Are We Having More Fun Yet? Categorizing and Evaluating Changes in Time Allocation (Survey‪)‬

ARE AMERICANS SPENDING THEIR time in more or less enjoyable ways today than in earlier generations? The answer to this question is central for understanding economic and social progress yet has been elusive and controversial. From 1965-66 to 2005, for example, working-age American women increased the amount of time spent working for pay, watching television, and caring for adults while they reduced the amount of time spent cooking, cleaning, entertaining friends, and reading books. Do these shifts imply that women are better off or worse off? Gary Becker and Reuben Gronau provided the modern economic framework for modeling time allocation among market work, home production, and leisure. (1) More recently, Valerie Ramey and Neville Francis, and Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, have made thorough attempts to apportion historical time-use data into these categories. (2) These studies are controversial and reach conflicting conclusions, however, in part because external judgments were used to classify activities into home production, leisure, and market work. (3) Would the average person classify gardening, for example, as leisure or home production? Another problem is that it is unclear how to trade off shifts in time allocation across categories, or within them, when it comes to evaluating individuals' welfare. Not all leisure activities are equally enjoyable, nor are all home production tasks equally taxing.