18 ms·

The Free-Time Paradox in America

257 points by jnordwick 10y ago

chollida1 10y ago
I can think of a few other things the article doesn't touch on that influence me. 1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich. 2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation. 3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  Your comment touches on how this happens, but not why. If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours? I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours? There's probably a correlation between being rich and being more inclined to spend time on activities which return money. In that, ceteris paribus, having less of that inclination will reduce your probability of becoming rich.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      I'd turn it around: Being rich provides you with the opportunity to spend time on activities which return more and more money, opportunities that do not exist for (or are out of reach of) the poor.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        I don't doubt that, the two ideas are in no way mutually exclusive.
  - tw04 10y ago
    Because, generally speaking, by the time you get to that point, work has become your life. Some people can't handle the disconnect. Much like when a pro athlete retires, they often lose their sense of self-worth because it was so closely tied to their profession.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I think it's the same addiction cycle that drives MMO addicts. If work is the only thing in your life going well you may focus on it rather than fix what's broken. Many successful people are less happey in retirement because that don't get a social circle playing up the importance of what they are doing. Sitting on a beach is simply less rewarding than landing a major contract. Thus, these people are not checking email on vacation because of dedication they are chasing a reward cycle.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    i'll give it a shot. i own a business that could potentially make me rich if i sold it, but haven't considered it yet. (it could also make me go broke, but that's another story). a poor or lower middle class person would probably disagree if they saw my income and business bank accounts, but hey, everything is relative. anyway. here are some reasons that may or may not apply to myself and my group of peers (all business owners end up hanging out with a bunch of other business owners or sales-type people, it just happens). 1. they like working. they may deny it, but they do. they like making things happen, making things in general, etc. 2. they feel like if they stop working, the money will disappear, or be taken somehow. this may or may not be rational. 3. they are compelled to do it, it is simply an inner drive they can't overcome. i.e. that's how the money was made to begin with. 4. they like having a high level of disposable income to spend on nice things/experiences/influence. this is the polar opposite of how a lot of people on HN think, who seem to constantly trying to humble-brag about their rankings in the frugality olympics. i definitely fall into #4, the others maybe, maybe not. i like nice shit, so i work hard. if i wanted to not spend money, i'd just be poor and not work much. i did it for 4 years in college, i could do it for the rest of my life if i wanted to. it's not hard to do nothing and spend nothing. it's literally the easiest thing in the world, you just don't do anything, all day long. sorry for being snarky.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Another point is that people have their sense of self-worth tied up in their occupation. I get paid a lot => I'm an important part of the world => if I stop then the world will fail (in some [tiny] way). You see a corollary of this in retirees, their occupation defined them. Pre-retirement they say "hi, I'm Joe, I'm a professor" - a professor isn't a professor when they're relaxing and enjoying themselves (the thought process goes) so in order to be a professor I must work long hours at teaching students.
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  - roc 10y ago
    I would guess: 1. Because the mindset of work > leisure is rewarded in the U.S., so wealthier people aren't choosing work because they're wealthier, they're wealthier because they choose work. 2. Because they have more leverage not only in how much they work, but in what work they do. If you draw a stark line between your job and what you enjoy, naturally you'll want to minimize that work and maximize your leisure. But if you actually enjoy your job...
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    I think they keep working because they achieve a lot of success with it so it's very rewarding. I am sure I would enjoy work much more if I felt that my work really makes a difference.
  - douche 10y ago
    Some people really like working. If I was independently wealthy, I would work like a dog on the things I'm interested in, and I'd enjoy the hell out of it. It's not so much doing the work, it's having to do the work, and not having control over my time, that gets under my collar.
  - cloakandswagger 10y ago
    It's pretty simple really: making money feels good. I run my own business, and as a result I have a very highly correlated effort-to-earnings relationship. The more I work, the more I make. I could spend my time doing "leisurely" activities away from work and I'd still make more than enough to live on, but instead I spend the better part of my work days (and oftentimes weekends) grinding away, trying to make this my highest earning September yet. I don't do this in the pursuit of some end goal. I have fairly modest tastes, and 90% of the money I earn goes into a bank account or brokerage where it sits forever. All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. When I was a kid I played World of Warcraft relentlessly, and gaining another level in that game gave me the same sense of forward progress. Money feels like the grown-up version of that.
    - seangrogg 10y ago
      So what do end-game raids look like to you?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Wonder if this is somehow upbringing-related. I've never felt the "making money feels good" thing. Sure, it feels great to have a surplus on my bank account, so that I don't have to worry about not having money for food, or buying quality computing equipment when I need it, or helping a friend in need. But the act of making money? It always felt to me (and still feels today) as a period of grinding you have to endure, a painful sacrifice, that will ensure the bank balance will maintain its level.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. You make money when you generate value for someone. It's OK to tie it to a sense of achievement, but at the end of the day you also have to remember to generate value for yourself.
    - intended 10y ago
      In school, one conversation with a close friend made it clear what this was about. I'd been brought up with a strong influence from my father who believed the pursuit of wealth for wealthy sake was pointless. It mattered what you did as a person than what you earned. My ideal job would be to become a scientist. My friend told me that he wanted to earn money, not because he wanted to be rich, but because he liked seeing that number go up. He knew that it was a straight up numeric increment for him. Now that's a relatively deep insight for a teen, which applies to everything from gaming to work. It's obvious and direct behavioral reinforcement. Oddly it doesn't explain why he grew up to be a scientist (bio-analytics/genomics) and I ended up wading into finance and business. Maybe self awareness is the pre requisite to being more comfortable with less than comfortable choices.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    Is it perhaps because the type of person who gets rich is more likely to be the type of person who enjoys the work they do in and of itself?
  - zhemao 10y ago
    It does implicitly answer the "why". If you have more choice in what you work on, you can choose work that you enjoy. If you enjoy your work, you'll do more of it. It's no longer a paradox when you take into account the fact that high-earning professionals consider work to be "fun".
- freehunter 10y ago
  Also many hourly workers don't get to pick their own hours. I know when I was stocking shelves, I only got to work the hours my manager scheduled me for. If I wanted to work more hours to make more money, I didn't have that option. I've got a friend who is a mechanic as well, and it's the same thing there. He only gets to work extra if they have extra work. If they don't have work for him, he goes home (and clocks out). I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
  - douche 10y ago
    We under-occupied salary workers just play our video games at the office... /s
    - freehunter 10y ago
      My wife gets jealous when she finds me playing Civilization during work hours (I work from home). But then she's upset when I'm on the phone with a client until 9pm and I miss dinner. Those hours pretty much balance out over the year, though.
      - deleted 10y ago
