Free Time Across the Life Course

Abstract

In most industrialised countries, citizens enjoy a very large amount of free time towards the end of their lives, when they are retired, but find it very costly to access free time during the middle part of their lives. This is concerning because those who die early are deprived of the reward of free time that retirement holds. Extreme discrepancies between a time-rich old age and a time-scarce middle age are not, however, inevitable: some states incentivise long work hours during middle age in combination with early retirement, whereas others incentivise shorter work hours during middle age and later retirement. This variation raises the thus far unexplored question of how a just society should design policies that affect the costs of access to free time across the life course. I answer this question by using a hypothetical decision-situation where prudent choosers must allocate access to free time across different life stages.