Rearranging Life and Our Economy

Do you ever get the feeling there is something fundamentally wrong with how we live?

I do.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite happy with my life.

Dismal Statistics

But between the dismal statistics about American life expectancy and visits with people who are suffering one stress or another, I start to wonder if there is a fundamental change that would improve our quality life.

Something that would end the dominance of work.

Yes, I know. Today, work is glorified. It is the 24/7 deity.

But it wasn’t always this way. Indeed, work was supposed to be pretty much over by now.  That’s what economist John Maynard Keynes anticipated in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”

It Could Have Been Different

Keynes thought that so much capital and technical improvement would accumulate by today that we’d be working only two days a week. Hello, five-day weekends.

Didn’t happen. At least not for us. Indeed, while work hours have been reduced some in Europe, Americans now work longer hours than we did half a century ago.

That’s why I read Juliet B. Schor’s “True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy.” Originally published as “Plenitude” in 2010, the book looks for ways to relieve the problems she saw in two earlier books, “The Overspent American” and “The Overworked American.”

Her solution, in a nutshell, is to do what Keynes anticipated: shorten the workweek. This would release time to things at home and in our communities.

She sums the problem up this way.

“Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.”

             In his 1970 book “The Harried Leisure Class,” economist Staffan B. Linder examined the relationship between productivity and how much time is used up in consumption. Just as Keynes saw a limit to time at work, Linder saw that we can’t produce immense bounty and also have the time to consume it.

So, time at work is self-limiting.

You can read my column about this here.  Or you can read his book here.

Beating the Drum for a Much Shorter Work Week

Professor Schor’s perspective differs from the conventional wisdom in a big way. She sees working less in the market economy as a big economic opportunity. She doesn’t see it as a terrible economic loss.

How can that be?

Simple. Lots of productive things happen without exchanges of money. We can be productive in the economy of our homes and communities – as we are now, but more so if we spend less time at work. The same change, she believes, would also create a more diversified, less fragile economy.

The non-money economy is seldom considered by conventional economists, politicians and policymakers because it doesn’t involve cash changing hands. But it makes a big difference to real people in real life.

Is this an academic, pie-in-the-sky notion?

I don’t think so.

The Economy Is About More Than Money

If we start from Professor Schor’s broader view of economic activity, our economy would look very different. We’d include the multitude of things not counted, like all the work we do assembling things we’ve purchased, home gardens, home cooking instead of fast food meals, etc. And we’d subtract things that are negative rather than adding them. (Think: Do prisons really contribute to GDP?)

But the operative word here is “could.”

Idealism or Possibility?

We’ve had triumphant, manic predictions of a return to independent, simple living for at least a century. All were premature. Here are some examples.

In the early 1990s Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez published the first edition of “Your Money or Your Life,” a book that showed the way to win personal time by living simply. The book has become a founding document of the FIRE movement, “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”

In the early 1970s an analyst at Rand Corp., Duane Elgin, declared that “Voluntary Simplicity” was a fast-growing sub-culture. Those who chose lives of voluntary simplicity avoided status-seeking purchases, did much for themselves and lived simpler lives with more time and less money.

In 1920s and 1930s, agrarian economist Ralph Borsodi observed that the corporate mark-up on almost everything was a major incentive for people to do things for themselves. Then, as now, there was active discussion of urban vegetable gardens. In broader reading on that theme I found an article discussing the ease of farming snails in small urban spaces.

OK, I know. It’s just a baby step, here, from sublime to ridiculous.

Our Collective Addiction

But the dominant fact is that the move to voluntary simplicity has yet to happen. Instead, we’re addicted to wealth. Rich, poor or in between, we’re stuck on the notion that having more money will bring free time, life satisfaction and happiness.

I wonder if we’re even capable of figuring out that it just ain’t so.

Related columns:

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

Scott Burns, “Sandbagging the Pursuit of happiness,” September 10, 2022 https://scottburns.com/sandbagging-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

Sources and References:

John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf

Staffan B. Linder, “The Harried Leisure Class,” Columbia University Press, 1970 https://www.amazon.com/b/?ie=UTF8&node=507846&tag=amazusnavi-20

Juliet Schor, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” Basic Books, 1992  https://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Juliet-Schor/dp/046505434X/ref=sr_1_4?crid=294OZIWG7LDNT&keywords=juliet+schor&qid=1663172370&sprefix=%2Caps%2C127&sr=8-4

Juliet Schor,”The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need,” https://www.amazon.com/Overspent-American-Want-What-Dont/dp/0060977582

Juliet Schor, “True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy, https://www.amazon.com/True-Wealth-Ecologically-Small-Scale-High-Satisfaction-ebook/dp/B0052REQJM/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_2?crid=2OJ5UZHS64SBB&keywords=schor%2C+juliet+b.+2011.+true+wealth&qid=1663172435&sprefix=juliet+schor+%2Caps%2C201&sr=8-2-fkmr2

Ralph Borsodi, “This Ugly Civilization,” https://www.amazon.com/This-Ugly-Civilization-Ralph-Borsodi/dp/1943687226/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Ralph+Borsodi&qid=1663172657&sr=8-1

Duane Elgin, “Voluntary Simplicity Second Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich,” https://www.amazon.com/Voluntary-Simplicity-Second-Revised-Outwardly-ebook/dp/B003100UMO/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1XSH78ZRW572&keywords=voluntary+simplicity+duane+elgin&qid=1663172798&sprefix=Duane+Elgin%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1

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(c) Scott Burns, 2022