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      - kiiski 10y ago
        > But then she's upset To be fair, from her point of view your hours playing Civilization might not balance out her having dinner alone.
        freehunter 10y ago
        She has no problem cashing my paychecks though! All joking aside, it is certainly a downside to the job I do, but she understands. "Upset" is kind of a hyperbolic word to use, she fully supports the work I do as it affords us a lot of freedoms we might not have otherwise. I can't say how often we've turned a business trip into a vacation just by switching the credit card on file with the hotel to my personal card, or left for vacation in the middle of the work day as long as I bring my phone and take my calls from the passenger seat. Not to mention she doesn't have to work full time, so she can pursue her own dreams and hobbies. Not that any of that matters to you, I just didn't want anyone thinking I was being selfish or insensitive to my wife's feelings.
- connoredel 10y ago
  I think your point #2 is right on. This article is wondering why recent observations are not behaving the "backward bending supply curve of labour" [1]. But this curve assumes a constant return on hours worked (i.e. a constant wage). If it really behaves more like overtime -- where additional hours are worth more but only if you've already worked a certain amount -- then the marginal hourly wage can rise as the marginal leisure value rises, and the equilibrium is pushed further out. In other words, it changes that curve to strictly increasing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
- deleted 10y ago
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cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I would like to tell the writer: "Cool story bro, nice job on all the research and kudos on your effort, but you're confusing the cause/effect." It's not that "rich people work so much", it's that "people who work much tend to be rich".
- taeric 10y ago
  Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... I'd disagree quite heavily with this assertion. Would be interesting to see the reasons. My hunch would be more in line with much of the "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations. It takes surprisingly little money to lounge playing video games when you don't have a car/house payments.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    I'd be inclined to say that the middle class work differently than the poor, and the rich work differently than the middle class. Working hard is the difference between middle class and upper middle class, or between upper class and upper upper class.
  - nadezhda18 10y ago
    > Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... so agree with you! poor people often work even more than rich because their salary is low and they have to take extra hustle just to make the ends meet. Getting a decent salary, which allows getting out of poverty, may free up quite a lot of time. > "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations agree again :) I think they just carry take a lot on their shoulders just because they like to (thus they "have managed to over leverage themselves ")
  - spacehome 10y ago
    What I've seen is a little more nuanced. People who front-load their effort by doing well from high school through grad school or early career get a cushier life after 35. This contrasts with those who don't put in as much effort in their late childhood and early adulthood who then need a much more solid work ethic post 35 to get a worse result.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
To me this is the key point... > “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.” When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.
hprotagonist 10y ago
>A Salary of Smoke Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field. The one who loves money is never satisfied with money, Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke. The more loot you get, the more looters show up. And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight? Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep, Whether supper is beans or steak. But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia. Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen: A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him And then loses it all in a bad business deal. He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him. He arrived naked from the womb of his mother; He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing. This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went. So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke? All for a miserable life spent in the dark? -- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&version=MSG https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&...
- Frondo 10y ago
  You can put up with whatever working conditions you want. You're certainly free to accept your lot in life. Me and a bunch of other guys, we don't agree that "nothing can be done about it". We're gonna fight the good fight. Lucky for you, when we fight the good fight and win, that stuff filters out to those of you who gave up, too.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  Half the article talks about how one theory is that they work because they take pleasure in their work, that they are no longer driven my money but by the creative process or working. While this might have only been true of a few people, a more mobile job market, more opportunity, more choice of field, more education, and other factors all allow more people to find jobs that they simultaneously love to do and get paid well to do. I'm one of those lucky people I guess. I absolutely love what I do and the more successful I become, the more I want to do it. Work has become almost game-like to me. I'll see your out of context quote and raise you The Parable of the Talents. If you have a gift for creation or investment, don't be ashamed of it, but nurture it and use it. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14-30&version=NRSV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14...
squozzer 10y ago
Here are some factors that might have a role -- 1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded. 2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan. 3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.
ascendantlogic 10y ago
"narcotic undertow of cheap entertainment" What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
- swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
  Overwatch is got to be the least rewarding fun game to play.
  - zzguy 10y ago
    What games are high reward? In terms of getting you a skill that causes "fulfillment" outside of the game, or gets you money?
    - Paul_S 10y ago
      Chess and Quake.
      - simplemath 10y ago
        You'll love Devil Daggers
        Paul_S 10y ago
        Don't see why. It's a single player game with none of the meta of quake duels.
    - seangrogg 10y ago
      Very indirectly and entirely personally: EVE Online. I unintentionally became more accustomed to delayed gratification, taught myself how to make micro-optimizations in my life to clear up time, chose to re-invest my time saved investing in new skills, learned (when trying to get a job/promotion) to frame my value in terms of what fulfilling someone else's needs, learned the value of researching both how to do things AND why people recommend those methods over others, and developed a decent sense of risk:reward-informed decision-making. YMMV.
legitster 10y ago
I think what's missing is how much more engrossing higher paying jobs are. Working on processing lines or customer service, you completely check out mentally. I wouldn't have been able to bear the thought of working more than I have to. But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field. So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.
- orky56 10y ago
  The executive function of the brain involves decision making and creativity. Many blue collar jobs are repetitive of just following a standard operating procedure over and over. It becomes taxing and creates an intrinsic limit to how much can be done. With many white collar jobs especially when promoted to higher levels of management and autonomy, the pleasure involved with decision-making makes work as rewarding as playing that game plus there's a monetary reward. The basic premise of the article is that if the undereducated people were afforded similar opportunities than we may have a different situation.
  - legitster 10y ago
    I'm not even sure if education has anything to do with it. I have lots of peers who chose careers where they "work-to-live" vs "live-to-work". An example may be a pharmacist who chose their career, and makes decent money, but the average pharmacist doesn't feel compelled to work extra hours. If you offered her more money at less hours, she would take it. Where you offer me more money, it won't really change the number of hours I am compelled to work.
drdrey 10y ago
I can't tell if "men" is used as a neutral pronoun in this story. > young men > lower-skilled men > non-working men > rudderless middle-aged men > elite men > poorer men > rich men > young non-college men
