Are Americans Lazy? Fortune magazine at CNN Money thinks we are. Like many of their articles it seems as of late, it is surprisingly ideological rather than factual. The argument is essentially this: U.S. workers are lazy given by increased amount of leisure time (such as sleeping, days off, hours of work per week, etc). His argument is based on a very good paper out of the Boston Fed and is not one that those authors are making. So the question is, why does increased leisure time NOT equal laziness? Hint: Leisure is a normal good. I’ll leave comments open for a few days if anyone has a suggestion, then I’ll leave the answer in a comment before closing them.
Also, you may also notice a rather misleading sentence that is carefully ambiguous in its wording:
Economists see it happening already, attributing some of the surprising flatness in Americans' real total compensation of the past few years to the presence of millions of global workers competing for jobs.
Which economists? Why real total compensation and not earnings? Interestingly, part of the reason this is misleading is part of the reason the leisure = laziness argument is wrong.
2 comments:
It's not that we're lazy. Its just that through technology we have found ways to work smarter in a lesser amount of time. Also the jobs that take a great deal of time are going to other countries where workers are paid less. Case in point: I grew up half an hour outside of Hershey Pa. The factory jobs-the time consuming jobs- from Hershey choclate comapny went to plants in Mexico while office jobs which do require less manual labor and come with more perks stayed in the US. Therefore the US would have more leisure time than other countries who deal with manual labor and factory work and lesser or no perks. It has nothing to do with laziness.
Cudos to Amy. Amy's partially correct in that the underlying process generating her observed outcome of changes in the types of jobs Americans work is also responsible for our reduced hours of work. American's are very well educated and productive, meaning we have a high opportunity cost to working in a low-skill job like factory jobs tend to be. Instead, we work in high-skill jobs where we earn much higher wages and income. Yet money isn't everything, after all we want time to spend it. Employers have also been increasingly using time-off rather than raises to attract better employees. This is not the same situation as the rest of the world, and one day that will change. We're not lazy, we're productive enough to take time and enjoy life. That's a luxory we are fortunate to have.
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