Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
May I ask you two questions?
Can you please list several things that you consider luxuries and which you believe these “poor” people spend a lot of money on?
Aphyer was discussing “working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them”, not specifically “poor” people. My experience of people working such hours, even on a low wage, is that they are proud of their work ethic and their ability to provide and that because of their hard work they have nice things and a path to retirement. They don’t consider themselves poor—they are working hard precisely to not be poor. As a concrete example, people in the armed forces have to smile and bear it when their bosses send them into war zones, never mind lower level abuse like being yelled at and worked past the point of exhaustion and following deliberately stupid orders.
That said, your question prompted me to get some statistics regarding the consumption patterns of low income households. I found the US BLS expenditure by income decile, and looked at the lowest decile.
This is emphatically not the same thing as either “poor” or “working 60-hour weeks”. People in this decile are not employed for 60hrs/week, because 60hrs/week for 40 weeks at federal minimum wage is $17,400 and puts someone in the second decile for income. Most of these people are retired or unemployed and spending down savings, which is why mean expenditure is $31,000/year vs mean income of $10,000/year. I welcome better data, I could not find it.
Those caveats aside, the bottom decile spent, on average (mean):
0.4% on sugar/sweets, $116/yr
0.8% on alcohol, $236/yr.
4.7% on food away from home, $1,458/yr
3.8% on entertainment, $1,168/yr
1.2% on nicotine, $383/yr
We’re looking at ~10% spending on these categories. From experience and reading I expect some fraction of spending in other categories to be “luxury” in the sense of not being strictly required, perhaps ~10%. This is in no way a criticism. Small luxuries are cheap and worth it. Few people would agree to work ~20% fewer hours if it meant living in abject poverty.
I’m curious what answer you would give to your own questions.
When I made $1000 a month at my first job, I didn’t buy new clothes for a year, had to ration my heating, and only ate out a few times a week. My main luxury expenses were a gym membership and heating the entire apartment on weekends.
Honestly, anything that’s not rice, chicken, cabbage, or rent is a luxury. Candy is a luxury. Takeout is a luxury. Going out for social events is a luxury. Romantic relationships and children are luxuries. I don’t think it’s impossible for Americans to be working 60 hours a week and consume no luxuries, but it’s probably very difficult.
Short answer: Money is fungible.
Long answer: If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and can’t buy luxury items, it is reasonable to say that you needed to work 60 hours a week just to afford essential items. If you work 60 hours a week, buy essential items, and also buy luxury items, it seems more reasonable to say that you worked [X] hours a week to buy essential items and [60-X] hours a week to buy luxury items, for some X<60.
If you ignore the fungibility of money, you can say things like this:
Bob works 40 hours a week. He spends half of this salary on essential items like food and clothing and shelter, and the other half on luxury items like fancy vacations, professionally prepared food, recent consumer electronics and entertainment, etc.
Now Bob has children. Oh no! He now needs to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford to send his children to a good school! This means he needs to work 60 hours a week to afford necessities!
But, even if we account a good school as a necessity, Bob’s actual situation is that he is spending 20 hours of labor on his personal necessities, 20 hours of labor on his children’s necessities, and 20 hours of labor on luxuries. He has the ability to work 40 hours a week for necessities. He is instead choosing to work 60 hours a week to afford luxuries.
That’s a reasonable choice for Bob to make! The modern world has some very nice luxuries indeed, and Bob can justifiably think it’s worth putting some extra hours in to get them, even if he doesn’t enjoy his job!
Yes, it would be better still if Bob could afford all the same luxuries with a 40-hour workweek. But don’t tell me that Bob is in the same position as a coal miner who had to work 60-hour weeks to put food on the table and heat his house in winter, and don’t try to use this to argue that there hasn’t been any improvement in poverty.
And as the world gets richer still, there are two ways this could manifest:
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to work less.
Bob gets richer, and uses that wealth to have more luxuries.
In the first world, we’ll see Bob working fewer hours. In the second world, we’ll see Bob working the same hours but having more nice things. Both are improvements! But which improvement we get depends on how nice the things our society can produce get. The more new nice things our society can produce, the more likely Bob is to continue working 60-hour weeks to get modern luxuries, rather than working shorter hours and accepting 1980s-era luxuries.