- irrational 10y ago
  I think it means males. The males are staying home, playing video games, watching porn, etc. while the females are attending college in droves and "leaning in" and discovering that they can get by just fine without the males around. I halfway suspect that video games and porn are this eras circuses and bread and that there is a secret feminist cabal backing the game and porn proliferation ;-)
jnordwick 10y ago
I think there might also be a very strong correlation between being rich and doing what you love, especially has job opportunities and mobility have drastically increased in the last couple generations. I don't know too many top 1 percenters that would say that would love what they do. Very few. And I do know of many that would say they never really made it -- because independently wealthy -- until they found what they really loved to do: from going into a new field to opening up their own store that grew. I think loving what you do has a lot to do with wanting to put in the effort to really getting paid back what you put in.
- simplemath 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure, given the opportunity, that I'd love yachting and recreational aerospace.
forrestbrazeal 10y ago
This article (in the tradition of Keynes) makes the implicit assumption that more leisure is good/brings happiness. (Hence the seeming paradox that rich people - those who should be able to afford more leisure - appear to work more.) I don't think that's true. There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming. If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-your-brain-on-retirement---not-nearly-as-sharp-studies-are-finding/2015/10/29/7a0168ba-7dac-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  > There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain. I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    To reinforce your point, here is the Youtube channel of a database admin (by day) in Tulsa, OK who spends his free time learning how to (and building) a ~70 foot steel cutter vessel in his front yard. https://www.youtube.com/user/submarineboat https://www.youtube.com/user/submarineboat
    - adamnemecek 10y ago
      Or this http://makezine.com/2015/04/20/understand-1700-mechanical-linkages-helpful-animations/ http://makezine.com/2015/04/20/understand-1700-mechanical-li... A retired mechanical engineer spends his time making videos of mechanical linkages in CAD. He's was at 1700 a year ago, hard to say how many he's at now, he's still releasing them. This is what technological progress looks like I think, in a couple of years this will be shown in just about any intro class into the subject and it will reduce the learning time by like, i don't even know, 100x? 1000x? Idk how these were described before but boy do they seem hard to describe in anything but animation. I'm also having a hard time imagining his brain isn't getting exercised just fine. I'm not a mechanical engineer and I spent like good 15-20 minutes watching them and getting quite a bit out of it.
WalterBright 10y ago
I remember coming home for Christmas/summer vacation while in college. I was good for about 10 days, enjoying my leisure. But then I wanted to get back to work. Leisure is boring. The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  I agree, although it depends on what you want to call work. For example, if I had enough money that I didn't need to work, I would still have plenty of productive projects to work on, but they may not make any money. There are plenty of open source projects I'd like to start/work on that would benefit greatly from being able to work on them "full-time", but I wouldn't make any money off of them (at least not without being more creative about how to monetize them than I've been so far).
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Whilst I understand the sentiment, I do wonder if the boredom you're experiencing isn't just a transitional phase. When it comes to leisure, I personally believe there's an art to being good at doing it. What I find is that it takes time to unplug from 'work mode' to truly enjoy 'leisure mode', and that time of unplugging often comes in the form of doing nothing/very little. As you say, that's fine for a while, but soon you want something to do. However, if you think about it, there are tons of things you can do with your leisure time, in some ways the choices are even more vast than those you can find paid employment for. What is required is time for the boredom to subside and imagination to kick in. For example, if you taught yourself the chemistry behind photosynthesis just because you were interested in it, would it matter to you if you weren't paid for knowing it?
- grahamburger 10y ago
  I've heard a lot of people say this, but I've never felt this way. After 10 days of vacation all I can think about is that I'd love to figure out a way to get 10 more. I also get bored/tired of sitting around doing nothing, but I guess that's just not really how I vacation. I use vacations and time away from work to explore and work on projects that I enjoy, and to me that's very fulfilling. I also really loathe working for someone else, so going back to work isn't particularly intriguing. Although I've been transitioning over the last year to working for myself, and that is starting to change the way I see things - partially because I can take long (multi-week) 'vacations' where I work in the evening and explore during the day.
smallnamespace 10y ago
This points out another issue with providing basic income -- while basic income is preferable to just letting people starve and probably better than expensive-to-administer welfare programs, it does not provide a substitute source for people's self worth. For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.
- smhg 10y ago
  I don't understand why you would require UBI to provide people's self worth. Some picture UBI to be this utopia that solves everything. Please evaluate it based on being an improvement (however small) to the current system. Also, playing videogames all day is an often heard scenario with UBI. But as the article states, this seems to happen now too. The question is: if it would be implemented, and after the dust settles, will so many more people be unproductive (in the narrowest sense possible)?
- GFischer 10y ago
  That's something I took away from the article: video games (and games in general) actually make people feel happier and worthy (although it's a "fake" accomplishment). I personally experienced that, during a "down" period, I took a lot of solace in games (particularly M:TG), getting some accomplishments there (national vice champion) made me feel less worthless. But it also made me pursue goals that weren't in my own best interests in the long term and neglect more important things. Overall, I'm glad I quit, since an unhealthy amount of time spent on games eats up on time that can be spent on skills that are valued by society, and I get obsessed very easily. Your point about getting paid as a status signal also rings with stuff like NBA stars arguing about getting paid less than X player, even though they're both extremely well paid, since it signals a preference. And lots of studies about fairness and wages.
octaveguin 10y ago
"entertainment has become an inferior good" That's quite an interesting thing to say that is super true. Consumption of too much media is now a sign of low class status.
- holmak 10y ago
  In case you didn't know, "inferior good" is an economics term with a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good
  - GFischer 10y ago
    That said, his comment does have a point, and consumption of inferior goods themselves can be a signal of low status.
sien 10y ago
The article points out a possible interesting reason why crime dropped around 1990 all over the developed world. "So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown." Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.
- irrational 10y ago
  Let's not forget all the free porn that is being consumed during the other quarter of their leisure time!
- kareemsabri 10y ago
  http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...
  - sien 10y ago
    The thing about legalized abortion is that it would have had no effect outside the US. Roe vs Wade had no effect in Europe or Australia. http://euc.sagepub.com/content/7/5/375.abstract http://euc.sagepub.com/content/7/5/375.abstract
    - kareemsabri 10y ago
      That's interesting - though it doesn't disprove the theory in the US. For example, the declines coincided with the dates individual states legalized abortion as well (some predated Roe v Wade).
tlb 10y ago
The author avoids an obvious arrow of causality: some people like work, which causes those people to work hard, which is more likely to make them rich. There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox. It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.
- allemagne 10y ago
  It's not difficult to understand why anyone might not want to argue that "poor people are poor because they're inherently lazy" from a strictly political perspective. In addition, thought, how many children of wealthy families really turn out poor out of laziness? How many of those wealthy families were impoverished in the previous generation? If your explanation were as important as you seem to be saying, maybe those questions shouldn't be easy to answer.
