John, thanks for asking the questions and being the straight guy for me. <Am I right that you are putting a value on UNPRODUCTIVE time>. No, you are wrong. I am not putting a value on either the productive or unproductive time, however productive or unproductive it is. The buyer of the person's time is putting a value on it, as is the seller of the person's time. They agree a price. All they do is report the price they agreed to me.
I'm indifferent to how they agree, or what they agree should be produced. All I need to know is the value per hour. Then, I line all those billions of agreements up in a row, biggest to smallest, and pick the middle one. That is defined as being the Q.
Simple isn't it?
Governments paying farmers to do nothing isn't buying their time. Pay rates would have to be as agreed on a voluntary basis between consenting adults. Slaves given $1 a day wouldn't be included. Child sweat shops wouldn't be included.
You are on the trail though. Oddly, your life seems similar to mine. These days anyway. Mine used to run like your wife's but now that I don't have a watch and I lost the diary I bought so that I'd be more orderly this year, it's a bit more variable. Sometimes though, I would love an hour to last two. Other times I'm goofing off, taking a day to play a round of golf and it's great to just sit and look at the blue, blue sky, fluffy white clouds, 747s arriving or leaving, wood pigeons swooping, fantails prancing, rabbits hopping around, rosellas and cockatoos chattering and going here and then back again, surrounded by the never-ending forests. Especially it looks good through my polarized light filter sunglasses.
But whether we are running a tight ship or a goof-off timetable, or one day will require $20 to get us to do something for an hour and another will require only $100, is irrelevant. All that matters is survey day and what everyone was paid that day. If you were in the $100 an hour mood [or time of your life], then you go in the line near the top of the scale. If you have just been fired, and had to get a temporary job for a day while looking for a real one, then that's your pay rate for the day and you'd go in the line further down.
The reason not to call it an hour is because it's not an hour that a Q is worth for everyone. Some people would earn lots of Qs an hour and other's only a q per hour. Calling it an hour would be a bit silly. Telling somebody "I earn two hours per hour" would be a bit confusing. It's good to have a different word for different identities. It's difficult enough to communicate as it is, without using the same word to mean many things.
The definition is a little the definition of time. Time is actually defined by distance, which is, paradoxically, defined by time. A distance, such as a light-year, is how far light goes in a year. What's a year? Well, that's how long it takes the earth to go around the sun. Time is just the comparison of one distance with another. Whether it's counting the number of times an atom vibrates in the time it takes the earth to go around the sun, or some other movement, they are all self-referential.
But distance and time do have different identities and names. So I think it's a good idea that a Q and hour have different names. But you are on the right track. There would only be one human being paid exactly 1Q. The next one up would be paid Q1.0000000001 and the next one down Q0.99999999999 [approximately].
If we did our survey on survey day and found that in fact the median human was getting only Q0.99999999999, then we would be in deflationary mode. We would have to print and lend some more Q to increase competition for goods and services and cause prices, including the median human's, to rise every so slightly. If on the other hand the median human's pay turned out to be Q1.0000000001, then we'd be heading into inflation and we'd have to raise the Q interest rates to force return of some Q and rebalancing of supply and demand around the magical median.
John, you say you think of time as a weird currency. But that's exactly what we are using now, but with a very difficult to measure technique. We survey the price of various goods and services, adjusted for the hedonics stuff, more or less. The price of those things depends directly on what people demand their pay to be to go to the trouble of producing said widgets. The pay they demand is what they think they are worth per hour. Bingo! Exactly the same as in the Q system.
Because productivity, hedonics, automation and all that jazz makes a standard car, or computer, or software, or basket of consumer goods and services making up the CPI a difficult thing to standardize, the current system is inaccurate, though, as you say, good enough, more or less. For now anyway.
As GG [George Gilder in this instance] says, cato.org time is in short supply. It's the scarce resource. Something we all don't have enough of. Though I do think I waste enough of them.
Mqurice |
