In writing my article on Americans and leisure time, I said "Of all these [developed] countries, the United States is, by far, the richest. And you would think that, as our wealth grew and our productivity increased, a certain amount of our resources would go into, well, us. Into leisure. Into time off." Various conservatives saw that sentence as the article's weak point. A fairly typical rejoinder:
Upcoming Klein columns will no doubt include "How come we have so many people in prison if crime is down", and "Why don't physically fit people stop working out so much and eat some donuts already?"
OHOHOHOHOHOHO, and so forth. I've been gotten but good!
The reason I point this out is that there's something really interesting in this rebuttal. What it argues, essentially, is that people should keep making more money in order to...make more money. In this world, the further accumulation of the thing itself is the justification for the further accumulation of the thing itself. This is, to me, a surprise. Assumedly, the physically fit people use their gains to play sports, or attract comely members of the opposite sex. We jail people to bring down the rate of crime. But why are we making money? Not, one presumes, simply so we can look at our bank accounts and marvel.
Money can, at base, serve two purposes: It can buy us things, or it can buy us time. Having a lot of money, making a high per-hour wage, theoretically reduces our need to work more hours and have even more money. It gives us a cushion from which we can enjoy our lives without worrying about basic survival. In another conception, we can keep making money so as to populate our lives with more things (some of them time-saving things, though data seems to indicate that time-saving devices don't actually lead to people having more time) -- bigger TVs, and better cars, and larger homes, and more powerful grills.
The point of my article is that our society, for reasons both of culture and economics, encourages the acquisition of "things" and dissuades us from purchasing more "time." The reasons for this, I argue, have to do with collective action problems -- namely the immediacy of individual incentives (buy a bigger house to keep up with your neighbor) as compared to group incentives (all of us together demand more vacation time). I could be wrong on that. But the fact that some think it's internally laughable to ask what money is for is actually quite interesting, and fairly good evidence for my thesis.
