Consumerism and social status keep our noses to the grindstone

What better time to think about whether we’re working too hard than while we’re enjoying a Monday off, thanks to a public holiday? Wouldn’t it be nice if every weekend could be a long weekend?

Actually, almost 100 years ago, the greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, pretty much predicted that’s the way we’d be living by now.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, he envisaged that by now, we’d be able to live comfortably while having to work only 15 hours a week. We could work just three hours each weekday, or clock up our 15 hours in just a few days – say, three five-hour days.

Really? What a duffer. How could anyone so smart be so disastrously wrong?

Well, not quite. What Keynes was saying was that, technological advance – the invention of ever-better labour-saving machines – would increase the productivity of our labour to such an extent that, by now, we wouldn’t need to work very hard to be able to live comfortably.

His point was that, as we’re able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, we become better off. We can take that benefit either as enjoying an unchanged material standard of living while working fewer hours a week, or as higher monetary income – thus allowing us to buy more stuff – while working the same number of hours.

As Jan Behringer and other economists from Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have written, in the years since Keynes made that prediction the productivity of labour in the developed economies has improved by more than he expected.

So, we could have been working a 15-hour week had we chosen to but, in fact, we chose to take the money and the extra stuff rather than the extra leisure. Working hours have fallen since the 1930s, but not by all that much.

Behringer and colleagues say the “obstacles to more leisure time are primarily sociopolitical in nature” – by which they mean it’s not purely economic reasons, the shortage of resources, that require us to work more.

I’ve no doubt it has suited the rich and powerful to have us working and spending rather than devoting four days a week to developing our hobbies. That way, the rich and powerful get more so.

But, by the same token, I think the rest of us have been easily seduced by the lure of the materialist, consumer culture. We love buying things that are new, shinier and do better tricks.

In Australia – and in Europe, but less so in America – pretty much all the reductions in working hours, the increases in annual leave and sick leave, and the introduction of that strange animal, long service leave, have happened because union-backed governments have imposed them on unwilling employers.

And every time they have, the employers and their political parties have predicted the death and destruction of the economy.

But, even so, how long since you’ve seen a union telling its bosses they should go easy on the pay rise, but cut working hours? No, I have no doubt that the workers have preferred more bangles and baubles.

Behringer and colleagues, however, have a different take. Their study of developments in the US and Europe over the decades leads them to two conclusions.

First, since the 1980s, average working hours have fallen more slowly as inequality – the gap between high and low incomes – has increased.

Second, in countries with high inequality, employees earning higher hourly wage rates tend to work longer hours than those on lower hourly wage rates.

Both these findings are striking because they contradict economists’ earlier finding that people with higher incomes chose to increase their leisure time.

So, what’s going on? The authors’ explanation is that rising inequality of incomes leads to more “upward status comparisons”. Like most social animals, we are conscious of our social status – where we fit in the pecking order.

And, particularly where there’s a big difference between the top and the bottom, we seek to improve our position.

“The upper middle class emulates the consumption norms of the rich, and sacrifices leisure time to do so. Because the rich also increase their spending on status goods such as housing, education, etc as their incomes rise, the middle class feels pressure to keep up,” they say.

“After all, what constitutes ‘a good place to live’ or ‘a good education’ is essentially defined in comparison to the standards that the upper income groups largely determine.”

Another of their findings is that working hours are more likely to be shorter when wage bargaining is centralised and government social benefits in kind (but not in cash) are more adequate.

One possible explanation, they say, is that centralised wage bargaining reduces status conflict because workers can decide collectively to avoid a “positional arms race” to allow shorter working hours and more leisure.

They find that social benefits in kind rather than cash are associated with lower hours of work. This may be because the direct provision of goods and services by governments reduces the need for status-oriented private spending on goods and services.

Education has many dimensions. It broadens the mind, it helps you get a better-paying job, and it’s a “positional good” – it helps people judge your social status.

"The extent to which the education sector is organised through private markets is found to be associated with longer working hours among workers who themselves have high levels of education,” the authors say.

