Re: [A-List] Where Did All the Leisure Go?

["Leigh Meyers" <the.buffalo.in.the.midst@xxxxxxxxx>]

> They classify as work baby care, gardening, a
> second job, cooking, basic child care, care of other adults, doing
> homework, pet care, housework, grocery shopping, home repair, paying
> bills, laundry, yard work, and so on.

Where did they find all the mentally ill people to survey?

Since when is yard 'work', taking care of your pet, cooking... etc, work?

Personally wouldn't want to eat food cooked by someone who thought
cooking was chore-like work, I think food needs to be cooked with love
or it's better to fast.

Where did the leisure time go?

Everyone traded it off to accumulate the money to compulsively
accumulate massive amounts of 'stuff' that they are told they need by
the advertising industry, to be a good human, to be 'loved', to get
laid, to 'keep up', to 'get ahead'...

It's repeated over and over and over again until the victim ACTUALLY
BELIEVES they NEED the 'stuff, just like the Saddam Hussein/AQ
connection. Just repeat it often enough, urgently enough, make them
feel like their way of life (lifestyle in the consumerism case) is in
danger if they stop for even a moment to ponder 'why terrorist', to
smell the roses or watch a bird in the sky.

Sick.

See:
Luxury Then and Luxury Now
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Luxury_Then_and_Luxury_Now.html

 Coco Chanel, an orphan turned legendary couturier, started a new
page in the book of branding when she began mixing fake diamonds, fake
pearls with real precious stones in her line of luxury jewelry. Up to
that point, the most renowned names in jewelry â Cartier, Bulgari â
commanded high prices because they used only the highest quality gold
and precious stones. The rogue designer thumbed her nose at convention
and charged the same price â if not higher â for her fake gems as her
competitors charged for authentic ones. Who cared if the diamonds were
fake, she scoffed, if it was a "real" Coco Chanel design? "The
important thing is not the carat," she remarked, "but the illusion."

The formula for luxury is a simple one. Use materials of exceptional
quality and limited supply. Combine those with uncommon design and
expert craftsmanship. Sell only to those few who are adequately
wealthy and connected. To this, the brand was added as a relative
latecomer, serving as a simple guarantee of authenticity and of a
certain standard of quality, resting on the established reputation of
the maker.

Then, somewhere in the loving confluence between the European class
system and North American mass media, the modern prestige brand came
into its own. No French clerk in the nineteenth century would have
dreamed of owning an HermÃs saddle or Louis Vuitton luggage, if,
indeed, he had ever even heard those names. Yet by the early twentieth
century, thanks largely to an emerging breed of magazines like
Harper's Bazaar, Women's Wear Daily, and Vogue, aspirational
middle-class Americans had not only heard the names, they wanted them
for themselves. In the absence of a bona fide US aristocracy, the
paraphernalia of the Old World ruling classes would do just as well.
<...>

Fevered Pitch: What Advertising Has In Store For Us All
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Fevered_Pitch_What_Advertising_Has_In_Store_For_Us_All.html

No, it's not just your imagination. The number of ads and marketing
messages that you encounter in any given day is actually increasing,
and it's increasing at a rate that has surprised even the most cynical
amongst us.

For years, the number that everyone in the industry seemed to be
tossing around - for your average urban dweller in your average rich
nation - was 3,000. That's 3,000 billboards, sandwich boards, TV
commercials, radio spots, posters, newspaper inserts, storefront
promos, magazine ads, web banners, spam emails, product placements,
infomercials, sponsorship logos, advertorials, and so on, and so on,
every single day. It seemed that we had reached the limits of
possibility, absolute marketing saturation.

Then the new estimates rolled in. Based primarily on research
conducted by Yankelovich Inc. - the respected American public opinion
and market research firm whose founder coined the term "baby boomer" -
the number on most everyone's tongue these days is closer to 5,000.
You'd be forgiven for having to rub your eyes at that figure. Of
course, it's a tough thing to quantify. Even 3,000 sounds impossible -
until you start to count for yourself. But could it really be 5,000?

