Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  In addition to how much time, we should also ask whose leisure we are tracking. Data such as Maddison’s shows us the rise of leisure from the perspective of the individual worker. That is great if you happen to be a typical adult male in paid work. It is not so revealing if you happen to be a woman, unemployed, under fourteen or over sixty-five. Work and leisure, moreover, are not individual experiences. Most people (still) live in households which share paid work, unpaid work and leisure unevenly among their members. If Mr John Smith came home one hour earlier from the office on Friday, it would make little difference to the sum of leisure if Mrs Smith spent an extra hour cooking his meal. One person’s leisure can mean another’s work. But it does not have to. Mr Smith might decide to lend his wife a hand with the dishes (thirty minutes), in which case each would gain thirty minutes of leisure, and immeasurable marital harmony. It is the distribution between members that matters as well as leisure overall. There are good reasons, then, why, before we can reach a verdict on the leisure revolution, we need to widen our perspective from that of the worker to that of society as a whole.

  Thanks to Valerie Ramey and Neville Francis, two economists, we have a comprehensive analysis of time use that allows us to follow the shifting balance between work and leisure in the United States across the twentieth century.16 Their data captures unpaid work (‘home production’, i.e. cooking, cleaning, etc.) and schooling, alongside paid work. It also includes adolescents, the elderly and those working for the state, for example soldiers and teachers. The figures reveal several fascinating long-term trends. Working men have indeed been doing less paid work since the 1930s, but women have been doing more. Put together, both sexes aged twenty-five to fifty-four on average worked exactly as many hours in 2005 as they did in 1910: thirty-one hours a week. When it comes to leisure, the picture is mixed. Americans as a whole (aged fourteen+) enjoyed four more hours of leisure a week in 2005 than their ancestors a century earlier. But some generations gained much more than others. The young (aged fourteen to seventeen and eighteen to twenty-four) had five extra hours of free time, the elderly (sixty-five+) as many as fourteen. Everyone was a winner, except the twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds. In 2005, they had almost the same amount of free time as in 1900. But look a bit closer and an interesting backsliding becomes visible. The middle-aged, too, had their leisure revolution. It simply went into reverse in the 1980s. For them, 1980 was the apex of leisure – five hours extra compared to 1910. This was quite in line with their younger cohorts. What set them apart was that these additional hours were all lost again between 1980 and 2005.

  John Maynard Keynes in 1930 gazed into a crystal ball and saw a future where, thanks to greater productivity, people would enjoy an extra twenty hours of leisure a week by 2030. Clearly, we are a long way from this utopia. At the same time, it is plainly wrong to think there was no leisure revolution at all or to suggest that workers in the 1930s gave up free time in exchange for goods and higher wages.17 Into the 1970s, Americans across all age groups enjoyed more leisure and did less paid work. It is a fallacy to presume that consuming more must mean having less leisure. The bulk of the twentieth century shows the opposite is the case.

  Does the reversal since the 1970s then prove the pessimists right? Not entirely. American women (aged twenty-five to fifty-four) did eleven hours more paid work in 2000 than they did in 1970. We would expect leisure to suffer. What is remarkable is that their free time declined by only half that amount. In other words, leisure proved quite resilient. Women did not trade in their free time for greater earnings on a 1:1 basis. Since a day has only twenty-four hours, where did the missing hours come from once women started going to the office? They came mostly from taking off their rubber gloves and putting down mops and dusters. Women’s weekly unpaid ‘home production’ has fallen by over eleven hours since 1960. Their husbands and partners picked up some of the slack. Since 1970, the typical middle-aged American man has been chipping in five extra hours a week doing chores at home. This, in part, explains why the leisure revolution came to a full stop for men of working age; incidentally, these were the very years when complaints about feeling rushed started to rise. Many men converted shorter working hours not into leisure but into housework. Going to work accomplished what Hoovers, washing machines and other domestic technologies had promised for decades but failed to deliver: to save women time.18 Time devoted to childcare, it should be noted, has expanded, even as the time devoted to cooking and cleaning has fallen.

  It is too simple to imagine a straightforward substitution of household labour by goods and services bought in the marketplace, as some economists do.19 While double-earner families did ‘buy in’ food rather than cook from scratch, they have been unwilling to let go of all sorts of other housework, including care of their children. The remarkable fact is that an American household spends the same twenty-two hours on home production in 2000 as it did in 1900 – in spite of having fewer children, although also because of more smaller households that create more work. Instead of substituting one for the other, households buy more goods and services and hang on to housework. If those doing it were paid for it, household work alone would amount to a formidable 22 per cent of GDP in the USA today; if the services provided by dishwashers and other consumer durables were added, this figure would rise to 30 per cent.20 It is no coincidence that the decline in unpaid work since the 1970s has been accompanied by a shift towards casual clothing and eating out. If people were willing to hand over even more unpaid work to the market or accept lower standards of comfort and cleanliness, leisure would benefit considerably; in sum, home production has proved as much a brake on the leisure revolution as work and wages.

