On May 13, 2007, at 12:42 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
> I'm really suspicious of this. We spend more time per household on
> paid work than before. We spend more time per household on commuting
> to and from paid work than before. Those two facts are right there in
> the same studies. So where is all this new leisure time coming from?
Than before when? It all depends on what your baseline is. In any case, whatever the historical trajectory, the BLS's time use survey <ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/atus.txt> 5-6 hours a day of leisure time, about half of it spent watching TV. For employed people, the average is over 4. How much leisure did the average farmer or worker of the lat 19th century - the people who made up the very active populist, labor, and socialist movements - have compared to that?
Doug