Hello Keith, It's some time since I posted the article on Duxbury's research. I suspect that what she is researching and what Norberg is referring to are two different things or, perhaps better, levels of things. Norberg is undoubtedly correct in pointing out that people, in general, earn a living in fewer hours now than they did 100 years ago. During that period, gains in prductivity have been enormous. Wherever industrialization has taken hold, people do things much more efficiently than they did in the past. However, there are many places left in which feeding a family would still take about as much time as it did a century ago. Not every place has modernized, and many places have regressed in their ability of support human life - e.g. parts of Afghanistan have been "bombed into the stone age".
Those are particular cases. And so is what Duxbury is researching. If I recall the article, she is concerned with professional couples in which women have made deliberate choices about careers versus family. If they choose a career they often find themselves on a "treadmill", so to speak, and find it difficult to get off and do what women were traditionally expected to do -- raise a family, look after kids, etc. Their biological clocks are ticking and their grandmothers are still somewhere in their pysche going "tisk, tisk, tisk", but the treadmill keeps going faster and faster. The result is a lot of stress of the kind Duxbury is looking at. Ed > Hi Ed, > > The article you posted on FW of the Globe and Mail of 13 February, "Work > winning out over family in the struggle for balance" by Elizabeth Church, > concerning longer working weeks was interesting. > > I meant to reply to this at the time because concern over here has also > been growing in recent years. However, it must be noted that the phenomenon > has been mainly confined to management and professional people rather than > most workers and, almost always, the overtime is voluntary. Now that we're > heading into calmer times, not to say recession, I think we'll find that > the enthusiasm will wane considerably. > > I wouldn't want to doubt the research of Prof Linda Duxbury on which the > article was based, but here's a longer term view -- three paragraphs from > Johan Norberg's recent book, "In Defence of Global Capitalism" (Timbro, 2001): > > (JN) > <<<< > The time we all spend working has diminished with rising prosperity, for > the simple reason that growth enables us to do less work for the same > payment -- if we want to. Compared with the parental generation, most of > today's workers go to work later, go home earlier, have longer lunch and > coffee breaks, longer vacations and more public holidays. > > According to American statistics, working hours today are only about half > of what they were 100 years ago and have diminished by 10% since as > recently as 1973 -- a reduction equaling 23 days per annum . . . [or] five > extra years' waking leisure. This is also because we have begun working > progressively later in life, are retiring earlier and are living longer. > > A western worker in 1870 had only two hours off for each hour worked, > spread out over a lifetime. By 1950 this had doubled to four hours off, > doubling again to the present figure of about eight hours off for each hour > worked. Economic development, thanks partly to trade enabling us to > specialise, makes it possible for us to reduce our working hours > considerably and also to raise our material living standard. We have never > taken less time to earn our living. > >>>> > > Keith > > > __________________________________________________________ > "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in > order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow > _________________________________________________ > Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > _________________________________________________ >
