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69 sats \ 5 replies \ @denlillaapan OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: Work Work Work Work Work! (The Economist) econ
knowing nothing else, you'd expect someone with a higher (real, takehome) wage be willing to substitute some for extra leisure... and conversely, someone relatively poorer willing to substitute some of their time for extra money.
But alas the world is stupid, and Europeans (#1056458), being lazy and silly, rather chill -- and rely on others for their daily bread. And overworked, consumerist Americans desire even more stuff.
I'm not sure who's the worst villain here
This question of whether higher wages leads to more or less work is a common question we pose in intermediate micro, and the answer is that it could be either depending on how you draw the indifference curves haha
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Is leisure a normal good?
I bring this up a lot when people talk about how income taxes lead to less work. It’s not clear that they either do or should.
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Good point. But then that makes the deadweight loss of taxation even harder to explain.
(Not meaning the DWL isn't there, more in the sense that it's hard to explain to people where DWL comes from).
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That’s a great point! I don’t think I’ve seen it raised before.
Yeah, it’s harder to explain the economic importance of what amounts to forgone leisure.
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It’s not straightforward because a higher wage means leisure time is more expensive.
This is pretty heavily discussed amongst labor economists because people generally respond (or fail to) to wage increases weirdly.
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