In truth, the number in and of itself is relatively inconsequential.
What matters is the very real sense of escalation. And if the poll
data that has been coming in, repeatedly, from researchers like
Yankelovich is any indication, people in many developed nations are
finding that the escalation is beginning to smart. We are hearing that
the majority of regular people feel bombarded by far too many
marketing messages. That the majority feel more hostile to advertising
than they did in the past. That most people now say they will avoid
buying products from companies that overwhelm them with marketing.
<...>


The Dismantlers: French Activists Speak Out Against Invasive Ads
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/The_Dismantlers_French_Activists_Speak_Out_Against_Invasive_Ads.html

Formed a year ago in Paris, alt (the Dismantlers) are one of several
French groups on a crusade against consumerism and aggressive
advertising. Staging high-profile protests across the country, the
group demands that advertisements in public spaces be restricted to
dimensions of 50 x 70 cm (the maximum size for political posters).
This March, the DÃboulonneurs won a huge symbolic victory at a trial
when they were found guilty of vandalizing billboards, but only fined
â1 â vastly less than the â75,000 and five years in prison which they
could have incurred. Alex Barret, one of the founding members who was
involved with the trial, shared his thoughts with Adbusters.

Q: How do you find the public reaction of the public and of the medias
vis-Ã-vis the trial and your activities?

A: We benefit from a large sympathy from the public. Why? Our
criticism of the invasion by advertisements is largely shared by the
public (according to a poll by Le Monde, 77 percent of respondents
feel that there is too much advertisement). Our approach is perfectly
non-violent, respectful of the public, of the police and institutions,
and of non-ad material. We have a measured and open discourse, and our
criticism of the ad system is solid and coherent enough so that people
can rally around it. The massive anti-ad action (Stopub) of 2003 in
the Parisian subways and in 20 other French cities allowed us to start
to open the debate . . . Since then, in the public eye, advertisement
was no longer so innocent and inoffensive.
<...>

Breaking the Consumer Habit: Living the Buy Nothing Life
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Breaking_the_Consumer_Habit_Living_the_Buy_Nothing_Life.html

San Francisco, 1951.

A living room fills with warm laughter and the aroma of fresh-baked
goodies. Suburban housewives walk around the room exchanging smiles,
telling stories. It's like any other casual gathering, except for one
twist: this is a Tupperware party, everyone is here to shop.

Painting over gray decades of war and depression with bright pastels,
products like Tupperware ushered in a new era of prosperity, renewal
and superabundance. Consumer goods like the television set and the
Cadillac became more than just necessities for life: for millions of
consumers, they were the essence of life itself.

Fast forward to 2005. A group of friends in the San Francisco Bay Area
are meeting over a potluck dinner. Disillusioned by the endless
consumer rat race, they are here to discuss how to not shop, to put an
end to needless consumption. Taking the concept of Buy Nothing Day to
the extreme, they have decided to attempt a full year without buying
new products. Dubbing themselves "The Compact" after the Mayflower
pledge at Plymouth Rock, the group vowed to limit their shopping to
food, medicine and basic hygiene products, buying used wherever they
could. Since the local news began covering them, their story has
exploded, appearing everywhere from the Today Show to The Times of
London. Today, with 8,000 new members and 55 subgroups worldwide â
from regions as varied as Singapore and Iceland â the Compact are
finding themselves at the forefront of the turning tide against
consumer culture.
<...>



