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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
Over the last few years my career has developed such that I can place a fairly precise dollar value on an hour of my work, and I nearly always have the option of taking on more work (for commensurate pay) in any given week. And I’ve noticed two strange things.
First, there are some daily tasks which are no fun and would be cheaper to pay for than do myself, but doing them myself provides an intangible benefit.
For me, cooking is an example. I don’t really like to cook, and it would be a much more productive use of my time if I simply ate to-go most days than to prepare something at home. But there’s something about forcing myself to go through the motions of the menial task that makes me feel much more human at the end of the day.
Second, I find it much harder to relax when time has a monetary value. If I go to the movies and the movie starts off badly, I start getting antsy – what if the movie is a stinker? I could lose $XX in productivity on this!
In short, I’ve found that there is indeed an intangible value of time which may be even more important than its monetary value.
Agreed. I cycle to work most days in preference to driving. This gives me time to listen to a half-dozen Ricochet podcasts and audiobooks I check out electronically from my library. As a result, I’ve ‘read’ a couple of books per month for the last five years or so.
I never meant to imply that time only has monetary value, only that time is the ultimate resource that could be exchanged for money.
For many years I did some online tutoring in my spare time. This put me in much the same position you are in: being able to exchange my time for more work. I never felt guilty about not working. Maybe it was because the pay was much less than my day job or because I don’t feel I need more money. I tutored for fun and for the satisfaction of helping students. Money was just the cherry on top. I quit last year partly because I valued my time more that the rewards of tutoring. More time for Ricochet!
Yeah, but what about that History Channel show about Nostradamus? Or about the aliens from outer space? Those are educational.
That is a saucy poem! Hadn’t read it before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.
If life expectancy were 100,000 years, what would the speed limit be? Would we walk everywhere, would we dig coal, build steam engines, cross oceans, or roof houses? What chances would we dare not take?