cardiac surgeon whose ski house isn’t visited very often because supporting it requires a lot of procedures. The attorney who practically sleeps at his office rather than in his $2 million home. These folks are “the harried leisure class.”

The other category? Yup. It’s everyone else. Everyone else aspires to higher consumption. But most can’t afford it.

Why? Because they simply don’t have the time, the income or both.

Since we’re talking about 90 to 95 percent of our population being in this squeeze, this might be the moment for retooling the American Dream.

Related columns:

Scott Burns, “A Problem to Savor,” 12/22/1998: https://scottburns.com/a-problem-to-savor/

Scott Burns, “Whatever Happened To Leisure?,” 7/12/2019: https://scottburns.com/whatever-happened-to-leisure/

Scott Burns, “Rearranging Life And Our Economy,” 9/25/2022: https://scottburns.com/rearranging-life-and-our-economy/

Book References:

Annie Lowrey, “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time – and How to Fix It”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063442558/?bestFormat=true&k=annie%20lowrey%20the%20time%20tax&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-v2_k0_1_12_de&crid=1W64MJ1XK7GT9&sprefix=Annie%20Lowrey

Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich In America And How They Got There”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250378508/?bestFormat=true&k=everywhere%20millionaire&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-v2_k0_1_11_de&crid=HXJKF7EJK6JP&sprefix=Everywhere%20

Juliet B. Schor, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure”: https://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Juliet-Schor/dp/046505434X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=15EJD7SMD0511&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.z3DaPoiuhk8mUaOLRQgRC0Doe0wWHPWcGMLMDSVDEZhXjbFqFgUOD07Qv6FkOoVB60A0xl4XJDmWsZsVJZJERhX3XNAHywC2dC2OAq4OduWTCXXW_M6b8KTHbest877QnvktjsBzVx30vAPL3yv_J22ia3raxW_EXt-zEy-s6D15GrZ4RCfMU3xrBSZLhNtAxt-Tjx7Myof2h6XvoWfIQlr-6-cClQOouOmExL6IX7k.VFDxtpzxtFd7kvpzdqfoONXWxlp9pS87Lmksw1m80a0&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Overworked+American&qid=1790869065&s=audible&sprefix=the+overworked+american%2Caudible%2C167&sr=1-1#

Steffan Burenstam Linder, “The Harried Leisure Class”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231033028/?bestFormat=true&k=the%20harried%20leisure%20class&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-v2_k0_1_13_de&crid=3D4BVIGON7S05&sprefix=The%20Harried%20L

Other sources:

Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” 9/14/2026: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.

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(c) Scott Burns, 2026