Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Likewise, though many of my fellow professors end their careers carried out of their offices feet first, workers in many other jobs are happy to spend their golden years reading, taking courses, seeing the national parks in a Winnebago, or dandling Vera, Chuck, and Dave in a cottage on the Isle of Wight. This, too, is a gift of modernity. As Morgan Housel notes, “We constantly worry about the looming ‘retirement funding crisis’ in America without realizing that the entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . . . Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”⁶ Figure 17-2 shows that in 1880, almost 80 percent of American men of what we now consider retirement age were still in the workforce, and that by 1990 the proportion had fallen to less than 20 percent.

Figure 17-2: Retirement, US, 1880–2010

Source: Housel 2013, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Costa 1998.

Rather than looking forward to retirement, people used to dread the injury or frailty that would keep them from work and send them to the almshouse—the “haunting fear in the winter of life,” as it was known.⁷ Even after the Social Security Act of 1935 protected the elderly from utter destitution, poverty was a common end to a working life, and I grew up with the image (possibly an urban legend) of pensioners who subsisted on dog food. But with stronger public and private safety nets in place, senior citizens today are richer than people of working age: the poverty rate for people over 65 plunged from 35 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2011, well below the national rate of 15 percent.⁸

Thanks to the labor movement, legislation, and increased worker productivity, another once-crazy pipe dream has become a reality: paid vacations. Today an average American worker with five years on the job receives 22 days of paid time off a year (compared with 16 days in 1970), and that is miserly by the standards of Western Europe.⁹ The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.¹⁰ Trends for the developing world vary by country, but as these countries get richer they are likely to follow those of the West.¹¹

There is yet another way in which thick tranches of life have been freed up for people to pursue higher callings. In chapter 9 we saw that appliances such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwave ovens have become common or universal, even among the American poor. In 1919, an average American wage earner had to work 1,800 hours to pay for a refrigerator; in 2014, he or she had to work fewer than 24 hours (and the new fridge was frost-free and came with an icemaker).¹² Mindless consumerism? Not when you remember that food, clothing, and shelter are the three necessities of life, that entropy degrades all three, and that the time it takes to keep them usable is time that could be devoted to other pursuits. Electricity, running water, and appliances (or as they used to be called, “labor-saving devices”) give us that time back—the many hours our grandmothers spent pumping, canning, churning, pickling, curing, sweeping, waxing, scrubbing, wringing, sudsing, drying, stitching, mending, knitting, darning, and, as they used to remind us, “slaving over a hot stove, working our fingers to the bone.” Figure 17-3 shows that as utilities and appliances penetrated American households during the 20th century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.¹³ Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.¹⁴ For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.¹⁵

Figure 17-3: Utilities, appliances, and housework, US, 1900–2015

Sources: Before 2005: Greenwood, Seshadri, & Yorukoglu 2005. Appliances, 2005 and 2011: US Census Bureau, Siebens 2013. Housework, 2015: Our World in Data, Roser 2016t, based on the American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b.