How Did Work-Life Balance in the U.S. Get So Awful? | Hacker News Reader

How Did Work-Life Balance in the U.S. Get So Awful?

theatlantic.com

43 pointshawkharris46 comments

This article provides a great example of why you can't ignore demographic shifts when analyzing statistical data across time periods.

The best example of this is household income. If you look at the data, it looks like household income has been flat since the 1980s. However, during that time, there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents worked) to single-parent households. In fact, if you look at the individual incomes, they have grown substantially over the same time period. It's only when you obscure the data by talking about "households" do you see the lack of income growth.

This article and your comment are both great examples of how easy it is to tell the story you want to hear with data.

Your point about households vs individuals is clever, because it ignores how the distribution of individual income growth across any other demographic factors.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Of course income is distributed differently across different demographics.

My point is just that you need to be care drawing conclusions from the data presented. Unless you control for other variables, you may draw erroneous conclusions.

The demographic analysis I'm referring to is income growth over time by income level.

Have you seen the income growth data by age group? Again, if you treat all income earners equally, the data looks terrible. This is because your age has a huge impact on your income. Most people see large income increases once they are past their late 30s/early 40s.

One big demographic shift to keep an eye on is the retirement of the baby boomers. Right now, they are in the highest income earning period of their lives. As soon as they retire, their income drops substantially and they are replaced by fewer and fewer individuals from lower age brackets.

I would imagine that overall per capita income will continue on a downward trend until after all the baby boomers retire, even though on an individual level, people are seeing increases in income level.

Most people see large income increases once they are past their late 30s/early 40s

I think dvanduzer's point is that this may not necessarily be so when looking at low-wage earners.

In a sense though, isn't household income what matters in the end? While individual income has grown, if the purchasing power of a household has remained stagnant, have things really changed?

Of course, that probably isn't a popular way to look at it, because the immediate inference is that we could realize significant improvements by shifting society back towards two-parent households, and that grates against current social trends.

There is a huge increase in how much unpaid labor a household can perform if only one member is doing paid labor.

Yes, household income is important, but remember what the household data infers.

You say household income is stagnant and people think "wages haven't increased", when in fact wages have increased, it's just that there are fewer wage earners per household.

That's an important distinction that points to very different solutions.

I agree it is important to know both data points.

My household has one income and 5 people. Many of my colleagues' households have one income and one person, or 2 households and 2 incomes. However, we're far above average household and per-capita income, even for the Bay Area.

I think a good set of metrics to measure what household income is trying to measure would be income-per-employee, incomes-per-household, and household size.

>> there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents worked) to single-parent households.

Do you have any data to support this? My understanding is that it has been the exact opposite, with women entering the work-force in large numbers in the past two-three decades. And as far as I know, men have not been leaving the workforce, except in relatively rare situations where they become stay-at-home dads.

I don't believe parent is referring to parents leaving the workforce, but single parents supporting children. That is, either a solo mother or father raising one or more children.

Agree. And, not trying to make a value judgement on women working, but the huge increase in labor supply that came with the mainstream entry of women into the workforce certainly has kept downward pressure on wages. And following that, the exodus of manufacturing from the USA further increased competition among workers for jobs, leading them to accept lower wages or longer hours.

Manufacturing did not leave the US.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

Maybe I should have said "manufacturing employment"

>However, during that time, there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents worked) to single-parent households.

I wouldn't categorize this shift[1] as "large" and given the relative sizes of the groups of households I don't believe it can be having the affect you suggest.

[1]http://i.imgur.com/j3CF9lk.png (from http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-14.pdf)

Sorry, I should have been clearer on the time period. I can't remember the exact dates, but the time period of the data I saw was from the late 1970s to the year 2000.

I agree there wasn't much of a shift from 1990s onward, but there was from the late 1970s.

You also have to remember that household income doesn't take much of a shift in household structure in order to flatten out income.

If you had 10% of households go from two income earners (say $80K) to single income earners ($40K) each, that would pull down the average substantially.

Are you sure you don't have that backwards?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_warren#Books_and_othe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A#t=8m25s

In my opinion: Our work-like balance got awful when we became greedy.

I'm not nearly 50% as smart as the HN demi-gods around here, but I've learned to tame my desires.

I live in a humble house and have shitty possessions - but I only have to work 20 hours a week to keep the lights on.

In my opinion, you have to learn to make hard choices with an eye for the long term. Here's an example: For us, we decided that sending our three children to a good Lutheran school was important Our observation was that it was wiser to educate our children in knowledge, but also values and heart. We anticipate that at 18 years of age, they'll be functioning adults and we won't have to prop them up into their 20's.

The one thing I've learnt is that it's hardest to learn to be content. With the rampant consumer culture and rat race, it's quite hard actually to step out of the 'box' and ask yourself "What the hell am I doing this for, at the end of the day?".

