Book review: Spending Time

Lesson one of economics tells us that resources are scarce. For every resource, there isn't enough to do all of the things that we might want to do with it. So, we have to make choices about how best to use our scarce resources to achieve our goals. It is tempting to focus any discussion of resources on tangible resources like money (financial capital). However, doing so potentially misses the most fundamental of all resources available to us: time.

Daniel Hamermesh's 2019 book Spending Time is devoted to helping us to better understand this key resource. The book is mostly devoted to describing our current uses of time, based mainly on data from the American Time Use Survey, with occasional data from other countries including the UK, France, Germany, and Australia. The limited selection of data sources demonstrates a need for much more attention to be paid to time use. For example, New Zealand's most recent national time use survey was in 2009-10, and I believe there was only one other survey before that, in 1998-99. In one of the few times New Zealand appears in the book, Hamermesh uses data from the earlier time use survey, showing that total work (including both paid work and household production) is equal for men and women. This is a somewhat surprising fact, when set alongside other OECD countries where total work is mostly higher for women than for men. The book reveals many other surprising facts, including that:

People who are married or cohabiting state that they sleep fourteen minutes less per night than singles of the same age. 

Hamermesh focuses on four categories of time use: (1) work for pay; (2) home production ("activities that we could pay others to do for us", like cooking or cleaning); (3) personal care ("activities that are human biological necessities, such as sleeping eating or having sex"); and (4) leisure ("anything that we typically do not have to do, that we enjoy, and that we cannot outsource"). Hamermesh works through each of those categories of time use, and then presents a number of comparisons, between women and men, between young and old, between richer and poorer, and between different US regions.

I found most of the book to be somewhat unsurprising, although not always (as the quote above highlights). I also learned a number of interesting new facts (new to me, at least), including that the US has no legal mandate for paid vacations (which explains why Americans spend more hours annually in paid work than people in other countries).

The reliance mostly on a single data source, and the general nature of the topic, could easily lead to a relatively dry and lifeless book. However, Hamermesh manages to keep it interesting with anecdotes from his own experience, and the occasional humorous quip, such as:

While most vegetables are not gendered, the American couch potato is male.

I felt that the one thing that was missing from the book was a good discussion of the implications of time use. Hamermesh devotes the final chapter to this topic, but it felt a bit too much like a late tack-on to an otherwise interesting book. Given the topic, I really wanted to know how we should be spending our time better. If time is becoming more scarce (an argument Hamermesh puts forward early in the book), then what is to be done about it? The solutions seemed quite banal to me (such as spreading work time more evenly across people and across people's lifetimes).

Nevertheless, I enjoy Hamermesh's research (and have referred to it several times on this blog, including his earlier book, Beauty Pays (which I reviewed here)). If you want to know more about how people spend time, the most valuable resource, this is a useful reference book to start with.