Vacations, we don't need no stinking vacations.

From The decline of the week-long vacation (America fact of the day) by Tyler Cowen.

Nine million Americans took a week off in July 1976, the peak month each year for summer travel. Yet in July 2014, just seven million did. Keeping in mind that 60 million more Americans have jobs today than in 1976, that adds up to a huge decline in the share of workers taking vacations.

Some rough calculations show, in fact, that about 80 percent of workers once took an annual weeklong vacation — and now, just 56 percent do.

This ties in with a report I heard the other day on NPR, possibly from the same source research, lamenting the rise of number of people who take no vacation in a year.

My analysis. Post World War II we had a command and control economy on a war footing with allocations, pricing, capital controls, and other centralized decision-making. In the forty years to circa 1985 there was a slow loosening of the centralized aspects of control and a shift to more rule-based regulations. It is hard now to imagine that price controls were still seen as a legitimate and effective policy tool as late as the eighties, that the airline, rail, trucking, telecommunications, banking and other industries were in many respects not just regulated but controlled. The long prevailing policy heuristic assuming that all people lived in families and that there had to be a "living wage" was a part of the larger mental mind set of centralized control and standardization - part of the legibility which James C. Scott describes in his Seeing Like a State.

The gradual loosening of central control caused continuing improvements in efficiency and resource allocation that helped fuel one of the longest cycles of increased productivity and prosperity. Similarly, the abandonment of the living wage heuristic, in part as a result of the atomization of society arising from the broad range of civil rights legislation of the sixties, in particular freeing up labor force participation for all citizens, likewise helped fuel rising prosperity.

The stereotype of all women at home back in the fifties and all men at work earning a living wage that was broadly equal is substantially a myth and a product of the imagination of the privileged elite. The stereotype might have been true for educated professionals but educated professionals were an insignificant slice of the populace.

But the decentralizing of the economy married with technology enablement has led to an unexpected emergent order. For those who do work, they are able and willing to work voluminously and continuously with immense remuneration in historical terms. Everyone else is much more marginalized, pursuing a range of activities, but again, pursuing them necessarily on a continuous basis. Laid of professionals, former manufacturing workers, new participants in the labor force, everyone is seeking safe sustainable full time work and that is simply much less available than in the old centralized economy. Those who are secure run fast and continuously to stay secure. Those who seek full time employment run fast and continuously to catch that train.

The paradox is that the enormous increases in systemic efficiency achieved allows much greater material prosperity for much lower incomes than in the past but at the cost of greater effort and insecurity.

Vacations, we don't need no stinking vacations.