Get it? If governments provided better healthcare and public schools, more people would be content to use the publicly provided services along with everyone else, and fewer people would feel the need to work longer to afford private hospitals and schools.

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Much prosperity comes from government and the taxes it imposes

The Productivity Commission’s job is to make us care about the main driver of economic growth: productivity improvement. Its latest advertising campaign certainly makes it sound terrific. But ads can be misleading. And productivity isn’t improving as quickly as it used to. We’re told this is a very bad thing, but I’m not so sure.

The commission’s latest report on our productivity performance, “Advancing Prosperity”, offers a neat explanation of what productivity is: the rise in real gross domestic product per hour worked. So it’s a measure of the efficiency with which our businesses and government agencies transform labour, physical capital and raw materials into the goods and services we consume.

The economy – GDP – can grow because the population grows, with all the extra people increasing the consumption of goods and services, and most of them working to increase the production of goods and services.

It also grows when we invest in more housing, business machinery and construction, and public infrastructure. But, over time, most growth comes from productivity improvement: the increased efficiency with which we deploy our workers – increasing their education and training, giving them better machines to work with, and organising factories and offices more efficiently.

Here’s the ad for productivity improvement. “There has been a vast improvement in average human wellbeing over the last 200 years: measured in longer lives, diseases cured, improved mobility [transport and travel], safer jobs, instant communication and countless improvements to comfort, leisure and convenience.”

That’s all true. And it’s been a wonderful thing, leaving us hugely better off. But here’s another thing: neither GDP nor GDP per hour worked directly measures any of those wonderful outcomes. What GDP measures is how much we spent on – and how much income people earned from – doctors, hospitals and medicines, good water and sewerage, cars, trucks and planes, occupational health and safety, telecommunications, computers, the internet, and all the rest.

The ad man’s 200 years is a reference to all the growth in economic activity we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution. We’re asked to believe that all the economic growth and improved productivity over that time caused all those benefits to happen.

Well, yes, I suppose so. But right now, the commission’s asking us to accept that our present and future rate of growth in GDP and GDP per hour worked will pretty directly affect how much more of those desirable outcomes we get.

That’s quite a logical leap. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Maybe the growth and greater efficiency will lead to more medical breakthroughs, longer lives, cheaper travel etc, or maybe it will lead to more addiction to drugs and gambling, more fast food and obesity, more kids playing computer games instead of reading books, more time wasted in commuting on overcrowded highways, more stress and anxiety, and more money spent on armaments and fighting wars.

Or, here’s a thought: maybe further economic growth will lead to more destruction of the natural environment, more species extinction and more global warming.

Get it? It doesn’t follow automatically that more growth and efficiency lead to more good things rather than more bad things. It’s not so much growth and efficiency that make our lives better, it’s how we get the growth, the costs that come with the growth, and what we use the growth to buy.

Trouble is, apart from extolling growth and efficiency, the Productivity Commission has little to say about how we ensure that growth leaves us better off, not worse off.

Economics is about means, not ends. How to be more efficient in getting what we want. The neoclassical ideology – where ideology means your beliefs about how the world works and how it should work – says that what we want is no business of economists, or of governments. What we want should be left to the personal preferences of consumers.

The Productivity Commission has long championed neoclassical ideology. It wants to minimise the role of government and maximise the role of the private sector.

It would like to reduce the extent to which governments intervene in markets and regulate what businesses can and can’t do. It has led the way in urging governments to outsource the provision of “human services” such as childcare, aged care and disability care to private, for-profit providers.

It wants to keep government small and taxes low to maximise the amount of their income that households are free to spend as they see fit, not as the government sees fit.

Fine. But get this: in that list of all the wonderful things that economic growth has brought us, governments played a huge part in either bringing them about or encouraging private firms to.

We live longer, healthier lives because governments spent a fortune on ensuring cities were adequately sewered and had clean water, then paid for hospitals, subsidised doctors and medicines, paid for university medical research and encouraged private development of pharmaceuticals by granting patents and other intellectual property rights to drug companies.

Governments regulated to reduce road deaths. They improved our mobility by building roads, public transport, ports and airports. Very little of that would have been done if just left to private businesses.

