Short post: do the poor have twice as much free time as the typical person?

No, obviously not!

Do you know why I like X Dot Com, the website formerly known as Twitter? It provides an infinite supply of bad ideas I can write about. Here’s one, and here’s the featured graph:

Just stop and think for a second, man.

This is an unsurprising relationship. As income goes up, total working hours tend to rise, too. Around the time this data was gathered, the median earner made about $30k before adjusting for inflation, so if you eyeball it, it looks like the poor (let’s say people making half the median) were working something like half as much as the typical person did.

Put simply, the problem is that this graph includes people voluntarily working part-time jobs. In the early 2000s, the share of part-time workers who were working part-time for “economic reasons” (either they couldn’t find full-time work or their hours were cut) was just below 20%, meaning the vast majority of part-time work was done voluntarily. If you instead focus on people working full time, working hours don’t fall nearly as much as income falls:

This is a little silly, since it only includes people working more than 35 hours/week, but you get the idea.

I won’t dispute the fact that poor people generally work less. We just saw that millions of people are working part-time involuntarily, which surely provides them with extra (unwanted) leisure time. But the posted chart suggests that the poor have much, much more leisure time when the real difference is significantly smaller.

How much smaller? The BLS has our back. A few facts:

• Full-time workers making $0 - $800 a week (or under $41,600 a year) had about 3.66 hours of leisure on weekdays, while those making more than $1,876 had 2.99, giving this version of “the poor” about 22% more leisure.

• People with only a high school diploma get about 5.03 hours of leisure on weekdays, while those with a bachelor's degree only get around 4.18, giving this version of “the poor” about 20% more leisure.

• Finally, black people typically have just 11% more leisure than white people, and only on weekdays. Being a poor white person makes you much “lazier” than being black.¹ I’m mentioning this only because they’re a favorite target of people involved with the weird right-wing version of being woke that makes you constantly talk about black IQ scores.

I’d prefer to look at full-time workers making $0 - $400 a week, but you can’t always get what you want (without digging deeper into government data). Whatever the real difference is, a simple correlational result like the one in the original graph is a terrible form of analysis. “Low income” is not the same thing as being poor.

1. No, I don’t think the poor are lazy. The quotes are there because I disagree with this assessment.