The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [36]
Money makes us feel better about our lives, but so does having free time. Americans have sacrificed enormous amounts of time to achieve their unparalleled economic prosperity. Easterlin’s paradoxical finding that Americans’ growing wealth hasn’t made us any happier is, in reality, proof that the time we spend earning money is erasing the happiness we get out of counting and spending it.
Researchers studying a group of one thousand Texan women who kept detailed diaries about what they were doing with their time and how they felt about it found that the women’s happiest activity was sex, followed by socializing after work and relaxing. The most undesirable tasks were commuting and working. Unfortunately for the women, they spent only about three hours and forty minutes doing their favorite things, and nearly nine hours on the unpleasant stuff.
No other workers in the industrial world work as much as Americans. Every country in the OECD except the United States mandates a combination of paid leave and paid public holidays. Portuguese workers get a total of thirty-five days off a year. Even the famously workaholic Japanese get ten. In the United States, by contrast, workers have no mandatory paid days off. And Americans get fewer vacations too. While the time devoted to work has declined in most industrial countries, in the United States it has remained flat over the past thirty years. Full-time American workers toil forty-six weeks a year, on average. That’s five more weeks than in Spain. Four decades ago Japanese workers logged 350 more hours at work per year than Americans. By 2006, Americans worked more than the Japanese.
This work has produced a lot of growth. Between 1975 and 1997 the nation’s GDP per head grew almost by half. Yet perhaps what went wrong is that all the happiness gained by Americans from the extra income was consumed by the unhappiness of having to work seventy-six more hours a year to get it. Compare this with the situation in France. The French economy has grown a little more slowly. But the French worked 260 fewer hours in 1997 than in 1975. Comparing the happiness boost provided by money with that provided by free time, researchers estimated that the United States would have had to grow almost three times as fast as it did to compensate Americans for their extra work and provide them as much happiness as the French got.
The trade-off changes as we become richer. The value of our scarce free time increases, while the things money can buy become less important the more we have. That’s why people in rich countries usually work less than people in less developed ones. Koreans enjoy about 650 more hours of leisure a year than Mexicans, but about 400 fewer leisure hours than Belgians. But the trade-off itself generates anxiety. Because the more our incomes rise, the more money we forgo when we spend time on nonproductive endeavors. The tension between time and money peaks when we make the most money of all.
The curve of happiness over the life cycle looks like a U, declining steadily until middle age and rising again. American men are unhappiest in their early fifties and Europeans of both sexes in their late forties. Mexicans hit their happiness minimum at about age forty-one. Middle age can be a disappointing inflection point. It’s when we finally admit our limitations and shelve the long-held plans to become a pop star, strike it rich, travel the world, and live forever. It is the point in life when we hit the peak of our careers and make the most money. But it is also the point at which we enjoy the least free time. The average middle-aged American man sleeps 8.3 hours a night, down from 9.8 hours in our late teens and early twenties.
Information technologies, portrayed as revolutionary tools to improve our lives, are the shackles of the contemporary economy. At the height of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment bank Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, wrote a scathing critique of government statistics that purported to show spectacular