Specialising in Suffering
In economics, we love specialisation, and in the simplest model of the labour market, the individual ’specialises’ in working and in enjoying leisure. He can only do one at the cost of the other, and the benefit from working is purely to earn a wage.
The average person in a developed world works (off the top of my head) a 9-5 job (8 hours). Many work longer, especially in developing countries. The average person also sleeps for around 7 hours (more like 9 for me!). Taking into account commuting times, spending time in the toilet, having meals (even cooking!) and frantically checking emails, the average person would probably have (24-8-7-5) around 4 hours of solid personal time to enjoy ’specialised leisure’. So the ratio of work to ‘play’ is 2-1. In primitive societies this ratio was probably reversed, with most people only spending a couple of hours hunting and repairing tools, or planting. Where we’ve come today hwoever, is that in moving from 4 to 8 hours of work, we’ve increased our effective wage probably around 100x (that is, we can consume 100x more goods today than we could 1000 years ago with 4 hours of work). This is all guesswork, but what I’m really wondering is that if we went back in time and asked someone back then if they would give up 4 more hours of each day in more work for 100x more goods, many would say yes…
Damn, and I started this article thinking I was going to write a tirade against specialisation …
Ah HERE’s my tirade: indivisibility. Economist rely on continuous models, assuming I can always choose an optimum trade off; e.g. 4 hours of work for $400. But why is it in society today contracts are largely based on “full-time” work. Doesn’t this result in inefficiency from the individual’s viewpoint? I can’t choose my optimal combination of work and leisure because there are no contracts out there that satisfy it. Those contracts don’t exist because of large fixed costs in training a specialised individual. And therein lies the irony: the more specialised we become, the more rigid or indivisible the leisure-effort tradeoff becomes.