- nzjrs 10y ago
  You ignore the obvious arrow of causality, it's hard to be motivated about cleaning toilets relative to other jobs.
- summerdown2 10y ago
  > It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... > However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries. Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.
tuna-piano 10y ago
Economists have studied this kind of thing for a long time. From Wikipedia: " In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1] The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time. Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time " Check out this Wikipedia page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I just wanted to say thanks for that comment. It set me off in some interesting directions.
tuxrux 10y ago
I had the pleasure of studying under a prof that wrote about how this can be a not so good thing:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278714 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278714
jondubois 10y ago
When you get rich, your life becomes much more interesting - You get more opportunities and you get 'lucky' more often. Also, your work actually makes your feel good about yourself. In effect, life feels like a game; you actually get to win from time to time. The richer you get, the more you win. When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life. Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
- carleverett 10y ago
  Very interesting theory - I think I agree. I would add though that a good portion of the causality is going the other way, where people who find work fun and stimulating become more successful, and those who are bored by it stay poor. These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
  - aleeds 10y ago
    I think that your argument assumes a certain level of job attained already. Sure, software engineers who enjoy it more become more successful. I doubt that people finding stocking grocery stores correlates with their success at all.
    - 1812Overture 10y ago
      I had a checkout clerk at Target the other day with Down Syndrome who seemed to LOVE her job and was very good at it. Unfortunately I don't see her working her way up to CEO.
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- panic 10y ago
  Are you speaking from experience?
tn13 10y ago
It is not "free time" that people want. It is "time to do what I want" is what we all want. For someone like Elon Musk running Tesla might be actually use of that free time. For many of us writing code is the use of that free time. On the other hand I can understand why unproductive people are unable to do much in USA. Most things are automated and minimum wages lock out people from mundane work.
hamiltonians 10y ago
til: people who are not working have a lot of free time I guess the author has never heard of homelessness. instead of being homeless, or being forced to find work, young people are living with parents longer
grellas 10y ago
I read this piece and was very saddened. Take it from someone who has been around a few more years than many others who contribute to this site. There is nothing good - long-term - about sitting around idle for extended periods. It kills your initiative. It kills your character. It kills your options in life. It kills your soul. I saw this happen to several people who were very close to me growing up and I still grieve at what they suffered in later years as the price paid for the extreme short cuts and high life of their youth. And this survey fact as reported in this piece - that is, of one in five non-college-educated young men in their twenties being so very much out of work for sustained periods - is not cause for celebration or for launching into philosophical discussions about the value of leisure in a developed society. It is instead a real tragedy, and I don’t care how many survey participants check a box attesting that, for the moment, they can say they have had lots of fun doing pretty much nothing beyond partying and playing games over the past 12 months or more. I know that today it can often happen that there are very limited options in the workplace and this so-called leisure is really an enforced leisure not of people’s own choosing. But that does not mean we should rationalize this to say that, after all, they do seem to be satisfied in their leisure. That is nothing more than a superficial covering-up of a bad situation. It is decidedly unhealthy for the individuals involved and for society as a whole to have large numbers of young men involuntarily idled for sustained periods in this way (wasn’t that what we used to call the Great Depression). Work is not an evil. It is a big part of how we grow and develop as people. It is a big part of how we negotiate life. Let us hope there comes a day ahead when enforced “leisure” is no longer a norm and the leisure people enjoy is of their own choosing.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  You're mixing up leisure and idleness. You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy. But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything! What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character. But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.
tapp 10y ago
I'd add another factor the author did not mention: the market in which those "Elite U.S. men" compete is vastly more competitive than it was a generation ago. I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I like the bit about 4am being the most productive hour. I have always been a morning person and for most employers and customers I have worked early in the morning until mid-afternoon. Quiet time is golden. As far as the main theme of the article: having more people idle is something society needs to adapt to. In the extreme of insufficient work, I would like to see a very low minimum income and a policy to promote breaking up jobs so people at least got 15 or so hours a week. Looking forward a decade, I bet there will be much less for people to work on.
scentoni 10y ago
Certainly part of the explanation of the paradox is that a great deal of what elites work on is (intentionally or not) finding ways to automate lower-skilled folks out of a job.
narrator 10y ago
I think gamer culture is a vast invisible swath of humanity. If you look at the communities on Twitch or YouTube around certain popular games, it's pretty clear that billions of human hours are poured into gaming.
- kbart 10y ago
  Before computer games there were also sports, cards, books, alcohol, drugs etc. It's only a consequence, not a cause of humans inclination for exciting their reward centers with least possible efforts.
plandis 10y ago
Honestly I feel like a lot of this is social. I'm motivated to go and work because my peers all do that to and it's been that way since I was a kid. People I knew in high school went to college. Now my college peers are getting jobs, etc... Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of. On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.
grn 10y ago
> The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least. Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes. Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)
- rconti 10y ago
  Absolutely. I'm SO glad I'm not hourly. I'd never take vacation because I'd think about all the money I'm 'losing'. I'd have a hard time enjoying unemployment for the same reason, even with ample savings. I make it a point to use up all my allotted vacation, which has the side effect of making me more productive, and makes me more respected at work than the guy who is trampled all over because he never takes time off.
yitchelle 10y ago
This statistic from the article strikes as amazing. Not 100% sure if I believe it. "In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” "Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown" Doing some quick maths put 15% of lower skilled men are playing video games all day during their idle time. Is this really happening on the ground?
- weerd 10y ago
  Oh yeah, definitely. It's a fantastic way to check out from the mundane crawl that is average life in America. Honestly though, it's better than watching TV. Atleast you have to interact and think. There's also the fact that multiplayer gaming allows us to meet new people with similar interests. Someday people are going to just put on the VR hat and practically live in another world.
- tamana 10y ago
  Depends on how you count. Do they mean 6hrs of games per day but then no more games at night and weekends, or do they mean 6 extra hours of games per day?
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fallingfrog 10y ago
I think part of what is happening is that people with less money do things themselves (cooking, cleaning) that wealthy people pay someone else to do. So wealthy people can spend correspondingly more of their time on the kinds of activities that count as economic activity in our current system- their jobs. The amount of time they have left for exploring/learning/resting is most likely still much more than what poor people have, though.

