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From: mwm@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Measure of success?
Message-ID: <780@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 1-Mar-85 06:14:13 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbtopaz.780
Posted: Fri Mar  1 06:14:13 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Mar-85 04:47:52 EST
References: <257@cmu-cs-k.ARPA> <761@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA> <457@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Reply-To: mwm@ucbtopaz.UUCP (Praiser of Bob)
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
Lines: 30
Summary: 

In article <457@ssc-vax.UUCP> eder@ssc-vax.UUCP (Dani Eder) writes:
>How about defining 'standard of living' as the fraction of the population
>that do not HAVE to work.

Two comments. First, this only covers a small fraction of the symbols that
fire when I think of "standard of living." I suspect we need another axis
or three.

Second, I don't think you've quite got the essence of what I meant by "free
time," even though you're very close. How about changing it to read "the
frction of the time the part population that has to work is expected to
work."

Ignoring sleep (which is vital to staying alive, and hence can be
considered "work"), a neolithic culture is once again near 100%. A
post-agricultural society shows a little drop (call it 80%), an early
post-industrial society shows another small drop to (figure 6 12 hour
days/week) 65%. We're at about 35% now.

The trouble with this is part of the time I'm not working, I'm still doing
things that I'd rather not be doing - laundry, shopping, preparing food,
etc. These all eat into my free time, and push that 35% up significantly.

The definition of "percentage that has to work" suffers from similar
problems: the percentage freed to do what *they* want to do is different
from the percentage who don't have to work.

Anybody else have any ideas?