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The Price of Your Time
When I was a graduate student, lo these many years ago, my roommate was college physics classmate who had switched to economics in grad school. In our conversations he would frequently annoy me by asking, “What about the price of your time?” In those days, it seemed like nothing more than an irritating econ grad student tic.
With advancing age, or perhaps because of my increased respect for the discipline of economics, I’ve come to see the wisdom of my roommate’s emphasis on the overriding value of time. Time is the only resource that is fundamentally limited to us as individuals. We plan our lives with the knowledge that our time is limited. People use debt to finance purchases because no one wants to save for 30 years to buy a house or several years to buy a car. It’s important to get it now. Presidential elections are important because you can’t simply wait for eight years of Hillary or Bernie to blow over. Sure, the electorate may come to its senses some day and finally understand that socialism is a bankrupt ideology. It took about 70 years in Eastern Europe. I can’t wait for that long.
Now imagine that you could expect to live 1000 years. Postponing the purchase of a house for 30 years doesn’t seem onerous. In your 900-year career there will be plenty of time to try different occupations and make mistakes along the way. On the other hand, imagine you could only expect 30 years of life. No one would invest 15 or 20 of those years in education.
Our material wealth has increased dramatically over the centuries yet people continue to conduct their lives in much the same way. The necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter are no longer scarce in Western society with one exception: time. Visions of a post-scarcity economy, a sci-fi cliché, fail to account for this fundamental fact. To the degree that it can be attained, Western societies are already post-scarcity.
In his book Human Action, von Mises makes the distinction between scarce goods and scarce time because of “…uniqueness and irreversibility of the temporal order.”
The economization of time is independent of the economization of economic goods and services. Even in the land of Cockaigne man would be forced to economize time, provided he were not immortal and not endowed with eternal youth and indestructible health and vigor. Although all his appetites could be satisfied immediately without any expenditure of labor, he would have to arrange his time schedule, as there are states of satisfaction which are incompatible and cannot be consummated at the same time. For this man, too, time would be scarce and subject to the aspect of sooner and later.
Or, as Andrew Marvell put it in verse:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
Addendum: Life expectancy at birth has only increased by about a factor of two over the last millennium, with much of the increase attributable to a decrease in infant mortality. Since infants don’t make life decisions, a more meaningful measure is life expectancy of children or young adults. A 10-year-old could expect to live to age 44 in ancient Rome, within a factor of two of current life expectancy in the US, about 80. Barring any dramatic breakthroughs, expect this number to change very slowly in the future.
Published in General
Your post truly resonates with me, DrLorentz. Yes, “Times winged chariot . .” It’s very much with my recently retired husband and I. And as you stated . . . if Hillary wins the election . . we’d not be as confident of seeing things ‘righted’ as we would have decades ago.
“I can’t wait for that long.” Time is contracting and precious now. As the horizon draws closer, I try to remain mindful of how lucky we were to be born where and when we were.
@drlorentz, thanks. Excellent note.
Once upon a time, I asked my wife to fill out a “money value of time” form (that I downloaded from the WSJ) before she asked me to do any home improvement or repair project.
Now she just hires people rather than fill out the form, and we are both happier as a result.
“Time is money” sounds like a hackneyed slogan used on late-night infomercials. Actually, it’s a profound truth in the sense that employers pay workers for exclusive access to their time. In working, you’re giving away some precious moments of your limited lifespan in exchange for the ability to obtain other goods or services (i.e., money). It may not be worth it.
Even if you could not have made any money during the time you would have spent doing repairs, your time is valuable to you because it is a scarce resource. An hour spent on a repair is one you will never get back. Unless you enjoy the work, that hour is a cost imposed upon you. For me, most repair jobs are an unpleasant chore.
Economists speak of the disutility of work. However, if you enjoy your work, the model breaks down. You are not exchanging your precious time for money since it’s something you might do anyway. I wonder how many people fall into this category.
The worksheet has “Do you enjoy this type of work” box (which I told my wife to assume the answer was no).
I’m more than happy to spend the afternoon changing the brake pads on my car (in part because it enables one of my hobbies, driving my car on the track), but I can’t stand anything that requires carpentry or electrical wiring skills. With respect to the latter, it took my wife years to understand that my electrical engineering degree did not give me any skills applicable to installing a light switch.
Thanks for the post. Reading it was time well spent.
On the other hand, cash is king.
Trust me, the handyman is cheaper than a divorce.
Time is king. When the grim reaper comes, there’s no negotiating for more. On the other hand, since time is money, I suppose both are kings.
Thanks for giving up some of your scarce and precious time to read it.
Whenever I pass a bus stop on my drive somewhere, I mentally ask the people there how much of their lives they are wasting waiting for the government transportation. I’m betting they never think of it that way. My time and my liberty are well worth the cost of my automobile.
