TECHNOLOGY AT WORK

February 2015
Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions
81
The number of leisure hours in the US has
increased for low-educated men but
decreased for high-educated workers
Other countries are seeing similar trends
A World of Leisure
In a 1932 essay entitled In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell argued that a
shorter working day would allow people to enjoy “the necessities and elementary
comforts of life.” 125 How could such a life be obtained? According to John Maynard
Keynes, technological progress provides the answer, potentially solving mankind’s
“economic problem”, and depriving us of our traditional purpose of subsistence.
Instead he predicted that we could eventually be facing the dilemma of how to use
our freedom from economic cares and occupy our leisure. 126
In the past, the wealthy elite have enjoyed the most leisure, while the poor needed
to work relatively hard for their subsistence. According to research by Hans-Joachim
Voth, average hours worked increased in Britain during the early Industrial
Revolution, from 50 to 64 hours per week between 1760 and 1800. 127 At the time,
Jane Austen’s novels about the wealthy elite depicted a society at leisure.
Yet, over recent decades, things have been different in developed economies. Not
only have average working hours declined, but the wealthy are now the ones
working relatively long hours. According to a recent study, leisure in America
increased by 6 to 8 hours per week for men and 4 to 8 hours for women between
1965 and 2003. 128 Furthermore, research shows that low-educated men saw their
leisure grow between 2003 and 2007, while highly-educated workers saw their
leisure decline. More recent data from the American Time Use Survey 2013 also
show that workers with at least a bachelor’s degree work on average two hours
more per day than high-school graduates. 129
This is not a trend that is specific to America. For the countries where data are
available, the vast majority of people today work fewer hours than they did in 1990.
Western Europeans, who worked more than Americans as late as 1960, now work
much less suggesting that unionisation and labour market regulations are partly
behind the decline in hours. 130 Leisure is seemingly also associated with
productivity-increasing technological progress. Workers in Greece put in the most
hours in the OECD: they work more than 40% more than Germans, for example. Yet
German productivity is about 70% higher, more than making up for the difference. 131
Technological change also partly explains why low-income workers enjoy more
leisure. An important feature of the digital age is that it provides many things for
free, giving low-income earners a more enjoyable leisure. According to a study by
Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A.
Stone “people with greater income tend to devote relatively more of their time to
work, compulsory non-work activities (such as shopping and childcare), and active
leisure (such as exercise) and less of their time to passive leisure activities (such as
watching TV).” As information technology makes especially passive leisure more
interesting and cheaper, the demand for leisure among low-income earners is likely
to increase further. Companies like Netflix and Spotify have recognised this trend,
and many others are following.
125 Russel (1932).
126 Keynes (1930).
127 Voth (2001).
128 Aguiar and Hurst (2007).
129 The Economist (2014).
130 Alesina, Glaeser, Sacerdote (2006).
131 The Economist (2014).
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