257 points by jnordwick 10y ago

I can think of a few other things the article doesn't touch on that influence me. 1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich. 2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation. 3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).

forgetsusername 10y ago
Your comment touches on how this happens, but not why. If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours? I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours? There's probably a correlation between being rich and being more inclined to spend time on activities which return money. In that, ceteris paribus, having less of that inclination will reduce your probability of becoming rich.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I'd turn it around: Being rich provides you with the opportunity to spend time on activities which return more and more money, opportunities that do not exist for (or are out of reach of) the poor.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      I don't doubt that, the two ideas are in no way mutually exclusive.
- tw04 10y ago
  Because, generally speaking, by the time you get to that point, work has become your life. Some people can't handle the disconnect. Much like when a pro athlete retires, they often lose their sense of self-worth because it was so closely tied to their profession.
- Retric 10y ago
  I think it's the same addiction cycle that drives MMO addicts. If work is the only thing in your life going well you may focus on it rather than fix what's broken. Many successful people are less happey in retirement because that don't get a social circle playing up the importance of what they are doing. Sitting on a beach is simply less rewarding than landing a major contract. Thus, these people are not checking email on vacation because of dedication they are chasing a reward cycle.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  i'll give it a shot. i own a business that could potentially make me rich if i sold it, but haven't considered it yet. (it could also make me go broke, but that's another story). a poor or lower middle class person would probably disagree if they saw my income and business bank accounts, but hey, everything is relative. anyway. here are some reasons that may or may not apply to myself and my group of peers (all business owners end up hanging out with a bunch of other business owners or sales-type people, it just happens). 1. they like working. they may deny it, but they do. they like making things happen, making things in general, etc. 2. they feel like if they stop working, the money will disappear, or be taken somehow. this may or may not be rational. 3. they are compelled to do it, it is simply an inner drive they can't overcome. i.e. that's how the money was made to begin with. 4. they like having a high level of disposable income to spend on nice things/experiences/influence. this is the polar opposite of how a lot of people on HN think, who seem to constantly trying to humble-brag about their rankings in the frugality olympics. i definitely fall into #4, the others maybe, maybe not. i like nice shit, so i work hard. if i wanted to not spend money, i'd just be poor and not work much. i did it for 4 years in college, i could do it for the rest of my life if i wanted to. it's not hard to do nothing and spend nothing. it's literally the easiest thing in the world, you just don't do anything, all day long. sorry for being snarky.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Another point is that people have their sense of self-worth tied up in their occupation. I get paid a lot => I'm an important part of the world => if I stop then the world will fail (in some [tiny] way). You see a corollary of this in retirees, their occupation defined them. Pre-retirement they say "hi, I'm Joe, I'm a professor" - a professor isn't a professor when they're relaxing and enjoying themselves (the thought process goes) so in order to be a professor I must work long hours at teaching students.
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- roc 10y ago
  I would guess: 1. Because the mindset of work > leisure is rewarded in the U.S., so wealthier people aren't choosing work because they're wealthier, they're wealthier because they choose work. 2. Because they have more leverage not only in how much they work, but in what work they do. If you draw a stark line between your job and what you enjoy, naturally you'll want to minimize that work and maximize your leisure. But if you actually enjoy your job...
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I think they keep working because they achieve a lot of success with it so it's very rewarding. I am sure I would enjoy work much more if I felt that my work really makes a difference.
- douche 10y ago
  Some people really like working. If I was independently wealthy, I would work like a dog on the things I'm interested in, and I'd enjoy the hell out of it. It's not so much doing the work, it's having to do the work, and not having control over my time, that gets under my collar.
- cloakandswagger 10y ago
  It's pretty simple really: making money feels good. I run my own business, and as a result I have a very highly correlated effort-to-earnings relationship. The more I work, the more I make. I could spend my time doing "leisurely" activities away from work and I'd still make more than enough to live on, but instead I spend the better part of my work days (and oftentimes weekends) grinding away, trying to make this my highest earning September yet. I don't do this in the pursuit of some end goal. I have fairly modest tastes, and 90% of the money I earn goes into a bank account or brokerage where it sits forever. All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. When I was a kid I played World of Warcraft relentlessly, and gaining another level in that game gave me the same sense of forward progress. Money feels like the grown-up version of that.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    So what do end-game raids look like to you?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Wonder if this is somehow upbringing-related. I've never felt the "making money feels good" thing. Sure, it feels great to have a surplus on my bank account, so that I don't have to worry about not having money for food, or buying quality computing equipment when I need it, or helping a friend in need. But the act of making money? It always felt to me (and still feels today) as a period of grinding you have to endure, a painful sacrifice, that will ensure the bank balance will maintain its level.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. You make money when you generate value for someone. It's OK to tie it to a sense of achievement, but at the end of the day you also have to remember to generate value for yourself.
  - intended 10y ago
    In school, one conversation with a close friend made it clear what this was about. I'd been brought up with a strong influence from my father who believed the pursuit of wealth for wealthy sake was pointless. It mattered what you did as a person than what you earned. My ideal job would be to become a scientist. My friend told me that he wanted to earn money, not because he wanted to be rich, but because he liked seeing that number go up. He knew that it was a straight up numeric increment for him. Now that's a relatively deep insight for a teen, which applies to everything from gaming to work. It's obvious and direct behavioral reinforcement. Oddly it doesn't explain why he grew up to be a scientist (bio-analytics/genomics) and I ended up wading into finance and business. Maybe self awareness is the pre requisite to being more comfortable with less than comfortable choices.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Is it perhaps because the type of person who gets rich is more likely to be the type of person who enjoys the work they do in and of itself?
- zhemao 10y ago
  It does implicitly answer the "why". If you have more choice in what you work on, you can choose work that you enjoy. If you enjoy your work, you'll do more of it. It's no longer a paradox when you take into account the fact that high-earning professionals consider work to be "fun".
freehunter 10y ago
Also many hourly workers don't get to pick their own hours. I know when I was stocking shelves, I only got to work the hours my manager scheduled me for. If I wanted to work more hours to make more money, I didn't have that option. I've got a friend who is a mechanic as well, and it's the same thing there. He only gets to work extra if they have extra work. If they don't have work for him, he goes home (and clocks out). I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
- douche 10y ago
  We under-occupied salary workers just play our video games at the office... /s
  - freehunter 10y ago
    My wife gets jealous when she finds me playing Civilization during work hours (I work from home). But then she's upset when I'm on the phone with a client until 9pm and I miss dinner. Those hours pretty much balance out over the year, though.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - kiiski 10y ago
      > But then she's upset To be fair, from her point of view your hours playing Civilization might not balance out her having dinner alone.
      - freehunter 10y ago
        She has no problem cashing my paychecks though! All joking aside, it is certainly a downside to the job I do, but she understands. "Upset" is kind of a hyperbolic word to use, she fully supports the work I do as it affords us a lot of freedoms we might not have otherwise. I can't say how often we've turned a business trip into a vacation just by switching the credit card on file with the hotel to my personal card, or left for vacation in the middle of the work day as long as I bring my phone and take my calls from the passenger seat. Not to mention she doesn't have to work full time, so she can pursue her own dreams and hobbies. Not that any of that matters to you, I just didn't want anyone thinking I was being selfish or insensitive to my wife's feelings.
connoredel 10y ago
I think your point #2 is right on. This article is wondering why recent observations are not behaving the "backward bending supply curve of labour" [1]. But this curve assumes a constant return on hours worked (i.e. a constant wage). If it really behaves more like overtime -- where additional hours are worth more but only if you've already worked a certain amount -- then the marginal hourly wage can rise as the marginal leisure value rises, and the equilibrium is pushed further out. In other words, it changes that curve to strictly increasing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
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cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

