
How Did Work-Life Balance in the U.S. Get So Awful? - hawkharris
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/how-did-work-life-balance-in-the-us-get-so-awful/276336/
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refurb
This article provides a great example of why you can't ignore demographic
shifts when analyzing statistical data across time periods.

The best example of this is household income. If you look at the data, it
looks like household income has been flat since the 1980s. However, during
that time, there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents
worked) to single-parent households. In fact, if you look at the individual
incomes, they have grown substantially over the same time period. It's only
when you obscure the data by talking about "households" do you see the lack of
income growth.

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sliverstorm
In a sense though, isn't household income what matters in the end? While
individual income has grown, if the purchasing power of a household has
remained stagnant, have things really changed?

Of course, that probably isn't a popular way to look at it, because the
immediate inference is that we could realize significant improvements by
shifting society back towards two-parent households, and that grates against
current social trends.

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refurb
Yes, household income is important, but remember what the household data
infers.

You say household income is stagnant and people think "wages haven't
increased", when in fact wages have increased, it's just that there are fewer
wage earners per household.

That's an important distinction that points to very different solutions.

~~~
sliverstorm
I agree it is important to know both data points.

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benjohnson
In my opinion: Our work-like balance got awful when we became greedy.

I'm not nearly 50% as smart as the HN demi-gods around here, but I've learned
to tame my desires.

I live in a humble house and have shitty possessions - but I only have to work
20 hours a week to keep the lights on.

In my opinion, you have to learn to make hard choices with an eye for the long
term. Here's an example: For us, we decided that sending our three children to
a good Lutheran school was important Our observation was that it was wiser to
educate our children in knowledge, but also values and heart. We anticipate
that at 18 years of age, they'll be functioning adults and we won't have to
prop them up into their 20's.

~~~
vpeters25
It's also about perspective.

If you have to wake up every morning at 5:15 am to catch a 1.5 hr bus ride,
arrive at work at 8 am, work for 9 hrs until 6 pm (1 hr lunch in between).
Then catch another 1.5 hr ride back home. Arrive after 8pm, eat something, go
sleep.

Now rinse and repeat, every week day for 9 years.

Does this even qualify as a balanced work-life?

Compare that to wake up at 8 am, have coffee, read hackernews, shower, arrive
at work at 9 am, work through 5 pm, arrive back home at 5:30, 5 hrs for
dinner, leisure, sports, go gym, play with kids, etc, go sleep.

Edit: the top example is my brother's typical workday in Chile, bottom one is
mine here in the US.

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miloshadzic
I was sure that the first was typical for a US worker.

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dvanduzer
I came to a screeching halt when I read "The Great Workweek Shift" chart. I
can't think of a more misleading way to present that kind of data.

Then "The Growth of Leisure Time for Men" chart is silent on whether the men
with fewer than 12 years of education would prefer to swap this extra
"leisure" time for paid work. In the last paragraph he refers to this as
"downtime" instead.

Very little source data cited. Clever unit shifting on most of the graphs.
Generally strange mixed messaging.

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ams6110
Yeah I think this is the first time I have seen "chronic unemployment" called
"leisure time" but I guess technically it's correct.

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gohrt
Technically unemployment is time spent looking for work. People not looking
for work are excluded.

Naturally, such a distinction is difficult to do accurately.

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evanlivingston
Bertrand Russell does a good job picking apart why we use innovation to make
ourselves work harder rather than life easier.
<http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html>

~~~
shaydoc
That is seriously good reading

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sliverstorm
Did anyone notice this little chart?

[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-31%20at%204.40.28%20PM.png)

Take a look at the one group that has lost leisure time.

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TheCoelacanth
So, for anyone with a Bachelor's or higher, leisure time has plummeted. For
everyone else, the increase in "leisure time" is likely because of
underemployment, so they would actually prefer to be working more to earn more
money.

~~~
sliverstorm
That seems somewhat unlikely? There are 168 hours in a week, or 128 hours of
time outside the 40 hour workweek. Even those without a high school diploma
have 113 hours of leisure per this graph- so I don't think we can immediately
conclude they just don't have work.

Also, this chart is from 1965 to 2005, so more recent trends will only be in a
tiny corner of this graph.

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gregpilling
So if a normal work week is counted at 40 hours, and there are 99 hours of
leisure according to that chart for a modern man with a degree, then it works
out that the average person on that plot line is now working 168 - 99 = 69
hours on average or 69 / 40 = 172.5% of a normal week. Sounds unbalanced to
me.

Juliet Schor has an excellent book on this subject The Overworked American:
The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure [http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-
Unexpected-Decline...](http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Unexpected-
Decline-Leisure/dp/046505434X)

~~~
sliverstorm
Right, the average working man works more than 40 hours a week because per the
article, this chart counts things like housework as work.

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vpeters25
I think something is seriously wrong with this work-life balance index
(<http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/work-life-balance>) when the US
ranks only slightly higher than Chile.

There is no way a country such as Chile, where the legal work-week is 45 hrs
and the average commute takes at least 1hr can be ranked so high.

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rm999
Great article, it's nice to see someone take a simple statistic that may tell
a misleading story and dig deeply into its causes. Macroeconomics is a complex
topic that generally deserves rigorous analysis.

The article mostly looks at gender and class, I wonder how immigration has
affected the shifts.

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cynicalkane
This is mostly microeconomics stuff, but for a national economy. Macro is when
the scale of a market causes it to obey different rules, sort of how quantum
mechanics is fundamentally different from classical but quantum particles
still obey classical laws in some situations.

Micro is a lot easier to work with because you can study it empirically, since
experiments and data can be assumed to scale up; it's subject to the "rigorous
analysis" you talk about.

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zwieback
Another question we have to ask is: "how much leisure time do we want?"

It's fair to judge a reduction in work hours as a good thing when most work is
hard manual labor. I doubt that's true for the majority of jobs any more. I
think everyone should have enough leisure time to be healthy and spend time
with their family or friends. However, I don't think we should be comparing
ourselves to Europe where decades of structural unemployment have led to low-
quality leisure time for large swaths of the population?

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come2gether
low quality leisure time? how is this defined?

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zwieback
Time off from work without anything to do and no money. I know, not something
that would happen to me but for a lot of people time off is spent in front of
the TV waiting for work to start up again.

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thekevan
If someone asked me that, my answer would be, "when you let it."

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davidw
Starting with agriculture, when we gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle,
according to some people.

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tsotha
When did work-life balance get so awful? Probably right around the time
agriculture was invented.

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pmarca
I think the title has a typo. Should be "How Did Work-Life Balance in the US
Get So Awesome?"

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mwetzler
The misogyny in the article's comments section is shocking and depressing.

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FellowTraveler
three words: the income tax.

