Trends in time use in Twentieth Century America.

• Author: Ramey, Valerie A.

In his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" John Maynard Keynes looked beyond the pessimism surrounding the Great Depression and predicted that rapid productivity growth would result in abundant leisure and freedom from most economic needs within a hundred years. (1) He speculated that the little work left to do would be shared as widely as possible, so that each person could spend about fifteen hours per week doing a few meaningful tasks.

Keynes was not alone in his belief that a new era of rising leisure was beginning. As of the 1930s, the standard factory workweek had declined significantly over the previous hundred years, appliances were reducing the drudgery of housework, and the high unemployment rates of the Great Depression had led to "forced leisure." Numerous scholarly articles during the 1930s examined various aspects of leisure, from teaching children how to use leisure time wisely to a variety of time diary studies that recorded how individuals used their leisure.

The extent to which societies respond to productivity growth by increasing their leisure time is fundamental to numerous economic questions. For example, the size of the response affects the foundations of growth models, assessments of standards of living, and forecasts of long-term labor supply behavior.

U.S. labor productivity rose eightfold during the twentieth century. Did leisure time rise significantly in response? To answer this question, I gather detailed data on the main uses of time by major segments of the population during the twentieth century. Although there have been numerous studies of time use and hours of work conducted during the early twentieth century, most of them were focused on a particular segment of the population. Thus, the main challenge of my research was to understand the particular context of each of the earlier studies and then to combine the pieces into a mosaic that would reveal patterns in time use for the general population.

In "Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth Century United States: New Estimates from Old Data," I compile information from virtually every time-use study conducted from 1912 to the present in order to estimate trends in time spent on "home production"--that is, unpaid household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and taking care of children. (2) Almost all of the studies use detailed time diaries. While most sample only a few hundred people, together they cover thousands of individuals across the United States. The most detailed data are for...