The road to happiness and prosperity," the philosopher Bertrand Russell declared in 1932, "lies in an organized dimunition of work." Russell made a strong case for the virtues of what he didn’t shrink from calling laziness, and his essay, "In Praise of Idleness," is often quoted today by writers who bemoan the overwork and paucity of free time endured by contemporary Americans. Seldom is much said about Russell’s particular vision of the promised land of leisure. He thought that a reduction of the workday to no more than four hours would be enough to revolutionize human existence, freeing writers, painters, amateur scientists, and the civic-minded to pursue their true interests. "Above all," Russell imagined, "there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia....Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid....Ordinary men and women ...will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion." 

Today we can see how far off the mark Russell was. While we are still some distance from his promised land of the four-hour workday, we have drastically reduced the burden of work since his essay appeared. The average workweek, 50 to 60 hours in Russell’s day, is now down to 40 or fewer. We have lopped Saturday off the workweek, cut the workday to eight hours, and created for tens of millions of people an entirely new sovereign state of extended idleness called retirement. Despite these and other vast improvements in the lot of the average person, complaints about frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia are louder than ever. An amusement more passive and vapid than anything Russell could have imagined—television—has become our national pastime. And most Americans would probably agree that we are less kindly and more inclined to view others with suspicion than we were 70 years ago.

Yet the argument that overwork and an absence of free time are the source of our discontents has recently reached a new crescendo. The focus now stays narrowly on the last 30 years or so, a period when the pace of life seemed to quicken and when the course of life itself changed for many Americans as vast numbers of women took jobs outside the home. Those who began the latest time debate, however, were less reformist advocates of "family friendly" work practices than critics of capitalism. If capitalism has not impoverished the masses, as Karl Marx predicted, then perhaps it has robbed them of time—a theme addressed years ago by the eminent Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in an essay titled, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Time is, after all, the most precious resource. An economy can be thought of as an elaborate mechanism for converting time into money, for making my 10 minutes of labor easily convertible into a gallon of gasoline or a jar of mayonnaise or some other product of somebody else’s labor. A group of progressive businesspeople in Montpelier, Vermont, made this connection explicit recently when they launched a new alternative local currency they called Green Mountain Hours.

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