Month: May 2007

Laid-Back Labor, the latest Freakonomics column in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, adds insight into the yardening vs. gardening discussion over at GardenRant.

To roughly paraphrase the GR discussion, we gardeners are passionate in our work and our quest for knowledge and understanding about what we do. ‘Yardeners’ want a nice-looking yard but don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time doing it or understand all the underlying theory. For those of us who see gardening as the salvation of the world, and want every yard to be an oasis of eco-friendly plant and animal life, it’s an important distinction to make as we proselytize.

Some excerpts from the Sunday Magazine article:

According to Census Bureau statistics, only 7.3 percent of American adults have played a musical instrument in the past 12 months.

Compare this with the 17.5 percent of adults who currently engage in what the Census Bureau calls “cooking for fun.” Or consider that 41 percent of households have flower gardens, 25 percent raise vegetables and 13 percent grow fruit trees — even though just 1 percent of Americans live on a farm today, down from 30 percent in 1920.

…

Isn’t it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their time and money performing menial labors when they don’t have to? Just as the radio and phonograph proved to be powerful substitutes for the piano, the forces of technology and capitalism have greatly eased the burden of feeding and clothing ourselves. So what’s with all the knitting, gardening and “cooking for fun”? Why do some forms of menial labor survive as hobbies while others have been killed off? (For instance, we can’t think of a single person who, since the invention of the washing machine, practices “laundry for fun.”)

Well I’ve tried to convince myself that laundry is fun by doing the folding in front of the TV.
The columnists go on to explain how economists separate what we do into three categories:

• Market work (which produces income)
• Home production (unpaid chores)
• Pure leisure.

In a study the columnists cite, gardening fell just barely into the home production category, narrowly missing falling into the leisure category. I wish they gave us some idea of the variability of responses on that. I suspect that many rated gardening as blissful leisure while others rated it as pure hell. The columnists add:

Whether or not you’re getting paid, it’s work if someone else tells you to do it and leisure if you choose to do it yourself. If you are the sort of person who likes to mow his own lawn even though you can afford to pay someone to do it, consider how you’d react if your neighbor offered to pay you the going rate to mow his lawn. The odds are that you wouldn’t accept his job offer.

And so a great many people who can afford not to perform menial labor choose to do so, because — well, why? An evolutionary biologist might say that embedded in our genes is a drive to feed and clothe ourselves and tame our surroundings. An economist, meanwhile, might argue that we respond to incentives that go well beyond the financial; and that, mercifully, we are left free to choose which tasks we want to do ourselves.

Read the whole article. Who hasn’t grown cherry tomatoes for $20 a fruit.