Complications Of More Leisure Time
For this week’s Shifting Career’s column, I spoke with Linda Nazareth, an economist in Toronto for Business News Network, Canada’s national cable station for business news. She is the author of a new book, “The Leisure Economy.” Below are excerpts from our conversation:
Q. You write about the arrival of a period you call “the leisure economy.” The term will strike many as an object of fantasy, especially since you set it up as a contrast to the current “time-crunch economy” plaguing so many of us today. In simple terms, can you define the leisure economy and explain why you believe we are on its doorstep?
A. I see us moving to a society where more people have more time. Right now, baby boomers and people a little younger are working flat out and driving their kids everywhere, and they are proud of it. If someone asks you how you are, you have to say, “I’m really busy.” I argue that the boomers are the most competitive generation we’ve ever seen and they have made it fashionable to be busy. They always had to compete with each other because there are so many of them. And because they have dominated everything, they have given us the time-crunch economy.
But we now have an aging society. And as people move out of the time-crunch years — the 30s and 40s when you have the most demands on your time and the least free time — you have a kind of forced leisure. There will be lots of them, and they will have what will seem — to them — to be lots of time, which will give us the first part of the leisure economy.
Q. In many ways, this is about demographics, and a good chunk of your thesis is that as the 77 million baby boomers age, they will elevate the status of leisure, much as they elevated the status of work-related accomplishments and pretty much anything else they experienced. But you say it’s not just the boomers, but also Gen Y, another mammoth-size generation. Tell us about that.
A. Gen Y is the generation born since the late 1970s, the oldest of whom are now in their 20s. It’s a generation that knows technology, knows they can multitask and has a lot of interests since they were brought up all kinds of activities, whether hockey, gymnastics, music or whatever. They are already putting demands on corporations, and when they have their families they will make even more demands. And what they want most of all is time. And because the boomers will be retiring, quite a lot of them will get a yes when they ask for those things. Part-time work has really been considered lower status. You don’t really see it for professionals all that often. I am eager to see whether this generation makes it much more widespread.
Q. Early in the book, you make the point that not everyone will be a part of the leisure economy (just as you point out that not everyone has been a part of the time-crunch economy). This all seems very related to class. Can you talk a bit about how you see these distinctions playing out?
A. We’ve seen a huge divide in North America, with the rich getting richer and not everyone getting part of that growth. And it is not just the super rich. It is also professionals getting more. However, those with a less elite education level are finding it hard to make any gains. So I think the next split will be the leisure split. We are already seeing it among the 55-to-64-year olds who are not able to retire staying in the labor force longer than they want. And I think we’ll be seeing more of that with the leisure haves being able to leave full-time work if they want, to dabble at work and other things and the have-nots being unable to get the leisure. The same is true for younger households. There will be an appetite in families to have one parent home for a time (male or female), but not everyone will be able to make that happen.
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Photo by John Wiley & Sons.
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