Call_me_Tobi: The Importance Of Time

OF THE THREE types of input that every activity needs - material goods, skills, and time - I've come to feel that perhaps the least understood is time. In conventional economics, it is treated as a commodity ("time is money") to be bought and sold at will, and therefore needing no special consideration. Yet experience suggests that the economics of time is not quite so simple. The following excepts from The Household Economy by Scott Burns bring out some of the key issues.

"We need time. We need time to work, to eat, to sleep, and to accomplish all the daily chores of living. We also need time to know and understand our mates, our children, and our friends. Most of our relationships, in fact, require more time than we have, and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that we could never have enough. Nor is our list of demands on our time complete. We have ignored the time we need to be alone, a necessary but invariably short- changed period. . .

"All these demands come before the proliferating hardware used in the consumption of still more time - before the possession, use, and maintenance of automobiles, small and large boats, tennis rackets, skis, and golf clubs, sewing machines and looms, bathing suits, hi-fi sets, tape decks, cameras, etc. All these things - the inevitable trappings of affluence - make still more demands on our ever-diminishing store of time. They are responsible for many of the sour notes sounded as affluence becomes more general and more disappointing. . .

"The limit to all of this has been explored by economist Staffan Burenstam Linder. If it requires time to produce things, it also requires time to maintain and consume them. While this may seem obvious to the harried, it is neglected in most economic literature. If we assume that each worker has a total of sixteen hours to "spend" and that each hour of productive work also requires a half hour of maintenance or personal work time (including eating, dressing, washing, etc.) and a half hour of consumption time, then we can expect an increasing pressure on our available time if we produce an increasing amount of goods in our hours of directly productive work. If a new machine doubles the output of goodies, we then will have twice as much product for the same amount of work. While this may be a delight, it also means that we have twice as much consuming and maintaining to do in our "non-work" hours. Thus we become ever more harried as our productivity increases.