To give another analogy, if there are various achievements and rewards for getting good times and scores on super meat boy, it'd be quite hard to stop trying to beat your friends and the top scores list to ask yourself why you're playing SMB in the first place when instead you could just sit down and relax without the worries and tension of the game.

It's also about perspective.

If you have to wake up every morning at 5:15 am to catch a 1.5 hr bus ride, arrive at work at 8 am, work for 9 hrs until 6 pm (1 hr lunch in between). Then catch another 1.5 hr ride back home. Arrive after 8pm, eat something, go sleep.

Now rinse and repeat, every week day for 9 years.

Does this even qualify as a balanced work-life?

Compare that to wake up at 8 am, have coffee, read hackernews, shower, arrive at work at 9 am, work through 5 pm, arrive back home at 5:30, 5 hrs for dinner, leisure, sports, go gym, play with kids, etc, go sleep.

Edit: the top example is my brother's typical workday in Chile, bottom one is mine here in the US.

I was sure that the first was typical for a US worker.

Greedy for what? That's why I decided to exit the rat race to some extent.

Look: I can understand working 80 hour work weeks for art, for something you really care about. I also might work like that if I thought I could really get rich-- if I owned the business or owned a big stake in it (and trusted my partners not to screw me out of it). But the tech scene is increasingly neither of these things-- it's making mediocre crap for hustlers. It's making junk that does nothing to advance the human condition.

I've also found that beyond a certain level possessions do not affect happiness much.

I came to a screeching halt when I read "The Great Workweek Shift" chart. I can't think of a more misleading way to present that kind of data.

Then "The Growth of Leisure Time for Men" chart is silent on whether the men with fewer than 12 years of education would prefer to swap this extra "leisure" time for paid work. In the last paragraph he refers to this as "downtime" instead.

Very little source data cited. Clever unit shifting on most of the graphs. Generally strange mixed messaging.

Yeah I think this is the first time I have seen "chronic unemployment" called "leisure time" but I guess technically it's correct.

Technically unemployment is time spent looking for work. People not looking for work are excluded.

Naturally, such a distinction is difficult to do accurately.

Bertrand Russell does a good job picking apart why we use innovation to make ourselves work harder rather than life easier. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

That is seriously good reading

Did anyone notice this little chart?

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%...

Take a look at the one group that has lost leisure time.

So, for anyone with a Bachelor's or higher, leisure time has plummeted. For everyone else, the increase in "leisure time" is likely because of underemployment, so they would actually prefer to be working more to earn more money.

That seems somewhat unlikely? There are 168 hours in a week, or 128 hours of time outside the 40 hour workweek. Even those without a high school diploma have 113 hours of leisure per this graph- so I don't think we can immediately conclude they just don't have work.

Also, this chart is from 1965 to 2005, so more recent trends will only be in a tiny corner of this graph.

So if a normal work week is counted at 40 hours, and there are 99 hours of leisure according to that chart for a modern man with a degree, then it works out that the average person on that plot line is now working 168 - 99 = 69 hours on average or 69 / 40 = 172.5% of a normal week. Sounds unbalanced to me.

Juliet Schor has an excellent book on this subject The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Unexpected-Decline...

Right, the average working man works more than 40 hours a week because per the article, this chart counts things like housework as work.

I think something is seriously wrong with this work-life balance index (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/work-life-balance) when the US ranks only slightly higher than Chile.

There is no way a country such as Chile, where the legal work-week is 45 hrs and the average commute takes at least 1hr can be ranked so high.

Great article, it's nice to see someone take a simple statistic that may tell a misleading story and dig deeply into its causes. Macroeconomics is a complex topic that generally deserves rigorous analysis.

The article mostly looks at gender and class, I wonder how immigration has affected the shifts.

This is mostly microeconomics stuff, but for a national economy. Macro is when the scale of a market causes it to obey different rules, sort of how quantum mechanics is fundamentally different from classical but quantum particles still obey classical laws in some situations.

Micro is a lot easier to work with because you can study it empirically, since experiments and data can be assumed to scale up; it's subject to the "rigorous analysis" you talk about.

Another question we have to ask is: "how much leisure time do we want?"

It's fair to judge a reduction in work hours as a good thing when most work is hard manual labor. I doubt that's true for the majority of jobs any more. I think everyone should have enough leisure time to be healthy and spend time with their family or friends. However, I don't think we should be comparing ourselves to Europe where decades of structural unemployment have led to low-quality leisure time for large swaths of the population?

low quality leisure time? how is this defined?

Time off from work without anything to do and no money. I know, not something that would happen to me but for a lot of people time off is spent in front of the TV waiting for work to start up again.

If someone asked me that, my answer would be, "when you let it."

Starting with agriculture, when we gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, according to some people.

When did work-life balance get so awful? Probably right around the time agriculture was invented.

I think the title has a typo. Should be "How Did Work-Life Balance in the US Get So Awesome?"

The misogyny in the article's comments section is shocking and depressing.

three words: the income tax.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com