Alan Jacobs


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In fact, one of the peculiar ironies of modern life is that the more successful we are, the more time stress we experience. An extensive survey of households in Australia, Germany, the U.S., and Korea by economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee found, “Complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from higher full-income families.” As well, they noted, “Time stress is a problem analogous to poverty: Both reflect scarcity of resources, time in the former, goods in the latter. The only difference is that in a growing economy the goods constraint will relax over time, while the time constraint cannot.” How did we get here?