so good afternoon it's a pleasure for me to introduce a great economist a a fellow American professor Daniel hammer mesh I'm I've met him here afternoon this is an open lively person he Frank honest and he likes to listen to everybody including his students in Austin Texas a university and one of the students one of his best students actually suggested that he should write down his observations anecdotes those examples that he would use during his lectures to illustrate his students how economic theories pervasive present in our daily choices and the result of this was a book the result was a book economics everywhere which is at its fourth edition now and actually in a book in an interview for a book called spouse anomic which is applied to the rules of economics which are sorry applies economics to the relationships between married people and Professor Hyneman a she said this is one of the so many fields in which using a bit of economic theory could be helpful in taking in improving actually making progress in our knowledge of the world actually there are so many things that cannot be understood without being aware of some of the economic theory and in his book economics is everywhere hammer mash you suspect from lyrics from Rolling Stone songs to illustrate the concept of scarcity Oh her I'm sorry and his granddaughter's behavior so he was one of these theatres of the book Freakonomics who uses economics to make provocative very bizarre analysis explaining for example that drug peddlers sometimes live at home with their mothers this book sold four million copies actually and in 30 was translated in 35 languages in hand a mesh I like the authors of Freakonomics is a really quite unusual bizarre sync thinker and he contributes two blocks in Freakonomics and after the yesterday he wrote one and he wondered what the economic advantage was of a festival like this one and this is the economics for the mass economics for the mass actually this is funded by the provincial government by private companies and so he wondered why should the government spend public money on something like this and in my opinion because this educates citizens and even more so this creates a social capital this creates cohesion among children a cohesion which otherwise wouldn't be there in August a new book will be published a new Hamish book Beauty pays that's a title showing that society favors those who are beautiful and quoting empirical data showing that being beautiful hoar handsome is something that actually makes you find better jobs you are favored or provided by banks when you look for money and usually you have also more beautiful spouses and more educated ones and I think that the title of our festival akanda the boundaries of economic of economic freedom and actually this is something that also illustrates professor hamamass work who has investigated the boundaries of economic theory today he'll be talking about what we do with our leisure time that is and actually the title is freedom from work so we are very eager or looking forward to listening to Professor Heyman meshes presentation because he will be helping us in getting a better knowledge of ourselves thank you thank you very much Steve the very kind introduction and I want to make a few comments about the festival Steve made the point that I've made in the blog yesterday about why this might be a very good investment for the Trentino government and I really do believe that I would love to have a festival like this at home in Texas although I can't imagine the government in taxes spending money on anything much less a festival like this but I wish they would the symbol of this festival as you can see over there is the squirrel okay and I want to think about what the squirrel does if he suddenly has freedom from work remember the squirrel has worked very hard collecting nuts saving nuts but it happens this was a very good year in squirrel land okay and so there was an abundance of nuts and he has a lot of time the question is what is the squirrel going to do with all that extra time you might think an economists have mostly thought that people either work or don't work and yet for the squirrel the non work time is not always the same take the squirrels example he could for example spend time chasing ladies squirrels this would be very enjoyable on the other hand one can imagine things he might do which spare time are not so much fun for example stand there and look at the sky because he can't think of anything better to do or there are no ladies squirrels around which has been the story of my life until I met my wife anyway you can see that time away from work even for a squirrel is not quite all the same it's not homogeneous and that's the motivation of this entire talk namely what do we do when we're not working how has it changed how does it differ across people and what's going to happen in the future let me stress I've been to several sessions I went to Alan Krueger session last night I heard Jurgen Finn Haugan yesterday all of the sessions I've been to in many of the sessions in this conference have to do with economic policy so let's refer back to the squirrel land here the squirrel is worried about his free time this is not an issue of government and therefore the premier of squirrel land let's call him senior scoreless Kony has nothing to do with anything over here it's merely a matter of individuals and learning how individuals behave so let's talk about this and go through a whole bunch of rather simple ideas which any economist could get if he or she spent this time thinking about them and getting data this is in case you don't know who this is this is the actor Johnny Depp he has a new movie out this week that's not why I'm putting his picture up it's rather an ad from Mount Blanc pens and the crucial point there is time is precious noticing as they watch on his hands use it wisely and that is the basic message of this entire talk time is scarce and once something becomes scarce it becomes economics and we have something useful to say about it it is true that money is scarce we all want more money no question about that but for more and more of us time as what's been scarce I know there's a recession going on now and people are worried about jobs and money nonetheless over the longer term its money that has become relatively abundant for most people in the