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?