EVER NOTICE...:

Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades (Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, Federal Reserve Working Paper 06-2)

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. 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.

...how life gets easier in direct proportion to the elites whining about how hard it is?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2007 2:57 PM