Work and Leisure: A History of Ideas∗

This paper reexamines an old question: what is work and why do we do it? A straightforward ’economic’ answer is that work is any time activity for which we receive a positive wage, but this begs the question which activities command a positive wage. Now the answer depends on market level considerations such as the available technology and the joint distribution of preferences and skills in the population. Unfortunately, these fundamentals are not directly observed and we must infer them somehow from observations on wages and individual choices. This circular logic leaves a lot of room for speculation and arbitrary definitions. In this paper, I survey this speculative territory and examine the views of classical economists (and philosophers) on work, its pain and its rewards. I also discuss the impact of the economic and social context in which work is performed on individual attitudes toward work.1