Western industrialized world and it's time which is not increased very much let me illustrate for Italy in the US so here we have tables for both Italy in the US showing GDP per capita that's the amount of money in real terms that we have to spend as you can see looking down the left-hand column there that in Italy in the last 50 years the average person is probably four times as well-off economically in terms of dollars then he or she was fifty years ago looking at the second column though life expectancy at birth has increased in this country but you know it's only increased about 15 percent so the amount of money we have has gone up by a factor of four the amount of time we have to spend it has gone up by a very very minimal amount only fifteen percent in the u.s. wealth has gone up only three hundred percent it's a huge amount but our life expectancy has gone up only about twelve percent so again if you take the ratio of money to time that ratio has risen tremendously increasingly in rich countries it's time that is scarce so the way I think about it is in terms of this little schematic here the upper one shows two little dollar bills and I'm sorry they could be euros it wouldn't matter and a watch a clock and that could be a low wage individual or a poor country a medium sized clock and not too much money in the rich country and among rich individuals down below the clock is still the same size but the dollar bills are much bigger and that's what's been happening over time in most countries outside the very poor developing world and it certainly was true across people within the same economy so let's keep this relative scarcity in mind the time available to spend one dollar has been going down more or less steadily in my country the time available to spend a euro or a thousand lira has been going down steadily in Italy as well so let's talk about how people spend time away from work let's try category categorizing uses of time now I want to categorize different things we do into four main categories this is arbitrary one could make any number of cat it's like accounting which is the moat well as they say about accountants there are people who weren't dull enough to become economists it's really a boring thing economics is much more exciting I think so I want to make a four fold classification here the first one is very easy things you do for pay where time spent commuting to your work I'll call that market work em the next category economists call home production or household production childcare cooking cleaning walking the dog mowing the lawn gardening these are things that you could actually pay somebody to do for you I could pay somebody to take care of my children if I still had young children I could pay somebody to mow my lawn I do that pay somebody to do the laundry pay somebody to iron my shirts and do the cleaning nonetheless most of us do some of these things we could contract them out but we don't the third category is what I will call biological activities things we have to do some of sleeping we all have to sleep eating washing up sex these are things that you cannot pay somebody to do for you you can pay somebody to have sex with you but you can't pay somebody to have sex for you okay you got to do it yourself maybe someday technology will change lastly here leisure this is everything else voluntary things that you might enjoy doing television watching exercising sporting events religious activities these are all not required but we do them because we enjoy them let me stress this caste classification is quite arbitrary one might for example say religious activities used to be things that you had to do that's not true anymore but as long as I make these categorizations in a given way and like any accounting keep them unchanged I think we're okay there is no problem with this particular category Asian just to illustrate this I like this cartoon it shows a couple talking and it's a man sitting on the couch and the couple is talking is saying that's the guy I hired to read Proust for me you can't hire somebody to read Proust for you you've got to go through all 4,000 pages on your own and I'm sure almost nobody in this room has done that I urge you it's it's it's worth the time that's a lot of time and as you get richer and mature that time becomes more valuable so let's look at a bit about how people spend time and here are some data as recently as I could get for Germany Italy Netherlands and the US with these four main categories of time use and what's interesting is this is for the average individual on the average day it looks very much the same Italians have a bit more leisure than the Dutch Americans don't have very much leisure we spend less time sleeping we spend a bit more time at home and about the same working for pay on average according to these data this is the average person this includes people who don't work at all it includes some like professors of economics who are working 70 hours a week but the main point to note here is the remarkable similarity across countries in the mounts in each of these categories if you break these categories down further you'll find that work for pay is only the second biggest single thing that people do by far the biggest individual activity that we engage in is sleeping the most important thing we do about one third of a day if you break these down still further the third most important thing that we do is watch television indeed if you add sleeping working and television watching you account for almost two thirds of what we have time to do television watching by the way is much bigger in America than anywhere else it's a favorite American activity bigger than in Italy Germany or the Netherlands or anywhere else let's look at this further and a lot of discussion of how people spend time deals with differences between men and women so the question I want to ask is away from work away from the confines of work do men and different and women do different things and so here's the same day to the same four countries breaking it down by gender F is women M as men same for categories and you'll notice not surprisingly that in each country work for pay is less among women than among men it's true everywhere in the u.s. they're a bit closer in the other three countries typically the man is working for pay twice as much as a woman on the other hand the favourite