Leisure Time

Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book, titled the Skeptical environmentalist Measuring the Real State of the World, discussing the major topic of climate change. He takes an economic point of view to climate change; he ways the pros and cons of many arguments made by other scientists in order to show how others arguments may be flawed. Along those lines Lomborg discusses how human kind is better due to an increased amount of “leisure time.” Bjorn Lomborg writes,

“Owing to lack of data we will here only look at leisure trends for the Western world, and the conclusion is quite clear. Despte what we may think (or feel), we have more and more free time at our disposal. Yearly working hours in the Western world have fallen drastically since the end of the nineteenth century, as can be seen from Figure 43. In most countries we only work about half as much today as we did 122 years ago.”

(I was unable to get figure 43 onto the blog, but I will bring it into class on Friday)

Bjorn Lomborg shows us the information that people have more time to spend. The question now becomes, what are people doing with that extra time? Not so long ago living was a 24 hour a day, seven days a week job. Now we work nine to five work days, five days a week. The world has changed and so have the habits. People don’t need to walk too far to the nearest school, post office, or grocery store. Even if someone lives in an area where the store is not around the corner, cars are more common than ever. Given the choice between a long walk and a short drive, I believe it is safe to say an American will choose the short drive nine times out of ten. Currently, scheduling time for exercise is not an uncommon thing. The people, however, who are able to spend time exercising are the people who are either motivated to stay fit or the people who are comfortable enough with their financial situation to spend time exercising and not working. And who is to say someone in a comfortable financial situation doesn’t sit at home all night playing video games and watching television. We live in a world of increasing stimuli, most of which you don’t need to move to get stimulated, making putting exercise time aside all that much harder even though as a society we have more and more leisure time.