  To see here the coming of an ‘androgynous society’ may be a little premature – women at present are still left with two thirds of the housework, and men tend to look after the dog rather than the kids. Still, the large gulf in time use between American men and women has narrowed, a partial convergence echoed across Europe and Canada.21

  This democratizing trend has been criss-crossed by new class divides. In the 1950s, observers started to notice that ordinary Americans were working less and expressed a greater desire for free time than their bosses. Executives, meanwhile, demonstrated their importance with long days at the office and multiple phones on their desk. Busyness signalled status. Time-use diaries since have documented the widening gulf between these two cultures of work and leisure. Education is a good predictor of leisure. The more Americans have of the former, the less they tend to have of the latter. A high-school graduate gained almost seven hours of extra free time between 1965 and 1985, whereas a university graduate stood still. Long hours were disproportionately clocked up by highly educated men and women. The educational gap was reflected in inequalities of time by income. High earners had four hours less free time than workers on a low income. The poor were the new leisure class, the rich the new working class.22

  Theories of consumer society often see leisure and work in a zero-sum relationship: the more important one becomes, the less significant the other. Yet the gain in leisure – while modest – has been paralleled by the growing significance of work as a source of wealth. In 1900, being rich meant having a country house or an inheritance. Today, it depends much more on one’s salary and qualifications – hence the fascination with bonus pay and the proliferation of university degrees. In the course of the twentieth century, success came to rely increasingly on human capital.23 Longer hours are one way to accumulate it. Idleness fell victim to career development.

  ‘Extreme busyness,’ Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1877, seven years before shooting to fame with Treasure Island, ‘whether at school, or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic [wide-ranging] appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.’24 The idea that idleness built personality will appear perverse to most readers today. Admittedly, Stevenson managed to combine idle moments with writing thirteen novels, six tr
avel books, collections of essays and poetry, composing – he played the flageolet, a type of flute – and travelling to North America and Samoa, where he cleared land and built a home, all in a life cut short at forty-four. Keynes, too, had a dismal view of work. In his eyes, the rich, if they worked at all, were motivated by avarice, the poor by the need to survive. That work might be a source of pleasure and pride largely eluded him.25 In post-industrial society, managers and professionals are spending longer hours at the office than their counterparts two generations earlier. In part, they do so because their job is more satisfying today – ‘le bonheur du travail ’, as the French say.26

  The contrast between hard-working Americans and idle Europeans is almost a cliché today. In 2006, the financial giant UBS pointed to longer work hours to explain why the American economy was growing faster27 – an idea that the recession since has surely put to rest. On the face of it, the numbers speak for themselves. According to the OECD, Americans worked on average 1,800 hours in 2005, compared to 1,680 in Britain, 1,550 in France, and around 1,400 in the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia.28 The introduction of the thirty-five-hour week in France in 2000 was the icing on the cake. In Germany, the number of paid holidays rose from twenty-three days in the 1970s to thirty-one days in 2010; after twenty years of service, an American employee would be lucky to get nineteen days. What lies behind this divergence? One thesis invokes the deep-rooted Puritan work ethic in America. This is rather dubious. In the 1950s, a keen observer of social change like David Riesman worried that America was undergoing an ‘anti-Puritan revolution’, where leisure, once a ‘fringe benefit’, ‘threatens to push work itself closer to the fringes of consciousness and significance’.29 Americans were more idle than Europeans into the early 1980s. A good deal of the recent reversal had to do with stronger unions, public services and social-democratic politics in the old world.

  Such contrasts between national types obscure more than they reveal. Americans, the argument goes, prefer income and consumption to leisure, whereas Europeans choose to be a bit poorer and take time off. It depends on one’s point of view. To Australian Aborigines, whose simpler lifestyle requires only three or four hours of work a day, the two alleged opposites would appear barely different versions of the same modern time regime.30 Once we dig beneath the national stereotypes, the parallels become more visible. In 1941, a mere 3 per cent of sixty-five-year-old Americans cited a preference for leisure as the main reason for leaving the labour force. By the 1980s, every second did.31 Ageing Americans, in other words, are not so different from Europeans. Conversely, many Europeans share in the trends outlined for the United States. Shorter official work hours notwithstanding, busyness and overtime have been on the rise in Europe, too, chipping away at a neat distinction between working week and leisurely weekend. In Germany, the number working in the evenings has increased from 23 per cent to 30 per cent since 1995; 40 per cent regularly worked on Saturdays, 20 per cent on Sundays in 2007.32 In the Netherlands, paid work has increased and free time decreased by almost four hours a week in the last generation.33 The gender gap with regard to leisure and unpaid work has narrowed – although it remains pronounced in Italy and Spain.34 One reason for the higher number of hours worked in the United States is that fewer people in France and Germany do paid work in the first place. This does not automatically mean the latter wallow in an ocean of leisure. Rather, they cook more frequently. Once unpaid work is added, the gap in work hours with the United States shrinks to 10 per cent.35 Spaniards virtually match American hours in paid work.