I would like to tell the writer: "Cool story bro, nice job on all the research and kudos on your effort, but you're confusing the cause/effect." It's not that "rich people work so much", it's that "people who work much tend to be rich".

taeric 10y ago
Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... I'd disagree quite heavily with this assertion. Would be interesting to see the reasons. My hunch would be more in line with much of the "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations. It takes surprisingly little money to lounge playing video games when you don't have a car/house payments.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  I'd be inclined to say that the middle class work differently than the poor, and the rich work differently than the middle class. Working hard is the difference between middle class and upper middle class, or between upper class and upper upper class.
- nadezhda18 10y ago
  > Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... so agree with you! poor people often work even more than rich because their salary is low and they have to take extra hustle just to make the ends meet. Getting a decent salary, which allows getting out of poverty, may free up quite a lot of time. > "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations agree again :) I think they just carry take a lot on their shoulders just because they like to (thus they "have managed to over leverage themselves ")
- spacehome 10y ago
  What I've seen is a little more nuanced. People who front-load their effort by doing well from high school through grad school or early career get a cushier life after 35. This contrasts with those who don't put in as much effort in their late childhood and early adulthood who then need a much more solid work ethic post 35 to get a worse result.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

To me this is the key point... > “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.” When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.

hprotagonist 10y ago

>A Salary of Smoke Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field. The one who loves money is never satisfied with money, Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke. The more loot you get, the more looters show up. And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight? Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep, Whether supper is beans or steak. But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia. Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen: A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him And then loses it all in a bad business deal. He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him. He arrived naked from the womb of his mother; He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing. This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went. So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke? All for a miserable life spent in the dark? -- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&version=MSG https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&...

Frondo 10y ago
You can put up with whatever working conditions you want. You're certainly free to accept your lot in life. Me and a bunch of other guys, we don't agree that "nothing can be done about it". We're gonna fight the good fight. Lucky for you, when we fight the good fight and win, that stuff filters out to those of you who gave up, too.
jnordwick 10y ago
Half the article talks about how one theory is that they work because they take pleasure in their work, that they are no longer driven my money but by the creative process or working. While this might have only been true of a few people, a more mobile job market, more opportunity, more choice of field, more education, and other factors all allow more people to find jobs that they simultaneously love to do and get paid well to do. I'm one of those lucky people I guess. I absolutely love what I do and the more successful I become, the more I want to do it. Work has become almost game-like to me. I'll see your out of context quote and raise you The Parable of the Talents. If you have a gift for creation or investment, don't be ashamed of it, but nurture it and use it. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14-30&version=NRSV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14...

squozzer 10y ago

Here are some factors that might have a role -- 1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded. 2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan. 3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.

ascendantlogic 10y ago

"narcotic undertow of cheap entertainment" What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.

swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
Overwatch is got to be the least rewarding fun game to play.
- zzguy 10y ago
  What games are high reward? In terms of getting you a skill that causes "fulfillment" outside of the game, or gets you money?
  - Paul_S 10y ago
    Chess and Quake.
    - simplemath 10y ago
      You'll love Devil Daggers
      - Paul_S 10y ago
        Don't see why. It's a single player game with none of the meta of quake duels.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    Very indirectly and entirely personally: EVE Online. I unintentionally became more accustomed to delayed gratification, taught myself how to make micro-optimizations in my life to clear up time, chose to re-invest my time saved investing in new skills, learned (when trying to get a job/promotion) to frame my value in terms of what fulfilling someone else's needs, learned the value of researching both how to do things AND why people recommend those methods over others, and developed a decent sense of risk:reward-informed decision-making. YMMV.

legitster 10y ago

I think what's missing is how much more engrossing higher paying jobs are. Working on processing lines or customer service, you completely check out mentally. I wouldn't have been able to bear the thought of working more than I have to. But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field. So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.

orky56 10y ago
The executive function of the brain involves decision making and creativity. Many blue collar jobs are repetitive of just following a standard operating procedure over and over. It becomes taxing and creates an intrinsic limit to how much can be done. With many white collar jobs especially when promoted to higher levels of management and autonomy, the pleasure involved with decision-making makes work as rewarding as playing that game plus there's a monetary reward. The basic premise of the article is that if the undereducated people were afforded similar opportunities than we may have a different situation.
- legitster 10y ago
  I'm not even sure if education has anything to do with it. I have lots of peers who chose careers where they "work-to-live" vs "live-to-work". An example may be a pharmacist who chose their career, and makes decent money, but the average pharmacist doesn't feel compelled to work extra hours. If you offered her more money at less hours, she would take it. Where you offer me more money, it won't really change the number of hours I am compelled to work.

drdrey 10y ago

I can't tell if "men" is used as a neutral pronoun in this story. > young men > lower-skilled men > non-working men > rudderless middle-aged men > elite men > poorer men > rich men > young non-college men

irrational 10y ago
I think it means males. The males are staying home, playing video games, watching porn, etc. while the females are attending college in droves and "leaning in" and discovering that they can get by just fine without the males around. I halfway suspect that video games and porn are this eras circuses and bread and that there is a secret feminist cabal backing the game and porn proliferation ;-)

jnordwick 10y ago

I think there might also be a very strong correlation between being rich and doing what you love, especially has job opportunities and mobility have drastically increased in the last couple generations. I don't know too many top 1 percenters that would say that would love what they do. Very few. And I do know of many that would say they never really made it -- because independently wealthy -- until they found what they really loved to do: from going into a new field to opening up their own store that grew. I think loving what you do has a lot to do with wanting to put in the effort to really getting paid back what you put in.

