What the Unemployed Do With Their Time...

...or Economists Can Know So Much and Still Not Get It
By Joshua Holland | July 2, 2010

Economists look at data clinically, and often without context that you or I might see as pretty important in the real world. It’s the nature of the discipline, but it often creates the appearance that they’re hopelessly out-of-touch ivory tower elitists divorced from how people experience their economic lives (which happens to be true in some cases, but is far from universally so).

The headline of this post might as well read, ‘Economists Can Know So Much and Still Seem Not to Get It.’ After all, Daniel Hamermesh is a smart guy, and I imagine that he does, in fact, get it.

Here’s Hamermesh, writing about “How the Unemployed Spend Their Time” on the Freakonomics blog over at the New York Times:

The American Time Use Survey for 2009 is out. Comparing its results—at a business-cycle trough—to those for 2007 (roughly a cyclical peak) allows for the first resolution of a fundamental question in time allocation/labor supply and macroeconomics: What do people do with their time when aggregate labor demand drops?

Some macroeconomists have constructed beautiful models arguing that much of the reduced market time can be shifted to producing things at home—to household production (child care, food preparation, shopping, home repairs, etc.) that would otherwise have been purchased. WRONG! In this recession, average work time (including school) dropped by 15 minutes a day. Of this drop, 6 minutes went to additional sleeping; and another 6 minutes went to additional TV-watching. The average American actually spent 2 minutes less on household production. The recession didn’t shift work from market to home activities that we think of as productive; the drop in market work went into activities that, at least at the margin, most of us would view as unproductive.

When you or I think about unemployed people being “unproductive” with their time, it’s loaded. There’s a value judgment there; it recalls Reagan’s welfare queens or more recent blather by Republicans that extending our relatively skimpy unemployment benefits discourages people from getting work*.

I don’t know Hamermesh well — I’ve just read a few of his posts over at Freakonomics. Maybe he believes it, and intends to make that point. But maybe he doesn’t.

I can say with near certainty that he was victimized by a headline writer trying to get some traffic. Note that the data he cites says absolutely nothing about how “the unemployed spend their time.” It only tells us that all Americans’ average time doing paid work declined by 15 minutes. That drop includes people who lost their jobs, but also many others who remain on the job but had their hours cut, either through limits on overtime or through the kind of involuntary “furloughs” tens of thousands of state employees have been forced to take. And note, too, that nowhere in the body of the post does Hamermesh use the word “unemployed.” He talks about Americans’ “average labor demand,” “reduced market activity” and “productive activity.” “Productivity,” for an economist, is a rather neutral measure of a person’s economic output — it’s not a loaded term.

Hamermesh is an older academic, and no doubt sent that text to a younger, online-publishing type who actually posts material to the Freakonomics blog with what he thought a popular, not-at-all stuffy headline like, “Do People do More Work Around the House When a Recession Limits Their Hours on the Job?” It was no doubt the headline writer, looking to get some clicks, who gave readers the impression that the post has something to do with whether the unemployed are productive, not Hamermesh. But he’s the author, so he’ll be blamed for the judgment he didn’t necessarily make.

Again, the context matters. If I were writing that, I’d point out that lengthy periods of unemployment lead to a greater risk of depression. And symptoms of depression include listlessness and exhaustion — people sleep more and lay around watching TV when they’re depressed. So even if the data were only looking at the hours of the unemployed, I’d still point out that it might be a chicken-and-an-egg thing — people without a job for a long time feel like shit about themselves and hang around the house being miserable.

And while it’s nice to think we’re all artisans who can make our own goat cheese during our down time, or can afford to pay babysitters to take care of our kids whom we’ll tend to ourselves now that we’re unemployed, the reality is that most people who are out of work look for a job, but also spend more time doing nothing. Both of those things suck, and that’s why most of us don’t want to be idle. We want jobs. We want to be productive. And again, if you met Hamermesh for a drink, he might tell you that, and maybe much more. But he’d be discussing sociology and psychology — not economics.

In my upcoming book (September 27!), I have a chapter on all the myths right-wingers hold about the European economic “model” (I argue it’s not a different model at all; there’s a few degrees of separation that make a crucial difference in these huge economies). In it, I talk about the same issue — time spent on the job. I point out that Western Europeans work fewer hours, on average, than do Americans, which accounts for their modestly lower average incomes. That’s an economic discussion for the most part. But I also bring in workplace studies done by researchers in other fields — sociologists, mostly — that show that Americans who work long hours are absolutely miserable about it and the overwhelming majority believe there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to catch up. That’s the crucial human context, which, were I taking a more traditional economic approach, I would only bother mentioning in the terms of something like employee retention, or the costs associated with worker burnout.

*Really generous unemployment benefits do, but it’s a trade-off: with better support, workers can be pickier about what jobs they’ll take and, as a result, when they do return to the labor force they come back with higher average salaries.