Juliet Schor: Speeding-Up of Everyday Life

I start with a proposition which I hope to convince you of, which is: achieving a sustainable economy in life style will require a reduction in the pace of life.

Why? We are witnessing today of course an increasing demand for speed, both from the production side, that is business, and from the consumer side. This of course is something that has been going on at least since the 19th century as we know of the history of time, but in fact of employers that goes back much farther -- at least a century earlier. In the last two decades roughly we have a development in the United States and Canada, in Japan, in The United Kingdom and among some groups, people like us for example. That is: a rising pace of life, an increasing demand for speed and convenience and consumer products. In my view, and here I will be deliberately provocative, the major cause of this increasing demand for speed is not technological but is due to economic developments and in particular to changing hours of work. Employers have been demanding more hours on the job and a higher intensity of work, a faster harder pace. At the same time we have increases in married woman labour force participation, an increase in dueller families which have created a time squeeze in the household and a time squeeze in daily life. This process is most advanced in Japan and the United States and to a lesser extent in the UK. But I do believe it has been reaching the continent in the last ten years and I predict that there is more to come.

What are the consequences of the time squeeze and rising hours of work and declining leisure time? On the one hand we see a higher level of stress and burn out -- people are overloaded --there is a kind of burn out and stress problem associated with long hours. Secondly we get a premium on the value of time outside of work, an acceleration of daily life and an increasing demand for convenience and consumer goods. We get fast and pre-prepared food, we have mail order shopping, we have automated tellers and in America where these things are extremely well advanced we even have drive through church services, or what we might call McGod. My view is that rising hours of work and declining leisure are the major factor behind a demand of speed. From the consumer and of course from the business side it is coming about as a result of the combination of technological adventures but also the increasing competitiveness of the economy as a result of globalisation, deregulation and a number of other factors. The changing pace of life for individuals is very intimately connected to business's increasing demand for high productivity. Now what is the connection to ecology? Clearly (and I think Wolfgang Sachs covers this point so I will not say to much about it), we have to recognise one very basic point, which is that speed intensive activities are nearly always more ecologically damaging than activities which are time intensive. But I think there is a less obvious point I want to talk about today and that entails the connection between speed and the labour market.

I would argue that achieving an ecological life style today, both for individuals and on a macro scale, entails the rejection of sustained increases in incoming consumption. It entails the rejection of economic growth. The future ecological path will trade money for time and use productivity growth to enhance leisure, not to produce more goods. Productivity will allow us to slow down. Now this is important because just think about the last 50 years (which some people have called the post war forties era), when both in North America, Japan, and in Europe to a lesser extent, a tremendous productivity growth has been achieved. In the United States productivity has tripled, in Europe it has increased by a far greater factor and in Japan of course by a factor of probably 15 to 20. Virtually all of that productivity growth has gone towards producing more goods and services, increasing our incomes and our consumption. Very, very little of it has gone towards giving ourselves more free time. In the US virtually none, in Europe of course there have been some increases in free time taken mainly in the form of longer vacations and to some extent in decline in the work week. But in comparison to the potential which productivity growth has given us to have more free time, very little of this has been taken. In fact less than we saw in the 75 years before the Second World War. We as societies, the advanced capitalist countries, have increasingly been on a cycle of what I call 'work and spend' in which productivity growth gets more or less automatically translated into higher incomes. People spend those incomes -- they become in some sense acclimated or habituated to them. There is a process of keeping up in consumer norms such that increases in the aspirational standard of living -- that is what we see in the media, on television, in magazines -- what the people just above us have. We go through a continual cycle of upgrading our expectations of what is necessary for a decent life. The fact that we work long hours and get high incomes makes it possible for us to realise those aspirations and then we go on to another cycle.

What is the problem in all of this? There is on the one hand the ecological problem, but I think there is another problem which is: it is quite clear from the evidence that this kind of increasing standard of living doesn't give people more life satisfaction, happiness or well being. We achieve that mainly in connection with where we stand relatively and we are in a situation in which we are all 'keeping up with the Joneses' -- or with the Smiths, but the Joneses keep keeping up too. And so nobody is getting better off in any very profound sense. Happiness correlates very poorly with increases in standards of living over time.

