Today’s to-do list so daunting you don’t have enough time to read this breezy and informative newspaper story?
Whining yuppie scum.
Daniel Hamermesh can work up about that much sympathy for you. Hamermesh, the Edward Everett Hale centennial professor of economics at the University of Texas, has an argument that goes like this: People who complain about their time crunch are complaining about the wrong thing. They’re simply too affluent to spend all the money they have.
But then, when was the last time you heard anyone belly-aching about having too much dough?
This isn’t a phenomenon unique to American soccer moms and NASCAR dads. Hamermesh and graduate assistant Jungmin Lee’s findings in an academic paper are titled, “Stressed Out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?” Pretty snappy for the field of applied economics. Evidence from Australia (where the seed for the survey research was planted), Germany, Korea and the U.S. supports their argument. The paper is on what’s called “requested resubmission” to an economics journal — i.e. not yet published but on that track.
Anywhere an economy is growing, Hamermesh argues, people are going to feel pressed for time. Want more leisure? Pray for an economic depression. Don’t sign your kids up for soccer — or don’t have kids.
Hamermesh’s light-bulb moment was to look at time as a commodity and its scarcity as an economic problem. As Hamermesh notes, social psychologists and sociologists have done work on how we use our time.
Hamermesh’s data from men and women in the four countries show that, of every day’s 1,440 minutes, on average 10.5 hours are spent sleeping, eating and the like; 5.5 are devoted to leisure. About four hours are devoted to work — that is, for work that pays. And about four hours goes to stuff that conceivably could be outsourced.
If all this averaging doesn’t sound like your eight-hours-or-more workday, it’s because women spend a good deal more time doing domestic work (“household production”) and less doing work for pay (“market work”). Also, Hamermesh notes, many people don’t work “in the market.” And by and large they don’t work much on the weekends.