Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 v7 ucbtopaz-1.8; site ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!houxm!mhuxj!mhuxr!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!ucbtopaz!mwm 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?