We call it Labour Day, honouring how we humans have earned our livings since our emergence as a species, first by chasing and killing animals, then by growing crops, gradually by making things and finally, now, most of us, by performing services for one another.
We haven’t all laboured, of course. It would surprise those who haven’t read him to learn that in just the fourth paragraph of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observes disapprovingly that “among civilized and thriving nations … a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work.”
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That was 1776. There are still order-of-magnitude differences in people’s consumption. But if anything we probably have more workers now. In the top one per cent of today’s society, “earned income” is by far the greater part of income — much more than in the middle of the past century, when many people clipped coupons for a living, and also a tiny bit more than in the incomes of today’s other 99 per cent. If you read Samuel Pepys’ daily diary in this newspaper or the recent novels of Hilary Mantel, you will be impressed by how energetic many aristocratic luminaries were. But one thing that clearly distinguishes people at the top of today’s income distribution is how hard they work — more than 60 hours a week, many of them.