Comparing Laid-Back Labor By Stephen J. Dubner And Stephen D.

According to the passage of Stephen J. Dubner and Stephen D. Levitt, “Laid-Back Labor: The $140 Homemade Scarf”, someone might buy $40 worth of yarn and spend ten hours knitting it and if her labor is valued at $10 an hour, the scarf costs at least $140 more than a similar machine-made scarf cost. Obviously, nobody wants to buy the scarf , so why Americans are spending so much time and money performing menial labor? Actually, they just regard knitting as a leisure for fun. In 19th century , Piano manufacturing was one of New York city’s largest industries, and by the 1920s, about 300,000 pianos were sold annually. Because of developments in technology, the radio and the photograph, however, eventually drove the piano into deep disfavor. Last year, fewer than 77,000 pianos were sold in the U.S., and only 7.3 percent of American adults have played a musical instruments in the past 12 months. Nowadays, many people believe that the musical instruments are gradually replaced by knitting, cooking and other activities as a enjoyment of leisure.
In a paper called “A Century of Work and Leisure”, the economists Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis found that Americans indeed work fewer hours than they did 100 years ago, but fill up a lot of their extra time with “home production” tasks. And they argued that anything at or above a 7.3 is leisure, while anything below is home