Now it's 2000: Trends in doing and being in the new millennium

Abstract

From the middle of the twentieth century the year 2000 has been a metaphor for the future. But now the magic year has arrived and we have the opportunity to retrospectively assess forecasts made last century. This paper uses information from Australian time use surveys to examine the predictions made in 1983 by Jonathon Gershuny. Gershuny proposes that households have a hierarchy of needs and wants that they wish to satisfy. As societies get richer they devote a smaller proportion of their national incomes to satisfying the more basic needs, and a larger share to the more sophisticated, luxury categories. However, over time, there is an increasing gap in the relative market prices of durable goods and luxury final services. This means that final services bought on the market (such as opera tickets, theatre tickets, even movie tickets) become more expensive compared to the cost of producing these services at home using relatively inexpensive appliances (e.g. stereo sound systems, video recorders and so on). In other words households turn to ‘self‐service’. On this basis, Gershuny predicts a decline in time devoted to paid work and an increase in time spent in unpaid work and in leisure consumption. Fortunately, however, time spent in unpaid work is itself reduced by the increasing productivity of domestic appliance (durables) and an increasingly equitable division of domestic labour. The net result is a society of greater leisure. This paper argues that Gershuny's predictions have gone astray because of two key weaknesses ‐ his failure to consider the effect of labour demand on the distribution of hours of paid work and his neglect of bargaining over the domestic division of labour.