OK, so here goes: (all comments refer to the modal human being - yes, there are other ways of living your life, but this is how it works for most people) 1) We

OK, so here goes: (all comments refer to the modal human being - yes, there are other ways of living your life, but this is how it works for most people) 1) We all have a fixed number of hours per day. 2) If we don't have enough money to pay for housing near the centre of a city, we lose a significant chunk of those hours commuting for work, shopping, cultural, entertainement purposes. 3) So we try to move as close to the centre of cities as possible, but 4) land in the city centre is constrained, so we are now in competition with everyone else to pay for central housing 5) So we try to earn more by working more, up until the extra hours worked are more than the hours commuting saved. It turns out that at the moment, thanks to various regulations / societal norms in the western world, this changeover point occurs at about 5 days work a week (for higher-paying professions, you can get this down to 4, for lower paying it may increase up to 6, or even 7) This pattern will occur until we can remove scarcity of all resources - whilst scarcity exists, we will always be in competition with our neighbours for those scarce resources, and we will have pressure to work more to obtain them. Thankyou for reading this economic theory from someone who knows next to nothing about economics...