Land of the Free? 88% of Americans Are Less Free Than They Could Be
Americans aren’t free.
Or, at least, not as free as they could be. Real freedom requires the time to do what we want, but 88% of Americans must work more than necessary. Technologically, we have freed ourselves — but our economic system takes most of that freedom away.
Given this situation — USA is not the land of the free.
Americans don’t have time: 88% must work more than necessary to acquire what they need.
To be free, we must be able to work as little as possible.¹
A free American could work as little as 10 hours per week.² If every working-age person pitched in, then this is the time we’d have to work to provide the entire population with what they need.
This means we could wake up on Monday, do our share of the necessary work, and then enjoy a six-day weekend. It wouldn’t bring us a life of luxury — but enough to cover our needs. And if we want more, we could get more by working extra — say a couple of months for a trip abroad, a car or a computer, or whatever else we desire. Whatever we do in our six-day weekend, the choice would be ours — whether we lie on the couch, work on projects, or spend time with family and friends.
This — is what freedom looks like.
By contrast, here’s what slavery looks like.
The following graph shows how much Americans must work to acquire what they need.
To earn a living income in 2019, 23% of US workers had to work more than 40 hours per week, 60% more than 20 hours, and 88% more than 10 hours per week. Only a small portion of 12% could afford to work less than 10 hours.³ But, in reality, even these high-income earners had to work a lot more — because even if they can afford to work less, they are often not permitted by their employers.⁴
To be as free as possible, we need to be able to work as little as possible, and the physical minimum is 10 hours per week. Despite this, Americans and people in most countries must work upwards of 40 hours per week to acquire what they need.
This is the polar opposite of freedom: a five-day work week instead of a six-day weekend.
Whatever America is — it is not the land of the free.
Footnotes
¹For the connection between freedom and how we work for our needs, see Why you are less free if you have to work more than necessary to care for your needs.
²For the 10 hours we need to work per week, see A 10-hour Workweek is Enough (To Satisfy Everyone’s Needs).
³For the graph and the time Americans must work to acquire what they need, see 88% of Americans Must Work More Than Necessary to Acquire What They Need (and the Unequal Distribution of Leisure).
⁴Kuroda and Yamamoto find empirical evidence that employers determine working hours. Specifically, that Japanese firms set minimum work hours which their employees are not allowed to work less than (p.71, Kuroda and Yamamoto, 2013). The reason, studied further by Delmez and Vandenberghe, appears to be that employers have incentives for long working hours (i.e. few workers and long hours per employee) in the presence of significant quasi-fixed labor costs. (p.2, Delmez and Vandenberghe, 2018) Quasi-fixed labor costs are labor costs that don’t change with hours worked but do change with employment, such as the costs of hiring new workers, training new employees, social insurance (e.g., social security, worker’s compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.), and private benefits (e.g., health and life insurance, vacation, retirement pensions, etc.).
References
Delmez, Francoise, and Vincent Vandenberghe. “Long Working Hours Make Us Less Productive but Also Less Costly.” LABOUR 32, no. 4 (December 2018): 259–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/labr.12128.
Kuroda, Sachiko, and Isamu Yamamoto. “Firms’ Demand for Work Hours: Evidence from Matched Firm-Worker Data in Japan.” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 29 (September 2013): 57–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjie.2013.06.005.
