What does it mean to live well? The U.S. Census Bureau informs us that an individual American with an income of less than $10,590 lives below the poverty line and is eligible for federal assistance. Add children and the number rises slowly: a father and two young children, say, is poor when their income is less than $16,689.
Certainly these numbers strike us immediately as indicative of low well being. But, as we are informed by Robert Goodin and Lina Eriksson, income figures don’t tell the whole story. Missing from this picture is the degree of control an individual has over how her time is spent.
At the federal minimum wage level of $7.25, the single individual in the first family has to work about 28 hours a week (ignoring taxes) to rise above the poverty threshold. Let’s be kind to the father of two and say he makes enough ($11.42) to work the same number of hours as the first family (of one) and still meet the second family’s higher poverty threshold.
Now the problem with using income as the sole measure of well-being is apparent: despite having equal income, the second parent still has enormous demands on his time in the form of childcare. Knowing that he has escaped monetary poverty isn’t sufficient to inform us of the full extent of his, and his children’s, well-being. For that, we need to know about the role time, and the demands on it, play in his life.
Goodin and Eriksson, along with their coauthors James Rice and Antti Parpo, explore the role of time use in well being in their new book, Discretionary Time.
Bob Goodin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Lina Eriksson is Research Associate, also at the ANU’s RSSS.
Click here to download the episode (31:38, 21.7 mb, mp3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript.
Resources
To start, we should again acknowledge the work of James Rice and Antti Parpo, the coauthors of Discretionary Time to whom we did not have the pleasure of speaking. Rice is currently completing a PhD in the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute at the ANU. Parpo is administrator of Social & Health Services in the district of Somero, Finland.
Bob refers to World Bank poverty measures. There are actually two famous World Bank poverty lines, generally referred to as the $1/day and $2/day standards, though their actual value is pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar in a certain year (2005) and then converted in purchasing power parity terms for a given country. You can find basic details on those on the World Bank’s website (see especially Chen and Ravallion’s paper on that site). But of course these have been sharply criticized, particularly by Thomas Pogge and Sanjay Reddy. For Pogge’s latest on this issue, see his brief essay, “Where the Line Is Drawn.”
Christian and Lina engage in some discussion of corporate lawyer hours and salaries. The problems of becoming a medium-income lawyer, as opposed to a high-income (but presumably long-hour) lawyer, is well illustrated by this graph.
Christian asks Bob for some details on the results of the study conducted in the course of writing the book. In that study, the authors examined time-use surveys. Some of that data is available online. See the Multinational Time Use Study and the Luxembourg Income Study.
Lina brings up the issue of redistribution, which has re-entered mainstream political discourse lately by way of Joe the Plumber. For more on what redistribution means, you can read the entry on redistribution in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Disclaimer: Christian wrote that entry!)
Bob suggests that autonomy is held to be an important value by philosophers. Here’s the SEP’s entry on autonomy. (This one not by either of us.)
