The point of the 30 hour work week, by the by, was to reduce the unemployment rate during the Great Depression, and had very little to do with any sense that people were spending too much time at work.

From a truly global and historical perspective, actually, time poverty was (and is) far, far more common than in 21st century America. You’re focusing almost exclusively on 20th and 21st century industrialized countries, rather than the actual bulk of people in the world or in history: subsistence farmers, housewives with enormous domestic responsibilities (and no labor-saving devices), etc. (See the PBS special The 1900 House, for example, in which the modern family who had to live like a 1900 family was reduced to tears by the amount of work it required.) In the 1800s, the average work week in America was between sixty and seventy hours a week. There were certain occupations which worked less than this (e.g. coal miners), but only because you couldn’t physically push a man to work more hours doing such an arduous job. The average hours slowly declined until the 1930s and has not changed substantially since then, regardless of whether you agree with the surveys or the time diary studies. Each one is only showing a difference of a few hours per week, maximum.

There never was a Golden Age; it’s just an illusion.

Why did getting out of debt mean you had to give your dog away?

How much does it cost to feed and otherwise care for a dog?

I just finished reading the excellent “Downshifting” per Trent’s recommendation and found some of the low-risk downshifting ideas in that book really good (taking all lunches outside the office/not eating at your desk, scheduling personal activities on outlook calendars and with admin staff, making it known you won’t be working weekends, etc). I will be implementing all of them in 2008 and think everyone else should too!

I find that the larger, societal issues that affect our individual personal finance experiences are often as equally important as, sometimes even more important than, the personal factors that affect our financial lives.

Often, there is only so much any of person can do to bring about needed change in their own lives, and working on personal as well as socio-political aspects of an issue simultaneously can help bring about so much more effective change than working on just personal issues alone (or just societal issues alone, though I think societal change can have much larger impact than just personal change).

One problem, however, is that with time poverty (great term) being such a prevalent problem for so many–as well as other problems that keep us all busy and often stressed or overwhelmed–a lot of us don’t pursue social change as much as we ought or could because of the effects of those very issues we’d benefit from changing. A catch 22, but one that I think is important to address and try to change.

I definitely hope to address both personal and societal factors in my blog and though many personal finance blogs already do that as well, I wish even more personal finance discussions included the societal aspect of personal finance and focused on both personal and social change as a means of addressing personal finance issues.

Just because we are talking about *personal* finance in no way means that our financial lives aren’t heavily affected by much larger *societal* issues as well, ones that we may benefit from changing along with our own personal issues. Anyhow, loved this post as it was not only well organized and thorough but the topic is one that is so important in American society these days, and one that so many are not happy with and are eager to change.

This same organization expects all my time to be productive in patient care. I am expected to do patient education…..in the middle of the night. So I have a catch 22. Either I am harassing patients with unreasonable demands that they participate in the hospital’s agenda of items that must be done prior to discharge or I am remiss in my duties.

So much for the healing effects of time.

Anyway, I might be the only one who was truly disturbed by the author lumping children and pets together but I just thought I’d express my feelings nonetheless.