Silly Little Country

Another NGO gone Wild

I wonder who funds these clowns.
In any case they claim to have published wisdon and Tim Worstall does a fine job of confirming my initial skepticism.

As an example, instead of measuring actual leisure time they decide to measure subjective “time pressure”. If people feel pressed for time then this must mean that they have less time.
Err, no. In an ever richer world we all have many more options (for example, women are not now limited to pumping out entire hockey squads and caring for them, they can become leader of the Conservative Party). Many more options brings us to what economists call opportunity costs. Precisely because we have many more options, even precisely because we have many more leisure options (do I listen to my iPad? Read Wired on my iPod? Turn on my Rampant Rabbit? Have a kaffeeklatsch?) even though we have more leisure time we feel, subjectively, more pressure on that greater leisure time.
This is, sadly, simply entirely and totally bollocks this report and shouldn’t be given credence or houseroom.
Anyone who wants to measure whether Canadians are working more or less should look up (and they’ll have to be in Canada to do this) the equivalent of this table from the last however many General Social Surveys it has been calculated for and come back to us with the all important answer: have leisure hours risen or fallen over the decades?
All else is bollocks.

Bollocks indeed!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:22 PM