1972
Australian Economic History Review 1972, 12 (2), 161-171. Link
The unquestioned pursuit of economic growth , defined in terms of goods and services produced, is rational only if we can make two assumptions, says Linder: first, that time is not an essential input into the consumption of those goods and services which have been produced and, second, that the amount of tirne available to any individual consumer is unlimited. Simply to state the assumptions is to refute them… No activity (even wearing clothes) can be carried on without time being used; indeed time is an even more essential input into non-work activities than goods in that it is easier to use up time without employing any goods than vice versa. Moreover it is clear that the amount of time available to any individual consumer per period (e.g. per annum ) is in completely fixed supply. Unlike other resources like land and capital, time cannot be saved or stored; neither can it be redistributed between persons either voluntarily or compulsorily.
Efforts will be made to fight off the need to accept that the only realistic definition of affluence is one which matches some limited amount of goods and services with the given amount of time. There will be a growing amount of simultaneous consumption, that is more and more activities crammed into the same unit of time… Just as one raises the yield of the worker in production by giving him more capital, one raises the yield of the consumer in consumption by applying more and goods per unit of time, or higher quality ones… raising the ‘goods-intensity of consumption’.
The crucial ingredients of culture, whether viewed as aesthetic creation or as aesthetic appreciation, are patience and discipline. These are precisely the qualities that suffer first and fastest as the scarcity of time increases. Of course there will be outward signs of a veritable cultural explosion—numbers of books published andsold rising rapidly, works of art fetching astronomical prices and so on. But inwardly the situation is very different. More and more books are being produced because people try to keep raising the goods-intensity of the activity ‘reading’; but of course they can only achieve this object if they actually read only a declining proportion of them. (This is true of academic work, too, as we all know. More and more books are produced and sold and entered on ever-expanding reading lists—to protect the reputation of the teacher—with no recognition of the fact that the amount of time available to read them has not changed and indeed no recognition of the fact that student’s time has become much more scarce relative to his income than it was in previous generations.