Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable.
Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago-a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to.
Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail-sometimes all at once. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems.
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Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time? Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”-and probably only by choice.
THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long.
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