CRYHUGHES

“THEORY: Successful people read business books.  Wildly successful people read obscure books.  Normal people don’t read.”

-Anonymous

Sattersten at 800-CEO_READ forwarded me a gallery copy of “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.” Its a great reference book to the leading titles on today’s most important business issues.

Link to the book (Amazon).

Interesting findings on how the unemployed spend their time: pdf

Normally unemployment spikes the demand for leisure, but this study finds that during recessions (and in the context of today), the lost hours are transferred to household maintenance. Coauthor Daniel Hamermesh best summarizes the findings:

But when unemployment suddenly rises, as in a recession, people shift from work for pay to household production; people don’t take more leisure time than before.

So if we would measure output to include production at home, we would infer that a recession doesn’t reduce total output by as much as we thought; and perhaps the utility burden of a short recession is not as severe as one might imagine.

Daniel Hamermesh, University of Texas, and Michael Burda, Humbolt University, submitted the working paper in January of 2009 to the NBER.