by Jonah Shepp
Reviewing Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed, Elizabeth Kolbert ties Schulte’s exploration of American busyness back to John Maynard Keynes’s famously incorrect prediction that dramatic increases in productivity would lead to less work and more leisure time in the 21st century:
Eighty years after Keynes first composed “Economic Possibilities,” a pair of Italian economists, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, got to chatting about it. How could “a man of Keynes’s intelligence,” they wondered, have been “so right in predicting a future of economic growth and improving living standards” and so wrong about the future of leisure? They decided to pose this question to colleagues in Europe and the United States. Perhaps some of those they asked were women; in any event, all those who responded were men. The result, “Revisiting Keynes” (2008), suggests that Nobel Prize-winning economists, too, are perplexed by “the overwhelm.”
Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime. But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need.
But Derek Thompson pushes back on the notion that Americans are busier than ever:
For much of the essay, this premise survives unchallenged. Obviously, we’re working more than ever, because it feels like we are. Right? Actually, no, we’re not.
As a country, we’re working less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s and considerably less than we did in the agrarian-industrial economy when Keynes foresaw a future of leisure. It’s not until the end of Kolbert’s essay that the reader steals a glimpse of the cold hard statistical truth: Every advanced economy in the world is working considerably fewer hours on average than it used to. …
For many Americans, particularly less-educated men and women, Keynes’ crystal ball has correctly foretold a future of historically high leisure time. But single parents in the U.S. report the most hours worked and severe time shortage in the developed world, and higher-educated men and women are actually working more than they were 50 years, bucking the global trend. Economists call this the “leisure gap,” and it’s a mirror reflection of the income gap. When it comes to leisure, the rich have less, and the poor have more.
He thinks this leisure gap reveals Schulte’s and Kolbert’s biases:
It’s appropriate that both Brigid Schulte and Elizabeth Kolbert are successful working moms, since this category of workers has seen its leisure time fall despite rising incomes. Since 1950, young married women’s work hours have tripled while married men’s hours have declined, according to the Philadelphia Fed. The well-educated rich, married, working mother is overwhelmed. But there are a lot of Americans who are neither well-educated, nor rich, nor working, nor parents. For them, there are probably more pressing concerns than belonging to (in the words of Swedish economist Staffan Linder) a “Harried Leisure Class.”
Previous Dish on Overwhelmed here.
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