How Much Time?
But how can we measure the pace of life? As a subjective state, an acceleration of the speed of life afects people’s experience of time. It causes individuals to consider time to be scarce, to feel rushed and pressed for time. In other words, people feel that they can no longer find time to complete the tasks and activities most important to them.
That time pressure is a common experience is evidenced by the fact that an increasing proportion of the population report feeling short of time. Since 1965, the US time-use researcher John Robinson has been asking adults, “Would you say you always feel rushed, even to do things you have to do, only sometimes feel rushed, or almost never feel rushed?” The proportion of Americans reporting that they always feel rushed rose from 25 percent in 1965 to 35 percent forty years later.8 Almost half now also say that they almost never have time on their hands. According to most evidence, people perceive leisure time as scarcer and more hectic. And this is also true cross-nationally, where there has been consistent historical growth of busy feelings through the last part of the twentieth century.
Do these widespread perceptions of time pressure reflect the behavioral evidence of how people spend their time? Has leisure time actually decreased?9
Let us begin by looking at trends in the hours of paid work. Several commentators have shown that there is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting Schor’s claim that the average length of the workweek has changed appreciably in recent decades. The issue is still a matter of controversy, at least at the margins, as diferent methodologies yield somewhat diferent conclusions, and there is significant variation between diferent countries. In the United States, average hours have held broadly constant for many years, as they have for example in Australia, Finland, and Sweden. In European countries, such as France and Germany, they declined as a result of deliberate government policies designed to reduce working hours.10 As a result, in France and Germany, employees work only about 80 percent as many hours a year as employees in the United States.
Overall, however, in both the United States and Europe, there has been no straightforward increase in working hours over the last fifty years.
Chapter three
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