"Reality of the Leisure Class

By Constantin Gurdgiev

Source Tech Central Station Daily Europe

"Andrew Carnegie's century-old conjecture asserts that large inheritance will decrease a person's labor-force participation. The idle wealthy classes aside, a somewhat different proposition applies for the working classes: a decrease in after-tax real income through higher taxation of wages and consumption will, in general, lead to falling hours worked and less leisure time.

From the point of view of European policymakers, accustomed to chronic unemployment, it is the latter part of this proposition that presents the greatest problem. Proponents of the European social model have argued that the excessively long hours worked by Americans cannot be accepted by European workers, who are willing to sacrifice higher income for more quality leisure. This implies that the European social model, with higher taxes, more social spending and severe restrictions on work time and working conditions, yields more free time to be spent on cultural activities, education, travel, family and friends.

There is, however, one problem with this idea: it is simply not true.

The latest evidence from the US Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the University of Chicago shows that while the length of the average work-week has been nearly steady in the US over the last four decades, the leisure time available to the American workers has risen even faster. According to the study's authors, Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst,

"...between 1965 and 2003 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."