  Above all, European time has undergone a similar polarization by class. In Germany today, more than half of those in a ‘superior position’ work more than forty hours a week; a fifth put in more than forty-eight hours. In lower positions, thirty-five hours or less are normal. In the United Kingdom, similarly, men with low human capital had less leisure time in 1961 than their better-educated fellow citizens. Forty years later, they had more. The average British manager gives up four days of his holiday entitlement every year.36

  All this means that education, gender and household composition shape leisure more than whether one lives in the United States, or Sweden, or France. A chief executive in Stockholm or Paris is closer to his New York counterpart than to the local postman when it comes to free time. Across the board, children are very bad for leisure; living alone with them doubly so. It is these social roles that largely determine who is time rich and who time poor. National policy regimes matter less.

  A group of social scientists has tried to capture how much free time people could have if they just worked enough to stay above the poverty line and attended to the bare necessities at home.37 Like ‘discretionary income’, people have ‘discretionary time’, a hidden reserve they could tap in to. Some have more than others. A single adult with no kids gains around eleven hours of discretionary time when tying the knot as the couple starts to share household chores. When the first-born arrives, a double-earning couple loses between seven hours (Sweden) and thirteen hours (United States). A subsequent divorce leaves a Finnish mother twenty-three hours worse off, an American thirty-three hours. As we might expect, time poverty, like other poverty, is less harsh in Scandinavian welfare regimes than in liberal America; although the figures also suggest that the French have even less potential free time.

  In real life, of course, time does not have the same kind of ‘discretionary’ quality as money. It does not come in clear units of dollars and pounds but is tied up in habits, sequences of activities and all sorts of acts of coordination. Counting it in bulk is fraught with problems. Still, the concept of discretionary time makes it possible to distinguish between those who give up leisure by choice and those who do so by necessity. Double earners complain about harriedness, but they could make Keynes’s dream a reality tomorrow if they wanted to. While not completely masters of their own destiny, it is hard to treat them as victims of time poverty. The real temporal proletariat are lone parents. What is interesting for our purpose is that Europeans – whether they live in welfarist Sweden or corporatist France – have been just as bad at turning discretionary time into leisure as Americans. A Swede could have eighty-five hours of extra free time a week and still live above the poverty line. In real life, he makes do with just thirty hours of spare time. Similarly, the average American, German and Frenchman each sacrifice forty-six hours a week of potential leisure. The contrast between leisure-loving Europeans and go-getting Americans must not be overdone.

  Most people in affluent societies, though, do not want to live just above the bare minimum. Downshifting remains a minority trend.38 Lots of extra free time is not seen to be worth it if it involves a shabbier apartment, older clothes and furniture and giving up the car, the newest electronic device and exotic holidays. The question is: is it the right choice? Or, is this allocation of time making people less happy than they would be otherwise? The question goes to the heart of what we mean by well-being and how to measure it. In the last generation, a vast literature has challenged the conventional economic yardstick of gross domestic product (GDP) and outlined a number of alternative measures of well-being. We cannot do justice to this extensive scholarship,39 only hint at implications for the uses of time. The initial focus of research was on the tenuous link between income and happiness in affluent societies. In a seminal paper in 1974, Richard Easterlin noted that, while rich Americans were happier than their poor neighbours, Americans as a whole were no happier in 1970 than in 1946, in spite of being 60 per cent richer (in real income). Once basic human needs were met – around $15,000 a year in 1974 money – additional income ceased to buy more happiness.40

  Other scholars since have been more optimistic and point out that richer countries do tend to be happier than poorer ones. Danes today are richer and happier than they were forty years ago. Whether there is a basic threshold beyond which money does not buy more happiness has also been questioned. A Gallup poll in 2007, for example, found that Americans’ reported well-
being continued to rise with their money.41 That happiness has not blossomed in the developed world at large even though money has rained down on us should not be so surprising. A new car or kitchen raises our objective well-being but at the same time it also raises our expectations. Our subjective well-being – which is what most surveys measure – remains unchanged. This is the so-called satisfaction treadmill. It is worth stressing, however, since it is sometimes forgotten, that the data does not show that affluence has made us less happy.

  It is useful asking people how happy they feel overall, but everyday life is a mix of more or less pleasant activities. We can learn a lot from asking in addition how satisfying or annoying they find particular activities on a given day and then checking how much time they devoted to each. This, put crudely, is the day-reconstruction method developed by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It has been the basis of an innovative inquiry into time use and well-being in France and the United States led by Kahneman, his Princeton colleague Alan Krueger and four other experts. The team interviewed eight hundred women in middle America (Columbus, Ohio) and a similar sample in the middle of France (Rennes) in 2005.42 The result is a ‘U-index’, a misery index which measures the percentage of time spent in an unpleasant state. There are many similarities. American, like French women, found sex, exercise and eating far more pleasant than going to work or looking after the children. Watching TV, it is worth noting, was as enjoyable as prayer and conversation, and considerably more so than sleeping and shopping. But there were also significant differences. French women tended to do more of the pleasant stuff, like eating and, yes, sex, and less unpleasant housework and paid work. And they found childcare less irritating than American mothers, which, perhaps, is the result of doing less of it, thanks to greater childcare support and having grandparents nearby.