The Harried Leisure Class

"This is a wonderful book. It’s a popularisation of an article that Gary Becker published in The Economic Journal in 1965, called “A Theory of the Allocation of Time”. The idea of that article, which I think is one of the great papers in economics, was that we have a certain amount of time, and we have a certain amount of money. We can trade part of that time to make more money, but if we do that, we have less time to spend the money. The crucial idea is that spending money takes time. Yes, you can throw it away, but then you’re not consuming. Consuming takes time. What the article looked at was how people choose the relative amounts of different things to buy in relation to how much time they take. What The Harried Leisure Class does is go through this and give examples and stories. My favourite one is about Swedish college women who said they preferred to date Swedish high school graduates rather than college students. Why? Because the high school graduates have more time, and the Swedish college men are just much too quick in everything… I don’t want to go into any further detail than that. Again, it was an issue of time and the value of time. I’ve written a number of papers based on this idea. For example I co-authored a paper on how stressed people are. It basically shows that if you have more money, you’re more stressed. You’re more stressed for time, because it takes time to spend the money. This incensed various New York sociologists who run various foundations. Their argument was that if you have money you can contract everything out. But the fact is that most of the things you do, you can’t contract out. The line I always give is, “You can pay people to sleep with you, but not for you.” You’ve got to sleep seven to eight hours yourself. You’ve got to eat. You can’t pay somebody to read Proust for you. That’s a crucial point, which again only an economist, thinking about the relative importance of constraints, would think about. So this book – and there’s a very fancy mathematical appendix which nobody would read – is just all wonderful talk about this. How over time, as our incomes go up, we get busier and busier, because it takes time to spend the money. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think what we should do is two-fold. One, not be too sympathetic when people complain about how rushed or how busy they are. If they want to be less busy and less rushed – earn less money and don’t bother me. The second thing is to realise that it’s the natural result of higher and higher incomes, and not complain about it so much. The American national pastime is complaining. We are remarkable complainers, and most of the things we complain about are things we have a choice over. A person who is rushed for time and has a high income could cut back on income, but they’re not going to. Ergo, they must be happier and better off doing this. So don’t complain to me about it. I think the book is very neat on that. But, like all the other ones, the fun thing about it, aside from its importance, is it’s just very nicely written. It’s fun to read."