Cash-rich,

for bespoke courses. With less cash, cheaper options such as watching TV or reading a book seem more practical. A time-use diary would record all of these activities as “leisure”, but curling up at home with a book is not only cheaper than going to the theater, but induces less of a sense of time stress.

I’m not saying we should shed a tear for the millionaire who feels she doesn’t have enough hours in the day to spend all her money. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that such feelings are common among richer people.

Another perspective comes from comparing education levels to how people spend their time across a week, as the economists Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst and Luigi Pistaferri have done.

People with more education — say, more than 12 years — tend to be richer. But do they also tend to be busier? It seems so. We have US surveys from around 1985 and 2005, and they show that less-educated people have more leisure time than those who are highly educated. (They also had more leisure time in 2005 than in the 1980s.) In contrast, the more highly educated group — who already had less free time in the 1980s — have been getting busier since.

There’s a gender dimension here too. Both in the 1980s and the 2000s, the people with the least leisure time were highly educated women, while those with most time to kill were less-educated men.

The gap between these two groups has widened. While less-educated men have gained 2.5 hours of leisure time a week (to a total of 39 hours), the more-educated women have lost two hours a week (bringing them down to a total of 30 hours). Women also feel more time-stressed than men, even after adjusting for other factors.

All these averages, of course, conceal a great deal of variation. The extra 2.5 hours of leisure a week that less-educated men have gained sound rather pleasant. But behind that average is a growing minority with 60, 80 or 100 hours a week of “leisure time” — better described as unemployment. Although research suggests that some young men seem not to mind unemployment, given that computer games are now so awesome, most people hate it.

So while there are many struggling people who are holding down several different gigs, juggling childcare and burning time on long commutes, overall the evidence shows that the rich are time-poor and the poor are time-rich.

Is this any compensation for the other inequities of life? Probably not — although it depends how much you enjoy your leisure and whether you enjoy your job. Recent studies of people doing gig work or shift-work on irregular hours find that a lot of them love the flexibility but many others hate the uncertainty or want more work.

Research on happiness shows that people — on average — tend to prefer leisure to work. On the other hand, it also shows that being unemployed is utterly miserable. Prof Hamermesh writes, “I would be very happy to wager that most people would choose to feel time-poor rather than income-poor.” It’s hard to disagree.