 The first in this series of free reviews, Marshall-Sarlin's Stone Age Economics, considered how ancient peoples lived. In this review we consider the Harrod Leisure Class, an obscure but insightful book on time as a limit to the consumer lifestyle. Published in 1970 by economist Stefan Linder, it examines how society has become time-poor and therefore increasingly trapped in the complex rationalisations of the modern economy. They are popular at the time, its problematic arguments have fallen into relative obscurity today, as Linder says in the introduction. We have line expressed the hope that the elimination of material cares would clear the way for a broad cultural advancement. The tendency is the reverse. The cause of these and similar anomalies lies in the circumstance that has been entirely ignored, namely the increasing scarcity of time. The limited availability of time and the increasing claims made on it mean that our affluence is only partial and not total as we seem to believe. Our affluence only takes the form of access to goods, the idea of total affluence as a logical fallacy. In the 20th century economic growth had been built upon scientific management, guiding the use of workers and materials to increase productivity. This was when, in the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of the leisure society arose, that productivity would increase so much that people would need to work very few hours to have a comfortable lifestyle. Unsurprisingly, this economic utopia did not materialise. Instead, growing wealth fuelled an endless cycle of increasing consumption which, elevated to a secular cult, became an end in itself. Linder argues that as it costs more time to maintain our stuff in our lifestyle, we can earn more from working those hours, and so the pressure will be to use throwaway, cheap goods, and buy new ones. Essentially, Linder is relating the contradictions between work in the modern world and the primary reward of this work, having more stuff, as Linder says. Changes in the average maintenance per product will be determined by the sector in which productivity is increasing most rapidly. In this situation, it will pay to reduce the maintenance per product, and instead devote a corresponding amount of time to highly productive work that will offer income to replace the goods that needed service. This is the used and throwaway system. In that sense, affluence is only a losery. In a society where time poverty dominates an individual's decisions, it inevitably leads towards less culturally refined ways of living. A time poor society doesn't value the quality or the creativity of certain goods, and this has a negative feedback in terms of our quality of life. People accept poor quality, or poorly performing services, as a necessary trade-off to balance the economic pressures of daily life created by time poverty. As Linder says, The most important way consumers can reduce the time required to shop is to live at the time spent thinking about what to buy. One comes to rely increasingly on rough rules of thumb. Reduced time for reflection previous to a decision would apparently entail growing irrationality. However, since it is extremely rational to consider less and less per decision, there exists a rationale of irrationality. For rules of thumb, consider the role of branding, and how that simplification ties into decision making, yet arguably a less diverse set of consumer choices. Modern commentators always compare the lives of people today with the early industrial revolution, where 80 to 90-hour working weeks, child labour and unsafe working conditions were sanded, so why not compare conditions today to pre-industrial times? As Marshall Silings describes, in pre-agricultural societies people may have only required two to four hours of work per day to secure their material needs for life. By the medieval period, the average peasant may have worked four or five hours per day on average for their landlord, usually concentrated into three or four months of the year, but the rest of the time was still there to serve their own material needs. It is the removal of common land and the movement into urbanised communities, which created a dependency culture that necessitated the harsh working conditions of early industrialisation. They had no choice, it was work or staff. What Linda argues is that while late industrialisation may have become more economically civilised, that compulsive force organised in our lifestyle has not gone away. Instead, the modern economy drives people to irreconcilable and thus stressful decisions in order to achieve impossible ends. As Linda says, The sharp of the conflict between the decline in utility of additional income and the rise in desires to increase wellbeing, the greater the propensity there will be for increasing economic growth by all possible means. Cultural development, other than the luxury for the few, has perhaps never been more than a dream. Economic growth has become an overriding end, not a means. Linda challenges the idea that progress inevitably brings greater leisure or cultural time. Instead, to maintain a socially driven compulsion for consumption, the modern world maintains its focus on material consumption as the sole metric for progress, contrary to the idea that progress must improve society's refinement. Fifty-two years after its publication, the Harrod Ledger class is just as valuable today for its insightful critique of the myths of consumer capitalism. As the limits to growth choke economic progress, its arguments highlight how people may react to these pressures and whether the maintenance of this lifestyle will drive people to self-optimise a decline in their wellbeing to maintain that economic state, rather than abandon it for another, more culturally civilised option by refusing to comply with the growth imperative.