Workaholics.

WHILE these pages have been critical of Europe's massive welfare states in the past, one must concede that Europeans have vastly superior cocktail parties. The potables tend to weigh in their favor, but the conversation does as well: Work is hardly ever mentioned.

Go to an American cocktail party, and you are bound to be queried endlessly about your employment. Americans need to identify one another's jobs, as if knowing a man's occupation reveals everything about him.

Americans are obsessed with work--a conclusion made evident by data. Erik Hurst and Mark Aguiar, two economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research, recently used five decades' worth of surveys to measure trends in American time use. They found that the time the average American dedicates to leisure activities increased 6.75 hours per week over four decades, between 1965 and 2003.

Almost all of that increased leisure time, however, came from a reduction in time spent working at home. Back in the 1960s, chores like dishwashing took hours out of every week. Now we all have dishwashers. Time spent on the job declined only a smidgen.

Our steady commitment to work is a bit of a surprise if you think our appetite for leisure should have grown in tandem with our wealth. But ...