economist phrase work at home among women housework childcare cooking shopping is much more among women than among men that's true in all three countries the third line shows the total work work for pay and work that you could pay somebody to do household production and if you'll notice Germany women four hundred and forty five minutes men four hundred and thirty six minutes Netherlands three ninety two and three ninety-nine us four seventy two and four seventy six there's an old American television show called Sesame Street for children I don't know if they have this in Italy or not and one of the favorite things was to show four different pictures and say one of these things is not like the others there's a whole song about that look at these four countries and tell me which one of these things is not like the others we'll come back to that in a minute Americans spend less time in leisure and a little bit less time in taking care of themselves too but the crucial point here is by gender those tremendous equality and total work except in one of these countries what's really amazing is if you do this for a whole bunch of countries this graph relates well-being wealth real GDP per capita on the horizontal axis to the difference in work between women and men so if you look there at the zero line going across there you look at most of the rich countries us Norway Netherlands Denmark Japan Finland are gathered very close to that zero line in most rich countries in fact there is very little difference in the total amount of work for paying at home that men and women do there is one tremendous outlier among rich countries and that is if you'll notice that dot up there which is IO to Italy in 2002 which is the most recent data we can get Italy relative to its wealth women do an awful lot more total work than men so we saw this anomaly men do 75 minutes less total work than women every day that's 10 hours a week out of 168 what are Italian women doing at home so much whenever I've presented this anomaly everybody says oh they're cooking no it's not cooking there's almost no difference between Italian women and other women of the total amount of time two thirds nearly it's extra time spent cleaning the house that's the big difference Italian women spend immense amount of time cleaning the house and that's true in southern Italy and also in northern Italy it's true for older women but it's also true for younger women for some reason gnorm here that women should spend a lot of time cleaning the house if you go back on this picture here guys if I were an Italian woman being exploited here working so hard I would try to find the country where the guys do more than the women do if you look down there there's one wealthy country Israel where the guys do more work than the women I think there's room for trade across the Mediterranean the women ought to go to Israel the Israeli guys ought to come here and find a wife will put up with this it's probably not going to happen but there's room for arbitrage here ok let's talk about changes over time and what's been happening over time the problem with this is we have huge amounts of data on how much people have worked for the last 60 or 70 years we have very little data for most countries on how they spend time away from work for the US we now can do this from 1965 to 2009 and in the UK we can do it from 1975 to 2000 whether the same trends look this way in other rich countries like Italy I just don't know the numbers aren't there I have to assume that this is common in rich countries so let's see what's happened here first of all two people generally and then two men versus women in the US over this almost 40 year period work is declined a little bit about four hours a week work at home has also declined a little bit also four hours a week Americans today despite our constant complaining and I think I described America as the land of complaints that's the one thing we're really good at that in higher education total amount of time working has gone down in the UK work time in the market for pay has gone down a lot work at home is basically unchanged but the bottom line here is in total we have more time for leisure and more time for biological things by gender however it doesn't quite look the same this is the US only which has the better data here for men total work time in the market has gone down you see from 53 to 40 hours per week whereas for women as we all know there are more women working in the US today and they're working longer look at work at home though for men American men are doing a bit more at home not much 3 hours more and a lot less than women but they are doing more women on the other hand are doing much less at home so if you add these together you will note that for both men and for women total of work has gone down both sexes have more time for enjoyment I'm very gratified by this I've watched this happen over my adult life I think it's a good thing who were the people who benefited from this decline in total work and there are tremendous differences by economic status and economic characteristics and let's look at the major determinants of how we're lost one is economically namely education the role of human capital in determining how much we earn should not be underestimated so let's look at people with only 12 years of schooling and those with 16 or more look at the first two lines and you will note that among people with relatively little education work for pay has gone down tremendously among people with a lot of Education work for pay has gone down only a little work at home among those with little education has gone up but the same is true for those with a lot of Education so that in the bottom pair of lines we see that among those with little education total of work time has gone down tremendously on the 15% whereas those with the university education or more total work time has fallen from 60 hours per week to 59 hours a week to the point that now those with more education are doing more total of work than those with relatively little education I'm depressed about this since I have a lot of education and I want to ask the question should you feel sorry for me I mean I'm working like crazy I do a lot of the cooking at home I work still despite being very old very hard and this has been true over my entire life the question is am i worthy of your