“Work Time and Market Integration in the Original Affluent Society”, 2019-10-14 (; similar):
[data; people spending an incredible amount of time doing nothing—easily a third! cf. Shadow of the Sun, The Discovery of France; & Traditions of Conflict, fear of witchcraft, The Gossip Trap, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology] Social scientists have long debated whether commercial markets lead people to spend more time working. However, this issue has remained contentious due to the difficulty of measuring time allocation in less commercial, more subsistence-oriented societies.
Here we use a high-quality dataset on time expenditure from 8 small-scale populations around the world to assess the relationship between work hours and market integration.
Consistent with influential theories from anthropology and economic history, the evidence suggests that greater market integration is associated with more total time spent working by men.
This increase in men’s work time closes the gender gap with women, whose work is not linked to market integration. Incorporating data from industrialized countries reveals these patterns across societies as well.
Does integration into commercial markets lead people to work longer hours? Does this mean that people in more subsistence-oriented societies work less compared to those in more market-integrated societies? Despite their venerable status in both anthropology and economic history, these questions have been difficult to address due to a dearth of appropriate data.
Here, we tackle the issue by combining high-quality time allocation datasets from 8 small-scale populations around the world (45,019 observations of 863 adults) with similar aggregate data from 14 industrialized (OECD) countries. Both within and across societies, we find:
evidence of a positive correlation between work time and market engagement for men, although not for women. Shifting to fully commercial labor is associated with an increase in men’s work from around 45 hours per week to 55 hours, on average; women’s work remains at nearly 55 hours per week across the spectrum.
These results inform us about the socioeconomic determinants of time allocation across a wider range of human societies.