simplemath 10y ago
I'm pretty sure, given the opportunity, that I'd love yachting and recreational aerospace.

forrestbrazeal 10y ago

This article (in the tradition of Keynes) makes the implicit assumption that more leisure is good/brings happiness. (Hence the seeming paradox that rich people - those who should be able to afford more leisure - appear to work more.) I don't think that's true. There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming. If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-your-brain-on-retirement---not-nearly-as-sharp-studies-are-finding/2015/10/29/7a0168ba-7dac-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...

adamnemecek 10y ago
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain. I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  To reinforce your point, here is the Youtube channel of a database admin (by day) in Tulsa, OK who spends his free time learning how to (and building) a ~70 foot steel cutter vessel in his front yard. https://www.youtube.com/user/submarineboat https://www.youtube.com/user/submarineboat
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    Or this http://makezine.com/2015/04/20/understand-1700-mechanical-linkages-helpful-animations/ http://makezine.com/2015/04/20/understand-1700-mechanical-li... A retired mechanical engineer spends his time making videos of mechanical linkages in CAD. He's was at 1700 a year ago, hard to say how many he's at now, he's still releasing them. This is what technological progress looks like I think, in a couple of years this will be shown in just about any intro class into the subject and it will reduce the learning time by like, i don't even know, 100x? 1000x? Idk how these were described before but boy do they seem hard to describe in anything but animation. I'm also having a hard time imagining his brain isn't getting exercised just fine. I'm not a mechanical engineer and I spent like good 15-20 minutes watching them and getting quite a bit out of it.

WalterBright 10y ago

I remember coming home for Christmas/summer vacation while in college. I was good for about 10 days, enjoying my leisure. But then I wanted to get back to work. Leisure is boring. The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.

wtetzner 10y ago
I agree, although it depends on what you want to call work. For example, if I had enough money that I didn't need to work, I would still have plenty of productive projects to work on, but they may not make any money. There are plenty of open source projects I'd like to start/work on that would benefit greatly from being able to work on them "full-time", but I wouldn't make any money off of them (at least not without being more creative about how to monetize them than I've been so far).
ZenoArrow 10y ago
Whilst I understand the sentiment, I do wonder if the boredom you're experiencing isn't just a transitional phase. When it comes to leisure, I personally believe there's an art to being good at doing it. What I find is that it takes time to unplug from 'work mode' to truly enjoy 'leisure mode', and that time of unplugging often comes in the form of doing nothing/very little. As you say, that's fine for a while, but soon you want something to do. However, if you think about it, there are tons of things you can do with your leisure time, in some ways the choices are even more vast than those you can find paid employment for. What is required is time for the boredom to subside and imagination to kick in. For example, if you taught yourself the chemistry behind photosynthesis just because you were interested in it, would it matter to you if you weren't paid for knowing it?
grahamburger 10y ago
I've heard a lot of people say this, but I've never felt this way. After 10 days of vacation all I can think about is that I'd love to figure out a way to get 10 more. I also get bored/tired of sitting around doing nothing, but I guess that's just not really how I vacation. I use vacations and time away from work to explore and work on projects that I enjoy, and to me that's very fulfilling. I also really loathe working for someone else, so going back to work isn't particularly intriguing. Although I've been transitioning over the last year to working for myself, and that is starting to change the way I see things - partially because I can take long (multi-week) 'vacations' where I work in the evening and explore during the day.

smallnamespace 10y ago

This points out another issue with providing basic income -- while basic income is preferable to just letting people starve and probably better than expensive-to-administer welfare programs, it does not provide a substitute source for people's self worth. For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.

smhg 10y ago
I don't understand why you would require UBI to provide people's self worth. Some picture UBI to be this utopia that solves everything. Please evaluate it based on being an improvement (however small) to the current system. Also, playing videogames all day is an often heard scenario with UBI. But as the article states, this seems to happen now too. The question is: if it would be implemented, and after the dust settles, will so many more people be unproductive (in the narrowest sense possible)?
GFischer 10y ago
That's something I took away from the article: video games (and games in general) actually make people feel happier and worthy (although it's a "fake" accomplishment). I personally experienced that, during a "down" period, I took a lot of solace in games (particularly M:TG), getting some accomplishments there (national vice champion) made me feel less worthless. But it also made me pursue goals that weren't in my own best interests in the long term and neglect more important things. Overall, I'm glad I quit, since an unhealthy amount of time spent on games eats up on time that can be spent on skills that are valued by society, and I get obsessed very easily. Your point about getting paid as a status signal also rings with stuff like NBA stars arguing about getting paid less than X player, even though they're both extremely well paid, since it signals a preference. And lots of studies about fairness and wages.

octaveguin 10y ago

"entertainment has become an inferior good" That's quite an interesting thing to say that is super true. Consumption of too much media is now a sign of low class status.

holmak 10y ago
In case you didn't know, "inferior good" is an economics term with a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good
- GFischer 10y ago
  That said, his comment does have a point, and consumption of inferior goods themselves can be a signal of low status.

sien 10y ago

The article points out a possible interesting reason why crime dropped around 1990 all over the developed world. "So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown." Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.

irrational 10y ago
Let's not forget all the free porn that is being consumed during the other quarter of their leisure time!
kareemsabri 10y ago
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...
- sien 10y ago
  The thing about legalized abortion is that it would have had no effect outside the US. Roe vs Wade had no effect in Europe or Australia. http://euc.sagepub.com/content/7/5/375.abstract http://euc.sagepub.com/content/7/5/375.abstract
  - kareemsabri 10y ago
    That's interesting - though it doesn't disprove the theory in the US. For example, the declines coincided with the dates individual states legalized abortion as well (some predated Roe v Wade).

tlb 10y ago

The author avoids an obvious arrow of causality: some people like work, which causes those people to work hard, which is more likely to make them rich. There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox. It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.

