Isn’t he just saying that everyone is on the treadmill of consumerism, first stop endless happiness, and I’m gunna get there faster than you?

Gittins claims (p.6) that conventional economics is ‘notorious for its poor record in predicting human behaviour’. But it is far from clear that Ross’s theories can even explain in hindsight, let alone predict anything, as was the case when he alleged that various ‘reforms’ urged by economists would reduce job security and satisfaction, when neither happened.

I think we should have modest expectations in social science, including economics. We are almost always talking about tendencies, not laws of behaviour. People tend to respond to financial incentives; that not all do or do in varying degrees does not show that the tendency does not exist.

“If there weren’t such a trade-off (at least at some point), everyone would just work all the time for no money.”

I should have said something like: “If working were pleasant, people would be willing to sacrifice pay to work more.”

I might help on this point:

“Gittins claims that their model ‘assumes all work is an unpleasant way of gaining money and the unemployed are to be envied for all their leisure time’. But which economist says this? Every economist I have ever read assumes that unemployment is bad (even if the value of the free time is not regarded as zero, unemployment is bad overall).”

Simple general equilibrium models of the economy tend to assume that people face a choice between two basic ‘goods’ - consumption and leisure, both of which are desirable. To consume, you need to work, which is by implication unpleasant. Hence there is a trade-off between consumption and leisure. This is used to derive predictions like higher wages (or lower taxes on labour income) allow workers to consume more and thereby induce people to supply more labour. If there weren’t such a trade-off (at least at some point), everyone would just work all the time for no money. It would not be possible to generate stable equilibria without making complicated assumptions about when too much work becomes unpleasant and requires a wage (increase) to compensate the worker.

Unemployment is a different issue because it means people are looking for work but cannot find it. That is an unambiguous bad.

So, yes, Gittins is crudely right and perhaps GE models or models of the labour market could take account of the psychic benefits of working. But the real issue is which model better predicts what people actually do, rather than what Ross or Clive thinks people ought to do.

When I looked at this issue at uni, I read that men often have fairly inelastic labour supply, in that higher wages tend not to affect their working hours much, but women had an upward-sloping labour supply curve, meaning that they were responsive to higher wages. Transposing this to the simple GE world, men are fairly indifferent to leisure while women actively prefer leisiure. This makes sense, because working women often face the opportunity cost of having to pay for childcare or have to do housekeeping after hours.