The Leisure

Strip the wage of everything the earlier plates have found in it — its justice, its measure, its meaning — and a hard residue remains: the wage is paid because, for most people and at the margin, work is something one would rather, just then, not do. Not that work is hateful; much of it is bearable and some of it is loved. But the marginal hour — the extra one, at the end of a long day, when the body is tired and the evening beckons — that hour has a cost to the one who works it, a cost the economists named without flinching: the disutility of labour.¹1The marginalist account (W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 1871): work carries a disutility that mounts with each hour, and a person supplies labour up to the point where the pain of one more hour just equals the worth of its pay. Cf. Smith’s ‘toil and trouble’ (plate viii). The least wage that will draw one from leisure is the reservation wage. Against it stands the pull of one’s own time: rest, family, idleness, the pursuit of whatever else the hour might hold. The wage is the bribe that overcomes that pull — the sum that must be offered before a person will hand an hour of their life to another’s purpose rather than keep it for their own. Below some figure, no one comes; each worker has, in effect, a price beneath which their time is simply not for sale. The wage is what clears it.

How much of their life a person sells, then, is a balance — struck hour by hour — between the wage an hour would earn and the worth of the hour itself. And here a subtlety enters that overturns the easy assumption that higher pay must always mean more work. A rise in the wage pulls in two opposite directions at once. On one side, it makes each hour of leisure more expensive: an hour not worked now forgoes more money than before, so the worker is tempted to surrender some leisure and work more — the substitution effect, trading rest for the suddenly dearer wage.²2A wage rise raises the opportunity cost of leisure — the earnings given up by not working — which pulls toward more work (the substitution effect); and it raises real income, and leisure is a normal good, wanted more as one grows richer — which pulls toward less work (the income effect). Which prevails is not fixed in advance. But on the other side, the same rise makes the worker richer — able to reach any given standard of living in fewer hours — and a richer person, like anyone with more to spend, tends to want more of a good thing, and leisure is a good thing. So the higher wage also tempts the worker to take some of their new wealth as free time, and work less — the income effect. The two pulls contend. Which prevails is not settled in advance; it turns on the worker, the wage, and how much leisure they already hold.

The wage is the price of an hour of a life.

For most workers, at low and middling wages, the first pull wins: when pay rises, hours rise with it, for the money is needed and the leisure given up is cheap. This is the labour-supply curve we expect — more pay, more work. But it does not hold all the way up. As the wage climbs higher, the second pull strengthens, for two reasons at once: each additional pound now buys less that the worker lacks — the gap between earning thirty thousand and thirty-five is keenly felt, between a hundred and fifty thousand and a hundred and fifty-five, scarcely at all — while each hour of life surrendered grows correspondingly dearer. Past some point the income effect overtakes the substitution effect, and the curve does something strange: it bends backward. Higher pay now buys fewer hours, not more. The worker, grown rich enough, begins to spend a rising wage on the one thing no wage can manufacture — time. Drawn out in full, the supply of labour is not a rising line but a leaning one: up at first, then folding back upon itself, so that the very rich, were they to follow it, would work less than the merely comfortable.³3The backward-bending labour supply curve: the substitution effect dominates at low wages (the curve slopes up), the income effect at high (it bends back), with a vertical ‘turn’ between. The diminishing marginal utility of income sharpens the bend. It is observed in practice — for instance in the Canadian labour market, and most clearly among some groups of workers.

Past a point, the wage buys time, not work.

This backward bend, written small in one worker’s choices, was once read large as the destiny of all. If a rising wage lets the individual buy back their hours, then surely rising wealth would let humanity buy back its leisure — and the richer the world grew, the less it would need to work. No one made the promise more famously than Keynes. In 1930, in the very pit of the Depression, he looked a hundred years ahead and foresaw not ruin but abundance: by the time his contemporaries’ grandchildren had grown — by about now — the world would be four to eight times richer, the age-old struggle for subsistence all but solved, and people would work, he ventured, perhaps fifteen hours a week.⁴4J. M. Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (1930). He predicted that by about 2030 living standards would be four to eight times higher and the ‘economic problem’ nearly solved, leaving a ‘fifteen-hour week’ — and a new difficulty: how to use the leisure won, how ‘to live wisely and agreeably and well.’ The machines would do the labouring; the people would be freed. And freedom, Keynes saw, would bring its own difficulty — for the first time, he wrote, man would face his real and permanent problem: how to fill the leisure that science had won him, how to live wisely and agreeably and well. The economic problem solved, the human one would only begin.

He was half right, which is the most interesting way to be wrong. The wealth arrived — by some measures the world outran even his guess. The leisure did not.⁵5The verdict on Keynes: the wealth came, the fifteen-hour week did not. Hours fell for a century, then roughly stalled, far above it. He overrated satiation — wants prove insatiable and relative, driving a ‘rat race’ — and Veblen’s leisure class (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899), in which leisure displayed status, has inverted: today the highest earners work the longest, and busyness signals rank. Cf. plate xii — work is also where meaning is found. Hours of work fell steeply for a century and then, in the richest countries, roughly ceased to fall, settling far above fifteen a week; and then came the strangest turn of all. For most of history, leisure had been the very badge of rank — the mark of the gentleman was that he did not work, and Veblen gave the idle rich their name, the leisure class, whose conspicuous uselessness advertised their wealth. That has inverted. Today it is the highest earners who keep the longest hours, and busyness, not idleness, that signals importance; the modern eminence boasts not of their leisure but of how little of it they have. The backward bend, real enough in the textbook, was overwhelmed in the world — partly because Keynes mistook our wants, supposing they would be sated once our needs were met, when in truth wants keep no ceiling and climb with every rung, so that we run to hold our place in a race with no finishing line; and partly because work was never only the sacrifice this plate began by calling it. It is also, for many, where meaning and standing and selfhood are found — the calling of an earlier leaf — so that even those rich enough to stop do not, for to stop would be to lose not income only but a self. Keynes half-saw it: everybody, he allowed, will need to do some work to be content. The old Adam is strong in us. We were offered the leisure, and we have, so far, declined it.

So the wage is, at the last, the price of a portion of a life — the rate at which a person turns their finite hours into the means of living, and the instrument by which they settle, mostly without ever deciding, how much of themselves to sell and how much to keep. The labour-supply curve, with its hopeful backward bend, holds out a real possibility: that wealth might be spent on time, that a life grown richer might grow freer.⁶6The bend is genuine, and some do claim it — trading a higher wage for shorter hours, buying back their time. That most do not owes partly to wants that never rest and partly to the goods of work itself (plate xii). The curve only offers the choice; what a person makes of it the wage cannot say. Some take it. But the same curve, folding back, measures how little of the promise we have claimed — how, offered the chance to work less, most of us have chosen, or been driven, to want more instead. The wage can buy back an hour. Whether anyone spends it so is a question the wage cannot answer; it belongs to the worker, and to whatever they believe their hours are for.

And so the folio nears the end of its anatomy. We have weighed the wage’s justice and its hours, its trust and its compulsion, its amount and its boundary, its rigidity and its measure; the authority it buys, the risk it sheds, the machine that rivals it, the meaning it cannot hold, the demand it sustains. Here, beneath all of these, lies the plainest fact of any: that the wage is paid for time, and time is the one thing a wage can never make more of. It can only set the rate at which we hand it over — an hour of the only life we have, for the coin to go on living it.