This argument would cease to hold water if there were a substantial number of people working 60 hours a week who genuinely weren’t spending substantial portions of their income on luxuries. I think this was true in the US even in the relatively recent past, that sizeable numbers of the people working 60 hours a week in 1945-1975 e.g. never left the state they were born in, prepared all their own food, had very limited access to entertainment, etc. I don’t think it’s true today: I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.
The relation between time and money is sometimes not linear.
I would be happy to work 2⁄3 time for 2⁄3 of my current salary (doing things similar to what I am doing now), but I don’t see such option on the job market. Most employers are “40 hours, or go away”. The ones who offer part-time jobs typically pay way below the market salary, and still think they are doing you a favor.
(To generalize, this is my objection against the concept of “revealed preferences”—sometimes the options we imagine intentionally rejected by other people were never real for them in the first place.)
A large part of the family budget is “money passing through your hands”. You get a salary. You pay for the mortgage, electric power, gas, car insurance, etc. Include some humble amount of food and occasional new clothes and shoes, and… if you have an average income, it is possible that maybe 90% of your salary is already gone at that moment. The remaining 10% are yours to spend as you wish.
My point is that the budget of average people has much less slack than it may seem—at one moment you have a little discretionary spending, the next moment your expenses somehow increase by 15% (your car breaks, you get sick and need some expensive treatment, etc.) and suddenly your salary is not enough even for the necessities. Maybe the people who work 60 hours a day would actually only need to work 50 hours a day to make ends meet, but such option may not be available on the job market.
Anecdotal evidence about the life of people working 60 hours a day: Nickel and Dimed
I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich’s co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
May I ask you two questions?
Can you please list several things that you consider luxuries and which you believe these “poor” people spend a lot of money on?
What evidence (and how much) do you base this on?
Aphyer was discussing “working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them”, not specifically “poor” people. My experience of people working such hours, even on a low wage, is that they are proud of their work ethic and their ability to provide and that because of their hard work they have nice things and a path to retirement. They don’t consider themselves poor—they are working hard precisely to not be poor. As a concrete example, people in the armed forces have to smile and bear it when their bosses send them into war zones, never mind lower level abuse like being yelled at and worked past the point of exhaustion and following deliberately stupid orders.
That said, your question prompted me to get some statistics regarding the consumption patterns of low income households. I found the US BLS expenditure by income decile, and looked at the lowest decile.
This is emphatically not the same thing as either “poor” or “working 60-hour weeks”. People in this decile are not employed for 60hrs/week, because 60hrs/week for 40 weeks at federal minimum wage is $17,400 and puts someone in the second decile for income. Most of these people are retired or unemployed and spending down savings, which is why mean expenditure is $31,000/year vs mean income of $10,000/year. I welcome better data, I could not find it.
Those caveats aside, the bottom decile spent, on average (mean):
0.4% on sugar/sweets, $116/yr
0.8% on alcohol, $236/yr.
4.7% on food away from home, $1,458/yr
3.8% on entertainment, $1,168/yr
1.2% on nicotine, $383/yr
We’re looking at ~10% spending on these categories. From experience and reading I expect some fraction of spending in other categories to be “luxury” in the sense of not being strictly required, perhaps ~10%. This is in no way a criticism. Small luxuries are cheap and worth it. Few people would agree to work ~20% fewer hours if it meant living in abject poverty.
I’m curious what answer you would give to your own questions.
When I made $1000 a month at my first job, I didn’t buy new clothes for a year, had to ration my heating, and only ate out a few times a week. My main luxury expenses were a gym membership and heating the entire apartment on weekends.
Honestly, anything that’s not rice, chicken, cabbage, or rent is a luxury. Candy is a luxury. Takeout is a luxury. Going out for social events is a luxury. Romantic relationships and children are luxuries. I don’t think it’s impossible for Americans to be working 60 hours a week and consume no luxuries, but it’s probably very difficult.