EDIT: please before being outraged at my comment have a look at actual evidence, e.g. Time and income poverty by Tania Burchardt; bottom decile compared with top decile has 12 hours more free time a week!
I think you are misrepresenting (or perhaps, misunderstanding) the conclusion of these studies. The increased "free time" is most entirely due to high unemployment at the lower end of income.
If you control for unemployment and under-employment, the graphs pretty much flatten out (as you can observe in the later graphs of the publication you linked below)
If the argument is "bored rich folks like to play-act working in their free time", that's a very different argument than "poor people have more free time"
There's also the confounding factor of the type of work folks are doing by socioeconomic status. The person packing heavy crates part time in an amazon warehouse may be working fewer hours than the software engineer at AWS, but they also may need higher recovery time due to the toll the physical nature of the work takes on their bodies.
Is eating healthy more healthy for somebody who is rich and can hire a private chef, than it is for somebody who is unemployed and has a lot of time to cook healthy food.
Is exercise more healthy for a rich person than for a poor person?
I'm sorry but are you seriously considering "bored rich folks like to play-act working in their free time" to be real and widespread - among rich - phenomenon?
Pretty much every FAANG engineer is in the top 5% of US by net worth. The ones who got lucky on an IPO are top 2% at worst, often top 1%.
Not in the context of this discussion. Here both rich and poor have to be group large enough to actually introduce significant bias to the sauna study. Top 1% is unlikely to do that.
It is evidence that you don't want to accept because it's not compatible with your world view. And what do you offer instead - assumption that poor people are hard working folks and that rich people are slackers? And that's somehow not an attempt to shore up a purely political position? Please show ANY evidence supporting your thesis. Also it's not misuse of statistics at all! Mean is perfectly appropriate statistic here. Again - you make some assumption providing no support for it whatsoever.
Edit: it’s absolutely not true universally and it’s ridiculous to suggest it is. Comparing averages will be very tricky as well.
On a piece of paper, both kids had the exact same amount of "free time" away from school. But in real life, the second kid was actually working the whole time.
Wealthy people can buy back their time by paying for things like daycare, grocery delivery, takeout, and house cleaning. People with less money can't afford to buy these shortcuts, so they have to do all this unpaid work themselves. This eats up their free hours.
Jobs that pay less often change workers' schedules at the last minute, so they can never plan their days or get enough sleep. They also might have to ride slow public buses for a long time to get to work. This means their free time is broken into stressful little pieces, like waiting at a bus stop or waiting for an unexpected shift to start.
Even when they do get an hour to sit down, they are usually very stressed about paying bills. When your brain is constantly worrying about survival, taking a break doesn't feel relaxing, and can even make you feel more anxious.
So, while wealthy people might officially work more hours at their jobs, the money they make lets them buy real, relaxing rest. People with less money might have fewer official job hours, but their "free time" is entirely stolen by unpaid chores, unpredictable schedules, and the stressful work of just trying to survive.
The long and short of it is that poor people work longer hours; they simply receive less formal recognition for it.
Your attempts to hide these facts and paint poverty as enviable in this dimension are disgustingly inhumane.
The report I'm citing is using residuals after paid work, unpaid work and personal care. I suggest you should actually look at evidence instead of using some made up stories. Do poor people like one in your scenario exist? Of course. Are they large group? There's absolutely no reason to believe that (unless your world view depends on that) because evidence shows something completely opposite. It's surprising how gullible people here are - how can you actually believe that poor people do not have free 30 minutes a day? Please look at stats of time watching TV/day vs income. And if you want to have ACTUAL discussion I suggest you should focus on facts, not inventing tearjerker stories.
I didn't make anything up, I looked at you sources and then I did more reading.
And you can, too.
I'm not making that claim, but keep on tilting at windmills if you like.