Daniel Hamermesh: How Do People Spend Time?

For economists, the idea of "spending" time isn't a metaphor. You can spend any resource, not just money. Among all the inequalities in our world, it remains true that every person is allocated precisely the same 24 hours in each day. In "Escaping the Rat Race: Why We Are Always Running Out of Time," the Knowledge@Wharton website interviews Daniel Hamermesh, focusing on themes from his just-published book Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource.

The introductory material at the start quotes William Penn, who apparently once said, �Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.� Here are some comments from Hamermesh:

Time for the Rich, Time for the Poor

The rich, of course, work more than the others. They should. There�s a bigger incentive to work more. But even if they don�t work, they use their time differently. A rich person does much less TV watching � over an hour less a day than a poor person. They sleep less. They do more museum-going, more theater. Anything that takes money, the rich will do more of. Things that take a lot of time and little money, the rich do less of. ...

I think complaining is the American national pastime, not baseball. But the thing is, those who are complaining about the time as being scarce are the rich. People who are poor complain about not having enough money. I�m sympathetic to that. They�re stuck. The rich � if you want to stop complaining, give up some money. Don�t work so hard. Walk to work. Sleep more. Take it easy. I have no sympathy for people who say they�re too rushed for time. It�s their own darn fault.

Time Spent Working Across Countries

Americans are the champions of work among rich countries. We work on average eight hours more per week in a typical week than Germans do, six hours more than the French do. It used to be quite a bit different. Forty years ago, we worked about average for rich countries. Today, even the Japanese work less than we do. The reason is very simple: We take very short vacations, if we take any. Other countries get four, five, six weeks. That�s the major difference. ...

What�s most interesting about when we work is you compare America to western European countries, and it�s hard to find a shop open on a Sunday in western Europe. Here, we�re open all the time. Americans work more at night than anybody else. It�s not just that we work more; we also work a lot more at night, a lot more in the evenings, and a heck of a lot more on Sundays and Saturdays than people in other rich countries. We�re working all the time and more. ...

It�s a rat race. If I don�t work on a Sunday and other people do, I�m not going to get ahead. Therefore, I have no incentive to get off that gerbil tube, get out of it and try to behave in a more rational way. ...  The only way it�s going to be solved is if somehow some external force, which in the U.S. and other rich countries is the government, imposes a mandate that forces us to behave differently. No individual can do it. ...

We have to force ourselves, as a collective, as a polity, to change our behavior. Pass legislation to do it. Every other rich country did that between 1979 and 2000. We think the Japanese are workaholics. They�re not workaholics. Compared to us, they work less than we do, yet 40 years ago they worked a heck of a lot more. They chose to cut back. ,.. It�s going to be a heck of a lot of trouble to change the rules so that people are mandated to take four weeks of vacation or to take a few more paid holidays. Other countries have done it. It didn�t just happen from the day the countries were born. They chose to do it. It�s a political issue, like the most important things in life. 

Time and Technology, Money Chasing Hours

Time is an economic factor; economics is about scarcity more than anything else. Because our incomes keep on going up, whereas time doesn�t go up very much, time is the increasingly important scarce factor.  ...

There�s no question technology has made us better off. Think about going to a museum. When I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as a kid, you�d pull levers. You did a few things. These days, it�s all incredibly immersive. Great technology. But you can�t go to the museum in any less time. You can�t cut back on sleep. A few things are easier to do more quickly because of technology: cooking, cleaning, washing, I don�t know if you�re old enough to remember the semi-automatic washing machine with a ringer. Tremendous improvements in the things you do with the house. Technology has made life better, but it hasn�t saved us much time. ... So, we are better off, but it�s not that we�re going to have more time; we�re going to have less time. But we have more money chasing the same number of hours.

 For a longer and more in-depth and wide-ranging discussion of these subjects, listen to the hour-long EconTalk episode in which Russ Roberts interviews Daniel Hamermesh  (March 25, 2019).