Lots of people in EA/rationality spheres are interested in concepts of ‘the value of one's time’ or ‘trading money for time’ - for example they might talk about whether it's worth it to hire a cleaner, or take an uber rather than a bus, because it costs you money but saves you comparatively more time.
In these discussions, it's usually assumed that the value of your time is something like your hourly salary or hourly rate. (This seems true from the first few 'non-EA-world' google results too). So e.g., if you make $20/hour (the theory goes), it's not worth it to spend an hour to save less than $20 (by, say, taking a slower and cheaper bus rather than a faster and more expensive train).
But I’m not sure sure this is the right way to look at it. Everyone needs rest. Let’s imagine that A can work the standard 40 hours a week, but if they try to work more than that, they quickly become tired and unproductive. And let’s imagine that they make $20/hour (based on dividing their salary by hours worked). You might think that by putting
... show moreLots of people in EA/rationality spheres are interested in concepts of ‘the value of one's time’ or ‘trading money for time’ - for example they might talk about whether it's worth it to hire a cleaner, or take an uber rather than a bus, because it costs you money but saves you comparatively more time.
In these discussions, it's usually assumed that the value of your time is something like your hourly salary or hourly rate. (This seems true from the first few 'non-EA-world' google results too). So e.g., if you make $20/hour (the theory goes), it's not worth it to spend an hour to save less than $20 (by, say, taking a slower and cheaper bus rather than a faster and more expensive train).
But I’m not sure sure this is the right way to look at it. Everyone needs rest. Let’s imagine that A can work the standard 40 hours a week, but if they try to work more than that, they quickly become tired and unproductive. And let’s imagine that they make $20/hour (based on dividing their salary by hours worked). You might think that by putting in an hour of time, they get $20 ‘out’. But in order to put in 40 hours at their job, they need to also rest for the remaining weekly hours (128). So if their weekly salary is 40 hours x $20/hour = $800, then in order to ‘get out’ that money, they really need to put in not just their working hours, but also the 128 rest hours in between (without which they couldn’t do their working hours). So the real value of their hour is not $800/40, but $800/168, which is $4.70 — quite a bit less!
I think this perspective could be applied to other things: the production of value often requires more hidden, shadowy supports.
Consider a big company where the CEO makes millions, but the factory workers make minimum wage. From a pro-capitalist/more classical-liberal perspective, this might be fair enough: the CEO has unusual specialist skills that generate lots of value for the company, whereas the factory workers don’t. If you put a random factory worker in the CEO role they’d probably do way less well at it.
But from a more leftist/anti-capitalist perspective, this is actually unjust, because the CEO couldn’t make *any* money without the factory workers. This is why unionizing and striking works (and why progressives usually support it): you can coordinate to prove to the bosses that they really need your labour.
This feels analogous to the work hours thing: the value produced by the CEO depends on the support of the workers who actually make the product.
For another example, people who work in the formal economy are often supported in hard-to-see ways by loved ones labouring outside the formal economy. The stereotypical example is a man who works 9-to-5 (for pay) while his wife cleans, cooks, does admin, and looks after the children (for no formal pay). Feminists have talked about this a lot. It seems as if the man’s money comes from the labour he puts in; but in fact, he can work the hours he does only because his other needs are taken care of.
Another possible example: often when we think of social impact, we think of individual heroes or geniuses. But usually, such people couldn’t do what they did without the support of more ‘average’ and less famous people who took care of their basic needs, or created communities and institutions they could thrive in.
It strikes me that which lens you take is influenced by your politics: liberals, centrists and libertarians might be inclined to focus on the individuals who "actually" produce the value, whereas socialists, leftists, anarchist might be more inclined to focus on the collectives and communities that work together to enable valuable things to be produced. And surely both lenses capture some truth.
I’m not really sure how coherent this thought is or how well the examples really map. Thoughts?
Jen Blight
in reply to Amber Dawn • • •I feel similarly about this. I tend to want to think in "models" rather than eg. procedures or rules and can have a hard time learning from or teaching people who don't. But I also think there are some classes of skills where having the model helps but the limiting factor in still drilling things into my System 1 brain.
For example, I recently started learning the violin but I'm already proficient in music theory from studying piano as a kid. The bulk of my learning in the past year and a half has been about developing different types of muscle memory around fingering/bowing and being able to listen to how that influences the sound. Having the model helps me identify gaps and structure my practice to target specific skills but I still need to do scales every day.
I suspect a lot of music curricula (an language, sports, etc.) are structured the way that they are so that learners can get started on drilling those sorts of low-level skills in parallel with developing the theory. The disadvantage is that sometimes certain things don't "click" until later. Eg. I'm also in a
... show moreI feel similarly about this. I tend to want to think in "models" rather than eg. procedures or rules and can have a hard time learning from or teaching people who don't. But I also think there are some classes of skills where having the model helps but the limiting factor in still drilling things into my System 1 brain.
For example, I recently started learning the violin but I'm already proficient in music theory from studying piano as a kid. The bulk of my learning in the past year and a half has been about developing different types of muscle memory around fingering/bowing and being able to listen to how that influences the sound. Having the model helps me identify gaps and structure my practice to target specific skills but I still need to do scales every day.
I suspect a lot of music curricula (an language, sports, etc.) are structured the way that they are so that learners can get started on drilling those sorts of low-level skills in parallel with developing the theory. The disadvantage is that sometimes certain things don't "click" until later. Eg. I'm also in a swing class and for the first few weeks I did fine in the class but would get really lost and frustrated in the social dance. It wasn't until the instructors starting talking about "frame" and "connection" and how that enables leaders to transmit their intent that I was able to tune in to what following was supposed to "feel" like and adjust my approach and I wish those concepts had been introduced earlier.
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