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The Harried Leisure Class. Staffan Linder. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.
Leisure Studies
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Staffan Linder was perhaps the first economist to understand and predict the frantic pace of modern life and leisure. A Swede, who taught at both Yale and Columbia, his modest little book-The Harried Leisure Class-challenged the thinking of economists by pointing out that consumption had to be measured in temporal as well as economic terms. Consumption takes time. As specialized work led to higher rates of productivity, the increased level of products and services had to be consumed. Hence the process of consuming must be sped up-by consuming more rapidly, by consuming higher quality versions of a product or service or by simultaneous consumption in which one consumed more than one thing at a time. Such an acceleration of consumption led to an acceleration of the pace of life and a harried leisure class.
Much of what Linder discussed in regard to time scarcity was perceived scarcity. Work time and leisure existed in a theoretical equilibrium, he argued, in terms of outputs. Increases in the productivity of work destroyed this equilibrium. The outputs from leisure then had to be increased to restore the balance. This was done by combining leisure activity with a higher volume of goods in the ways mentioned above-thus commodifiying leisure and bringing its outputs into parity with the increased outputs of work. This new situation led to a general perceived scarcity of time in modern life. We must be careful, Linder argued, not to image a mythical society in which citizens have both lots of material goods and lots of unused time. In...