ll-remunerated, as wages rise so more work will be offered by each worker, because each increase in wages makes leisure more expensive and therefore less attractive. Consequently, it is only at high rates of income, after successive increases in earnings and work-time and decreases in leisure-time have taken place, that the value placed upon leisure will eventually match and then exceed the attractions of further work and the acquisition of yet more goods.Thus, there is abundant evidence of how labourers and artisans were thought to behave, but it is appropriate now to examine the issue from the perspective of the workers themselves, although even on the level of elementary theory this is a far from straightforward task. There is the basic problem of what constituted labour and leisure. Voluntary leisure time has to be distinguished from involuntary: work cannot be performed if there is no demand for it. What constituted labour is also problematical in a society in which many members possessed or had access to their own means of production (plots of land, basic industrial equipment and such), in which a significant proportion of production, both for self-consumption and for sale, took place within the household, and in which a significant proportion of the labour force combined household production with work for wages. By no means all of the time spent away from paid employment was`wasted on idling': those with smallholdings raised crops and kept poultry and animals, while the landless could glean corn and collect fuel, and produce a variety of goods to be consumed within the household or even sold. Indeed, it is possible that much so-called 'leisure' might have yielded a greater marginal return than time spent working for wages. Nor did a day off work necessarily mean the loss of a full day's production. As Adam Smith was to confirm in the 1770s, the working of short weeks by the self-employed or by those paid by the piece could simply...
