"For decades, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, born into an oil fortune, has been asking people how much money they would need to be happy. 'No matter what their income', he reports, 'a depressing number of [people] believe that if they only had TWICE as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them...'
Yet...
"Harvard University economist Juliet Schor writes in 'The Overworked American': 'Since 1948, the level of productivity of the US worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time. Every time productivity increases, we are presented with the possibility of either more free time or more money. We could have chosen the 4 hour day. Or a working year of 6 months. Or every worker in the US could now be taking every other year off work-- with pay'. Instead, Americans work the same hours and earn twice the money.
From "Are We Happy Yet?" by Alan Thein Durning (Roszak 1995)
Yet...
"Harvard University economist Juliet Schor writes in 'The Overworked American': 'Since 1948, the level of productivity of the US worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time. Every time productivity increases, we are presented with the possibility of either more free time or more money. We could have chosen the 4 hour day. Or a working year of 6 months. Or every worker in the US could now be taking every other year off work-- with pay'. Instead, Americans work the same hours and earn twice the money.
From "Are We Happy Yet?" by Alan Thein Durning (Roszak 1995)
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Canada
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Re: Working too hard is hardly working
Sun, March 19, 2006 - 7:14 PMThis is no surprise, really. economic theory is based on economic growth, which really means the production of more stuff with economic value. Compare what the well-stocked home needed in 1948 to what the well-stocked home has now....snow blowers, pc's two cars, television, dishwashers bread machines, rice cookers....Do we really need them? They didn't in 1948. I don't know that people want more money. They want more stuff.....
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Re: Working too hard is hardly working
Mon, March 20, 2006 - 12:15 AMYou're right, it is a material thing...and 6 billion people bent on getting more stuff is more than the planet can handle. Edwrad Abbey once said that 'growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.' And Chellis Glendinning spoke of the addictive quality of it, mentioning a businessman who told her that once the Chinese market was cracked, there would be no more room for the market to grow and nuclear war would be inevitable. Simple livers show us by example how little we need, and how much we're missing...
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Re: Working too hard is hardly working
Mon, May 29, 2006 - 1:19 AMmmm...so true. What is this frantic race for money? I prefer to have twice as much time~ it makes me feel rich when I can wander around in the mountains on a weekday. Time to ride the bicycle because I'm not in a hurry. There's nothing wrong with abundance-of time or money. A combination is nice. But perhaps, an abundance of money is relative to one's perceived needs. The less we need and desire, the more we have. Simply true! -
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Re: Working too hard is hardly working
Tue, May 30, 2006 - 10:10 PMSo what can we do to facilitate the paradigm shift needed for the majority of people, particularly those in the "developed" world, to understand this truth?
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