‘Welfare’ as it is conceived in welfare-state studies is an objective measure of people's ‘opportunities’, cashed out in turn in terms of ‘control over resources’. Minimally, the aspiration of this chapter is to get ‘time’ included among those ‘resources’ in such discussions. Indeed, the larger aspiration is to get ‘time’ included high on that list, fully on a par with income itself.

Ordinary welfare-state studies focus heavily on people's income streams, and the adequacy of those for meeting their needs. Time is just as important, however, for all the reasons that we gave at the outset: time and money are conjoined in the production function for welfare, just as labour and capital are conjoined in the production function for commodities; it takes money to buy goods, but it takes time to consume them. Having discretionary control over time is thus as important as having discretionary control over money, when it comes to producing subjective welfare. Not only are there those a priori reasons for considering time and money co-equals in promoting well-being. We also have corroborating empirical evidence from ‘happiness’ studies, reported in section 2.3.2.

This chapter begins with a few conceptual remarks on how ‘welfare’ is measured in welfare-state studies, drawing attention to the strong analogies between ordinary measures of ‘income’ and our ‘discretionary time’ indicators (section 8.1). We then proceed to report the impact of governments' ‘welfare-state sector’ on people's discretionary time, first across each country's population as a whole (section 8.2) and then focusing upon particular subgroups.