NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

The underworked American: Stop your whining: leisure time is on the rise (Christopher Shea, August 12, 2007, Boston Globe)

Working beneath the radar, however, some sociologists and economists have been gathering provocative data that suggest that Americans are not nearly as workaholic as we think we are. True, we don't evacuate our cities in August, like the French. But today, these scholars say, we spend far less time on work than Americans did four decades ago. From 1965 to 2003, according to one study published this month, the average American gained the equivalent of seven weeks of vacation -- in the form of extra leisure time spread throughout the year.

Much of the time-savings comes from a source few people think about when they whine (or brag) about their workweeks: cleaning and cooking. We do much less of it than we used to, thanks to vacuum cleaners, takeout food, and other innovations. And the time-savings there more than offsets the extra time women now spend in offices, according to the study, which appears in the latest issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

"The amount of stuff that my wife and I do around the house, compared to what my mom and father did around the house, is lower by an order of magnitude of 30 or 40 percent than what they did," says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago who coauthored the study. His parents didn't have a dishwasher. "We have takeout food twice a week from a variety of healthy opportunities; they didn't."

The new study is part of a quiet revolution offering an arguably more accurate, and certainly surprising, portrait of how we spend our time. Hurst, along with coauthor Mark Aguiar, a University of Rochester economist, is among a growing number of scholars who champion the use of so-called time-diary surveys, which ask people to recount in detail how they spent a specific recent day. The technique has been used for decades but is gaining in popularity as economists realize the importance of pinning down the time spent on small, forgettable tasks (like mopping a floor). And it discourages exaggeration, its advocates say, because the time estimates for a given day can't add up to more than 24 hours.

The big difference is that we have so much more time to bitch and moan about how little time we have.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 12, 2007 8:51 AM