Whatever Happened to Leisure?

The man ahead of me in the supermarket checkout line is talking on his cellphone. While talking, he is using one arm to unload the second of two loaded shopping carts. As far as I can tell, it’s been the same phone call for both carts. The call continues as he pays the bill and, as he departs, he’s still talking.

“I just don’t know,” the cashier says, rolling her eyes. “No eye contact at all, not once. Can you believe it?”

Good leisure, bad leisure

I’m sure the customer is a busy man. But it makes me wonder. Whatever happened to leisure? Where did casual conversations go? The only leisure many people I meet have ever experienced is the enforced kind — the nasty, anxious leisure of unemployment.

I wouldn’t call that high-quality leisure.

The association may be much of the problem. If you want high-quality leisure, true leisure, you need to have some income. The two go together, kind of like gin and tonic. In fact, every time leisure begins to appear, we treat it like the plague because it shows up as unemployment.

This isn’t a new problem.

In the late 1960s, automation was supposed to create mass unemployment. Economists seriously talked about the need for a guaranteed minimum income. Today, a new generation of economists is talking about the same thing because, well, automation is coming.  And this time it will have artificial intelligence, too.

In fact, there is a relationship between work and leisure. The more you work, the less leisure you have. But if you are more productive at work, you might choose more leisure over more money. People always talk about doing that, but few actually do it.

It’s a fear thing.

But productivity has more than doubled

But what about productivity? If I go to FRED, the statistical data bank at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, its “real output per hour of all persons” in the business sector shows an index number of 41.56 in early 1970, rising to 107.19 in the first quarter of this year. That’s more than double, an increase of 158 percent.

So what happened? Did we get more income? Or more leisure?

Neither, it turns out. An abundance of studies indicate that wages for most workers have been stagnant in real terms since 1970. Ditto leisure. In her 1992 book, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” economist Juliet B. Schor tracked our surprising loss of leisure time. That was years before the Blackberry and well before the launch of the first iPhone in 2007.

Today, no one can escape work: It will reach him or her by call, email or text, day or night. The hard part is measuring when you’re NOT working.

Theoretically, rising productivity will eventually diminish our work hours, if only because it takes time to consume and do the work now associated with much of our consumption. Skeptics should consider a model created by the late Swedish economist Steffan B. Linder and published in his 1970 book, “The Harried Leisure Class.” He noted that in addition to our paid work, we also have time devoted to personal work.

If you don’t know what personal work is, let me elaborate. When you are checking out your purchases with the automated cashier at Home Depot, you are doing personal work. When you are losing time searching for a functional human in any of the big box stores, you are doing personal work. When you spend time assembling, say, your kitchen cabinets from Ikea or fighting the octopus of wires between the TV set and everything else, you are doing personal work.

It mounts up.

The table below, a model from Linder’s book, shows the displacement of work time by personal work and consumption time as productivity increases. As productivity increases we should be enjoying both more stuff (consumption) and more personal time for consumption.

Productivity rose to somewhere between columns two and three on the chart since 1970. So while the most common (and reasonable) worker complaint these days is “Who ate my pie?” we need to ask another question, too.

Who took my easy chair?

Sources and References:

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis   https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHPBS?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=other_formats&utm_campaign=other_format

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

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(c) Scott Burns, 2019