Lifetime Economics

Lifetime economics is simple: value in use time; price in work time; use time minus work time equals real profit, free time.  What I would like to do here is collect examples from people like you who visit this blog.

Here is one example.  Suppose that you are earning $10 an hour and you buy a shirt for $20.  The work time cost of that shirt for you is 2 hours.  That’s pretty easy.  What about use time?

There are several ways that you could figure the use time of the shirt.  Here is one way.  Suppose that you wore the shirt 12 hours on the first day.  Your real profit by buying that shirt would be 12 hours minus 2 hours = 10 hours.  And that is profit for only the first day that you wore the shirt.  Every day that you wore the shirt thereafter would give you a real profit of 12 hours.  There are many complications you could add to the calculation, like the cost of washing the shirt periodically, but let’s keep it simple.  The point here is that you made a very profitable purchase by buying that shirt.

Here is an example of what I would like to receive from you.  How much work time does it cost you to live where you are living?  To answer, just divide your monthly rent or mortgage payment plus utilities by your hourly wage.  Say that your rent and utilities cost $600 a month and you are paid $20 per hour.  $600 / $20 = 30 hours of work time.  What is your use time?

Again, there are several ways you could figure the use time of where you live.  Keeping it simple, the place is available for your use for a month.  A month is 24 hours for 30 days for a total of 720 hours.  Your real profit is 720 hours minus 30 hours = 690 hours.  Do the math for your place at your wage and post it here.  That way, we can practice the method and identify issues that need to be resolved.

Time Money for World Peace

We use clocks and calendars to organize all our personal and social relationships and they do a very good job.  We are not always on time for our appointments, but we know when we are early and when we are late. 
The same cannot be said about money.  We need money for most of the things we need to live, but we can never be sure how much our money is worth.  To make matters much more complicated, there are over 100 national currencies being used in the world today and none of them, zero, state on the money itself what the money is worth.  The name of the money tells us its nationality but not its value. 
By denominating money in Hours of work and by trading an hour of my time for an hour of your time world wide, we can trade fair to everyone's benefit.  That is how we can get to world peace.