>Justin sez:
>>The other limit is time. Human effort is itself scarce in the sense that
>>each of us can only put out so much of it in our limited lives, so that if
>
>this is the penultimate neoclassical position underpinning the notion of
>"opportunity cost." (I'm not saying that is Justin's purpose or position, just
>that "time" is the ultimate scarce resource for neoclassicals.) Even
>if nothing
>else were 'scarce', the fact that when you are doing one thing you
>are not doing
>something else means that 'decisions have to be made'--decisions about
>'allocating' scarce resources among alternative uses, or 'competing ends.' It
>is often presented as a Robinson Crusoe story. Lionel Robbins is the classic
>reference.
Perhaps, Justin thinks that our current disposition toward time (= the ultimate scarce resource that imposes upon us a duty of constantly calculating "opportunity costs" as if it were a categorical imperative) is not a historically bound & transient one specific to the capitalist mode of production; but I believe that we won't have the same disposition under communism. Under communism the proverb "time is money" won't apply.
***** JULIET SCHOR
The Overworked American:
The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, January 20, 1993
Interviewed by David Barsamian...
_Talk about Western cultural notions of time as embodied in such adages as "Don't waste time" and "Time is money."_
I think that "Time is money" is an important one, because what happened with the transformation of the economy into a capitalist economy in the Middle Ages is that people began to see time in economic terms, which was not at all the case before that. Previous to the rise of capitalism, people had a very leisurely attitude towards time and did not see time as a scarce resource. But with the development of market systems and the growth of the economic value of time and of puritanism, which stressed the need to save time and the idea that being idle was a sin, that you had to spend every moment productively, i.e., making money, people came to have a very different attitude to time. You can even see these differences today when we look across the world at less developed societies, where the economic value of time is less because people's wages and their ability to earn money is less. So what's happened is that we have gotten ourselves into a trap in which we've become prisoners of time in two ways. One, workers are prisoners of time because their employers pay for their time and therefore are at great pains to control that time and to eke every last penny out of people. And I think in a more general sense as well, just as citizens or people existing in the society we find ourselves imprisoned by time because we see time as something that we don't have enough of and we have to squeeze every last opportunity out of the time we have.
_And it's something to be "spent," not "passed."_
A very important phrase used by the great historian E.P. Thompson. Time was "passed" in the past. People just sat and passed the time. You can even see this still in southern Europe or other parts of the world where people have that attitude to time. In the evening, men especially will be sitting at the café passing time, very enjoyable and meaningful way to spend one's time, to pass one's time. But in this country, passing time is an art form that is rapidly disappearing....
<http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barschor.htm> *****
Under communism, I'd like to think that we shall build a cafe society with a renaissance of the art of passing time (though between capitalism and communism, we'll have to live with socialism with equal rights & thus also with "time is money," as Marx says in _Critique of the Gotha Programme_).
Yoshie