Jobs are safer because governments imposed occupational health and safety standards on protesting businesses. The internet, with all its benefits, was first developed by the US military for its own needs.

The commission says that when we improve our productivity, we can choose whether to take the proceeds as higher income or shorter working hours.

In theory, yes. In practice, all the reductions in the working week we’ve seen over the past century have happened because governments imposed them on highly reluctant employers. Ditto annual leave and long-service leave.

I don’t share the commission’s worry that productivity improvement may stay slow. It won’t matter if we do more to produce good things and fewer bad things. But that, of course, would require more government intervention in the economy, not less.

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We are too busy for our own good

Years ago, I took a sabbatical and we lived a few months in California and a few in the backblocks of New Zealand’s South Island. I’d just got used to how impatient shop assistants were if you couldn’t immediately spit out exactly what you wanted to buy, when we moved back Down Under and I was expected to wait politely while the person ahead of me in the queue passed the time of day with the lady behind the counter.

We’re not yet as bad as America, but there’s no doubt life in big cities such as Melbourne and Sydney is a lot faster and more furious than it used to be – and still is in quieter parts of the state.

We have to move faster in the big cities, of course, because we have so much to do, so much to fit in. Or so we imagine. We blow our horns at other motorists who slow us down as we hurry to our next commitment. (When did we become a nation of horn-blowers? Yuck.)

And that brings me to your summer break. Did you – or are you still – enjoy the chance to take it easy, get up late, stay in bed reading, potter about, read the paper, avoid doing much?

Or did you rush about, keeping busy, trying to fit in as much fun as possible, keep the kids entertained?

In other words, did you really get a break, or were you as busy as ever, just doing a different list of things?

When I was young, annual holidays were almost synonymous with being bored. There was never anything much to do apart from go for a walk. My big sisters sat on their beds reading – they had eiderdowns, I remember – so I hung around them doing the same. They fed me issues of a little children’s magazine called Sunny Corner, continuing the adventures of Milly-Molly-Mandy. (I’ve had a weakness for chick-lit ever since.)

I became a bookworm at an early age partly because everyone else at home was reading books but mainly because there was nothing else to do. And, in my very religious family, reading was allowed on Sunday between going to meetings. Even comics.

And that brings me to weekends. Do you see them as a chance to do a lot of pleasant things you can’t do during the week? Do you start with a list of great things to do, but end with a lot of the pleasures you’d hoped to achieve not crossed off?

Sometimes I think being so busy at the weekend is a form of greed. Of having eyes bigger than your stomach. I doubt it’s much of a recipe for the good life.

But have you noticed how, when you try to tell a friend how exceptionally busy you’ve been, they invariably counter that they’ve been busy, too? No one wants to admit to being unbusy.

Even the retired claim to be terribly busy. Everything’s relative, I guess.

In his latest book, Australia Reimagined, social guru Hugh Mackay reflects on the “culture of busyness”, about which he has many reservations. “No matter how we try to dress it up, disguising it as a virtue or a badge to be worn with pride, relentless busyness is a health hazard – yet another contributor to our epidemic of stress and anxiety,” he says.

“For too many of us, holidays have been compressed into ‘short breaks’, the pleasure of walking or running in the open air has been swapped for a quick burst at the gym, the therapeutic joy of aimlessness has been overwhelmed by the need for everything to have both a purpose and an outcome.”

A sane person would regard excessive or sustained busyness as a warning signal, he says. “No time to read? No time to walk? No time to play? No time to nurture a neglected relationship over a cup of coffee? Surely there’s something awry in a life like that.”

Sometimes we keep ourselves busy because we feel we need to be – and be seen to be – busy, especially at work. Many bosses keep themselves busy making the easy decisions so they can put off the really hard ones.

Sometimes we’re busy because we’re not as efficient as we should be. Sometimes we’re busy at work because it’s better than being at home with our not-so-loved ones. Sometimes we keep busy because it leaves us no time to think about the meaning of our lives.

Mackay says our addiction to busyness has three adverse consequences. First, we’re becoming a sleep-deprived society.

Second, we’re becoming afraid of stillness, solitude and inactivity.

