Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom

Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom
ISBN-10
1139470779
ISBN-13
9781139470773
Category
Political Science
Language
English
Published
2008-02-21
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Authors
Robert E. Goodin, Lina Eriksson, James Mahmud Rice

Description

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare.

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