Harried Leisure Class

The Harried Leisure Class was written by Staffan Burenstam Linder, professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. In a concise and thought-provoking book marking a departure from the majority of his writings on international trade, Linder challenged his fellow economists to consider the consumption of time in the same way that they considered monetary consumption. From this starting point, in The Harried Leisure Class, he presents a depressing but recognizable vision of the negative consequences of economic growth in affluent economies.

The title of the book makes reference to Thorstein Veblens's classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, written in 1899, in which Veblen describes an emerging ruling class who are in fact a “leisure class,” doing very little productive work. Linder's title makes ...