Between the time people no longer have to spend laboring to pay for their basic necessities because those necessities are increasingly easier to produce and, thus, increasingly cheaper (prices driven down by competition that can profit with less and less cost per unit), and the time people save through technologies making basic process like acquiring meals and groceries, banking, etc less time intensive, you end up with people who have more time. More of their labor time can be spent moving toward non-essentials once their needs are met, and they end up with more free time to kill in a standard 16 hour day (assuming we're all sleeping well and getting our solid 8). With more free time to kill, people need more stuff to do. . . hobbies and entertainment. This is why occupations like actor and professional athlete have become so lucrative in recent years when, through the VAST majority of human history, these sort of entertainer roles were hardly a path to significant economic prosperity. More free time creates demand for more non essentials. This is also why we live in a country that has a poverty line at which people can afford to live in an apartment with internet access, a flat screen, and a smart phone. If you honestly acknowledge what is and is not a human necessity and take a look back at the labor hours that once had to be dedicated to acquiring -just- those bare basics, it's pretty hard to make the argument that technology slowly chokes out the masses in a capitalist system.
Absolutely right in "Between the time people no longer have to spend laboring to pay for their basic necessities because those necessities are increasingly easier to produce and, thus, increasingly cheaper (prices driven down by competition that can profit with less and less cost per unit), and the time people save through technologies making basic process like acquiring meals and groceries, banking, etc less time intensive, you end up with people who have more time" for some portion of the time period, starting in the dark ages and ending somewhere in the '70s.
And it makes absolute sense that "and the time people save through technologies making basic process like acquiring meals and groceries, banking, etc less time intensive, you end up with people who have more time."
In some ways, I agree that the standard of living for the disabled and the elderly has improved. That they live in an apartment much more the result of that we have an over supply of housing. That we have an oversupply of housing is the result of the improved efficiency of the past decade. The same is true of internet access and cell phones. The availability of internet access and cell phones to all is more to do with the fact that it is simply cheaper to leave the network available for everyone, then cut off access to the poor. It is due to the efficiency, for sure, but ancillary in cause rather then direct. The "free time" increase, if it exists as a predominate factor, isn't a direct cause or even a necessary cause. All that is necessary is that it be cheaper to sell the products to the retiree on SSI or SSDI then it is to pull it back out again or monitor it. Cell phones are cheap. And the network has economies of scale. Once laid, basic cable is in. It costs no more to "turn it on" for a new user then it does to send someone out to put a blocking filter in the line.
It is interesting that, back in the early '70s, there was this utopian ideal of everyone going to a shorter work week, 32 hours a week or whatever. This utopian ideal was never properly realized.
But since the 60's, the labor force has gone from about 30% of the population to almost 50% of the population. And that increase has not been realized by a comenserate decrease in working hours. The labor saving devices, in house work and cooking, has been absorbed by those workers who spent their time on those duties entering the labor force. Much of the increase we have seen, in standard of living, is as attributable to an increase in the measurable portions of the GDP rather then the previously unmeasurable portion that was merely the housewife's duties.
And, for some companies, this did happened as the recession hit. Safeway and Home Depot have this policy of cutting back the hours of some employees, spreading out the burden. Perhaps it is simply because Home Depot finds more utility in having more available employees. Perhaps it is because the Food Workers Union reached a social agreement that workers are better off sharing the burden. Why they choose to has little meaning. In that the final outcome is that one person doesn't end up unemployed. And employees have more free time.
And in engineering, this same process has been part of the economy for a good decade, as companies higher contract workers to do one task or another. This spread out the work among a saturated labor market. Whether they did so to avoid medical insurance costs or other expenses is beside the point. The net effect is that the work, declining relative to the labor force, was spread out. And engineers had more free time.
But, more free time is not necessarily the driving force behind demand for more non essentials. Unless we actually measure the idea it is not clear if it is a predominate factor in creating more demand. More income is the driving force, whether more free time exists.
While we have seen periods of increased demand for non-essentials like flat screen TVs, this isn't the direct outcome of more free time. It is the outcome of the availability of products that make our free time more "efficient" and "productive". I can think of many people that surely miss the opportunity to spend their non-existent free time watching their new flat screen TV.
And there are processes that run counter to "more free time" for workers, from the wage labor to the president. Everyone, in competition in the labor market, simply works as much as they must in order to ensure their position in the labor market.
Just as well, given that people are generally willing to keep working to make as much as they can, if not for current consumption, but because a) they are use to it and b) they want to save just in case, I do not believe that any efficiency gains have resulted in a comparable decrease in working hours.
This is all good hypothesis to test. I think it needs to be tested.
But, from anecdotal experience, the higher income becomes, due advancement in the professional work force, the more hours are demanded. When you take the wage earned by a salaried manager and divide it by hours they put it, their hourly rate suddenly becomes much less then we first assume. (And their dog takes a good brunt of it at home, so he is due his portion of that compensation.) Also, as far as my experience goes, the standard work week has been 40 hours since as far back as I can recall.
All in all, before we can conclude that efficiency has resulted in more free time, we really need to look at the actual labor hours per working person. And, I get a sense that, like all aggregate data, there are likely confounding issues with it. I don't need to know what they are to know that there is a high probability of them existing. And in those confounding issues lies the refinement at to whether "free time' has been a driving force for demand or if it is primarily the availability of products, with little new free time to use them, that has been the driving force behind an increasing workforce and simply having more stuff to play with when we have more free time.
