The best example of this is household income. If you look at the data, it looks like household income has been flat since the 1980s. However, during that time, there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents worked) to single-parent households. In fact, if you look at the individual incomes, they have grown substantially over the same time period. It's only when you obscure the data by talking about "households" do you see the lack of income growth.

Do you have any data to support this? My understanding is that it has been the exact opposite, with women entering the work-force in large numbers in the past two-three decades. And as far as I know, men have not been leaving the workforce, except in relatively rare situations where they become stay-at-home dads.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

Of course, that probably isn't a popular way to look at it, because the immediate inference is that we could realize significant improvements by shifting society back towards two-parent households, and that grates against current social trends.

You say household income is stagnant and people think "wages haven't increased", when in fact wages have increased, it's just that there are fewer wage earners per household.

That's an important distinction that points to very different solutions.

I think a good set of metrics to measure what household income is trying to measure would be income-per-employee, incomes-per-household, and household size.

I wouldn't categorize this shift[1] as "large" and given the relative sizes of the groups of households I don't believe it can be having the affect you suggest.

[1]http://i.imgur.com/j3CF9lk.png (from http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-14.pdf)

I agree there wasn't much of a shift from 1990s onward, but there was from the late 1970s.

You also have to remember that household income doesn't take much of a shift in household structure in order to flatten out income.

If you had 10% of households go from two income earners (say $80K) to single income earners ($40K) each, that would pull down the average substantially.

Your point about households vs individuals is clever, because it ignores how the distribution of individual income growth across any other demographic factors.

My point is just that you need to be care drawing conclusions from the data presented. Unless you control for other variables, you may draw erroneous conclusions.

One big demographic shift to keep an eye on is the retirement of the baby boomers. Right now, they are in the highest income earning period of their lives. As soon as they retire, their income drops substantially and they are replaced by fewer and fewer individuals from lower age brackets.

I would imagine that overall per capita income will continue on a downward trend until after all the baby boomers retire, even though on an individual level, people are seeing increases in income level.

I think dvanduzer's point is that this may not necessarily be so when looking at low-wage earners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_warren#Books_and_othe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A#t=8m25s

I'm not nearly 50% as smart as the HN demi-gods around here, but I've learned to tame my desires.

I live in a humble house and have shitty possessions - but I only have to work 20 hours a week to keep the lights on.

In my opinion, you have to learn to make hard choices with an eye for the long term. Here's an example: For us, we decided that sending our three children to a good Lutheran school was important Our observation was that it was wiser to educate our children in knowledge, but also values and heart. We anticipate that at 18 years of age, they'll be functioning adults and we won't have to prop them up into their 20's.

If you have to wake up every morning at 5:15 am to catch a 1.5 hr bus ride, arrive at work at 8 am, work for 9 hrs until 6 pm (1 hr lunch in between). Then catch another 1.5 hr ride back home. Arrive after 8pm, eat something, go sleep.

Now rinse and repeat, every week day for 9 years.

Does this even qualify as a balanced work-life?

Compare that to wake up at 8 am, have coffee, read hackernews, shower, arrive at work at 9 am, work through 5 pm, arrive back home at 5:30, 5 hrs for dinner, leisure, sports, go gym, play with kids, etc, go sleep.

Edit: the top example is my brother's typical workday in Chile, bottom one is mine here in the US.

To give another analogy, if there are various achievements and rewards for getting good times and scores on super meat boy, it'd be quite hard to stop trying to beat your friends and the top scores list to ask yourself why you're playing SMB in the first place when instead you could just sit down and relax without the worries and tension of the game.

Look: I can understand working 80 hour work weeks for art, for something you really care about. I also might work like that if I thought I could really get rich-- if I owned the business or owned a big stake in it (and trusted my partners not to screw me out of it). But the tech scene is increasingly neither of these things-- it's making mediocre crap for hustlers. It's making junk that does nothing to advance the human condition.

I've also found that beyond a certain level possessions do not affect happiness much.

Then "The Growth of Leisure Time for Men" chart is silent on whether the men with fewer than 12 years of education would prefer to swap this extra "leisure" time for paid work. In the last paragraph he refers to this as "downtime" instead.

Very little source data cited. Clever unit shifting on most of the graphs. Generally strange mixed messaging.

Naturally, such a distinction is difficult to do accurately.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%...

Take a look at the one group that has lost leisure time.

Also, this chart is from 1965 to 2005, so more recent trends will only be in a tiny corner of this graph.

Juliet Schor has an excellent book on this subject The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Unexpected-Decline...

There is no way a country such as Chile, where the legal work-week is 45 hrs and the average commute takes at least 1hr can be ranked so high.

The article mostly looks at gender and class, I wonder how immigration has affected the shifts.

Micro is a lot easier to work with because you can study it empirically, since experiments and data can be assumed to scale up; it's subject to the "rigorous analysis" you talk about.

It's fair to judge a reduction in work hours as a good thing when most work is hard manual labor. I doubt that's true for the majority of jobs any more. I think everyone should have enough leisure time to be healthy and spend time with their family or friends. However, I don't think we should be comparing ourselves to Europe where decades of structural unemployment have led to low-quality leisure time for large swaths of the population?