Photo: Rene EhrhardtThe average American spends about one hour at meals, and about the same time grazing — eating as a secondary activity to something else (very often leisure). But how does this differ across the population? Those whose time is valuable — who have a high wage — have an incentive to multi-task, to graze rather than devote their full time to meals.
Moreover, since setting up meals takes time (has fixed costs), higher-wage people have an incentive to engage in more incidents of grazing and have relatively fewer meals. This simple bit of economics describes what we observe in detailed data from the American Time Use Survey. It’s another illustration of how economic thinking can predict and explain phenomena that, at first blush, would hardly seem to be economic.
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High value workers typically get free lunches via their companies or suppliers or political connections and multi-task via that social interaction with their superiors or business associates.
Low value workers don’t have the money to pay someone else to prepare fresh food (by default considered healthier food) so they rely on manufactured food such as found in fast food outlets or microwave ready foods or pre-bagged foods which they prepare and eat while engaged in other low value activies such as watching TV, driving, playing on-line games, etc
I’m pretty sure there is an alternate description of the events that you were observing that fits the data just as well.
So much for testing out hypotheses.
There you go with your opportunity time assumptions again.
Holy Mankiw! Do you really think we live in a perfect meritocracy where the people who make the most money actually spend all their time wisely working hard? Most CEOs have more liesure time than your average worker, and make a whole lot more than those who are logically maxing out the value of every minute.
I agree with DrS. I’m sure there’s some utility function here. For many people, eventually the extra time not working will be worth more than the wage you could be earning by working. A rich CEO might prefer to take work off early just so he can prepare meals with his family precisely because the extra income is not worth it to him. Maximizing working time, regardless of wage, pretty much never happens.
So, if I eat in front of my computer instead of in front of the newspaper, my job has to pay me for lunch???
Logic-fail…
Maybe people with higher wages are more likely to be lonely – and who wants to sit at a table alone?
I don’t get any entertainment out of eating at a table alone, so I always do what you call “grazing.” The ‘prepared foods’ section at whole foods keeps me fed.
I definitely spend less than two hours a day eating, though… 30-45mins at the most.
I have one thing to say about this, and that is heteroskedasticity.
The opposite argument, that those who are high wage earners and have higher disposable incomes, might want to spend more, both in terms of time and money, on meals as compared to those who earn less, is equally good.
Often it depends not upon the wages but on the individual’s utility function and the percieved value they derive from leisure time such as meals. Some people, irrespective of how much they earn, will place the value of an elaborate meal below the marginal wage they can earn, while certain others will do exactly the opposite.