allemagne 10y ago
It's not difficult to understand why anyone might not want to argue that "poor people are poor because they're inherently lazy" from a strictly political perspective. In addition, thought, how many children of wealthy families really turn out poor out of laziness? How many of those wealthy families were impoverished in the previous generation? If your explanation were as important as you seem to be saying, maybe those questions shouldn't be easy to answer.
nzjrs 10y ago
You ignore the obvious arrow of causality, it's hard to be motivated about cleaning toilets relative to other jobs.
summerdown2 10y ago
> It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... > However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries. Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.

tuna-piano 10y ago

Economists have studied this kind of thing for a long time. From Wikipedia: " In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1] The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time. Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time " Check out this Wikipedia page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...

dredmorbius 10y ago
I just wanted to say thanks for that comment. It set me off in some interesting directions.

tuxrux 10y ago

I had the pleasure of studying under a prof that wrote about how this can be a not so good thing:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278714 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278714

jondubois 10y ago

When you get rich, your life becomes much more interesting - You get more opportunities and you get 'lucky' more often. Also, your work actually makes your feel good about yourself. In effect, life feels like a game; you actually get to win from time to time. The richer you get, the more you win. When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life. Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.

carleverett 10y ago
Very interesting theory - I think I agree. I would add though that a good portion of the causality is going the other way, where people who find work fun and stimulating become more successful, and those who are bored by it stay poor. These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
- aleeds 10y ago
  I think that your argument assumes a certain level of job attained already. Sure, software engineers who enjoy it more become more successful. I doubt that people finding stocking grocery stores correlates with their success at all.
  - 1812Overture 10y ago
    I had a checkout clerk at Target the other day with Down Syndrome who seemed to LOVE her job and was very good at it. Unfortunately I don't see her working her way up to CEO.
- deleted 10y ago
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panic 10y ago
Are you speaking from experience?

tn13 10y ago

It is not "free time" that people want. It is "time to do what I want" is what we all want. For someone like Elon Musk running Tesla might be actually use of that free time. For many of us writing code is the use of that free time. On the other hand I can understand why unproductive people are unable to do much in USA. Most things are automated and minimum wages lock out people from mundane work.

hamiltonians 10y ago

til: people who are not working have a lot of free time I guess the author has never heard of homelessness. instead of being homeless, or being forced to find work, young people are living with parents longer

grellas 10y ago

I read this piece and was very saddened. Take it from someone who has been around a few more years than many others who contribute to this site. There is nothing good - long-term - about sitting around idle for extended periods. It kills your initiative. It kills your character. It kills your options in life. It kills your soul. I saw this happen to several people who were very close to me growing up and I still grieve at what they suffered in later years as the price paid for the extreme short cuts and high life of their youth. And this survey fact as reported in this piece - that is, of one in five non-college-educated young men in their twenties being so very much out of work for sustained periods - is not cause for celebration or for launching into philosophical discussions about the value of leisure in a developed society. It is instead a real tragedy, and I don’t care how many survey participants check a box attesting that, for the moment, they can say they have had lots of fun doing pretty much nothing beyond partying and playing games over the past 12 months or more. I know that today it can often happen that there are very limited options in the workplace and this so-called leisure is really an enforced leisure not of people’s own choosing. But that does not mean we should rationalize this to say that, after all, they do seem to be satisfied in their leisure. That is nothing more than a superficial covering-up of a bad situation. It is decidedly unhealthy for the individuals involved and for society as a whole to have large numbers of young men involuntarily idled for sustained periods in this way (wasn’t that what we used to call the Great Depression). Work is not an evil. It is a big part of how we grow and develop as people. It is a big part of how we negotiate life. Let us hope there comes a day ahead when enforced “leisure” is no longer a norm and the leisure people enjoy is of their own choosing.

droopyEyelids 10y ago
You're mixing up leisure and idleness. You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy. But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything! What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character. But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.

tapp 10y ago

I'd add another factor the author did not mention: the market in which those "Elite U.S. men" compete is vastly more competitive than it was a generation ago. I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I like the bit about 4am being the most productive hour. I have always been a morning person and for most employers and customers I have worked early in the morning until mid-afternoon. Quiet time is golden. As far as the main theme of the article: having more people idle is something society needs to adapt to. In the extreme of insufficient work, I would like to see a very low minimum income and a policy to promote breaking up jobs so people at least got 15 or so hours a week. Looking forward a decade, I bet there will be much less for people to work on.

scentoni 10y ago

Certainly part of the explanation of the paradox is that a great deal of what elites work on is (intentionally or not) finding ways to automate lower-skilled folks out of a job.

narrator 10y ago

I think gamer culture is a vast invisible swath of humanity. If you look at the communities on Twitch or YouTube around certain popular games, it's pretty clear that billions of human hours are poured into gaming.

kbart 10y ago
Before computer games there were also sports, cards, books, alcohol, drugs etc. It's only a consequence, not a cause of humans inclination for exciting their reward centers with least possible efforts.

plandis 10y ago

Honestly I feel like a lot of this is social. I'm motivated to go and work because my peers all do that to and it's been that way since I was a kid. People I knew in high school went to college. Now my college peers are getting jobs, etc... Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of. On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.

grn 10y ago

> The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least. Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes. Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)

rconti 10y ago
Absolutely. I'm SO glad I'm not hourly. I'd never take vacation because I'd think about all the money I'm 'losing'. I'd have a hard time enjoying unemployment for the same reason, even with ample savings. I make it a point to use up all my allotted vacation, which has the side effect of making me more productive, and makes me more respected at work than the guy who is trampled all over because he never takes time off.

yitchelle 10y ago

This statistic from the article strikes as amazing. Not 100% sure if I believe it. "In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” "Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown" Doing some quick maths put 15% of lower skilled men are playing video games all day during their idle time. Is this really happening on the ground?

weerd 10y ago
Oh yeah, definitely. It's a fantastic way to check out from the mundane crawl that is average life in America. Honestly though, it's better than watching TV. Atleast you have to interact and think. There's also the fact that multiplayer gaming allows us to meet new people with similar interests. Someday people are going to just put on the VR hat and practically live in another world.
tamana 10y ago
Depends on how you count. Do they mean 6hrs of games per day but then no more games at night and weekends, or do they mean 6 extra hours of games per day?

deleted 10y ago

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fallingfrog 10y ago

I think part of what is happening is that people with less money do things themselves (cooking, cleaning) that wealthy people pay someone else to do. So wealthy people can spend correspondingly more of their time on the kinds of activities that count as economic activity in our current system- their jobs. The amount of time they have left for exploring/learning/resting is most likely still much more than what poor people have, though.