The consumer-trend-setting professional middle-class will continue to buy embellishments/replacements to existing consumer goods, such as a flat screen TV (plasma or LCD -- whichever is the more expensive), or an SUV (instead of a replacement car), or the latest counter-rotating electric toothbrush, or a redesigned garden, or a refurbished kitchen, or PVRs (personal video recorder -- disc version) instead of VCR, or to go on a much more exotic holiday once a year, or a digital camera in order to show their status, but they won't be able to buy anything that resembles what I am calling a stratum good (that is, a consumer good that pushes the economy forward significantly by sweeping through all the consumer strata) because:
<<<<
He/she is [You] are a post-consumption consumer. You have everything you need, and most everything you want. Except time.
Purple Cow by Seth Godin (Portfolio, 2003)
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Agreeing with Seth Godin, slightly more rigorously: <<<< Work, rest, and play
What about the developed countries or, as Keynes put it, "the progressive countries"? Some observers apparently believe that his vision of leisure in the ascendant has already been realized. According to the newspaper columnist Christina Odone, work has been debunked and leisure has taken its place. Whereas work used to consume almost all our lives between cradle and grave, it is now fitted in between umpteen other activities that are more important: sex and shopping, children, exercise. Society now operates on what she calls the unwork ethic. Our business, she says, is hedonism.
Compared with the position 100 years ago, she has a fair point. From 1870 to 1990, in both Europe and North America, incomes soared and the average number of hours worked per annum fell from 5,000 to 1.600. In some countries the fall in average hours worked has continued since 1990, albeit at a much slower pace.
A fair proportion of people in the developed countries do exercise their preference for more leisure over more money. Some do it by opting voluntarily for early retirement; some by choosing less time-consuming and less stressful jobs; some by choosing to work part-time; some by spending an extended period studying at a relaxed pace rather than working hard to earn money. Equally, the intensity, sophistication, and expense of many leisure activities are much greater. But that is exactly what you would expect given the huge increase in average incomes over the period. It is natural and inevitable that a large part of people's expenditure goes on leisure goods and leisure pursuits.
Yet I do not think it is fair to say that society as a whole operates on the unwork ethic. Even with regard to hours worked, if you look at trends over the last 20 years you see a rather different pattern, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Designated hours of work in manual jobs may have fallen, but actual hours of work in office, professional, and managerial jobs have actually risen. And whatever the average hours of work may be per head, it should never be forgotten that more heads are working as married women increasingly stay in full-time work. In short, work plays a larger, not a smaller, part in our lives....
In America matters are definitely starker. In the 20 years to 1992 the working hours of the average employee in the US increased by the equivalent of one month per year. Americans seemed to be choosing money over time. In America especially, but also in some other Anglo-Saxon countries, if there is one "thing" that most working men and women are really short of it is time. The more successful you are, the more short of time you tend to be. This is the exact opposite of how things used to be in the old days, good or bad, when wealth conferred leisure. Nowadays, the only people with oodles of time are the retired and the permanently unemployed -- the underclass. In general, however, they have little or no money with which to enjoy their "leisure."
In the Anglo-Saxon countries certainly, and spreading into the countries of continental Europe, the work culture has become more intense and more demanding, with a concomitant increase in feelings of stress and pressure. Although some people undoubtedly do enjoy work, all the evidence is that large numbers do not -- and they certainly do not enjoy the excessive pressure, stress, and sheer input of hours. Even in France, although people work fewer hours than the British, over recent decades the pace of life has increased and such customary practices of yore as the three-hour lunch are on the wane.
Accordingly, I think we must count Keynes' vision of a mass switch away from work and toward leisure as largely unfulfilled.
Money for Nothing (p283) Roger Bottle (Nicholas Brealey, 2003)
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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