There was an iconoclastic article in last week's Economist, which strikes at the coventional wisdom about the balance between work and lesiure:
A pair of economists have looked closely at how Americans actually spend their time. Mark Aguiar (at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) and Erik Hurst (at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business) constructed four different measures of leisure.* The narrowest includes only activities that nearly everyone considers relaxing or fun; the broadest counts anything that is not related to a paying job, housework or errands as “leisure”. No matter how the two economists slice the data, Americans seem to have much more free time than before.
Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs—the overstretched middle class of political lore—do very well.
If what my ex-students tell me is true, however, lawyers haven't seen much growth in leisure time. To the contrary, it seems as though lawyers are working as harder or harder than ever, if we are to believe a Chicago Lawyer survey:
A full 80 percent of respondents said they work 40 hours or more a week. About 33 perent work 50 to 59 hours a week, and 10 percent said they work 60 or more hours a week.
About 73 percent of respondents said they worked on weekends, with 7 percent reporting they worked more than seven hours on the average weekend. About 72 percent said they worked from home after normal work hours each week.
They're not all happy to be working that much. Nearly three-fourths of respondents who have a spouse or children said that work cuts into family time ''somewhat more'' or ''far more'' than they'd like. More than half of all respondents -- about 54 percent -- said they would reduce the number of hours they work, with a corresponding cut in pay, if they had the option.
The study cited by the Economist would suggest that lawyers should not have seen as much growth in leisure as people who work in professions requiring less education, but it seems lawyers are actually losing lesiure time? Why? The CL survey shows a definite link between working hours and pay:
The survey showed that how much money a lawyer makes corresponds almost exactly with how much work reduces family time. In the open-ended responses, lawyers said over and over again that achieving a high level of success in the profession simply demands putting in long hours.
But if lawyers can (and do) make more money by working more, why isn't that equally true of other professions whose practitioners seem to be enjoying more leisure? And why hasn't the market made available options for lawyers who would be willing to take a cut in pay to work fewer hours? Very curious.