sympathy should we pity the highly educated people who are working so hard the answer is unequivocally no it's a choice like most things in economics they're earning more and as you also probably know the United States is currently the champion of inequality among rich countries and that inequality has been going up a large part of the cause for our increasing work among the well-off among higher educated is that it pays to work more the returns to work have gone up it's not surprising that rich Americans are also working more it's also the case and this is increasingly true in rich countries that work isn't what it used to be in a very real sense more and more of us have jobs that are fun it's not a matter of sitting there repetitiously pushing a button and doing the same thing for eight hours a day now I can sit for 10 hours a day and play with my computer skype my friends try to write papers teach interesting classes etc etc in other words work is more fun than it used to be it's also the case among better-off people it's not just that the work is fun the better off do more different things they get more variety in life they have less routine in life so here I have data for Australia and Germany I can't do this for the United States showing the number of different things that the average person does each day by level of education and you will see going down the table in both columns that the people with more education do more different things and comparing across days they have fewer days where they're doing the same thing at the same time of day they have more variety and what they do they have more variety and when they do it I like variety variety is good English phrase variety is the spice of life and my life as an educated rich Persian person is probably spicier than that of a person with less education all right so far I haven't done any economics at all to me economics is the science of incentives and I've said nothing about incentives the question is do incentives affect behavior let's think of something that everybody believes is fixed I have a friend sitting out here who tells me he sleeps 8 hours a day which I find shocking and given his lincom level it's especially surprising to the point I don't believe him this is data from a study I did with a colleague 20-some years ago looking at the relationship between sleep and wages and asking whether people whose wage is higher whose incentive to work whose time is more valuable whether given the high price of time they in fact sleep less and the answer is for both men and women they do sleep less among men anyway a person whose wage is half the average is sleeping about well almost 30 minutes a night less than a person whose wage is twice the average among women there's very very little difference when women's wage goes up they just tend to work a lot more but men sleep is highly responsive to their wage there was a story in a newspaper about that about this paper the headline was sleep why should I it costs too much sleep costs money and if it cost money you do less of it next thing to think about going back to my graph with the dollars and the clocks is time pressure in the United States it's a badge of honor to say that you're busy it's a disgrace to say I have a lot of time people are embarrassed at least among economists to say that oh I can do that I have the time for that people pretend to be very busy it's a signal of how important you are is this an economic phenomenon and who is more pressured for time men or women so here we have data for three different countries that labels up top were left off but the countries are going from left to right the United States Australia and Germany I couldn't get this for Italy in each pair the left-hand column is men the right-hand column is F women what you will see for each country is firstly that an awful lot of people say they're always pressured for time they're always busy notice in the US over half of women say there always are almost always busy among men it's a little bit less what's also true which is really interesting is that in all three of these countries and I'm sure it'd be true in Italy women say they're busier than men and give them up Italian women are doing cleaning the floors of the house perhaps this is not surprising women are more pressed for time than men women complain more about being rushed than men do is this very simply women do more different things here I have this for six countries listing the number of different things that men and women do blue is men red is women in every one of these countries women are doing more different things women have to juggle different activities and juggling is difficult women are called on if the child is sick to stay home from work and take care of them that's true everywhere and that's stressful women are managers of the household in most countries and that's stressful so I'm not surprised that in fact women do express more time stress than men the other thing to note about this is who is busy who complains about being busy who's more pressured for time the rich or the poor well you think about that graph at the start of this discussion for whom is time relatively scarce who had a lot of money and a small clock the answer is the rich so who should be the ones who are complaining about not having time it should be the rich and that's exactly what you observe in all three countries plus also the Korea so if we leave out let a hundred be the earnings of people who say they're always stressed you will know going from those who were often stressed which is black to sometimes stress which is dark gray to rarely stressed or never stressed earnings goes down almost steadily as stress goes down not surprisingly those who are most stressed who complain the most are those for whom they have a lot of money and relatively few euros or dollars should we feel sorry for the time stressed again no you want to be not stressed for time I tell you what you do don't make as much money okay give it away and live a stressful stress-free I'm abundant money scarce life I don't see too many people doing that in my country or yours and therefore again too bad suck it up no problem at all complain but don't expect me to sympathize with you the bottom line question in this is what would we do if we didn't have to work so much what would we do with the extra time what do we do