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Time is an important resource ... finite ... and limited.
It has been fashionable for a long time to engage in programs like 'Time Management', and employees have been held accountable for the time spent in the factory and what was done on 'company time', but the concept of time as a resource has not been particularly well developed.
The cost of worker time is taken into account everywhere in the prevailing system of business accounts. Maybe payroll systems are the most reliable of all accounting systems because when they go wrong, workers are not very forgiving.
When I was a corporate controller, the company computer where we ran the payroll went down just before the payroll run (this was in 1972)and I was faced with the prospect of 3.000 workers with no paychecks next morning. With no hope of doing the work using the computer, our little accounting department resorted to old fashioned manual calculations and check writing ... and next morning checks were available. A crude solution but it worked and the incident did not cause much of a stir. I know what would have happened if the checks had not appeared ... just an excuse
In the corporate arena, labor costs are monitored rigorously, and most companies are pretty ruthless about keeping these costs as low as possible.
But as a society we are very sloppy about people and time ... as a society, people's time has no cost and is treated without any respect.
Every day millions ... maybe billions ... of hours of time are wasted because people are commuting to work and stuck in traffic jams.
Say 1 billion of hours wasted every day at $10 per hour ... that is $10 billion a day. Every day for a 200 day work year that is $2 trillion of wasted time.
In the airline industry, the capacity of the airline is limited by the number of seats on the planes. The airline is operating at maximum capacity when all the seats are full. When a plane flies with empty seats, there is wasted revenue.
In society, the capacity of the economy is limited (in part) by the number of people and the time they are able to work ... before they get too tired. When people are not working, there is a waste of this valuable labor resource.
The logic is the same in the airline and in the society. A well run airline does everything it can to reduce the number of empty seats and the waste of revenue. There is no equivalent in society ... there is merely 'hope' that the probloem will resolve itself because there is macro-economic growth and a panoply of macro-economic tools that are completely out of touch with the day to day issue of people wasting their time.
In the TrueValueMetric (TVM) framework, society is held to account for the waste of people's time ... a productive society does not waste much of people's time, but neither does society 'exploit' people in negative ways. Freedom to choose should be enhanced in a productive society ... to choose between a vacation that will make the family happy or working working working to enhance savings for the family's future. Time gets used so that both family and society are beneficiaries.
CAVEAT. Care must be taken that the 'management of society' does not deteriorate into a 'black hole' of self interest and unproductive welfare. In the corporate world there is business accounting to ensure that the resources of the company are used in the company's interest. In society there is TVM to ensure that the resources of society are used in society's interest.
TVM metrics
There are two TVM concepts that need to be developed. These are:
- A Universal Time Unit, and
- A Universal Value Unit
Universal Time Unit ... uTu uTus exist because a person exists and time exists. There are a limited hours in a day, limited days in a life and a finite number of people in the global population.
Universal Value Unit ... uVu uVus are created when needs and/or normal wants are satisfied.
Related issues
Some reform minded economists have postulated that it is time that should be the backing for a currency, not a metal like gold, or the 'full faith of a government', or a legal entity like a bank. Clearly there are some important issues about currency and the operation of the modern monetary economy that are visible but not fully understood, it seems, by the experts, let alone the general public.
Peter Burgess
January 2012 ... Preliminary draft and placeholder
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