Work and Leisure in America
Work and Leisure in America

Author: Giuseppe Ruggeri

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1039127347

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What does the future have in store for the United States in regard to technological advances, economic growth, and employment? What insights about the future can be gleaned from a careful examination of economic and institutional developments over the past seventy years? This book examines these questions and many more with the hope of helping readers gain a better understanding of the main factors that determine the path of sustainable progress. To achieve this goal, this book begins by presenting an in-depth summary of the statistical record of the United States from 1950 to 2019 with respect to changes in the major demographic components, the labor force, employment, hours of work, wages and income distribution, and patterns of consumer spending. Part two explores the major institutional and behavioral changes over the past seventy years that have influenced these trends, focusing on changes in family structure, the religious landscape, and trust in the media and public institutions. Part three summarizes the key lessons learned from the economic, institutional, and value changes over the past seventy years, then uses these conclusions as a foundation for exploring potential future trends. Throughout the book, the author argues that sustainable progress does not rely solely on economic forces but depends instead on a supportive institutional framework and a value system that provides a suitable moral compass. While recognizing the pivotal role of technology and labor markets, the author suggests that the fundamental issues facing the United States are largely outside the economic sphere. These include inequality, justice, human relations, the functioning of public and private institutions, trust, and shared values. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the factors that will shape the future of the United States and all other developed economies in the decades to come.

The Overworked American
The Overworked American

Author: Juliet Schor

Publisher:

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0786725257

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This pathbreaking book explains why, contrary to all expectations, Americans are working harder than ever. Juliet Schor presents the astonishing news that over the past twenty years our working hours have increased by the equivalent of one month per year--a dramatic spurt that has hit everybody: men and women, professionals as well as low-paid workers. Why are we--unlike every other industrialized Western nation--repeatedly ”choosing” money over time? And what can we do to get off the treadmill?

Hobbies
Hobbies

Author: Steven M. Gelber

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1999-06-25

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780231504232

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Whether it's needlepoint or woodworking, collecting stamps or dolls, everyone has a hobby, or is told they need one. But why do we fill our leisure time with the activities we do? And what do our hobbies say about our culture? Steven Gelber here traces the history and significance of hobbies from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1950s. Although hobbies are often touted as a break from work, Gelber demonstrates that they reflect and reproduce the values and activities of the workplace by bringing utilitarian rationality into the home, imitating the economic stratification of the marketplace, and reinforcing traditional gender roles. Drawing on a wide array of social and cultural theory, Hobbies fills a critical gap in American cultural history and provides a compelling new perspective on the meaning of leisure.

Eight Hours for What We Will
Eight Hours for What We Will

Author: Roy Rosenzweig

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521313971

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Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts the author takes the reader to the saloons, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where American industrial workers spent their leisure hours, to explore the nature of working-class culture and class relations during this era.

The Frontier of Leisure
The Frontier of Leisure

Author: Lawrence Culver

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-09-20

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0199779686

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Southern California has long been promoted as the playground of the world, the home of resort-style living, backyard swimming pools, and year-round suntans. Tracing the history of Southern California from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, The Frontier of Leisure reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs--it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure. Lawrence Culver shows how this "culture of leisure" gradually took hold with an increasingly broad group of Americans, and ultimately manifested itself in suburban developments throughout the Sunbelt and across the United States. He further shows that as Southern Californians promoted resort-style living, they also encouraged people to turn inward, away from public spaces and toward their private homes and communities. Impressively researched, a fascinating and lively read, this finely nuanced history connects Southern Californian recreation and leisure to larger historical themes, including regional development, architecture and urban planning, race relations, Indian policy, politics, suburbanization, and changing perceptions of nature.

Welfare Policies in the UNECE Region
Welfare Policies in the UNECE Region

Author: Alberto Alesina

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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This paper discusses why UNECE countries have chosen different social welfare policies, focusing on why the American welfare system is less generous than the typical European one, and examines the causes and implications of these differences. It also explores variations in welfare policies within western European countries by comparing their effectiveness, successes and failures.

Time for Things
Time for Things

Author: Stephen D. Rosenberg

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0674979516

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Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure. Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff? Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges his labor for an automobile, he acquires a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the advent of durable consumer goods—cars, washing machines, refrigerators—as well as warranties, brands, chain stores, and product-testing magazines, which assured workers that the goods they purchased would not be subject to rapid obsolescence. This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.

Men Without Work
Men Without Work

Author: Nicholas Eberstadt

Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1599474700

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By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession—lower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work—most especially among America’s men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while “unemployment” has gone down, America’s work rate is also lower today than a generation ago—and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-four—or “men of prime working age”—was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression. Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.” So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society? Nicholas Eberstadt lays out the issue and Jared Bernstein from the left and Henry Olsen from the right offer their responses to this national crisis. For more information, please visit http://menwithoutwork.com.

Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World
Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World

Author: Michael J. Naughton

Publisher: Emmaus Road Publishing

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 194901357X

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If we don’t get Sunday right, we won’t get Monday—or any day of the workweek—right. The divided life is a temptation so built into our society, we may not even recognize it. Yet most of us fall prey to it. We either undervalue work, resenting it as simply a job, or we overvalue it as an identity-defining career. Michael Naughton, drawing on his background in both business and theology, proposes that the key to finding balance is another important human activity: leisure. In light of leisure—not mere amusement, but time for family, silence, prayer, and above all, worship—work becomes a space where men and women can find deep fulfilment. Naughton provides real-world examples of how businesses can promote authentic human flourishment and innovation through practices and policies that support leisure. In Getting Work Right Michael Naughton will change how you work—and rest.

Shock of Gray
Shock of Gray

Author: Ted Fishman

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1416551034

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In "Shock of Gray," Ted Fishman explains the astouding economic and political changes we face as our world suddenly grows old.