A useful column from the counter-intuitive economist Tim Harford, on why it is that we can't stop thinking of increasing consumption as the best indicator of a healthy economy. So many of the government measures deployed in the financial crisis are aimed at "restoring consumer confidence", and for good short term reasons:
Economists worry about a sharp fall in consumer spending, because when demand for goods falls, so does demand for labor. Our desire to spend less is quickly revealed as a desire to spend less hiring each other (and our friends in China) to make things. Result: economic collapse, unemployment, misery.
the picture is completely different. We earn—this is a very rough average—twice what our parents did when they were our age. When today's teenagers are in their 40s, there is no reason why they shouldn't decide to enjoy their increased prosperity by working less instead of earning more. Rather than being twice as rich as their parents, they could be no richer but start their weekends on Wednesday afternoon.
So why isn't that shift happening? Harford (a bit disappointingly) refers to some familiar studies in behavioural economics, which try to show that we want to earn more money because it's a sign of status - and that we're irredeemably status-obsessed. (It's the usual stuff: if you're given the choice between earning £100,000 in a society where people are earning more than you, or £50,000 in a society where people are earning less than you, you - irrationally - choose the latter option. As sociologist Alan Wolfe and I have both noted, in reviews of some of this stuff, it's mostly based on student samples in abstract psych-lab conditions. A very impoverished human data-set).
His other answer is that historically, we already do have more free-time - more than four hours for women (and more for men) since 1965, and a huge gulf away from working (and dying) conditions at the turn of the century. Harford is a bit sneery about the "work less, spend less" movement, and its critiques of advertising as the bonds which tie our psychologies to consumerism.
But he's somewhat trapped by his use of the tainted term "leisure" to define non-working time (tainted because it implies passivity and triviality). What we've been noticing over the years is that people are seeking the feeling of being fully autonomous and self-determined throughout all areas of their lives, whether productive, creative or familial - and we've called that the "play ethic".
People's increasing interaction with social software and digital culture is one example of how the general urge to play (as I define play) is beginning to affect many different kinds of institutions. And create different kinds of institutions, too. See for example enterprises like The School of Everything or The School of Life, which are trying to fill up these extra hours Harford identifies with informal, innovative learning of all kinds, both on and offline. Indeed, they're realising the original Greek definition of school, shkole, as Pekka Himanen once wrote:
Shkole did not mean just “having time”, but also a certain relation to time: a person living an academic life could organize one’s time oneself – the person could combine work and leisure the way that he wanted.
For me, there is still a need for some kind of regulatory or welfare support - ie, a political strategy - to help people expand the zone of play into these increasingly less work-dominated lives. As Harford says:
If this were a gradual process, mass unemployment would not result. People would simply earn less, spend less, wear a few more secondhand clothes, and spend more time reading or going for walks.
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