The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Keeping Track of Our Time

Quick, before we're all caught up in the reading of campaign entrails, I'd like to mention an item on the agenda of the Department of Labor's first budget hearing later this week: the American Time Use Survey, which will be eliminated if the Bush administration gets its way. Don't yawn: This is one of the most fascinating, and useful, data-collection endeavors around. And though there isn't a music video (yet) touting the cause of keeping it funded, there is a group of economists who are using their time to rally support for it. Check out this Web site if you're in need of a worthy cause to get behind when the primary season cools down.

Begun in 2003, the ATUS is a household survey that aims to track how Americans use their time when they aren't working. It's a look into the nonmarket nooks and crannies of life that isn't replicated by any other measurements. As such, it's a source of some of the most revealing information we have about how family life is changing—not to mention a resource for assessing all kinds of policies: Who's doing how much on the home front, with the kids, or with the elderly, for example? And what might that suggest about the role of the government or business? Without any data, we won't have answers. Without the ATUS, it will be easier to forget that those are important questions that need asking in the first place: That's the even larger danger of defunding the ATUS. Katharine G. Abraham, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who is now at the University of Maryland and is a driving force behind the SAVEATUS mission, put it this way to me: "It seems to me that this is a more general phenomenon—that social statistics generally tend to get short shrift relative to economic statistics.  And I also think it's self-reinforcing—if we don't have information on the non-market effects of our policy choices, for example, we tend to ignore them or at least give them less weight than they should get." Time spent figuring out where our time goes is time well spent-and it isn't even very expensive: $4.3 million a year.