Saturday, April 6, 2013

Couch Potatoes of the World Unite

Version 0.4

Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!
You have nothing to lose but your free time!

Yes, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, but there's a serious notion underneath. We need to rethink economics, and I'm even going to outline a different way of thinking about it. I hope my conclusion surprises you: The couch potatoes are more valuable and more human than you think and they actually contribute more to our economy than they are usually given credit for.

Let's start by analyzing economic activity and classifying it into three categories. There is an essential category that keeps us afloat, an investment category that makes things better, and everything else that makes us enlightened human beings. The rest of this post is basically explaining those three ideas and offering a few of the most basic observations, but my real questions are about the numbers. I've been looking for this kind of information for some years, and so far I've been coming up dry. Isn't ANYONE else thinking along these lines? Please point me at the right economists. The comments are open for such purposes!

The essential category includes such things as producing food and clothing and maintaining houses and essential infrastructure. This is what you have to do just to keep life at the current physical level. One way to think about it is as a metric of the productivity of the civilization. A more advanced society will do this more efficiently. Think of it as an average of the total working time. In an advanced society, perhaps the average working time to produce the essentials will be 2 hours per week, and the rest of the economic activity is for other purposes, whereas a relatively less advanced society may require 30, 50, or even 80 hours of weekly work from each individual just to stay afloat. In other words, at some point a society cannot sustain itself because there aren't enough hours in the week, and there are poor and effectively dysfunctional societies that really are dependent upon outside assistance just to attempt to survive.

The investment category includes all of the spending that improves productivity and thus reduces the economic expense of the essential category. That includes things like building better infrastructure or creating better machinery for more efficient factories, but it also includes less obvious things like technical education and even abstract research where the results are years away and quite unpredictable. You can actually evaluate the spending in this category based on the RoI (Return on Investment). The easy calls are cases where you can calculate that developing a certain device will cost a certain amount of money and it will take a known amount of time to make profits that equal that amount of money. Yes, the future is never certain, but some things are relatively easy to predict and the investments in those cases are easy to justify. I actually think this part of the economy should be evaluated in competitive terms. A nation that wants to advance relative to other societies should spend more in this category, for example by tweaking the tax incentives to encourage people to shift more money from the next category...

Now we're ready for the category of everything else, and that's where the couch potatoes enter the picture as representatives of the leisure class. Yes, it's a stereotype with negative connotations, but there really are a lot of economic activities in the leisure class that are represented by the people who watch television or who read books. This category has a lot of interesting attributes. For example, it is divided into a creative and consuming side, and advanced societies have already passed the threshold of maxing out. Let's take a simple example of books: We already publish more new books than any person can possibly read, even if that person was free to spend all of his time reading new books. Another aspect is that the demand on the consuming side is never satisfied. You can only eat so much food or wear so much clothing, but the only limit on your leisure time is the time itself. A related aspect is that many of these leisure goods are not consumed, since the same movie can be viewed by any number of people. What mostly counts in this part of the economy is how people vote with their time. In the example of an advertising-based economy, it really matters to the advertisers if the couch potatoes vote for football or baseball.

Okay, I guess that's enough food for thought. As noted earlier, I've been thinking about these ideas for some years, but so far I haven't found any leads and especially I haven't been able to find any numbers. If you know of such, comments with pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Oh yeah, I better explain the subtitle about "free time"... In the original version it was "humanity", but later on I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. It is the time after all.

10 comments:

  1. Well, interesting to see how many people have read it, but apparently no one has a lead to such research? Or perhaps more likely no one can understand what I'm asking about?

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  2. Well, as of this date, the most optimistic claim of the google is that as many as 66 unique other people may have cast their eyes upon this comment, but none of them had any leads or questions... Too far out there, eh?

    Anyway, one more wrinkle involves considering the relative value and polarity of investments. It isn't just a form of the famous RoI (Return on Investment) thing, but that these kinds of economic models should also consider investments with negative polarities, spending that actually leads to future wastes of time.

    The interesting example that came to mind involved how to assess excess eating. Sometimes a bit of body fat will help you get past a tough time, but obesity will actually cost the bearer in the most definite form of time--obese people have lower life expectancies.