with our extra time and this goes back to one of my favorite quotes in the economic literature from John Maynard Keynes who people should have heard of even though he's pretty much ignored by economists these days he was talking about what might happen if people didn't have to work so much he says three hours shifts or a fifteen hour wait week may put off the problem for a while but eventually Western rich society has to face the possibility that there just won't be so much need for work anymore so what I want to inquire into is what would we do what do we do if we suddenly got extra time notice we have gotten extra time we aren't working as much but that's taken a long period of time and I'm quite convinced someday we'll have a lot more free time I hope so I wish I had more free time I wish I were into workaholic I wish I weren't like that squirrel there he is again okay who like his friends the hamsters is on a wheel running around faster and faster and faster which is my description of American life two or three examples of this first of all every one of us gets one extra hour every year on the first Sunday in October no it's the last Sunday in October in Europe I believe when you go on winter time isn't that correct I think it's the last Sunday in October in America it's the first Sunday in November and we had data from the Netherlands for two consecutive weeks one of which beforehand one of which right after which included the day which was an hour longer and the question to ask is what did people do with the extra hour on the day that they went from summertime the wintertime ask yourself what do you do on that day and this gentleman is mouthing the word in English the answer is he says he sleeps okay let's see here we have four men and women by marital status so there's 60 minutes extra what do they do married women it's almost all extra sleep they're so stressed and so busy fifty three of the 60 minutes are extra sleep the only group where sleep doesn't account for at least half of the extra time is single men what are they doing they're out partying playing football or whatever notice 45 minutes of the extra hour among single men is partying leisure and so on but for most of us not surprisingly this temporary but expected increase in time is spent in sleep I wish it were true every day what about when we retire from paid work we all plan to retire someday this is of course part of a long time planning thing I have spreadsheets showing my entire rest of my life both dollars in time other people might not be so neurotic but we all do plan for retirement that's why I like the squirrel we put acorns aside for the future here are some data for Italy by age and I'll discuss the American data in a bit looking at people who are prime age adults 22:54 are our two main categories work for pay and work at home and then breaking down biological things into sleep and other personal things and breaking down leisure into television and other leisure and as you all should know let's compare just the first column which are working age adults to people like me who are let's say 67 or 68 that's the third column and you'll notice from prime age Italians to people age 67 they're cutting back work by four hours per day basically four and a half hours of work down to half an hour so they're getting four extra hours per day to play with that's an awful lot of time what do they do with it well they spend about an hour and a quarter more working at home maybe cleaning the floors even more not taking care of kids but taking care of grandchildren which a lot of which goes on in this country perhaps cooking perhaps shopping they spend almost an hour extra sleeping almost no time an extra personal care almost an hour of extra television watching and very nicely forty-five minutes of extra leisure of other types so it's very much split it's not all one thing in Italian when he or she retires uses his time or her time to expand all these activities I've made up this same table for America I was about to present it and I said maybe America is not typical which is generally true if you do the exact same table for America you find the very depressing result that over half of the extra time is consumed in one activity watching television Americans who retires spend immense amounts of time in front of the tube Italians which i think is praiseworthy spend much less time extra a lot extra but nowhere near as much extra as an American indeed the hundred and forty-two minutes that you see old people spending and television watching is less than the average American spends watching television maybe it's because the quality of our television shows is so much higher than elsewhere after all we have reality television show and American Idol which is surely very meritorious the third question this part to ask is what if we had a permanent time when fall what if something happened that said we just couldn't work or just as healthy but we can't work as much it happens in Japan in the late eighteen nineteen 80s and in Korea in the early 2000s the government legislated a decline in market work people just because it cost more for employers to employ them essentially we're told you can't work as much how did speak people spend what I call the gift of time so here is very briefly it's not easy to see this each vertical bar is a year and it shows for each year up here what happened to market work you can see that market work in 76 and 86 in Japan above was constant and then market work work for pay fell like crazy it's clearer in Korea where in 1999 the average korean that's the lower graph worked 350 minutes on a typical day in the 2009 he or she had worked 40 minutes less per typical day in other words the government succeeded in getting people to work less what did they do with it well the one thing they didn't do looking at the Korean graph which is clear is increase work at home there was essentially no change in the amount of time spent cooking cleaning shopping taking care of kids what did happen in Korea was a big increase in the time spent in biological activities and a small increase in leisure in Japan it was somewhat more mixed with a larger increase in leisure but the main point is in this very clean example of being told to work less people use the less work time to expand leisure and to expand things that are fun in other words that suggests