An interesting article (that I found via this Friday’s Jornal de NegĂłcios): It’s all about balance in life, not payments, by Ross Gittins.
Remember how, in the 1970s, people used to foresee enormous reductions in working hours and wonder how on earth we were going to occupy all that leisure time?
What a joke when you consider how much longer and harder so many of us work these days. Whatever happened to that crazy idea?
I’ll tell you. We could have significantly reduced working hours – we had the improvement in the productivity of labour to allow us to afford it – but we chose not to.
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The latest gear is so expensive that we work – give up leisure – to buy the leisure equipment we don’t have the leisure to enjoy. I noted an economist quoting as a laudable example of increased choice the worker who cashed in his annual leave so he could buy a plasma TV.