I was particularly interested in the application of this logic towards hours worked per week. (I do hope that this isn't too tangential!) Conventional wisdom, according to Galbraith, was that man should work; it was both a necessity for existence and a cultural code. In the Victorian age, he noted, “Failure to work, even when it could be afforded, was offensive...” (215). To Galbraith, this is the final ounce of old world wisdom of which we must let go. Until we can cross this stop the artificial sense of urgency to produce and achieve efficiency, we will never fully enjoy the fruits of our labors. Galbraith calls this the “one final bridge [that] must be built between the world of scarcity and that of affluence” (216).
Our need to constantly produce causes, Galbraith notes, “the production of relatively unimportant goods” (216). Deciphering the relatively unimportant goods from the relatively important goods could be a difficult task; I'm not even sure how one could ever definitely make that call. I think my iPhone is a necessity, as it has been at most internships I've taken. However, Galbraith could argue that the number of hours worked per week, which has increased in the U.S. over the past few decades, is an indication of our desperate need for some sort of imaginary production fulfilment.
The following chart from the OECD shows the trends in hours worked per capita over a thirty year period in recent history. As one can see, the United States is all the way to the far right, with a 20% increase in hours worked.
The picture within the U.S., however, is a bit different. The OECD report notes that "annual hours per employed person have remained more or less unchanged for US workers since 1980" (2). The graph above, in this respect, is a bit misleading -- the 20% is more influenced by shifts in the share of the population working than any sort of crazy increase in the number of hours worked on a micro level.
However, one could also argue that after the tech boom which occurred over the last two to three decades, it's a bit nonsensical that as a country we're still working same amount of hours on average as we were before the advent of computers.
Anyways, reading this reminded me of research I did into life-family balance this summer in light of Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Can't Have It All" piece in the Atlantic. This all comes from quantitative interviews among a small sample of CMC alums, but I can't tell you how concerned they were about us overworking ourselves in the workplace. They worried that CMC's definition of success places too much value on workplace success. One in particular noted "Life's too short." (I also should mention that several of the alums I spoke with had lived both here and abroad, and were quick to proclaim that Americans have a culture of "overworking" as suggested by the chart above -- I do wonder if those stats perpetuate a myth.)
I know the "have it all" debate -- for both men and women -- permeated the press this summer. I wonder if this phrase, and the endless pursuit of perfection, is somehow linked to a conventional norm that has failed to die out. Maybe it's linked to the old world social philosophy of need-based production that Galbraith is referring too.
I'm genuinely unsure about how I feel about Galbraith's as a whole, but I found his description of conventional wisdom through economic history very interesting. We're an affluent society and maybe we should start acting like it. Cheers.
Sources:
http://www.oecd.org/employment/employmentpoliciesanddata/32504422.pdf
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us
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