As countries develop, they face a choice: cash in on productivity gains as increased income or to enjoy increased leisure. That leisure means not only shorter workdays or a shorter workweek, but also longer vacations, more paid holidays, paid family and m

This post originally appeared on University of Massachusetts Amherst's Care Talk blog.

The lazy father is enshrined in popular culture. Google up the term and there he is: Homer Simpson snoring on the couch. Unfair caricature, especially on Fathers’ Day!

So, it’s easy to see why a short essay by Robert VerBruggen in defense of fathers caroomed through social media this week, boosted by a link from Ross Douthat’s regular New York Times opinion column.

But is laziness really the issue? Serious complaints about the gender division of labor seldom boil down to finger-wagging accusations of moral turpitude. They point instead to economic inequalities between moms and dads that result from social institutions — public policies, employer practices, and cultural norms.

Mr. VerBruggen is skeptical of such inequalities, suggesting that those who emphasize them are…well, lazy. They have ignored the facts revealed by the American Time Use Survey.

June 2019, Aaron Medlin and Hye Jin Rho

Dean Baker
Truthout, June 24, 2019

The Trump administration is considering a unilateral change to how the government measures poverty. If adopted, the change would reduce by millions the number of people eligible for Medicaid, parts of Medicare, SNAP, and other benefits over the next 10 ye

(This post first appeared on my Patreon site.)

A theme often repeated in the media is that Japan is suffering terribly because of its low birth rates and shrinking population. This has meant slow growth, labor shortages, and an enormous government debt.

Like many items that are now popular wisdom, the story is pretty much nonsense. Let’s start at the most basic measure, per capita GDP growth. Yeah, I said per capita GDP growth because insofar as we care about growth it is on a per person basis, not total growth. After all, Bangladesh has a GDP that is more than twice as large as Denmark’s, but would anyone in their right mind say that the people of Bangladesh enjoy a higher standard of living? (Denmark’s GDP is more than twelve times as high on a per capita basis.)

On a per capita basis, Japan’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of 1.4 percent since the collapse of its stock and real estate in 1990. That’s somewhat less than the 2.3 percent rate of the U.S. economy, but hardly seems like a disaster. By comparison, per capita growth has averaged just 0.8 percent annually since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 in the United States.

But per capita income is just the beginning of any story of comparative well-being. There are many other factors that are as important in determining people’s living standards. To take an obvious one that gets far too little attention, the length of the average work year has declined far more over this period in Japan than in the United States.

According to the OECD, the length of the average work year has declined by almost 16 percent between 1990 and 2017 (the last year for which data are available). By comparison, the length of the average work year in the United States has declined by less than 3 percent over this period. This is a really big deal in terms of peoples’ lives.

If we use a start point of a 40-hour workweek, for 50 weeks a year, a 16 percent reduction in hours would be equivalent to 8 weeks a year of additional vacation. Alternatively, it would mean a 6.4 hour reduction in the length of the average workweek, meaning that people would be working 33.6 hours a week rather than 40 hours. My guess is that most people in the United States would be very happy to see the same sort of reduction in work hours as in disaster Japan.

June 17, 2019, Eileen Appelbaum

Dean Baker
Truthout, June 17, 2019

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) led to increases in health insurance coverage and reductions in racial and ethnic disparities in coverage. With Fathers’ Day this weekend, it’s a good time to take a closer look at trends in coverage for fathers. In this post

June 12, 2019

June 12, 2019 (Prices Byte)