to me to use the economists term that the extra utility we get from these activities is especially high and if we could just somehow force ourselves or have the government force us to work less we would use that time in leisure and in non-work activities in the house none of the time was used for work at home it was all used for other activities the final area which I think is worth talking about is requiring people to take what in Europe is called holidays what in America we call vacations an interesting fact which I noticed many years ago and now that I spend a few months every year in Germany it's even more clear to me I spend two months in the Netherlands we're always on holiday I'm spending seven weeks teaching in the Netherlands six weekdays in those seven weeks are holidays there's Easter Friday Easter Monday Queen's Day the day after Queen's Day this week is hey mph art that's Ascension Day that was Thursday but Friday is a holiday also week after next is Pentecost Monday that's also a holiday there are I think 15 public holidays in the Netherlands I think 14 and much of Germany how many public holidays are there in the US I believe seven or eight in other words a week and a half less of public holidays and it's also the case that mandated time off from work vacations as we call it in Europe Germany is five or six weeks per year in the u.s. it's two weeks per year and the evidence is very clear this is not my research that if we force people to take an extra week of holiday they do roughly an extra week less of work it's not that it's made up for elsewhere in other words in most of Europe quite remarkable people just work less I think that's wonderful the goal of life is not work the goal of life is enjoyment it's nice to have money as I saw it goes together with time but we in these countries are quite rich already and somehow I'd like to get my own country to get off the rat-race that I see us in the main point is that institutions customs and laws matter my statistic on this is the average German is on holiday three times as much as the average American there are three times as many Americans as Germans and therefore any given point of time there is many Germans on holiday as there are Americans on holiday despite the difference in the size of the country my first contact with Tito was he got me to be involved in a project five years ago which resulted in the book and he and I were talking tio bore area and I were talking about the title and I said how about the following title hours of work in the EU and us are Americans crazy or are Europeans lazy as my contribution my answer is absolutely clear on this I think Americans are crazy I would like to require us to take more holiday regrettably I don't think that President Palin next year will be doing that what's the bottom line here the bottom line here is that we're getting richer and richer and richer as societies we're getting richer and richer and richer as individuals societies need to arrange institutions to accommodate the various different ways in which people can use non-work time there is an American humorist Will Rogers who said buy land they are not making any more of it in other words land is increasingly scarce as there are more and more people that's not quite true if you spend time in the Netherlands they are making more of it up there but by-and-large land is scarce but butts also increasingly scarce as time you're not getting any more of it it's increasingly limited compared to what you can do with it and for that reason that's also valuable to use time wisely thank you very much at this Swabia temperately demand a Wall Street we have some time for for for questions of all questions and answers something I forgot to say earlier on is that is what Professor Hamish does when he's got free time he's got six grandchildren he also goes jogging every morning I think and then he travels travels a lot since it's here so questions now speaking English which is where workers are cut you know where people get an extra hour a week at the end of daylight savings time one could do the same thing in May when people get a fewer hour oh one less hour a week when summer time goes in right and I suspect it would be a very a symmetric table and the question will become what does that imply about the theory underlying of this if you're giving people an extra hour leads to very different results than taking an hour away what if we had data from the day the Sunday in late March when Italy goes on summer time would it be that men married men sleep 43 minutes less I don't know I would like to get those data the questioner believes that it wouldn't look like this with minus signs in front not sure I would bet people lose a lot of sleep also perhaps not as much but again the reason it wouldn't be as much is because most people believe they aren't getting enough sleep and therefore there is this asymmetry so if you lose an hour you wouldn't in fact cut back sleep by one hour if you gain an hour given how starved we all believe we are for sleep we do in fact sleep at the extra hour been grass sizzle now thank you very much for your very brilliant presentation but don't you think professor don't you think that if we consider our lives and we just don't base it on income and we consider it just as an exercise of curiosity and passion wouldn't we be able to overcome this dichotomy between fun and work wouldn't we be able then to get the same income we need and have fun at the same time it's an excellent question and I thank you for it I think a lot of what we've seen over the last 50 years it's precisely that mixing of fun and work at once partly because technology has enabled us to have more fun partly also because we want to mix fun and work well my favorite cartoons was a picture of the effects of computerization on the workplace it showed four people sitting in front of a computer screen at the job doing different things one woman had said contacting old boyfriends another guy have had downloading pornography from a website other ones were like that we do combine work and play much more than we used to this is because a we like variety and B we would like fun and we're now able to have fun and work together we are tending in that direction nonetheless there are limits and to some extent we'd rather have pure fun that's why the Europeans have six big holidays my