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The Poor Enjoy More Leisure Time?
By JLP | July 5, 2008
When you think of being “wealthy” what comes to mind? Playing 18 holes of golf on a weekday? Traveling abroad without having to worry what it will cost? Living in a big house and being able to hire help to take care of it?
Wealth has traditionally been synonymous with leisure. The wealthy elite were free from the bondage of work, chores, and even childcare.
Time have apparently changed. According to this Wall Street Journal Online article, the rich are more likely than ever to spend their time stressed.
According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, “being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.”
Now I don’t doubt that the rich spend more time than they used to feeling stressed and doing compulsory tasks; they probably work more on than they used to, and more than your average poor person as well (hence their higher salaries, perhaps). But I have a serious problem with this article comparing the ultra-poor (those making less than $20K a year) to the “rich” who make more than $100K. Those groups seem arbitrarily chosen to prove a weak and ridiculous point: that poor people enjoy much more true leisure time than the rich.
People who make less than $20,000 a year, for instance, spent more than a third of their time in passive leisure, like kicking back and watching TV. By contrast, those making more than $100,000 a year (I would call them affluent, not wealthy), spent less than a fifth of their time in passive leisure. “The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were structured and often stressful — shopping, child care and exercise.”
So the Americans out there making less than $20,000 a year are spending more than a third of their time in “passive leisure” - i.e. being couch potatoes. That sounds like a personal problem to me, not something that should make the rich long for that lifestyle. Maybe if they get off their bumps they would be making more than $20K a year.
[Note: Passive leisure can also include things like getting a spa treatment, traveling, etc., but people in that income bracket are spending the majority of their passive leisure time in front of a TV or video game - not on the golf course or at the spa].
And those unfortunate rich people are spending twice as much time as the poor in “structured and often stressful activities” such as shopping, child care, and exercise. Seriously? So rich people spend more of their time shopping and exercising and taking care of their kids, and that’s supposed to be stressful and less preferable than the “passive leisure” activity of watching 6 hours of TV a day like the poor in the study?
I for one would rather be making more than $100K a year, be a little stressed about having to juggle it all, but still having plenty of time to shop, exercise, play with my kids, and afford passive leisure luxuries like travel and spa treatments than to be making under $20K a year and have no resources or leisure options other than to sit in front of a TV for a third of the day.
More from Meg at The World of Wealth
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