If you have been concerned about the erosion of America's manufacturing baseand the proliferation of minimum wage service jobs, listen to this! The Academy ofLeisure Sciences claims that leisure is becoming the new center of our economy. Thisseems almost a contradiction in terms as leisure activities are generally thought to bewhat we do when we are not working. How can leisure be a significant economicforce?

Identifying leisure's economic importance is difficult. Leisure doesn't fall neatlyinto the categories we use to describe our economy. It is hard even to find the word"leisure" in government economic statistics. Entertainment, sports, recreation, andtravel businesses form the basis of a leisure industry that extends to virtually everyindustry in America. Recreation vehicles, recreation rooms, vacation homes, leisureclothing, sports medicine, home entertainment centers, athletic shoes and fun foodsindicate how pervasive leisure has become in the American economy.

Time and money are our scarcest resources and how we spend both in large partdetermines the nature of our economy and our society. A third of our time is leisure.American's spend about a third of their income on leisure pursuits. One third of ourland is devoted to leisure and recreation. A set of activities that accounts for a third ofour land, labor, and capital must be central to our economy.

Leisure Spending

The most commonly cited government statistic on leisure is the recreationportion of consumer spending. The Department of Commerce defines recreationspending to include spending on home electronics, radio and television, music,entertainment, sporting goods, amusements, home gardening, toys, books andmagazines, and recreation equipment like boats, motor homes, and bicycles. In 1990consumers spent $280 billion on these recreational goods and services, constituting 7%of all consumer spending. This is three times what consumers spent for new cars in1990.

As impressive as this may seem, $280 billion is only a small part of all leisurespending. The majority of leisure spending is classified elsewhere. For example, of the$458 billion consumer's spent on transportation in 1990, more than a third involvedleisure travel. About a third of all automobile vehicle miles are for recreation trips.Sixty percent of air passengers are on leisure, not business trips. Via similar arguments,considerable portions of consumer spending on housing, clothing, food, and educationcan be classified as leisure spending. Add all of this up and leisure easily accounts forover one trillion dollars or about a third of all consumer spending. In an economydriven primarily by consumer spending, this makes leisure America's number oneeconomic activity.

Robert Crandall, Chairman of American Airlines, recently told customers in theairline's American Way magazine, "you are a customer of the world's largest industry." He was not referring to the airline industry, but to the much larger travel and tourismindustry. Worldwide, travel and tourism is a $3 trillion a year industry, with revenuesof over $600 billion in the United States. Somerset Waters, who edits an annual industrysummary for the world travel industry, argues that an industry is any collection ofbusinesses that produce a related set of goods and services. The U.S.'s top threeindustries by his reckoning are tourism with $621 billion in spending, health care with$604 billion and education with $331 billion. Waters defines tourism to include allspending on trips of 25 miles or more away from home. If we deduct business travelfrom his estimate of tourism spending, and add the portion of leisure spending thatoccurs at home or in the local community, we again get a leisure spending figure in theneighborhood of one trillion dollars.

Leisure Jobs

What about jobs, you may ask. A comprehensive count of leisure industry jobs ishard to find. There are some leisure jobs in every industry, including defence. Crandallclaims that travel and tourism employs 9 million people in the U.S. There are about aquarter million public sector recreation jobs in federal, state, county and local agencies. There are nearly 2 million writers, artists, entertainers and professional athletes. Noone has completely sorted out all of the jobs that are linked to leisure and convertedthese to full time equivalents. The simplest way to get a total leisure job estimate is toconvert leisure spending to jobs. If about $40,000 in consumer spending generates a job(full time equivalent), a trillion dollars in leisure spending translates into 25 millionjobs about a quarter of all jobs in 1990. If this isn't enough, figure that every leisure jobgenerates another job in a supporting industry. This ties nearly half of all jobs toleisure.

Depending on which measure of economic importance you choose to accept,leisure is between five and twenty times the size of the automobile industry in the U.S.Indeed, in 1990 there were almost twice as many full time equivalent jobs in lodgingestablishments alone, as in all businesses, manufacturing, motor vehicles and parts.Leisure industries are generally far more labor intensive than the auto industry andmanufacturing. Ironically, this means that leisure industries provide more jobs, andmanufacturing provides more leisure. Nevertheless, leisure seldom comes to mindwhen discussing our economy, unless it is the unwanted leisure from unemployment.Why is this?