questions about whether people really have a choice how much to work so you were saying that we shouldn't be to the highly educated who worked so much because their choice and then towards the end of your talk he said well if you give people next a week holiday they just take it as if they they didn't actually have it don't really have a choice of how many our state they work see is it's working hours a choice always in order to what extent it is if it is not to say it's a reason for government intervention in their area it's the choice in two dimensions first it's a choice for individuals we know it's a huge amount of work by economists on this it's especially true for older people younger people used to be true more for women than for men that difference is now been lessened but nonetheless people's amount of work people sleep as I showed you does respond to the returns to it in other words the price of something affects our behavior just like the price of spaghetti affects the amount hostel by the price of my time affects how much I want to work we aren't creatures fully of institutions nonetheless we are affected by institutions we are affected by constraints on our behavior and if we can get ourselves to be affected differently if for example in the United States we were to have requirements for more holiday time that too would affect our behavior but both prices and governmental mandates affect us we are not creatures that are fixed somehow sociologically in these things so not to demand it and there are other questions patient per year do you mandate that your graduate students take question is how many weeks of vacation do I make my graduate students take there was a book that came out recently which had interviews of graduate students one of their main complaints was how pressured for time they are my feeling in how unhappy they were I remember a colleague of mine played to one of our graduate students who said he smiles too much for a graduate student I don't think graduate students should smile they should be working hard they're at a point in life where they should be investing in their careers working as hard as they can to establish themselves and learn something it's guys like me who should be taking all the leisure time there's no investment possibility my horizon is very short so the answer is to your question is zero and negative if it were possible spero casino and through the money your partner Amanda analyst petard Shamu okay while we wait I can ask a question I mean there is one question here in the front row I think I have a question for you however in the meantime more on psychology of work rather on the issue of your presentation the top of your presentation but since work ranks second you know ranking of how we use time and since when we have the opportunity we increase the hours devoted to leisure etc if they're a factor identity I mean do we identify with work more in the States than in Europe do you feel that we can be identical do we identify ourselves with the work we are involved in is this psychological argument credible I mean what are the cultural factors because date anodize show that in there are no men not so much there is no so much difference between cultures what do you think about that there are several answers to that first of all work is for so many of us are major identifiers I do believe and I've seen studies on this suggesting that Americans do identify more with their work whether that's because they really do or it's just they feel they have to say that because they work so much that's very hard to say that's why I do economics and not psychology or sociology I don't like what would happen I like what does happen surprising in some ways people should identify with what they do most of by that criterion I should identify myself and most of you should identify yourself as sleepers that's my major activity nonetheless identify myself economists as she no identify myself as a teacher his economist secondarily I think that's probably more true in the US as you say than it is in Italy or the rest of Europe and that's unfortunate perhaps if we become more like Europe in these ways maybe will a star identifying ourselves as husbands fathers or even more important members of a community which is not what Americans typically do well in English and Italian I don't know I have to ask this question you're so impressed with how much time women in Italy are spending cleaning the houses and the floors and I have to ask you what do you think is the reason for that you said that women really enjoy the floor answer there is something else going on in Italy that makes it that's special place for women okay the question is why are Italian women on their hands and knees cleaning the marble floors so much I got asked my co-author Michael Berta who's giving a talk gave a talk last night had this vision of little old ladies and black dresses scrubbing marble floors but the answer is it's little old ladies it's young ladies it's everybody and not all of them are in southern Italy as I said I can't believe that Italian women enjoy cleaning floors any more than the American women do nor do I see why they don't hire cleaning ladies given that the price is no different than elsewhere somehow and I hate to say this I believe it's culturally determined that this goes on why this cultural determinants still continues after all these years I would love to see new data in Italy for 2011 maybe this has changed I hope so because it stands out like a sore thumb compared to the entire rest of the rich world thank you is that a good answer I don't think so yeah I cannot make it funny you know you saying it this young lady after she's done here is going to go back and do what clean the floor well I'm professor of economics 30 minutes or Anita jános Antal professor right I'll ask you in a telling cuz I know you get translation what do you think the recent idea of living your life slowly in Italy we have slow food as low life movements so doing things in a different way much more slowly and in a less hectic way and then well I believe that as your age progresses you still do many things but it takes you longer and an older person needs more hours for cleaning the home because it takes him or her longer also for personal care I can see this in my father who's 85 years old is perfectly independent but it did