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Why Do Americans Work So Much?

• coldtea 10y ago
  >In a new paper, Friedman tries to figure out why that increased productivity has not translated into increased leisure time. Perhaps people just never feel materially satisfied, always wanting more money for the next new thing. “This argument is, at best, far from sufficient,” he writes. If that were the case, why did the duration of the workweek decline in the first place? That's a very shallow counter-argument. For one, when the workweek declined neither TV was a force, nor was advertisement as prevalent and constant as it was in later decades. Both strong factors in people "never feeling materially satisfied".