Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst published a working paper in 2005 titled “Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades” that found that the average man and woman in the United States has approximately eight additional hours of leisure time per week compared to what their 1965 counterparts enjoyed.

This is a historical blessing.

This is time that could be spent improving one’s financial capital (self-teaching new skills to earn higher market rates for labor or studying investment opportunities so surpluses can be better deployed), beauty capital (exercising or making one’s own meals), social capital (socializing with those who ought to be socialized with), intellectual capital (reading materials that better position you to see the world as it is and how it ought to be), among others.

But that is not, collectively, what we are doing with those additional eight hours. The typical American is … Read the rest of this article!