seem three hours to get ready whereas he was ready enough an hour when he used to go to work so the efficiency of time I mean we always have to be efficient to achieve as much as we can also when we wash each other when we take care of ourselves what do you think of this two separate questions here let me comment on than an order the first question is the slow movement I had not heard of this until this trip to Europe one of our friends in the Netherlands it's talking about it's going to a slow food restaurant you know I wonder about that it may be slow food for me but I'm not sure it's slow food to the person who is cooking it and spending time taking care of me and so I wonder if this is just not another example of rich people indulging themselves I worry about how real in terms of time-saving it is on average I have no doubt that the saves time but the rich people who can afford to buy other people's services I wonder if it's true on average I would expect this to happen more and more indeed I wonder why we don't do more of that in the US where the price of low-skilled labor is so low and professors and other wealthy people have so much money to buy things with so I'm not sure I believe that in other words it sounds real good there was a book in 1971 by a man named EF Schumacher called small is beautiful and if anybody is old enough to remember that book and it was the same sort of thing that somehow it's good to do less and so on it's had no impact on us at all the efficiency argument that the questioner makes about when we get older I have no doubt watching my age at mother last year at age 92 it took her forever to do almost anything but in the table I have up there we're talking about people 65 to 69 and I am absolutely convinced and would be very angry if somebody told me they were less efficient at sleeping TV watching going to the movies or anything else like that so no question you're right about the very old but among people who are retiring these days at age 60 or 65 the evidence is absolutely clear health-wise they are just as healthy as they were thirty years ago with a very few exceptions and I would assume also just as efficient in using their time it's rather that people want leisure and if forced to take leisure they happily accept it and when they have enough money saved aside to keep themselves not worried that even if they live to ninety five they'll have enough money they will spend more time at leisure and spend it very efficiently also how how is influencing the trend of working for pay at home the results of your research I'm not sure I understand the question about the teleworking or workout home homework helping to telecommuting for example well she I'm a good one to ask essentially I do tell a commute I do most of my work at home I can work on the computer I can do my email I can look at Facebook heaven help me and things like that the virtue of working at home the reason it's so attractive is you can do what the questioner earlier said you can combine work for pay and household production with regrettably occasional biological activities like getting more food and having a snack in the middle of the morning but in terms of telecommuting per se even in the US where it pays the telecommute because communications and travel is so difficult commuting to work is very difficult it takes a long time even there is only a small fraction below 10% of people who say they telecommute so I think this is an increasing opportunity for variety an increasing opportunity to save time but it's still just not very widespread it just isn't that important yet the question if you look at Germany they have a lot of holidays the Germans and thriving in a globalised war world so they the economic from economical point of view are very successful does it mean that we can have both so we can all holidays and the economic success oh it's just a temporary blip and they're gonna pay in the long run not being as successful as they are the Germans have had this many holidays for quite a long time there's nothing new about this and it was only 10 or 15 years ago when they had to absorb East Germany that people were moaning the high unemployment in Germany and the tremendous problems they have we pay too much attention to the short-term I remember the big worry in the u.s. in the 1970s was the Japanese are going to take over the world they're selling us everything we can't compete and yet economically in the last 15 years people view Japan as a basket case the current fear and their papers being given at this conference I think ala Cena's paper is how the Chinese are taking over the world you know I'm sure it'll be the Brazilians in 15 years who we have to worry about these things come and go but in the end they're all good things I don't think any of this has to do with holidays I think we choose what we want in the holidays I think the productivity effects within a substantial margin just aren't very great so I don't think the Germans will pay a price for this because they've had it for a long time in both bad times and now good times I don't think it's an issue tomandamanda Channel say check one last question you show data that people with a university education in the US are working longer hours now and my question is are they being paid for those hours or are the university professors and managers that are just working longer hours and is there a way to to disentangle that kind of data the answer is very clearly yes certainly University professors are not paid by the hour I know that if I work one more hour I will not get an extra $10 directly but if I work an extra hour if a manager works an extra hour he or she will is impress his or her peers etc etc and earn more and there's no question that the gains from working an extra hour in terms of total earnings for the very higher educated people have gone tremendously and it's not just true for people who are like the 90th percentile compared to the average the very very top people the people in the top 2% have seen the biggest increase in the returns to work for our the big change has been at the very top I'm not quite wealthy enough to have benefited as much as most other people from that sadly grazie Mille and professor Hammer mesh ranked avoid key city Venuti Haskell tyrant thank you very much professor Hammer mesh and thanks to all of you for coming here today