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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
Topics: Miscellaneous | 11 Comments »
July 5th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I agree. Having a reasonable and comfortable salary (say $100k) adds more stress but you have more options than sitting around watching TV.
July 6th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Being affluent gives you the choices that you want to make. Everyone that makes $100k but wants to spend more time watching TV can easily find a job making considerably less and afford them more time to sit around. It is clearly the less desirable option, because people are not making that trade!
July 6th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I read something about this study, too, and its complete garbage. Yes, sitting on your duff all day is leisure, but I’d rather be working at a job I enjoy, making 6 figures, that I had sitting on the couch. I think many people with higher incomes actually enjoy their work rather and don’t see it as stress than those with lower incomes who are generally working for the 6 figure people.
July 6th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Exercise is stressful?!? Perhaps if you are an overweight couch potato.
July 6th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I agree with what the study suggests.
Speaking “stereoptypically”, it would seem that poor people do not work as hard as people who are better off, this is why they are poor.
As a society, if we where less driven to improve our financial situations, we would all have more “leisure time”.
The goal is to find a balance between working too hard, and not working enough to maximize the quality of your leisure time.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:39 am
It makes you think, huh? Money does not equate ease. I have a surgeon friend who is gone all the time from his family and is miserable. I wouldn’t want his life for all the money he makes. I know his job leads to good things for people but there needs to be balance. We need it for insurance for our lives and sanity.
Jerry
http://www.leads4insurance.com
July 7th, 2008 at 4:30 am
I agree – The study gives a whole new meaning to “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I do not understand the motivation of differentiating between passive leisure vs structured and often stressful activities – It seems simply to be a mechanism to get the results the researchers want even if the data does not support the hypothesis. Just my thoughts from a quick read of the article.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:07 am
If you’re making less than $20k (as a family), I don’t think you’re working very much…so of course you have more free time!
July 7th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I read frank Rich’s WSJ column/blog, but often come away with the sense that he stretches his statistics to fit the headline.
But, I can speak to this one from experience. I grew up around poor people (come to think of it, I was one of them). And I currently live among a very affluent and wealthy community. I wouldn’t say one works any harder than another, but they certainly have very different priorities and spend time in very different ways.
The poor people I grew up with, worked not for fullfilment or opportunity, but simply because it was necessary to put food on the table. Their jobs were usually hard, unpleasant, and boring. And they were often supporting large, fractured, inter-generational households, in other words, complicated family situations. When they got home, their idea of leisure was to completely leave work behind, and totally chill out on the couch, in the lawn chair, on the porch, and shoot the breeze with family and neighbors. Big, spontaneous, all-day barbeques (always in sweltering, humid weather) were a major feature of summer.
By contrast, the relatively wealthy people I live around don’t have time to hang out and chat too much. Schedules are packed with work, commuting, shuttling kids to this that or the other practice/lesson/play-date, or to see grandparents, then off to the weekend house. Social bonds are developed more by activities in common than by neighborhood geography (i.e. your kids are in the same play so you get to know each other). And work and play are kind of inter-mingled in a way that makes play seem more like work. There is a kind of work hard, play hard, competitive mentality that makes it difficult to truly relax (at least in my observation which may be quite biased to big city lifestyle). In fact, relaxation in the form of sitting on one’s rear-end and doing absolutely nothing (unless forced at gunpoint by the wife to sit on a beach and read a novel), does not seem to be part of the wealthy mindset. And even on the beach, one might be required to take a conference call or two.
I’d certainly rather be wealthy than not, which is how I’ve focused my priorities. But, it’s not at all how I thought it would be. When I was a kid, I dreamed that once you made it, that was it. I figured it would like hey: You made it, you proved yourself, you’re the bigshot, you could take 3 hour lunches and be at the country club yukking it up with your buddies by 4pm. But, even the guys I know worth mega-bucks don’t have that lifestyle. By and large, self-made people are doers and they can’t just turn off that compulsion to be productive. Even the trust funders I know, are driven people, bent on proving that they aren’t just relying on family money.
Somewhere, I’m sure there is somebody living the wealthy life of leisure. Wherever they are, I wish they’d let me in on the secret password.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I don’t see how shopping and exercise are stressful activities. Exercise helps counter the impact of stress.
Lower income people spend more time watching TV cause they can’t afford other activities like browsing at the mall or gym memberships.
Jim
July 14th, 2008 at 4:35 am
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