On 5/14/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> <http://www.nber.org/digest/feb07/w12264.html>
> Where Did All the Leisure Go?
>
> "While leisure per capita has varied over the last 105 years and has
> exhibited some low frequency movements, it is the same now as it was
> 105 years ago."
>
> Considering rising business productivity and the spread of labor
> saving household appliances, Americans today must have far more
> leisure than their counterparts in 1900, right? Well, maybe not. It
> depends on how you measure work and leisure and which sectors of the
> population are included in the analysis.
>
> In A Century of Work and Leisure (NBER Working Paper No. 12264 [LINK:
> <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12264>]), Valerie Ramey and Neville
> Francis take a fresh look at work versus leisure trends through the
> twentieth century. They conclude that some 70 percent of the decline
> in hours worked has been offset by an increase in hours spent in
> school. Further, contrary to conventional wisdom, average hours spent
> in "home production" - that is, cooking, cleaning, caring for
> children, and the like - are actually slightly higher now than they
> were in the early part of the last century. Meanwhile, leisure per
> capita is approximately the same now as it was in 1900.
>
> Some busy couples, with both spouses working, may not find these
> findings so surprising. But they would likely be a surprise to the
> famed British economist, John Maynard Keynes, who predicted in a 1930
> essay -- "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" -- that rising
> productivity would result in a large increase in leisure during the
> next hundred years. And, he speculated that the central problem for
> humanity would be using its abundant leisure time in a meaningful way.
>
> Several studies do support the Keynes' forecast. For instance,
> Maddison shows that hours worked per employed person in the United
> States have fallen from around 2,700 a year to almost 1,600 a year in
> the last 105 years. But Ramey and Francis regard such studies as
> telling only part of the story, since they omit changes in labor force
> participation rates and in non-leisure activities. They argue that
> their study involves "more comprehensive and better measurements of
> hours of non-leisure time and the potential workforce."
>
> For example, rather than using the "working age" population -- that is
> the civilian non-institutional (not in prison or otherwise
> incarcerated) population aged 16 and over -- Ramey and Francis use the
> total population in most of their study. That's because the
> restrictions on child labor have changed so much over the last hundred
> years. Children were important workers on family farms early last
> century; that explains why school vacations, even today, are long and
> in the summer. In 1910, the Census showed that 25 percent of male
> children aged 10 to 15 were employed.
>
> "To the extent that the representative household cares about all of
> its members, interactions between different age groups may be
> important for understanding trends in adult leisure," Ramey and
> Francis add. Further, the fraction of the population aged 65 and over
> has risen from 4 percent in 1900 to more than 12 percent in 2000. That
> too has an impact on hours of leisure.
>
> The authors also regard as relevant the hours of work of government
> employees (teachers, civil servants, and so on), the time spent
> commuting to and from work, the time spent in formal education, and
> the time spent in home production. They use surveys asking individuals
> to rate their enjoyment of various activities and classify as leisure
> those with the highest enjoyment scores, including sex, playing
> sports, playing with or reading to the kids, art, music, movies,
> sleep, reading, recreational travel, and so on -- all activities that
> give direct enjoyment. They classify as work baby care, gardening, a
> second job, cooking, basic child care, care of other adults, doing
> homework, pet care, housework, grocery shopping, home repair, paying
> bills, laundry, yard work, and so on.
>
> The authors admit that there is a "degree of imprecision" in some of
> their estimates, especially for the early part of the last century and
> for home production. For instance, they include hours worked by sole
> proprietors and their unpaid family members working with them. The
> authors assume, too, that commuting time in the early part of the
> twentieth century was the same as later in the century -- that is,
> about 10 percent of total hours worked, since in those early days most
> people worked on Saturdays.
>
> Hours spent on education have risen, of course, as attendance in
> secondary schools has become the standard. Over the century, school
> hours rose from 330 per year to almost 900 per year for those ages 5
> to 22.
>
> In looking at housework, the authors rely on a host of studies. They
> note that early in the last century, "Having clean clothes, clean
> dishes, a clean house, and well-cared for children was just another
> luxury the poor could not afford." For the poor, many meals consisted
> of simple, unheated foods. Working-class families often could not
> afford the fuel to cook. The authors also quote Betty Friedan, writing
> in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique: "housewifery expands to fill
> the time available." Labor saving appliances were used to help bring
> about a revolution in sanitation, cleanliness, and better nutrition.
> Also, educated parents spend more time with their children.
>
> The surprising conclusion here is: "While leisure per capita has
> varied over the last 105 years and has exhibited some low frequency
> movements, it is the same now as it was 105 years ago.
>
> -- David R. Francis
> --
> Yoshie


--

Disclaimer:
No computers were harmed during the production of this email; void
where prohibited; subject to change with or without notice; all
information provided "as is" and any express or implied warranties,
including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of
merchantability and fitness are disclaimed; no other warranty
expressed or implied; this is not an offer to sell securities; use
only in well-ventilated area; keep away from fire or flame; not
recommended for children; this supersedes all previous notices; all
trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.