Now, it turns out that lots of people are beginning to figure this out. After a half century of work and spend we have an avant-garde movement in the United States (I think to a lesser extend in the UK, and even less on the continent, but I think we will see more again of it), in which millions of people and I talk mostly of the Americans now, millions of Americans are beginning to live a different kind of life. Live a life not of work and spend, but one in which they are trading in a significant way money for time. These people are not primarily motivated by ecology, except the real extremes of this group I would say, but they are mainly motivated by the excessive pace of life within the consumer treadmill. They find themselves stressed out, hurried up all the time and they feel that their lives are out of balance and I think even more profoundly, they feel a lack of control. That high speed, high pace of life is very commonly translated at a very great level for people to a feeling of being out of control. Contrary to what one might think an alternative perspective which would be, is that the speed gives us a feeling of mastery and control. Maybe that at least among this group people are reaching the limits of a sped up society. The media has colloquially called this group downshifters and I suppose that is as good a term as any. They are transforming there lives to get more time and to slow down. What do I exactly mean by a downshifter? It is a person who is working less or not at all, who has jumped of the treadmill, a casualty of work and spend, someone searching for a higher quality of life, not necessarily a higher quantity of income? I believe this is one of the most important trends going on in the USA today and I am not the only one who thinks this. The pop sociologists do too, but unlike them I have actually done a poll and have some real evidence about it. In the first 5 years of the 1990's 20% of Americans, and that is a very large number, much larger then I had expected, reported that they have made life style changes (voluntary life style changes and that is very important of course, we have involuntary downshifters too) which resulted in their earning less money. Such as changing their jobs, quitting work, going to a part-time job. They tend to be more young than old, that is they are disproportionably found in the 18 to 40 year old range, although there are significant numbers between 40 and 55, they exist at all income levels. Large numbers of men are doing it, more than a fifth of all respondence to the survey, male respondence, indicated that they had made a voluntary downshift and they tend to be more highly educated than the population as a whole. In my colatitude research I found, they tend to be very high rates of college's graduation. I believe it is an avant-garde movement. I will not say it is going definitely to become the majority, it may or may not, but it is large, it is important and I think we ought to take it very seriously.

Here I should say I do have a profound disagreement of course with Stephen Kern: I don't believe that people always opt for speed. In fact I would argue a very important segment of the population in my own country, at least today, is opting to slow down. And I would say, I found it a kind of surprising view from a historian, because it sounds extremely a-historical to me. Secondly, as long as I am on this topic, I would say that this idea that technologies have an essence, is one that is logically completely unsupportable. Technology is always contradictory and the car, just as much as it takes us places faster, it pollutes the air and makes our neighbourhoods unsafe for our kids.

Let me make one last point about how all of this connects to design. We tend to think of technology and design as developing at most in a kind of production context. It is very important to remember what I think is the forgotten element and that is the labour market link. The post war era was one of full time jobs and full time incomes. And products gear to these incomes, which means the continual upscaling of products. The low end of the consumer market continually drops out and if you are wondering about this, go to a third world country and look at the low end varieties of products that exist there, but no longer do in the West. This means that we need to design differently in order to bring back that segment of the market in one sense and also to design specifically for downshifters in mind.

Let me briefly mention five principals of design that I think go along with the downshifting trend. First of all they need less expensive versions of products, eco design is typically very upscale and therefore contradictionary with the downshifted life style. Second we need to stop continuously upscaling because downshifters are not, they are going in the opposite direction. Third we need to give durability to products because downshifters are less into novelty and product turnover. They want something that lasts. Fourth we need to emphasise function over symbolism. Downshifters are finding symbolic meaning outside of the consumer sphere, unlike people trapped in work and spend. They want function in there products, so we can stop advertising. And finally downshifters are less oriented to speed and convenience. Time is what they have. They have gone from the ranks of the time poor and the money rich to the ranks of the time rich and the money poor. I think we are to pay attention to that.