Third, busyness can both distract us and insulate us from the needs of the people around us. Busyness “decompassions” us, he concludes.

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Greenery has magic properties

I've just got to get through extended Christmas festivities - and subsequent mopping up - and I'll be off on my hols. What am I doing this year? Same as most years: heading for the bush. This time, we're going to the mountains.

As a denizen of the inner city, I've long had a great desire to get out into the country whenever possible. Get into the grass and trees, where the air is clean and the sleeping seems better.

There's a place we rent not far up the coast that backs on to a national park. I call it Lyrebird Lodge. And even when we go overseas, I often find the country towns beat the big cities.

In recent times, I've been singing the praises of big cities: how efficient they are and how they promote creativity and productivity, particularly in the era of the information economy.

But cities have their dark side and insufficient grass and trees is it. That's more than just a personal preference. Environmental psychologists and others have been gathering impressive evidence of the health-giving properties of greenery.

It's evidence to support the US biologist E. O. Wilson's "biophilia" hypothesis: because humans evolved in natural environments and have lived separate from nature only relatively recently in their evolutionary history, people possess an innate need to affiliate with other living things.

Research published last year found that people who live in urban areas with more green space tend to report greater well-being - less mental distress and higher life satisfaction - than city dwellers who do not have parks, gardens or other green space nearby.

Mathew White and colleagues at the University of Exeter Medical School used a national longitudinal survey of households in Britain to track the experience of more than 10,000 people for 17 years to 2008.

They found that, on average, the positive effect on well-being was equivalent to about one-third of the difference between being married rather than unmarried and a 10th of the effect of being employed rather than unemployed.

A different study followed the experience of more than 1000 people over five years, in which time some moved to greener urban areas and some to less green areas. The results showed that, on average, people who moved to greener areas felt an immediate improvement in their mental health. This boost could still be measured three years later.

"These findings are important for urban planners thinking about introducing new green spaces to towns and cities, suggesting they could provide long term and sustained benefits for local communities," the lead author of the study said.

A study from Canada began by summarising all the various benefits from contact with nature that other research had found: it can restore people's ability to pay attention, improve concentration in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and speed recovery from illness. It might even reduce the risk of dying.

Yet another study notes that the first hospitals in Europe were infirmaries in monastic communities where a garden was considered an essential part of the environment in that it supported the healing process.

This study of studies, from Norway, says: "In most cultures, both present and past, one can observe behaviour reflecting a fondness for nature. For example, tomb painting from ancient Egypt, as well as remains found in the ruins of Pompeii, substantiate that people brought plants into their houses and gardens more than 2000 years ago."

Many studies find health benefits from contact with nature. The Norwegian paper says a key element in this may be nature's stress-reducing effect. Stress plays a role in the causes and development of cardiovascular diseases, anxiety disorders and depression.

Contact with nature may help "simply by being consciously or unconsciously pleasing to the eye".

Office employees seem to compensate for lack of a window view by introducing indoor plants or even just pictures of nature. One study found that having a view to plants from the work station decreased the amount of self-reported sick leave.

One of my favourite blog sites, PsyBlog, conducted by the British psychologist Dr Jeremy Dean, notes research estimating that people now spend 25 per cent less time in nature than they did 20 years ago. Instead, recreational time is often spent surfing the internet, playing video games and watching movies.

But this is more up my line: Dean reports a study finding that taking group walks in nature is associated with better mental well-being and lower stress and depression.

The study evaluated a British program called Walking for Health, and involved nearly 2000 participants, divided into two matched groups of those who took part in the walks and those who did not.

The walks, which extended over three months, combined three elements, each of which you'd expect to make people feel better: walking, being in nature and being with other people.

Those who seemed to benefit most were those who had been through a recent stressful life event, such as divorce, bereavement or a serious illness.

"Our findings suggest that something as simple as joining an outdoor walking group may not only improve someone's daily positive emotions, but may also contribute a non-pharmacological approach to serious conditions like depression," one of the study's authors said.

You beaut. When I get to the mountains, I'm hoping to do a lot of bush walking.

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