Whatever Happened to the Leisure Age?
by Pavlov MacTavish,,
Department of Technocultural Studies,
Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology
In the 1960s and 70s commentators agreed that by the end of the century we would be living in a Leisure Age. Automation would relieve humanity of the need to work for more than a few hours a day. Well, the end of the century is here, and the Leisure Age seems farther away than it did in 1960. A larger proportion of the population is working, and working longer hours.
Of course, automation often increases labour instead of reducing it. For example, thanks to automation your computer can now check your spelling for you, but after reviewing all the computer's suggested changes to see which need to be made and which are the result of some guy in Utah's ignorance of words like Dufferin or anglophone you still have to check the spelling yourself anyway, since computers can't handle distinctions like those between their, there, and they're. Similarly, your telephone can now take messages for you, but that means you have to spend more time dealing with messages.
Be that as it may, we are surrounded by labour-saving devices but are spending more of our time in labour. How did this happen? I believe the answer can be derived from the school of thought which is usually referred to as quantity theory (Self, 1991). The basic idea of quantity theory is to treat characteristics as quantities rather than as descriptions, and to assume that these quantities are fixed. The quantity theory of insanity, for example, holds that a group can have only a fixed degree of sanity, and that any increase in insanity in one or more of its members will be compensated for by an increase in the sanity of other members.
Even quality can be conceived of as a quantity. For example, over the past 40 years technology for recording sound has improved enormously. At the same time, the quality of the music it records has declined. Those of us who can remember listening to Aretha Franklin on one of the tinny transistor radios of the 1960s will always, and justifiably, prefer that experience to listening to Madonna or Britney Spears on CD. Twenty to thirty years before Aretha Franklin, though, fans of popular music were listening on devices inferior to the transistor radio to artists of the stature of Benny Goodman. So we can conclude that the quantity of quality is fixed – as the quality of recording technology increases, the quality of the music it records must decrease to compensate.
So how does quantity theory explain our current non-Leisure Age? The answer, I think, lies in what I call the labour equilibrium. When a technical innovation allows a function to be performed more competently, the group will adjust its behaviour so that the net quantity of labour required will not be altered.
Consider the computer. Personal computers now offer enormous computing power to the ordinary consumer. Programs that required several minutes of time on a mainframe computer of the 1970s now run in seconds on a PC. Or rather they would run in seconds, if we were interested any longer in getting things done with computers. Instead, we have become obsessed with pretty screen displays and pretty computer output.
For example, today's word processing software, running on computers with 100 times the power of those of ten years ago, is no faster than the word processing software of ten years ago. The additional power, instead of being used to increase speed, is used a) to make the computer screen look like something off the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, and b) to satisfy elevated standards for the appearance of documents.
In the 1970s a report typed in a single size of Courier font, justified only on the left, and with italics indicated by underlining, looked pretty spiffy. Today a document without full justification, multiple fonts and font sizes, and endless graphics looks tawdry and half-hearted. So computing power is used to make screens and documents look prettier rather than to make word processing faster. And the documents produced by the high-powered computers of today are no more informative than those produced by the primitive typewriters of yesteryear.
Most importantly, in the end it takes longer to produce a document today than it did in 1975. A Selectric typewriter couldn't do all that much, but that also meant that less could go wrong with what it could do. Furthermore, the opportunity for endless revision was less in 1975 because the time required for revision was too long to allow deadlines to be met comfortably if more than a few changes were to be made. People got things right the first time instead of depending on computing power to fix their mistakes for them.
So when automation reduces the amount of labour required to perform a function, the group responds by raising standards of production so that labour requirements are maintained at the previous level. Yes, people have lost their jobs to technological change. On the other hand, technological change has created jobs in fields which make little contribution to productivity – web site design, for example, or cable television.
But why is there an equilibrium? Why does the group act to maintain the amount of labour required? The argument that people do this to protect their incomes is questionable, since a more likely result of that desire would be overt opposition to technological change – why invent complicated strategies for frustrating technological change when you can just refuse to change?
The answer is simple: people just don't want leisure. It's not that they couldn't figure out what to do with their leisure time. The problem is that if they were usually at leisure they would no longer feel worthy. For most people their work is the source of their feelings of worth. They like to think that they are good at their work and that they are doing important things for society. They have also been trained to believe that self-indulgence is wrong. As self-indulgence in private life increases, as it has been increasing steadily for thirty years, the desire to perform worthy work to atone for that self-indulgence increases. For these reasons society is continually fighting a winning battle against leisure.
So there's your answer. Thank you for your attentive interest. Now get back to work.
REFERENCE Self, Will (1991). The quantity theory of insanity. [London?]: Bloomsbury
(also in Penguin, 1994).Whatever Happened to the Leisure Age? © Coolth, 2000
Re-posted on March 25, 2004
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