In this paper from some researchers at the University of New South Wales, the authors use the 1997 Australian Time Use Survey to study how much time people spend doing housework and what household appliances said people have. According to the authors, this is the first such paper that uses actual data instead of various proxies. They find that so-called “labor-saving” devices don’t reduce the amount of time (usually) women spend working in the home, and sometimes cause them to do more housework.
Why?
Let’s leave aside the issue of distribution of labor between men & women and stick with the issue of labor-saving devices prompting greater work.
Economically, it is clear that clean dishes and clean clothes, etc., are goods. It is also obvious that if technology increases the marginal productivity of home labor, then, all else equal, a person would spend more time doing housework. Of course, our homes are of finite size and more productive labor should finish the job sooner. This leads me to wonder if we’re responding to a loosening constraint by acquiring more stuff. Do we have more dishes, clothes, landscaping, floor space, etc., than we have in the past? If we had no dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, self-propelled lawn mowers, and so on, would we have smaller homes, smaller wardrobes, and a lot less stuff? Will the invention of the Swiffer feather-duster cause an explosion of nick-nacks?
In a sense, is consumerism, to some extend, caused by the availability of home-production technology?
Er…google for this:
"The Australian 1997 Time Use Survey is unique among
official surveys, as it simultaneously provides detailed information
on time spent in housework and an inventory of household
appliances. The analysis of this data shows that domestic
technology rarely reduces womens unpaid working time and even,
paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour. The
domestic division of labour by gender remains remarkably resistant
to technological innovation. "
The study evaluated the impact of a clothes dryer on time spent. I’d be more interested in that of a washing machine. One thing missing from the discussion is what the alternative is. The alternative to a dryer is hanging clothes out. (Only 50% of Australian families had driers in 1997? ) In either case, the clothes need to get hung, and the drying is done without intervention. The alternative to a washing machine is hand washing, I suppose, very time consuming.
Same thing with lawn mowers. This supposedly added to grounds maintenance time. But what do people without lawn mowers do? Rock gardens, I suppose, or they live in a place where they do not have to mow the lawn, like in an apartment. This makes no sense to me.
I’m also interested in how they counted time required for a task. If laundry extends over a period of three hours, do they count three hours or just the time someone is actively involved?
Anybody who watched the 1900 House has got to be skeptical of this conclusion.
Shopping, btw, does not appear to be well defined. Do they mean food shopping, or all shopping?
First of all this is BS. Compare the time it takes to wash two same size loads of clothes - one with the washer/dryer the other with a bucket and a brush. Probably takes about 2 hours for both. The difference is that I can do something else while the machine is working.
The reason that we aren’t all working a 4 hour week is that work fills the volume of the container you provide for it.
We definitely now have more “stuff” to clean, as well as higher standards of cleanliness. At one time, for example, unless you were really upper class with a housefull of servants, you wore the same clothes for several days. And it was a full day’s work to wash and dry a family’s clothes. Another day for ironing. You might have had 2 basic outfits (so you’d have something to wear while one set was being washed) and a “good” outfit for things like religious services. We have LOTS more laundry now than we used to.
At one time, rugs got cleaned once in a while, maybe once or twice a year, but picking them up and beating them out of doors. It is not uncommon today for meticulous homemakers to vacuum all the rugs every day.
If we didn’t have these various devices you can bet most of us would have simpler lives. And we wouldn’t have an hour a day to spend on non-productive things like websurfing and playing games and watching sporting events.
My ex mother-in-law purchased ton’s of gadgets used for very specific situations. Each required it’s own batteries, cleaning, storage, etc. Any time saved was surely lost on the maintenance overhead of these items.
Cite? Did you verify this methodological error? Where is it spelled out? Because the only reference I can find in the paper specific to this has loading & unloading the machine as distinct from washing if one did not have a machine.
Right. I think that both the paper & I were clear that labor-saving devices are used to increase household production rather than decrease total workload. My question is Why?
[nitpick]
Based on what? Your personal experience? Respectfully, if that sort of data were useful, we wouldn’t have to resort to rigorous sampling methods and statistics.
[/nitpick]
The question is Why don’t we use labor-saving devices to increase our leisure time instead of increasing household production? Why are our preferences that way?
