WORK LESS Institute of Technology

LEISURE AS A FACTOR OF PRODUCTION I

The butt-on-a-slide model
(first of a seven part, plus epilogue, series)

by the Sandwichman

Anyone who has taken an introductory economics course has heard of something euphemistically called the "labor supply model." I won't expound on it here in detail because it’s common as dirt. If you don’t already know it, you can find out without difficulty.

All I really need you to know is that, paradoxically, there is no labor in the labor supply model. There's only income, leisure and the preference of the individual for more of one or the other. Leisure is assumed to be a "normal good". Labor is just what's left over after the individual "consumes" all the leisure he or she wants. Working resolves itself into the vacuous double negative of not-not-working.

One more thing: the canonical labor supply model is typically graphed to look like a minimalist line sketch of a butt on a slide. So I’ll call it the butt-on-a-slide model to afford it the disrespect it deserves.

Thankfully, this butt-on-a-slide model has come in for criticism lately. But it seems to me that this criticism has so far missed the mark.

Spencer (2003, 2004a, 2004b) objected that the model effaces the qualitative dimension of both work and leisure, a dimension that was specifically addressed in the approaches of Jevons and Marshall, not to mention Marx. Philp, Slater and Harvie (2005) disputed the epistemological coherence of the model's microfoundations, concluding that "the indifference curves which underpin labor-leisure preferences are themselves founded on axioms which have been shown to be problematic elsewhere in neoclassical economics. Derobert (2001) questioned the pedigree of the model, noting the paradoxical disappearance of labor, documenting the bibliographic anomalies in the model's transmission and discovering that the model's final codification (by Scitovsky 1952) was accompanied by a heralding of its defects: "the above argument also shows the kind of pitfalls one might fall into by regarding leisure as a commodity."

Next: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse

Posted by sandwichman at January 28, 2006 10:20 AM