Why Isn't Leisure's Economic Importance Recognized?

Our perception of leisure's economic importance depends a great deal on howwe look at leisure and the economy. We don't see much of a relationship if we defineleisure as time off of work and make work and the production of goods synonymouswith economic development. These commonly held perspectives on work, leisure, andthe economy were formed during the industrial revolution. Virtually all of our existingeconomic theory, industry classifications and statistical reporting systems were alsodeveloped for a period when manufacturing led the economy and leisure was merelytime to recuperate for more work. These somewhat outmoded ideas and economicreporting systems still shape the way we see leisure and the economy today, eventhough the nature of our economy and leisure has changed dramatically.

Changes in societal values and understanding of our economy comes slow. Westill haven't fully accepted and understood the decline in agriculture's economicimportance, although it was superseded by manufacturing over 130 years ago. Duringthe 1970's, economists like Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out thechanges that were transforming the United States to a "post-industrial" society. Themost significant of these structural changes was a transition from a goods to a serviceeconomy, and with it a decline in manufacturing's importance. For the past 20 years,the economy has largely undergone this transition. Growth in leisure and recreationservice industries, as predicted by Bell, has been an important part of the transition to apost-industrial economy.

The transition to a service economy has been far too rapid to expect thenecessary adjustments in societal values or measures of economic development andworth. Since Adam Smith, economists have largely characterized services as a residualor leftover category of economic activity. Services handled what were seen as theunimportant but necessary housekeeping chores for the economy. It is probably notcoincidental that women have historically performed many of these service jobs. Thewomen's movement and other forces have recently begun to reshape society's viewsabout the social and economic values of services like childcare, education,housekeeping, nursing, community service, and leisure.

The recognition of leisure as both a social and economic force requires evenmore difficult adjustments in our value systems. While most Americans are often"waiting for the weekend," we are reluctant to admit this, particularly when confrontedby Japanese competitors. Economist Juliet Schor documents the American addiction towork in her book, The Overworked American. She describes how a goods-orientedeconomic system has fed this addiction, trapping people in a work-spend cycle. Theresult, she argues, has been a decline in leisure and, for many, a lower quality of life.

The Economic Significance of Leisure Time

The economic significance of leisure goes far beyond measures of spending andjobs. These figures account for spending on leisure. Also of economic significance isthe fact that most consumer spending occurs during leisure time. Holidays andfestivals account for large upswings in retail sales, with Christmas sales making orbreaking the year for many businesses. It has been suggested that shopping forpleasure has become our most popular leisure activity. Compared to Europeans,American's spend three to four times as many hours a year shopping. Mega-malls caterto leisure shopping today, just as interstate highways stimulated the number oneoutdoor recreation activity during most of the 1970's driving for pleasure. Shoppingcenters have become a gathering place for teenagers after school, a place for seniors toget exercise, a location for various community events and fairs, and a place to justbrowse and pass the time.

Shopping centers are not alone in using leisure to sell their products. The vastmajority of advertising is directed at us during our favorite leisure pursuits. Try towatch television, listen to radio, read a magazine, watch a rented video, attend a movieor sporting event, or just take a leisurely ride without being interrupted by somecommercial message. Businesses sell to us during our leisure and in most cases directlyuse our interest in leisure to help sell their product.

Also of more economic significance than what people spend on leisure is howmuch of their time they devote to leisure and how they use this time. Time is ourscarcest resource, as it is for all practical purposes relatively fixed in supply. Thequality of our lives depends a great deal on how we use the time we have. Juliet Schornotes that through increases in efficiency, we can reproduce the standard of livingAmerican's enjoyed in 1948 in half the time it took fifty years ago. We could havechosen a four-hour day or a six month work year. Instead, we chose to produce moregoods, or perhaps we were not given this choice.

