![]() ![]() Now that people are living longer, parents are less likely to pass on a big financial bundle when they die. This reinforces another reason why well-off people are investing so much time in parenthood: preparing children to succeed is the best way to transfer privilege from one generation to the next. “Parents also now have far more insight into how children learn and develop, so they have more tools (and fears) as they groom their children for adulthood. It’s not a surprising observation, especially when you think about it in the context of competitive advantage. In the hierarchy of this ‘juggling class’, working parents are at the top, and the most time-scarce segment of society, according to Geoffrey Godbey, time-use expert at Penn State University, are working mothers with young children. And the people most affected? After decades of the opposite, it is now the best educated and highest paid workers putting in the longest hours and juggling the most household responsibilities. Multi-tasking has become a necessary skill, but with undesired consequences it makes us feel more pressed for time. We have become a society of instant-gratification – impatient and constantly vexed by thoughts that we can be doing so much more with the time we have. This evolution has arguably worsened over the decades, and especially with the advent of the internet. Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time. A person, he mused, “may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife-all at the same time, with varying degrees of success.” The socioeconomic result of this phenomenon is a “harried leisure class”, and when confronted with multiple choices of how to consume time given the opportunity cost of making that choice, stress levels rise. ![]() “ Being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still.” Swedish economist Staffan Linder in 1970 observed that utility maximization of leisure time becomes more important and the best way to do this, he found, was for people to increase their consumption per unit of time. This increased value of work time puts upward pressure on time in general and the result is that leisure time begins to seem stressful as people fell pressured to use it in the wisest and most efficient manner. The first group “wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do something that was more profitable,” explains Mr. “The participants who made this calculation ended up feeling less happy and more impatient while the music was playing,” as compared to the group not asked to value their time. Before the experiment, one group was asked to think about the value of their time by estimating their hourly wage the other was not. In 2011, University of Toronto researchers Sanford DeVoe and Julian House carried out an experiment which looked at the reaction of two groups of people as they listened to the first 86 seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé. As wages increase, people work longer, because now working becomes a more profitable use of one’s time. People are more careful and conscious in their use of time. In socioeconomic terms, the cost of leisure time has increased exponentially. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.” Weren’t the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, with their cars and their dishwashers and their computers, supposed to save us time so we could take part in more enjoyable and leisurely activities? The answer is quite simple: “When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. Although the article cites that, technically, “American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago”, that statistic doesn’t conjure up a vision of people swinging in hammocks and drinking lemonade. So starts a great (albeit lengthy) article from the Decemedition of the Economist.Ĭlearly, this was one that Keynes got wrong. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”-and probably only by choice." "The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. ![]()
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