Summary

This significant book explains how work-life balance is being destroyed because individuals fail to link their work effort with its adverse environmental effects and the personal costs they impose.

The burgeoning literature dealing with work-life balance suggests that the developed world is more interested in this issue today than at any other time in the recent past. Provocative and insightful, Work, Leisure and the Environment presents a rigorous explanation based on economic theory as to why contemporary societies suffer from over-work and work-life imbalance, asserting that they are both the cause and effect of environmental degradation. The author focuses upon a fundamental flaw in contemporary market economies that causes individuals to unknowingly reduce their well-being by working and consuming excessively, while enjoying inadequate leisure time. It is argued that this inability to correctly assess the benefits derived from their work effort causes individuals to place unreasonable and unsustainable demands on the environment. By ignoring the environmental destruction that accompanies work effort, its benefits are overestimated and, as a consequence, individuals voluntarily choose to work longer hours than they should.

This engaging volume will have widespread appeal amongst researchers and policymakers interested in the environment, consumerism and labour markets and will also be an invaluable reference tool for studies into leisure and work-life balance.

Choice Review

Robinson (economist, Queensland Univ. of Technology, Australia) believes market economies cause individuals to dramatically increase work and consumption and reduce leisure, which creates unsustainable demands on the environment. The free market fails to correct long-term environmental problems because of negative externalities, defined as unintended adverse effects on third parties when two parties engage in market transactions. These negative externalities include water pollution from factories; loss of biodiversity when farms supply only what consumers demand; air pollution caused by motor vehicles; and the vast range of activities that contribute to global warming. Robinson suggests increasing public education programs on the environment and work-life balance, developing an optimum level of taxes affecting environment and work activities, mandating shorter work hours and fewer work years, and providing more opportunities for part-time work. Analyzing the environmental impact of overwork, Robinson broadens discussion of this topic covered in other publications, e.g., Juliet Schor's The Overworked American (CH, Sep'92, 30-0420). Though the book claims to be geared to noneconomists, it has a strong academic tone. Summing Up: Recommended. Economics and business collections, upper-division undergraduate through professional. G. E. Kaupins Boise State University