2025 Morley Gunderson Lecture: Time — At Work and Not at Work

Time is our scarcest resource. Compared to income, the amount of time at our disposal has grown much less rapidly over the last century. That’s true in rich countries, like Canada and the U.S., but is increasingly also true in less developed countries. For the average working adult, work time constitutes barely 20 percent of the typical week. It is only the second most common activity, being far behind sleep time, but slightly ahead of TV-watching; and yet, economists and others analyze work time much more thoroughly than the more important non-work time. This lecture discusses both work and non-work, concentrating particularly on differences in how time is spent across such characteristics as gender, age, immigrant status, and income, and on how it is used differently across counties. Dr. Daniel Hamermesh focuses on how the shortage of time affects behavior, and how these effects differ across these same demographic and economic characteristics. He asks the question: What would we do with the extra time if we suddenly got more time each day, week, or year? The answer is surprising and fairly distressing, but his talk culminates with a discussion of policies that might make the increasing scarcity of time less burdensome.