Tag Archives: life

Would you work more hours if it meant you didn’t have to do housework?

I don’t have a catchier title, but this *is* a question I’ve been pondering. When I was young I thought that having someone else do housework for you was the height of luxury, but these days it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon. I don’t know anyone who paints their own fence, mows their own yard, or cleans their own roof. These jobs used to be seen as just part of owning a house, either you did it or you forced your kid to do it as part of their chores. But it seems nowadays most people hire professionals to do it instead.

Even the most basic housework has been outsourced, with services available to clean your bathroom and kitchen twice a month, or your whole house if you like. And of course think about restaurants and fast food: eating outside your own home has almost doubled in the past 50 years. That’s a lot less meals that people have to cook, a lot less dishes they have to clean, and even less groceries that they have to buy.

So housework is being outsourced, and is it related to how Americans seem to work many more hours than the rest of the developed world?

Shifting gears now, I’ve written before about the Europe vs America economic debates. Inevitably in such debates, the conversation shifts to working hours, workers in Europe work less hours than workers in America.

But Josh Barro on twitter has pushed back against claims about European quality-of-life: they don’t have dryers. Reddit too has a huge thread about the lack of dryers and high-energy appliances in Europe. Can a place without such creature comforts really be comfortable?

I don’t want to dwell on the dryer debate. Yes Europeans can dry their clothes in the sun. Yes, it may be cheaper. But does it require more work? Is an electric dryer not a labor-saving device that lets you cut out the work of hanging up your clothes and taking them down?

And coming back to housework, doesn’t paying someone to do your housework also save you from doing that labor? And if so, how much is your time worth it to you? To restate the question from the title of this post: if working 45 hours a week instead of 40 meant you never had to do housework, would you take it?

Some people like doing housework, I get that. But for most people, it’s a chore. And so I wonder if Americans on the whole have made a choice: they work more at work so they can work less at home, and I wonder if anyone has quantified this. European’s extra housework may not show up in the metrics, but it should still be quantified to know if Americans really do “work more hours.”

Working at work vs working at home is a dichotomy any student of economic history understands. When women first entered the private sector workforce, it didn’t mean that women *started working*, and that they weren’t working before that. Women had been doing work at home without pay since the dawn of time. If you calculate the labor done by homebound women and compare it to the paid labor plus housework done by working women, women’s’ overall working hours went down when they entered the workforce. They could use the money they made at work to pay for other people’s labor or labor-saving devices at home.

Men had also taken this leap from housework to paid work centuries before. During the days of subsistance farming, men, women, everyone had to do a hell of a lot of odd jobs to keep themselves housed, clothed, and fed, even when they weren’t actively “working” on their farm. This is why claims of how few hours medieval farmers worked are so misleading: they had many “holidays,” sure, but besides attending church those days would still be spent doing work around the house even if they wouldn’t be spent in the field.

If you were a medieval peasant, you might have a roof that needs mending, food that needs preserving, you need a new chair to fix the old one, a new patch to cover the hole in your cloak, and you had to do all this yourself or it wouldn’t get done. It didn’t show up in “hours worked” because it’s housework in the home. But it still needed to be done to maintain quality of life.

When men started moving from farms to factories, they traded their labor in for money, and could then use that money to *have their roof fixed, buy their own food, buy a new chair, or have their cloak patched*. They could use money to get someone else to do labor for them. They started working *less hours* when you account for both house work and factory work.

Factories workers worked a *lot*. But subsistence farmers worked far more for far less. But if you only calculate “hours worked” using work *outside* the house, then you’d wrongly conclude that subsistence farmers lived cushy lives and that women’s liberation destroyed women’s free time. Nothing could be further from the truth, instead, people these days work much more outside the house in exchange for working much less in it.

And I wonder how much that feeds in to the America vs Europe debate on working hours. How much labor do Europeans do around their homes that Americans *don’t* do. How much labor do Americans save by using dryers, by hiring landscapers, by hiring homecleaners, and are they happy with the extra hours they work to afford that? Do Americans work more hours to save themselves from housework?

Cheating cheaters

I haven’t written in far too long, so here’s the streams of my consciousness.

I recently learned an acquaintance of mine cheated a fair bit in college. They took classes during COVID, and have confessed to cheating on the at-home exams for difficult classes during the time when distance learning was new and Universities were lax.

I wish I could say otherwise, but it does lower my opinion of this person.

I don’t like cheating at all. A recent bugbear of mine has been the increase in “cheating” I’m seeing on the roads. This may sound like a topic change, but hear me out:

We all have a duty to drive safely. That means obeying posted speed limits, obeying lights, no unsafe behavior. Any car breaking this duty makes the roads less safe for all of us. But we all know why so many cars speed, run red lights, or make right turns from the far left lane: it gets them home faster.

