So here’s an idea - let people choose
Britons have just 23 hours of ‘genuinely free’ time a week – so much for labour-saving technology
Elle Hunt
Well, yes. And no, to be honest. The actual climb back through the evidence shows that “work” hours have indeed declined, both in the marketplace for The Man and also those things that must be done in the household - cleaning, cooking and so on. Keynes and the 15 hour workweek has come about and it’s - as we have pointed out many a time - largely the technologically driven reduction in household labour that has made it do so.
What’s filling that gap is childcare. And there’s a certain argument that playing with your own children is not, in fact, work, but somewhere between a form of leisure and rather the meaning of life itself. And yes, if we put childcare in the leisure section then working hours have declined precipitately. If they’re in work hours not so much.
But here’s where we need to think about it:
A century ago, there was a collective desire and will to use technology to manage work, underpinned by the belief that leisure was akin to freedom. It was assumed that people would make choices to free up more time to spend with family, or on their hobbies. But that vision was tested – and eventually crushed – by the emerging view of progress as more money with which to buy more things, and of work as “the centre of life”.
We oppose that idea of the collective desire and insist upon giving free rein to the individual one. Yes the machines are going to continue to take bites out of the time required to do the work we currently do. It’s then up to each individual as to how that newly freed up time is used. Perhaps more leisure and perhaps replacing those now redundant work hours with more work so as to have a higher physical standard of living.
We certainly cannot see why the government should try to make that determination for the individual and, to be frank, we can’t see why the neighbours should either. It’s simply not a collective decision, not something to be decided collectively.
Vivat Libertas and all that. For that is what the machines, the mechanisation, are really all about. Freeing up the time for us to choose even if the choice is not quite what others approve of.
Tim Worstall