Area of Research: Diffusion of Social Phenomena

“The reduction in life hours of work  since 1850: estimates for Dutch males” by Jaap de Koning follows the 1995 paper by Jesse Ausubel and Arnulf Gruebler Working less and living longer: Long-term trends in working time and time budgets.

de Koning finds the number of hours Dutchmen work during their lives gradually diminished. Men born in 1840 worked on average 118 thousands hours, while it is only 67 thousands hours for the 1950 cohort.   As a percent of total number of hours available to a man, the decline is from 23% for the 1840 birth cohort to 9%for the 1950 birth cohort.  The finding resembles what Jesse and Arnulf found for American males.  Technology lifts productivity and lengthens lives, and the changed ratio of work to life explains many of the benefits and worries of modern societies.

During September, PHE welcomed a guest, Dr. David Burg, a biostatistician based at the Golan Research Institute in Katzrin, Israel, as a visiting researcher.  Dr. Burg is working with PHE on a number of projects including the development of online software for statistical analysis of time series data as well as studies applying biological models to social and technical phenomena.  We were fortunate enough to have the participation of many, if not all, the PHE members involved in the joint research.  Pictured below with New York City in the background from left to right are: Jason, Mark, Jesse, Doris, Perrin, Iddo, and David Burg.

As part of our ongoing interest in diffusion of social phenomena, PHE researcher Iddo Wernick has published a paper, Jews in Time and Space, using the writing of books to describe historical development of the Jewish people as waves of organic development, still ongoing.