What higher purpose could be tied to education than increasing leisure time? And yet the English songwriter Andy Partridge might have had it right when he complained, "They taught me how to work but they can't leach me how to shirk correctly." Added leisure time appears not to be among the many well-documented benefits of increased educational attainment, according to "Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades," a paper authored by economists Mark Aguiar of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago.
The good news is that leisure time increased for everyone between 1965 and 2003-by six to eight hours per week for men, thanks largely to a ...