The Rich Are Different...

... they sleep more, according to a new paper referenced in an Alex Tabarrok post. As the graphic reproduced below indicates, the key to their success is greater "sleep efficiency":

The poor manage to spend the most time in bed and yet get the least actual sleep due to long "sleep latency," the time spent in bed trying to fall asleep. I've got a fairly downscale sleep profile. I'd like to see some further research on this. In the United States, it's always interesting to look at class issues through both the income lense and the education lense and see which has more explanatory power. Age, marital status, and whether or not you have children also seem like obvious demographic factors to look at. Personally, I find that a lot of my best work gets semi-done during periods of sleep latency, in that that's often when I figure out what I'm going to write the next day. Is that genuinely inefficient?

Comments

I don't know. Somehow, this has to be Bush's fault.

Steve

Posted by Steve | September 12, 2006 9:47 AM

Is watching TV in bed counted as time in bed? If so, then these findings are completely explained and unsurprising. Poor people are less likely to spend money on evenings out, and thus spend more time in front of the TV waiting to fall asleep.

I am also a toss-turner. It's not unusual for me to go to bed feeling relatively tired only to find, two hours later, that I'm wide awake. I do come up with valuable thoughts and ideas during this time, but they can only be "fixed" if I write them down before I really fall asleep.

Posted by Battlepanda | September 12, 2006 9:52 AM

I've lived in some poorer neighborhoods, in crappy apartments. Between densely packed nieghborhoods, thin walls, and thoughtless neighbors (who often had erratic schedules, swing shifts, barking dogs, cars whose drivers thought nothing of just leaning on the horn to signal their passengers to come out and get in, not to mention the occasional gunshot) getting to sleep wasn't easy. And that was without having extended family living in a small space, as often happens.

Being poor involves lots and lots of PITA annoyances just to get through the day. Or the night.

Posted by jimBOB | September 12, 2006 9:53 AM

What could people be doing in bed other than sleeping? Hmmmm....

Posted by Al | September 12, 2006 10:44 AM

It's hard to sleep when you're worried about paying the bills.

Posted by eric | September 12, 2006 12:11 PM

Noisy neighbors and neighborhoods does seem like a good explanation. I wonder if they adjusted for distance to the next dwelling place. Not only are the poor more likely to live in apartment buildings or duplexes, but if they live in single-family houses then lot sizes are smaller and neighbors closer.

Posted by MQ | September 12, 2006 12:48 PM

Someone is confusing correllation with causation here (not to mention the possiblity that having a lower income level causes lower sleep efficiency (as eric is points out). Although reading the abstract, it doesn't seem to be the original authors ...

Posted by moonbiter | September 12, 2006 1:10 PM

You people are mostly young so you don't know a major fact about aging: at some point, sleep goes bye-bye.

Sleep while you can.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | September 12, 2006 3:01 PM

My sleep latency is almost entirely pointless recounting of enjoyable theories or unpleasant anxieties. It takes a lot of mental effort to quiet my mind enough to fall asleep.

Posted by yoyo | September 12, 2006 3:13 PM

One of the few good things about the two-month period in college when I was working two jobs and sleeping 2-3 hours a night on average (and NOT because I was partying) was that I developed the ability to fall asleep on a dime, anywhere, which has stayed with me even as I've gotten older and now need at least 5 hours of sleep a night. A number of people have told me this is a valuable ability, but I mostly experience it as an inconvience, because it sometimes leads to me falling asleep in rather embarrassing circumstances when i would prefer not to (For example, I inevitably fall asleep within 10 minutes of sitting down for a flight, and if I'm not in a window seat I can wind up waking up a few hours later embarrassingly draped over my neighbor...)

Posted by flippantangel | September 12, 2006 4:46 PM

Laying in bed figuring out what you're going to write the next day is just as efficient as sitting at your desk deciding what to write right now. It may even be more efficient since you don't waste time writing stuff that you'd later erase because it was just tired dribble.

The correlation of incomes and sleep efficiency is probably a correlation of incomes and job types. Think about non-work hour productivity. Low wage work requires actually being at the job site to be productive - scan this label, count these boxes, move these boards. But higher wage work can be made more efficient by thinking about it away from the job site - brainstorming, deciding business strategy, solving engineering problems. And middle income work can be addressed only in part away from the job site - you can solve financial relationships in bed, but you still have to do the math with the actual numbers in the office. You can think about what to write, but you still have to actually write it.

In your case, the time you spend thinking about writing is time that increases or improves your writing the next day. But the lady checking groceries at Giant can lay in bed thinking about her next day just like you do and not increase or improve her next day's output at all. It's the nature of the respective jobs.

We can test this. If I'm wrong, then union memebership would have no effect on the correlation. But if I'm right, then the more union participation, the less strong the correlation. Do you know where to find historical sleep efficiency data?

Posted by The Black Monk | September 12, 2006 4:58 PM

David Brooks will soon be writing a column about how fair and proper it is for the rich to be financially rewarded for their greater sleep efficiency.

Posted by Karl Weber | September 12, 2006 5:30 PM

What about Ambien? All of New York is on Ambien, at least according to the Observer and I personally witnessed some pretty hard charging super wealthy NY power types totally dependent on Ambien for their down time. All these newer, less addictive supposedly safer sleeping pills (ambien, lunesta, sonata) are not available in generic and cost a shitload even with insurance. So the rich are better able to afford a sleep switch that turns them off immediately when they need to shut down.

Personally, I can't go to sleep without at least an hour of You Tube. And then I take my Lunesta.

Posted by Caroline | September 12, 2006 7:39 PM

"Personally, I can't go to sleep without at least an hour of You Tube."

This is one of those sentences that sounds dirtier than it is.

Steve

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