From time to time, PBC posters like to poke fun at college courses that seem to be Seinfeldian — that is, about nothing. Among those are “leisure studies” courses, which you’d think were content-free credits. Earlier this year, a flap erupted when a professor of leisure studies wrote a piece pushing back against the criticism of Obamacare that it was pushing people out of full-time work. Perhaps you’ll remember that — the prof opined that less work was something to celebrate and only unfeeling, nose-to-the-grindstone conservatives could gripe about this good development.

A recent issue of Chronicle Review revisited that flap. We read in Nathan Schneider’s piece The Labors of Leisure that the professor in question was Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa. The piece is completely sympathetic to Hunnicutt and his academic discipline. Schneider writes, “Today the very idea of leisure sounds absurd to the ears of such cultural bellwethers as O’Reilly and Hannity, and like a personal insult to hardworking politicians like (Paul) Ryan. The corresponding decline of academic discourse on leisure is particularly ironic.”

First, what conservatives and libertarians find offensive about Obamacare is that it compels people to adjust to its onerous regulations by working less than they probably want to. Schneider evidently doesn’t grasp that economics is about making trade-offs, such as between work and leisure. It’s best to let each individual figure out for himself how to make such decisions. Nobody is saying that work is inherently good, only that making people work less when they’d prefer to earn more is a bad thing.

But second, what is this “academic discourse”? Schneider writes, “Fifty or sixty years ago, many sociologists saw leisure as an urgent challenge for their field; with more free time surely to come, how would people use it? Leisure-studies departments were one result.”

Good grief. This is much ado about nothing. Labor saving devices have been gradually liberating people from having to work to survive for centuries, and people have had no trouble deciding for themselves how to use that time. It varies from person to person depending on his unique set of likes and dislikes. What useful knowledge could possibly come from studying that?