NO ONE WORKS HARDER THAN THEIR PARENTS DID:

The American Social Model (Tim Worstall, 07 Feb 2006, Tech Central Station)

The thing is, for all the complaints about and pointing at the way in which the American work-week has been rising over the decades there's one uncomfortable little fact (or, depending upon how you look at it, hugely comforting one): At the same time as everyone has been working ever harder for The Man -- and getting nowhere according to the doomsayers -- it's also true that Americans have been getting ever more leisure time.

The latest empirical proof comes in a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing "inequality" in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

There's an awful lot to pick out of that one paragraph. But before anyone's head explodes over the paradox of how can there be more leisure while we all know that working hours are getting longer, allow me to explain.

There was a mind-numbing discussion of how hard it is to be a young adult in America on the Diane Rehm Show today, with author Tamara Draut. At one point they worried about the fact that folks don't take time off after college to wait tables, pay off their undergraduate student loans, and save for graduate school.

MORE (via Ali Choudhury):
The land of leisure: Why Americans have plenty of time to read this (The Economist, 2/02/06)

A pair of economists have looked closely at how Americans actually spend their time. Mark Aguiar (at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) and Erik Hurst (at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business) constructed four different measures of leisure.* The narrowest includes only activities that nearly everyone considers relaxing or fun; the broadest counts anything that is not related to a paying job, housework or errands as “leisure”. No matter how the two economists slice the data, Americans seem to have much more free time than before.

Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs—the overstretched middle class of political lore—do very well. [...]

Do the numbers add up? One thing missing in Messrs Aguiar's and Hurst's work is that they have deliberately ignored the biggest leisure-gainers in the population—the growing number of retired folk. The two economists excluded anyone who has reached 65 years old, as well as anyone under that age who retired early. So America's true leisure boom is even bigger than their estimate.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2006 12:03 PM