Competition and Happiness

Labor day is a joke now. We work more hours than we care to work, way more than the 40 hour weeks that some heroic people fought for long ago. We are in the age in of global competition. If you can't do it cheaper, someone else will. If not in this country, in a different country. If not with older, more mature employees, with younger, more eager employees. 
We have come to accept this as a part of our life. We first started outsourcing more work: garden to the gardener, scrubbing toilets to stronger soaps, cleaning diapers to disposable diapers, chopping veggies to the packaged food industry, birthdays to the local jumpy house, and cooking to restaurants and prepared or semi-prepared food industry. As a next step, we gave up down time, and started working with global teams at night. And then we gave up exercising, just to keep up with the rat race. Now, there is not much left to give up.

Inspite of this, Garey and Valerie Ramey claim (http://www.econ.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Rugrat.pdf) that the time spent with children is actually going up, not down. However, before you jump with joy, do read their thesis on why. Do you think we are making the world a better one for our kids?