John Robinson, director of the American's Use of Time Project, reports that halfof American workers today say they would give up a day's pay to have an additionalday off of work. While there are increasing stories of people who have opted out of therat race, whom the rest of us tend to view with considerable envy, large scale trade-insof work for leisure still seem rather distant. For most, an increase in leisure timerequires a change in lifestyle to reduce expenses, including spending on leisure. Irrespective of whether Americans choose to have more or less leisure, the economicramifications of these decisions are substantial.

Changing Definitions of Economic Value

Not everyone in the recreation and leisure field is enthusiastic about leisure'sgrowing economic importance. The commercialization of leisure is often at the expenseof intrinsic values of leisure--like freedom, creativity, learning, socialization and selfdevelopment. Leisure sociologists are concerned about the commercialization,commodification and packaging of leisure by our economic system. These concerns arenot very different from those of liberal economists who wonder how our economicsystem can use so many resources, produce so much, and yet have so little relativeimpact on the quality of people's lives.

Is leisure destined to the same fate as other goods and services in our society? Must it be mass produced, bought and sold, and consumed in large quantities to beeconomically significant? In spite of the growing commodification of leisure,households still produce most of their leisure services themselves. The value of leisureexperiences that we provide for ourselves are not captured at all in economic measureslike the Gross National Product (GNP). If we included the labor costs of providing ourown leisure, child care, housekeeping, and everything else we do for ourselves, wewould likely double GNP and, more importantly, have a better appreciation of thevalue of these services. It is somewhat odd that these services have economic value when we payother people to do them for us, but have no value when we perform them for ourselves?

Only the value of goods and services exchanged in the market are included inGNP. While economic statistics, theories, and measures of value are strongly rooted inthe traditional marketplace, economists have increasingly had to broaden theories andmethods to address a host of nonmarket issues. Environmental quality and manyleisure-related concerns have been in the forefront of these developments. For example,economic values can be estimated for parks, endangered species, air and water quality,and yes, even solitude and sunsets. While such non-market measures of value havebeen routinely included in estimating the ratio of benefits to costs of individual publicinvestment decisions such as building roads and reservoirs, these non-market valuesare not reflected in overall measures of the performance of our economy. GNP rises ifwe replace a park with a factory and little distinction is made between a pollutingfactory or a clean one.

Economic measures that more fully account for human resources, and all of thebenefits and costs associated with the production of goods and services will inevitablyincrease understanding of the importance and role of leisure in our society. Trilliondollar estimates of leisure spending are impressive, but only partially capture leisure'seconomic significance. Much of our leisure time and many of our most valuedexperiences do not involve market transactions and therefore do not show up asspending or contributions to GNP. Indeed, while consumer spending on leisure isgrowing, most analysts report a decline in both the quantity and quality of our leisuretime.

Daniel Bell argued that the post-industrial society will involve a change insocietal goals and values from those of production efficiency to serving social needs. As a concept somewhat antithetical to efficiency, leisure can perhaps help liberate usfrom an excessive concern for efficiency. Leisure also pulls us toward a social needorientation, being a personal and social need to which most Americans can relate.Leisure is therefore well suited to be the catalyst for reshaping the goals and values thatour economic system should serve. For example, current leisure issues direct attentionto the structure of work and leisure, the value of services we provide for ourselves, theroles of government and the private sector in meeting social needs, the distribution ofwealth and opportunities across population subgroups, the quality of the environment,the character of our communities, and the quality of life.

The set of values, activities, and resources subsumed under the concept of leisurecan therefore play a significant role in helping to redirect our economic system to meetthe challenges of the 21st century. In this sense, leisure is arguably not yet the center ofour economy, although it is center stage for most buying and selling. It may be moreaccurate to say that leisure will be the catalyst for most of the significant changes thatour society and economy will undergo as we adapt to the post-industrial period.

For further information, contact:

• Daniel J. Stynes, 131 Natural Resources Building, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1222. Phone: (517) 353-5190; Fax: (517) 336-2296.

• Geoffrey C. Godbey, Recreation and Parks, 203 Henderson Building South, The PennsylvaniaState University, University Park, PA 16802. Phone: (814) 865-1851; Fax: (814) 863-4257

• Dr. Richard Kraus, 515 Tennis Avenue, Ambler, PA 19002.

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