I’m pretty sure the key issue is whether you count time spent doing child-focused activities like birthday parties or soccer games as “leisure.” They can be fun, sure, but they also feel obligatory (at least to middle-class parents).

Basically, work time has been declining since 1900 or so. Less educated workers, who are typically paid by the hour, are generally working fewer hours, and this trend has been continuing. More educated workers, who are usually salaried, are working longer hours. Women are working longer hours than they used to. People stopped spending time with their friends in the late 1960s, and all the new leisure time has gone to watching television watching. I really wish I were making this up, but that’s what the study shows, and it looks like a pretty reasonable estimate.

It’s a rather grim picture. Of course, most people reading this blog are probably exempt, that is, exempt from wage-hour laws, so they are probably working longer hours and screaming, “Where’s my #^$%%$ leisure time?”

One recollection that I find striking is that when we were looking for a house in the early 1980s, we found that a substantial proportion had finished basements with wet bars. From what I’ve seen, this isn’t very common any more (I know of friends who ripped theirs out).

I’m also not sure the male-female comparisons people seem intent on making are sound, given that the study demographically weights the sample across time, but not across gender.

But suppose some woman start working, say around 20 h/week. Clearly, more hours are worked by adults and their combined average free time is reduced. If half of them now work, the true average is now 25 instead of 20. But if we sum hours and divide by the new value of n_e (now increased because of the working women), the supposed “average hours worked” goes down to 33.33, due to dilution by the PT workers. See the difference? Whether or not someone who should know better made that specific error in arguing a point, I bet it has gummed up some statistics and been abused somewhere.

tyrannogenius

As a NZer, I know it’s fairly common to take a leave of absence from your job, or quit it, and go travelling around the world for a year or two. This seems to be a result of increased incomes allowing this to be financed. Taking a year’s holiday all at once, rather than taking an extra 1.3 weeks each year over a 40 year working-life has some advantages. And as a third-generation member of Servas I have encountered a number of Americans doing an OE. But of course, any American off spending a year mooching around Outer Mongolia is not going to be answering the door to any statisticians. Is taking your leisure time in large lumps accounted for in these surveys of time-leisure trade-offs?

Um, didn’t you ever hear of the double day? (that’s just the top correct google hit, not the full bibliography, because I’m busy with my kids now that I’m home from work.) Yes, women work outside the home more frequently now, so they get others to provide childcare, but quite often it isn’t ‘the market’ so much as family and friends. But despite what you saw on the Jetsons, housework and arranging the patchwork of activities, doctor’s visits, etc. takes time.

C’mon Belle, you can do this much more entertainingly than I can. Where are you?

i.e. we don’t have enough workers anymore, and we don’t want to even consider some kind of government-subsidized childcare to solve the problem, so would you lowly peasants mind putting off your leisure time until you die? After all, you can sleep as much as you want then.

Americans – especially women – spend less time cooking, cleaning and looking after their kids than they did in 1970. These functions have been largely outsourced to the market. So you’d expect the time saved to be divided in some proportion between leisure and increased market work hours.