Couch potato logic

This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. ...

But unpaid working hours for both men and women have been falling fast, indeed, faster than women's paid have been rising. So total work has declined and leisure increased.

Basically, to a wealthy US libertarian who's paid to sit at home and pull things out of his ass for a once-a-week column, sitting in front of the TV = vacation while cooking dinner ≠ vacation. Not only that, lower income groups have more "vacation" than upper income groups:

It is the lower educated, lower income groups that are seeing the greatest expansion in leisure time.

Fascinating! The lower your income, the smaller your house is and consequently the fewer chores you have to do around the house, leaving you with more time to sit and watch TV--heck, what else could you afford to do?--and we all know that watching TV = vacation (see above). Not only that, sitting around and watching TV helps fight unemployment:

That is, if everyone stays home canning there are no simple jobs in the factories for people to do. So they rot on the scrap heap of unemployment, burning cars for entertainment's sake. This European social model doesn't seem to have all that much going for it so far really, does it?

Yeah, jeez, working in an economy that depends on healthy exports because the population at home is miniscule compared to the world market; where social services like health and child care are taken out of the hands of employers to make them more competitive in that worldwide marketplace; where even a higher unemployment rate tends to help improve export competitiveness; yeah, that's gotta suck! I'd much rather work one of those minimum wage jobs and have all that "leisure" time to watch TV!