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Commentary: Cash-rich, time-poor wealthy are always in a hurry
It seems that people with more money find more things to do with their time, so feel more time pressure, says Financial Times' Tim Harford.
LONDON: Will making more money save you time? Or will it make you feel more rushed than ever? I’ve been pondering this question because a friend challenged me to figure out whether income poverty and time poverty go hand in hand.
There are cash-poor, time-poor people, who juggle multiple shifts with childcare and spend precious hours on long commutes. There are cash-poor, time-rich people — pensioners or job seekers wondering how to fill the day. But, on average, are richer people more or less busy than those with less money?
On one point, the evidence is clear: whether or not people on high incomes are busy, they think they are. In a forthcoming book, Spending Time, economist Daniel Hamermesh looks at “time stress”, which is measured not by looking at a time-use diary but instead by surveying people to ask if they often feel “rushed” or “pressed for time”.
New parents, especially new mothers, are more likely to complain of time-stress. So are people who work longer hours — no surprise there. But what about income?Â
Prof Hamermesh finds that “people who were always or often stressed had the highest earnings ... earnings were lowest among the never-stressed”. Money goes hand-in-hand with the sense that there aren’t enough hours in the day.
MORE MONEY, LESS TIME
This isn’t just for the obvious reason that high-income people spend more time doing paid work, although on average they do. (They also sleep less and watch less television.)Â
Of people who work the same hours, having a higher income per hour is correlated with feeling pushed for time. Even people who don’t do any paid work at all feel more rushed if they have more money.
On the face of it, this makes little sense: Surely, for any given workload, money is a timesaver rather than a time-sink?Â
Logically, yes. Psychologically, no. It seems that people with more money find more things to do with their time, and so feel more time pressure.
For example, someone with money to spare may book nights at the theatre, reserve tables at fancy restaurants and sign up for bespoke courses.Â
With less cash, cheaper options such as watching TV or reading a book seem more practical. A time-use diary would record all of these activities as “leisure”, but curling up at home with a book is not only cheaper than going to the theatre, but induces less of a sense of time stress.
READ: How poverty tends to trap people into making poor decisions
I’m not saying we should shed a tear for the millionaire who feels she doesn’t have enough hours in the day to spend all her money. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that such feelings are common among richer people.
LESS EDUCATED HAVE MORE TIME
Another perspective comes from comparing education levels to how people spend their time across a week, as the economists Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst and Luigi Pistaferri have done.
People with more education — say, more than 12 years — tend to be richer. But do they also tend to be busier? It seems so.Â
We have US surveys from around 1985 and 2005, and they show that less-educated people have more leisure time than those who are highly educated. (They also had more leisure time in 2005 than in the 1980s.)Â
In contrast, the more highly educated group — who already had less free time in the 1980s — have been getting busier since.
There’s a gender dimension here too. Both in the 1980s and the 2000s, the people with the least leisure time were highly educated women, while those with most time to kill were less-educated men.
The gap between these two groups has widened. While less-educated men have gained 2.5 hours of leisure time a week (to a total of 39 hours), the more-educated women have lost two hours a week (bringing them down to a total of 30 hours). Women also feel more time-stressed than men, even after adjusting for other factors.
All these averages, of course, conceal a great deal of variation. The extra 2.5 hours of leisure a week that less-educated men have gained sound rather pleasant. But behind that average is a growing minority with 60, 80 or 100 hours a week of “leisure time” — better described as unemployment.Â
Although research suggests that some young men seem not to mind unemployment, given that computer games are now so awesome, most people hate it.
RICH ARE TIME-POOR, ANDÂ POOR ARE TIME-RICH
So while there are many struggling people who are holding down several different gigs, juggling childcare and burning time on long commutes, overall the evidence shows that the rich are time-poor and the poor are time-rich.
Is this any compensation for the other inequities of life? Probably not — although it depends how much you enjoy your leisure and whether you enjoy your job.Â
Recent studies of people doing gig work or shift-work on irregular hours find that a lot of them love the flexibility but many others hate the uncertainty or want more work.
Research on happiness shows that people — on average — tend to prefer leisure to work. On the other hand, it also shows that being unemployed is utterly miserable.Â
Prof Hamermesh writes, “I would be very happy to wager that most people would choose to feel time-poor rather than income-poor.” It’s hard to disagree.
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