Matt Breunig Almost Gets There

But, still, fluffs it

Matt Breunig’s latest is, as with so much of Breunig’s stuff, superficially persuasive. But there’s a bit left out, the bit left out being what kills the assertion.

The obvious problem with this measure is that it does not account for how many hours of work each country has to put in to produce its GDP. This implicitly treats all time not spent working as having zero value. Childhood, student life, retirement, vacations, holidays, family time, and socializing are assumed to be worthless. Under such a metric, a country whose workers put in eighty hours a week to produce a certain amount of output is considered to be just as well-off as a country whose workers can produce the same output in half the time. This is nonsense.

To account for differences in leisure time across countries, you want to look at GDP per hour worked, which is a figure the OECD also provides.

So, while the US has higher GDP per person it has lower per hour worked and also, the second part of the argument, that income is less equally distributed. Therefore USians are, in fact, poorer than EUians. QED.

That GDP per hour declines the more hours worked well, economists have been talking about marginal whatevers forever.

And so Breunig’s argument seems to work and therefore……except we also get this line toward the end:

The fact that GDP is unable to capture the value of leisure time (or the value of nonmarket production),

Oh, wait up, what is this non-market production?

That’s the work we all do at home, not for money nor The Man. The washing up, the laundry, clearing the gutters, changing the oil in the car and on and on. A century back it would have included growing the vegetables for the family, two centuries back moving the outhouse each 6 months and skinning the pig each autumn.

As feminists like to remind us - even if they go well overboard with that burden of emotional labour shtick - there is indeed work that has to be done in the household.

Economists concur - Tim Smeeding is big on this. We end up, in the science here, dividing time into four parts. Personal time is what must be done personally and cannot be done for you. Sleeping, eating, having a shower and even, yes, a bowel movement. Household labour is what is done inside the household not for money. Kiddie care, cooking, washing up, clearing gutters and so on. Market hours are those done out in the economy for The Man - and are recorded in this GDP thing. Leisure is the balancing item. What’s left over to be ourselves after we’ve done the first three.

One amusement is that those passing stools at 3 and 4 on the Bristol Chart have more leisure time than those at 1 and 2 - time taken per visit - and those at 5, 6 and 7 - more visits.

The rather more important point is that leisure is not the time left after working for The Man. As it happens, personal time doesn’t vary much over Europe and US. But non-market - household - hours do. A pencil sketch would be that USians work more market hours, buy more tech and gadgetry to do that household labour than EUians do. Well, OK, it’s a choice. But note the assumption that Breunig has made - that this leads to more leisure for the EUians. Which isn’t, necessarily, true. It is at least feasible that the paid for gadgetry saves more household hours than the The Man working hours required to buy it. Therefore, while USians work more market hours they actually gain more leisure time.

And, well, that’s an empirical thing. And there is at least one Tim Smeeding paper showing that the German housewife has less free - leisure - time than the USian one. Fewer The Man working hours, sure (it’s societally normal for a German woman not to work while there are young children in the household) but home making that vital sauerkraut leads to less free time overall. Perhaps.

And, well, this also seems to be more generally true. While USians do more market, The Man, working hours they do not have fewer leisure hours. In fact, quite possibly more leisure hours as a result of much less unpaid labour in the household hours. Note the possibly there, I’ve not seen an absolute proof of this. But German housewives as an example etc.

Which, you know, rather kills the Breunig hypothesis.

But then something very basic to remember about any analysis of working hours, leisure and so on. If you’re not including unpaid hours in the household in your count of working hours then you are going to be wrong.

Oh, and getting the roughage content of your diet right will increase leisure time, of course.