
Americans value free time over money: survey - epi0Bauqu
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080502/lf_nm_life/americans_wealth_dc
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byrneseyeview
Problems with this survey: "Wealth" versus "free time?" Why not a dollar value
versus a time value?

Also, once you reduce it to that, the answer is very simple: look at how much
people work versus how much they make per hour. Since when do we need to ask
people how they would behave when we already have evidence of how they do
behave?

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llimllib
If the title is to be believed, no Americans have jobs.

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spydez
The article did mention that, for the poor, those values were inverted. They
valued money over free time.

So really it's just a supply/demand type curve, and most Americans are at a
point where the nebulous 'free time' has a better value than an equally hazy
'more money'.

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Hexstream
"The survey also revealed that a disproportionate number of people under the
age of 30 and retirees in the group made $20,000 or less a year."

Perhaps because they're more likely to participate in a telephone poll of this
kind?...

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mynameishere
All polls are like that. The industry pretends that they are dealing with
random samples, but they are never, ever doing so. They select for people who,
unlike me, don't hang up the instant they recognize a cold call. I've got it
down to 2, 3 seconds top...click.

One sure sign: A slight pause between my "hello" and the interlocutor's "Is
so-and-so there?"--time in which the auto-dialer is connecting queued
operators. I could probably hang up _before_ I hear a human voice and still
have a 95 percent success rate at identifying them.

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gruseom
What people _say_ they value is not necessarily the same as what they do
value.

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daniel-cussen
I think this means a lot of people have jobs that require a fixed number of
hours (say, 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year) in exchange for a fixed
amount of money. Americans may feel the number of hours is too high, but their
wage per hour is fine. Basically, Americans work too many hours, and therefore
would like to buy hours back.

E.g. Someone makes $100,000 on 5,000 hours per year. They can't work less than
5,000 hours, or they'll get fired. Their wage is $20 per hour. However,
working 5,000 hours a year is painful and the dude doesn't need to spend
$100,000 a year. He would happily buy back time at $20/hour. If a genie
offered him free money or an equivalent amount of free time (with a $20/hour
exchange rate), he'd take the free time.

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xirium
Scott Adams recommended that loyal and productive staff be rewarded with
additional holiday; that staff can purchase additional holiday and that
everyone leaves work at 5PM. He called it the OA5 business process (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140712> ).

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donw
I'd rather make less, and have a few months off every year to go and travel,
than make more, and be chained to my job.

Of course, the end goal is to make a ton of money _and_ have free time, but
that's still a work-in-progress. :)

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aneesh
Everything is a tradeoff. _How_ much free time, over _how_ much money?

The general statement that Americans value free time over money is both
useless and meaningless.

