The Benefits Of Leisure Activity

Andrés Yesid Henao
Economics student

THE BENEFITS OF LEISURE ACTIVITY

Leisure is the time when you are not working or doing other duties which is used for resting, enjoying hobbies or sports.Before, during and a long time past The Industrial Revolution people used to work a big part of the day, seven days a week, in order to produce what they needed for living. When the industry beganto incorporate technology, workers became more productive. These conditions created the “Leisure class”. That’s the term used by Veblen to denominate a group consisting on people who obtained goodswithout making them directly. Marx denominated it “exploitation” or “capital gain”; describing the situation on which the capitalist used to obtain gains forcing workers to work more than what theyneeded to produce the value of his salaries. All the population wanted to live as the Leisure class: Work less, consume more.
In the beginning of the industrialization the worker class used to work 16hours a day; without having rest on “weekends” or vacations and in many cases they had to sleep on the factories. That’s why workers started to claim for their rights. They asked for a reduction onhis work-hours, for vacations, for higher salaries, etc. It was a fight between capitalists and workers on which finally “won” workers. Now many of the people work less than 8 hours a day and they havevacations and free time on weekends.
But how can leisure activities contribute to help us in life? We can consider the three more important areas which are positively affected by the leisureactivity: the economical, the social, and the physical and mental health.
From the economic point of view capitalists do not lose reducing the work time of people, because, as says Clark, people is paidaccording to their marginal productivity. By other side leisure has become important in the economic activity and now it contributes in a big amount to the rise of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of...