I do almost all my own home improvement projects. It is what I enjoy doing with my time. That, or old car improvement projects.
I raised my kids not to think about what things cost in dollars, but in time. Whenever they wanted to buy something, I asked, “How much time did it take you to earn that much money?” Often after considering it this way, they changed their mind.
Now, as adults it is automatic to them. If you asked them how much their rent is, they would reply, “It cost me xx hours per month”. They also talk about how many hours they have to work for groceries, and other goods.
By the way, do you realize you work 1 out of every 7 work days to pay Social Security (unless you meet the maximum contribution before the end of the year).
That’s good. If more people thought about time and money this way they would have a more rational approach to national economic policy. Then maybe Bernie Sanders and his ilk wouldn’t be getting much traction.
Sometimes it works the other way. I’d rather pay someone else to get dirty crawling under the house to fix the plumbing rather than do it myself. Time spent at my work is more pleasant. Besides, both parties benefit from specialization according to Ricardo.
Don’t remind me. On second thought it’s important to be reminded of this unpleasant, yet fundamental, fact.
You might be surprised. The issue is that if you don’t have a car, you have to spend that time if you want to get to work. And your work options are limited to places and shifts that are served by the public transportation.
Mr. Amy has to deal with this with his employees. They’re smart kids; they could do better than making grilled cheese sandwiches for $9/hr. But several of them don’t have cars, so they have to work within walking distance of a bus stop, and within walking distance of home for the ones who have late night shifts at the better paying dinner-targeted restaurants. And those apartments are of course more expensive.
It’s one of the ways the poor stay poor — they not only lose so much time because they can’t afford capital investments like cars, but they also lose the ability to work the hours and jobs to afford the car or they pay extra in housing to have the privilege of working.
Revolutionary Road
Materially.
As I reflect on this thread, it occurs to me that what is shocking is how much time most people waste. The average person watches nearly five hours of television a day.
It has literally never been easier in the history of mankind to get a world class education for free, and yet most people would rather watch reality TV than improve themselves or their earning potential.
The average of 5 hours per day has an unexpected ethnic breakdown. From the link:
There’s an interesting message for us in there but I’m not quite sure what it is.
That the most racist amount of television to watch is 155.3 hours.
Nice post which resonates with me ever more in my (mostly) retired state. Thanks.
Time advantage is a huge advance the wealthy can afford.
Cooks, maids, drivers, executive assistance. What all these services are really buying is not food, cleanness, transportation, or note taking. All these services are buying time.
The thing I really want in live is not a huge mansion or a yacht. What I want is a full time staff.
The flip side is that the time you spend waiting for and riding on public transportation can easily be spent doing something you enjoy doing (reading, listening to music/podcasts, watching a movie/TV show, maybe even doing some work) instead of stressing about the traffic conditions you’re driving through.
As I settle in to my retirement, I spend moments noticing how quickly time is speeding by. My husband and I say to each other, almost every Friday, “Where did the week go?” It isn’t that we’re not using our time well, because we both have things that we love to do and that are fulfilling; it’s more like we realize that there are fewer days ahead of us than behind us. Each day is precious. Thanks for the post!
Anyone who puts his life and decisions on hold waiting for political improvement and a more favorable civic culture, will die before he or she does anything. Pursue your interest and take the consequences. If Hillary is elected, the point of not having time will be moot. Everything will get worse, the nation may enter a period of gridlock akin to that currently existing in Brazil, with political crisis compounded by economic crisis compounded by environmental and health crisis in a country with a weak civic culture to start with. If you bought tickets for the olympics, sell them on eBay for what you can get and move on. “Tis of the essence of life here that life has for us on the rack nothing but what we somehow chose. Thus are we wholly stripped of pride in the pain that has but one close, bearing it crushed and mystified.”
It all depends. If you have the time to spare and have a good book to read and would rather read than deal with traffic, a bus ride can be a pleasant alternative.
[Oh, I see that Weeping beat me to this response.]
That’s fascinating. I choose to ride the train rather than drive 25 minutes to work, because it gives me the time to do a little reading that I could never do in traffic. So we value the same thing, but chose opposite paths to get it.
Edit: I see Weeping got here ahead of me at #23. Oh well, sometimes the train is late.
It depends on the quality of the transportation and the nature of the community. Mr. Amy has a 25 minute drive to work by car. It’d be a 1.5 hr trip by bus. Or he could live closer to work, and we’d pay an extra $300-400/month in rent.
Having one’s own transportation can be the most valuable thing in the world.
The bus takes about an hour, and I get motion sickness reading on a bus, so I take your point. One end of my commute is Newark, by the way, which despite its insistence on social democrat city government has improved a great deal over the past years.
Uh-oh, an old people post!
I kid. This is also a topic I’ve thought quite a bit about myself lately (then again, I’m also no longer such a spring chicken…maybe a summer rooster).