Regarding the conceptualization of time, I think your angle could still benefit from including some Lakoff/Johnson (that I know you know): Might be that time is illiquid from a physics angle (which is not strictly true post-Einstein), but we still treat it like it was a thing that is conceptually very close to money. Imho it doesn’t really matter whether we CAN safe up time as long as we can genuinely feel like it and plan and evaluate our actions accordingly. Time is pretty much non-perceptual, so it doesn’t matter all that much what it REALLY is…

Money is a metaphor — as you said, it’s a fabrication that’s meaningful only in the company of others who share the delusion, but on a desert island it’s just kindling. Money is a metaphor for value and we hope that the transfer of money corresponds or at least correlates to the transfer of value, as it often does.

So, we have this ubiquitous concept that feels like a law of nature because we’re soaked in it — as infants, educated adults, everywhere we see the effects of money. When our worldview is so thoroughly infected by a concept like money, it becomes almost impossible not to apply it to things to which it isn’t fundamentally applicable.

Of course it’s possible, in the sense of a “dirty hack,” to apply money to time as if time is an economic asset, but maybe that’s just not true. Take our lives for example. Only a group can make an assessment of the economic value of a given life; for the person, that value is always infinity dollars.

But wait, you say, people choose other things over life all the time! Their country, their friends, their family, etc. They even choose to end their lives early in order to preserve their wealth for living relatives.

Yes! Exactly!

Clearly there are “assets” that can meaningfully compared to a human life (like love and other lives), since people regularly trade their lives for these things. Money, I think, is fundamentally not one of those.

Thought experiment:
—-
I’m a rich guy. I’ll give you access to an account that has $1,000,000,000 in it. You may not transfer the money, but you may spend it freely, only on yourself. In exchange for this access, I get to kill you right now. What do you say?
—-

So, I’m asserting that maybe–like money and lives– the value of time can’t rightly be compared to the value of money, despite how often we do it and how natural it feels, because the scale is too different. Maybe we should work toward a system that identifies things like lives and time, and divorces those things from money entirely.

As individuals the answer is to separate our time from income by building valuable, cash flow positive assets. That’s the “Zen Ethic”: the only way to live in a world with money that doesn’t lead to misery, is to build streams of passive income.

** No. Not at all. **

This is a really flawed understanding of basic economics.

The trade off is “I could have an additional $10″ versus “I could participate in this leisure activity.”

It’s no different from going to a department store with $40 to spend and choosing “I could have this $40 shirt” or “I could have these $40 shoes.”

You don’t buy $40 of shoes so that you can later buy at least $40 in shirts.

Neither do you need to participate in leisure time or sleep for the sole purpose of earning more money in the future.

I read Niall Ferguson’s book recently (first half was really good, 2nd half not so much) and also saw his special on PBS. Another good one is Bernstein’s “Against the Gods.” Might do a joint review soon.

Mythology and time/money… certainly something there (in the Western tradition too, as with Yama, there is an identification of Father Time with the Grim Reaper, so it seems a natural connection to make.

I also wonder if the Hindu mythological references can trigger any useful perspectives to ponder upon. Money is associated with the Kubera (lord of wealth) or Lakshmi (goddess of wealth, much higher in the hierarchy than minor deva Kubera). Both have benign and positive images in all stories. OTOH, time is called Kaala, indicating Yamaraja, the god of death, a dreaded entity. But Yama is also called Dharmaraja, upholder of virtue or principle.

Coming back to more earthly matters, the “time value of money” has adorned the initial chapter of any basic textbook on finance for decades. I thought the phrase “money value of time” is not usually heard but a Google phrase search returns 780,000 pages (against 515,000 for TVM!) and includes a link to this funny cartoon. I reckon this phrase has gained currency (unintended pun) in recent years with the growth in self-employed consultants, many of whom spend their time to make money by telling others how to make money by…

As for other religions, the protestant/catholic/zen is just quick shorthand. In a more abstract sense, I suppose the distinction between ant vs. grasshopper style time values does exist in all traditions.

Venkat

If you’d ask a nomad on the Qangtang leaving her tent to count the family’s yaks at a temperature of -48deg C. if she’d rather not swap her lifestyle with farmers that own a house and heating to go with, she’d say no. If you asked her why, she’d say because a farmer had to work.

These people do not work. They lead a life. Such a thing is not possible under the conditions of advanced division of labour. Even if your jobs and projects have lots of fun in them, disciplined work they stay.

What I would like to point at, is, that below the time money pattern lies the much older pattern of work as in work for and leisure as in being for and with yourself. The time thing is relatively new indeed as you pointed out in former posts.

The distribution of giving, taking, serving, getting served, of wishing and satisfaction is dancing on and on.

Wouldn’t it be best to think of time as activity and activity as fruit?

Perhaps, one could argue that entrepreneurs these days are operating on a Protestant work-ethic (as capitalists) in order to become time-free and leisure-heavy later in life.

Justin: That was actually meant to be a hedge statement rather than provocative. Cultural anthropologists who study time (eg. Robert Levine, “The Geography of Time” and Jay Griffiths, “A Sideways Look at Time”) make the case for time as a shared experience in some sense. I get it culturally (i.e. a party, rave or Amazonian native ritual involving some psychogenic drug), but I can’t personally understand how time could be psychologically experienced collectively in true “we” time. So I hedge. Maybe there IS such a thing as a collective consciousness that I have simply not experienced.

Spitz et. al. say no.

An interesting and provocative point, but I’m not sure if I agree. There’s definitely something here, yes … something about time-space compression under globalisation, liquid modernity, and the psychology of flow.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see the effect of increasing lifespans on the whole time-money nexus. Assuming they do, y’know, increase.