David Brooks recently observed, correctly, that more affluent U.S. workers tend to work longer hours than less affluent U.S. workers. This has led to clueless, scatological fulminating from Matt Taibbi and a more thoughtful post from Monica Potts at The American Prospect. Potts writes:

I’ve had a hard time coming up with the stats he used to say that, for the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than poor people do.

I don’t know about “the first time in human history.” But there are many sources for the observation re: working hours, including this 2006 working paper by Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano.

During most of the 1900s, the hours of work declined for most American men. But around 1970, the share of employed men regularly working more than 50 hours per week began to increase. In fact, the share of employed, 25-to-64-year-old men who usually work 50 or more hours per week on their main job rose from 14.7 percent in 1980 to 18.5 percent in 2001. This shift was especially pronounced among highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. For college-educated men, the proportion working 50 hours or more climbed from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent in these two decades. Between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, but fell by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile. There was no increase at all in work hours among high-school dropouts.

One hypothesis attributes this to the shift in marginal tax rates. Edward Prescott has done a lot of research on this question [PDF]. And the decline in labor force participation by prime-age males in the U.S. is an issue of long-standing interest to me. In Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, Peter Edelman, Harry Holzer, and Paul Offner offered a number of reasons for this phenomenon, including the impact of mass incarceration, the high implicit marginal taxes facing low-wage workers, particularly non-custodial fathers, etc. The literature that Edelman draws on is very extensive. There are also cultural explanations, like those advanced by William Julius Wilson in his highly-regarded When Work Disappears. I’m surprised that people are surprised by this phenomenon, not least because the lowest-earning quintile is very different from the highest-earning quintile in terms of family composition, and it would be surprising if this didn’t have an impact on non-cognitive skills, proclivity to take part in the formal sector, etc.

Potts offers another hypothesis:

I suspect that low-wage earners just aren’t allowed to work as much as they might want to. They’re probably the employed — not the employers — and their bosses aren’t going to let them work overtime just because they need more money. If they do work overtime, they’re probably asked to work off the clock, or just aren’t paid properly. The people I know who work at or near the minimum wage have hours that are intensely managed by their superiors just so they don’t get more money or qualify for benefits. Unless the workers are unionized, there’s little recourse.

We do have some evidence on this question, but I’ll stick with my own observations. The low-wage earners that I know tend to have a different mix of priorities: they engage in more household labor, they often have creative pursuits that aren’t terribly remunerative, etc. Some have illnesses and disabilities that make it difficult to work a full-time schedule. This applies to some members of my immediate family, who deal with chronic illness, including mental illness, and thus engage in sporadic market labor or, for long stretches of time, no market labor at all.

Having grown up in an inner-city neighborhood, I know many smart, thoughtful people who don’t have the so-called noncognitive skills they’d need to flourish in the working world, and so they earn enough to meet their basic needs, in the formal and sometimes the informal economy, while devoting themselves to other activities. Some serve as informal public goods providers in their neighborhoods. Others engage in practices that are frowned upon by the wider society. The world is complicated.

Taibbi seems to believe that all low-wage work is intolerable, despicable, or undignified. This hasn’t been my experience or that of my immediate family members. He also has an interesting conception of who tends to work minimum wage jobs.

I prefer getting my analysis on these matters from Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman than Taibbi. But that’s just me.