MDDM Ch.30 "Time and coin and little else"(303.28)

Mutualcode at aol.com Mutualcode at aol.com
Tue Jan 29 22:56:32 CST 2002


>From _F a s  t  e   r_, James Gleick, Pantheon Books, p. 242:

"Ford actually meant his calculations to sound humane. 'The
idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work,' he wrote.
'He must have every second necessary but not a single
unnecessqry second.' Ford himself, as the century's archetype
of a factory owner, made sure he was the master of those
seconds. Like all good metaphors, Time is money has a degree
of truth that varies where you stand. For Henry Ford, time
was money and was not money; he was not paid by the hour.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By,
take pains to note that 'time isn't really money:'

    If you spend your time trying to do something
    and it doesn't work, you can't get your time
    back. There are no time banks. I can give you
    a lot of time, but you can't give me back the
    same time, though you can give me back the
    the same amount of time,

"This is the clever sort of wordplay you might expect from
academic literary theorists with time on their hands. But it
is also a conundrum likely to burden social practical economists
for the next generation or more. Time, not money, takes 
center stage in the new economy. We buy and sell computer
time and golf time. The spirit of these transactions would
have been abhorrent to the Middle Ages, when the Church
understood that time belonged to no one but God and that
trying to sell it amounted to usury. We are not so finical.
Our modern economic life depends increasingly on the scarcity
of time, the competition for time, the revaluing of time, and
the redistribution of time. Where are the equations for that?"




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