They want to get to where they’re going ASAP and they don’t care how unsafe they make the road. Not just for themselves, but for all the cars around them who now have to swerve out of the way of their dangerous driving and maybe cause secondary wrecks in the process.

Dangerous drivers cheat the system that keeps us safe for very minor gains. And I really despise it. Deaths on the roads have continued to increase year after year since the pandemic, and it seems no city or police force is willing to tackle this. An increase in death is just what the city government wants I guess, revealed preference and all that.

They could halt the dangerous drivers by enforcing traffic laws. Have cops patrol the street, give tickets to any speeder, anyone running a red. Automate the ticketing process if need be, revoke people’s license for dangerous driving, and jail them for years if they drive without a license. Time and time again, research has shown that vigilant enforcement is the only mechanism to reduce lawlessness. If less than 1% of the lawbreakers are ever punished, why wouldn’t everyone break the law?

In times like this you can only fall back on your own morality. Your own willingness to obey the social contract and not endanger your neighbors, even if it would benefit you to get home a few minutes earlier. But many people can’t do that, and so they drive like maniacs.

Going back to my acquaintance, they told their cheating story to me in a moment of weakness. They are struggling a lot with their current work, and I wonder if they revealed this in part as a way to say-without-saying “I’m so stupid, I only succeeded by cheating.” I think this person is smart, but doesn’t know how to apply their effort properly. They feel like they’re grinding themselves into dust to succeed yet still failing. I feel like they’ve completely misplaced their efforts, and they need to step back and analyze the situation instead of just grinding harder and harder for no gain.

But while I hate to admit it, this revelation does color my opinion of them just a bit. I can’t say I’ve been unmoved by the desire to cheat. I can’t say there weren’t times when I wished I could just crack open a book during the test, or ask someone to write a paper for me.

I tell a story that maybe the real reason I never cheated was I was too unimaginative or even lazy to do so. I resisted getting a smart phone until almost the end of college. I never wanted to write notes in tiny writing that I could look at during the test.

Once, in high school, I remember having to write a paper and wishing someone else could do it for me. I did a bit of googling and sure enough there was a website I could find that seemed to have a pre-written paper on exactly my topic. But clicking the link, I could only read the first 2 sentences before a pop-up demanded payment. And as a high schooler without a credit card to my name, I closed the link and went back to procrastinating until I FINALLY wrote the paper myself.

But while I’ve toyed with the idea of cheating, I never fell into it. My acquaintance clearly did.

Everyone justifies their actions of course. “It wasn’t even in my major, so I would never have to know this stuff again, why not cheat” (blatant lie, it was a pre-req for further classes, and I don’t know why they’d even lie about it this).

“I liked the first half of the course, but the second half was just all memorization and it was so boring” (I know the course myself, you shouldn’t be memorizing, you should be studying patterns. You should have studied smarter instead of studied harder, learn the patterns and you don’t need to memorize).

But while it reduces my opinion of them a little, I still think (know?) this person is bright and CAN succeed if they just learn how to properly place their effort. Then again, maybe this cheating story shows a pattern. They didn’t know how to spend their effort to find patterns instead of memorizing, so in the end their only recourse was cheating. They don’t know how to spend their effort now… there won’t be any recourse if they can’t figure it out.

New job, new regrets

I’m starting a new job soon. As a scientist, I feel like you go into every job hoping you’ll accomplish something. Not just keep the lights on or stay out of trouble, but to actually create or discover something that’s never been seen before.

I had a lot of hopes when I joined my current job, and few to any of them have panned out. Maybe I was unrealistic or overoptimistic, or just plain unlucky and I shouldn’t feel bad, but I do feel bad and wish I could have done more.

As I go into my final days in this office, at this job, I look at all the data I have and the people I’m training to replace me, and I feel like maybe with a little bit more time, I could accomplish what I’d planned. I could create something publishable and really add to the field. But then after a few days of that feeling, I’ll run into a new unsolvable problem and be right back where I started, feeling certain that I’ll never accomplish what I wanted at this job.

I don’t know, I don’t want to get into too many specifics because the technical details would bore my readers, but the hopes I had when entering this job didn’t match the regrets I have leaving it. I wish I could have done more, but I don’t know how. And I’m worried that the work I *did* do will be forgotten and ignored by my coworkers who are still there, since I never got my work into a publishable state.

If I were in it for the money, I wouldn’t be in science. I just wish I could get the discoveries that I *am* in it for.