We use the extra time to have more of things we like and want. More variety of clothes, for example. Many of us apparently like cleaner clothes and carpets, and we’d rather spend time dealing with frequent washing and vacuuming in return for having same. Also it’s less tiring to push a machine across the carpet, or to dump some clothing into a machine than to scrub and beat the dirt out by hand.
And we do, partly, use machines to give us more leisure time. Certainly I can spend this time right now writing here instead of standing over the sink washing dishes. A machine is doing that for me.
I estimate I spend a few hours weekly doing laundry, not counting the time that I’d spend anyway in sorting, folding and putting away, which would be the same regardless of method. A few generations ago cleaning far fewer clothes would have taken the better part of two days.
Sometimes we believe, rightly or not, that a particular gadget produces better results. Or else it’s just fun to use.
The definition of workload has changed over the years.
In the 1950s our house had a refrigerator, washer, dryer and stove. By the end of the decade we also had a dishwasher.
My mother used those appliances to take care of a husband and three children. She also spent a lot of time canning fruits, because in those days, you couldn’t necessarily find fresh fruit year-round.
And to do all this, she also had a cleaning woman come in twice a week to help with the ironing (everything had to be ironed). The house wasn’t air conditioned, so things had to be dusted.
By the 1970s she had a bigger washer and dryer, so she could do more clothes per wash. The house was air conditioned, so there was less dusting, and she had quit canning fruit.
One big difference. My mother, although 20 years older, was now keeping up a larger house by herself, without a cleaning woman.
A couple of points (likely covered by posts subsequent to the OP):
These are labor saving devices, not time saving devices. There is a difference.
On average, our cleanliness standards are much higher.
I would argue that there is an inverse correlation between the amount of “stuff” one owns and a persons level of cleanliness: the more stuff you own, the less likely your home will be neat and tidy. I have no idea if this ties in with the larger debate, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
I don’t know about you, but my wife can’t relax unless she’s working on one project or another - she has a prodigious amount of energy. So I’m gonna guess that it’s the nature of the beast, that people don’t like being bored and while they are waiting on something to get done, they’ll do something else.
… sorta like me, sitting here talking to you while waiting for the dryer to finish its cycle.
For instance, we use way too much energy (electricity, etc., that is). Our solution? Find more energy sources, even though we’ll soon exhaust those. But a real solution that’s pretty much achievable right now: use less energy.
Likewise with expenses–rather than reduce our expenses and live a simpler life, most people instead choose to work much longer and harder to afford more expensive stuff.
The discussion in the paper is a bit thin, but it’s an interesting question.
I like JohnT’s labour saving/ time saving distinction. I remember my grandmother doing the washing and I’ve see genuine handwashing in India: time spent is not the only issue. Putting the washing on is a much less unpleasant task than beating the dirt out of clothes by the sweat of your brow.
Plus washing doesn’t wear out clothes so much these days, so maybe laundry is more about maintaining one’s wardrobe than it used to be and less about keeping the stench an contagion down.
So yeah, a combination of reduced disutility of work and increased payoff might explain this story to some extent. The local environment being a strongly income elastic might have something to do with it too.
I wouldn’t dismiss sociological explanations, but I’d want to explore prices and income first.
That is a good point. Vacuuming is probably much easier than cleaning carpets the old way, by dragging them outside, hanging them over a line, and beating the dust out of them.
Maybe our standards of cleanliness have risen because the cost of cleanliness has dropped. Or more generally, maybe our standards of home production have risen because the costs have dropped. I’m picturing most dads wanting the lawn to look like the lawn of the Taj Mahal, but only being able to give so much effort to the cause. With self-propelled lawn mowers and weed wackers, that gives them more time and energy for other lawn-related activities. In the home, we’d generally like to have more choice of clothes and to see our favorite pieces last longer. Now that we have washing machines and dryers, the cost of larger wardrobes (and less stink) may have gone down and we expand our wardrobes until the cost is about the same.
With that line of thinking, we might expect the amount of time households put into home production to stay constant, and labor-saving devices paradoxically affect the level of home production because our labor-leisure trade-off isn’t changed as a result of these devices.
I am so going to buy stock in nick-nack companies.
) find new and exciting ways to fill that time with more stuff to do.