    Anyway, I'm continuing to look for traces of anyone studying such time-based economic theories, and haven't seen any leads in the two months since I posted this. I wish I remembered when I first started thinking about the topic, though I'm sure that the book called Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz greatly influenced my thinking on the topic, and that was over a year ago.

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  3. Upon reflection, I'll note that I regard most of this blog as covering Ekronomics 101. Since then, I've been "working on" two solution approaches that derive from the analytic perspective.

    One is for pro-freedom anti-cancer taxation. I think a properly designed progressive profits tax based on market share could encourage good corporations to reproduce by fission. One result would be more choices and more freedom in the market.

    The newer idea involves a guiding sales tax, where essential goods and services would be taxed at the lowest rate and recreational goods and services would be taxed at the highest rate, with investment-related stuff in the middle.

    The underlying principle there is that the government needs taxes to function, but taxing is more of a disincentive than a motivator. The good goals need to determine the total budget, but within the constraints it makes sense to use higher taxes "against" less desirable behaviors.

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  4. Kind of disappointed there's been so little reaction to this joke over the years, but maybe that's partly because the google seems to be hiding all of my blogs, even when I know just what I'm searching for and where to look...

    Anyway, on today's visit I actually made a significant change to the subtitle. Where it now says "free time" it used to say "humanity", but I recently realized that time is the entire point.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  7. I feel like I should clarify why I removed that long two-part comment. Mostly it was the "Anonymous" attribution. However, it was also rather incoherent. Rather suspect that it was actually disguised advertising, but tweaked to attempt to make it sound like it had some relationship to the blog, but not actually relevant.

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    Replies
    1. "Let's start by analyzing economic activity and classifying it into three categories. There is an essential category... but my real questions are about the numbers. I've been looking for this kind of information for some years, and so far I've been coming up dry."

      "Well, interesting to see how many people have read it, but apparently no one has a lead to such research? Or perhaps more likely no one can understand what I'm asking about?"

      Part 1 addressed these questions giving empirical data from people who have lived within certain limits.  If that was not the kind of data you wanted, cool, you should have said that.

      "A more advanced society will do this more efficiently. Think of it as an average of the total working time... 2 hours per week, and the rest of the economic activity is for other purposes...relatively less advanced society [need to spend more time]may require 30, 50, or even 80 hours of weekly work..."

      While part 1 might address the hours a week element to some degree, part 2 was meant to address the philosophical question of what is essential and for whom?  I tried to capture skills and how that impacts the amount of hours you need to work in a lifetime to create enough reserves to then not have to work.  I also noted that essential is a matter of opinion.  Is essential 2k cals and a 5x7 living area or is essential a swank roof top apartment in Greece looking over the sea with a nice slice of pizza and a beer?  Basically part 1 gives a rough minimum resource level to hit somewhere in the typical middle class American/European life, assuming enough skill while part 2 captures that the data given in part 1 is likely wrong for the majority of people who hold different values and thus your categories (like "essential") need refining, at least to me.  

      Your other categories also have similar issues and I tried to address those. What if free time creates a "RoI" purely due to a hobby becoming profitable? See video game esports.  Could I have broken it apart more?  Probably.  But re-reading it now it still makes logical sense to me.

      Regarding being anonymous, I found this from link spam in a semi-related slashdot post.  If you don't get /.'s great history of the anonymous coward, I suppose that's your failing. As for my choice to be a AC, I have not read enough of your blog to know if I want my name associated with it.  Since Google required full names back in the day, I either put my full, googlable name up or I go AC.  I went AC.  I'm a coward by trade. If you really want to know me as a human add a contact me widget to your blogspot template and I could have emailed you directly.  As a retired 35 year old, if I decide to go back to work someday I have to consider my future employer googling me. *shrug*.  I am a member of ERE's forum, but have less than 30 posts to my name, so not exactly hugely active.  Feel free to post this or delete it as you see fit.

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    2. I glanced over it, didn't detect any probable spam advertising and therefore validated it, but I don't feel any motivation to read and study your comment more seriously. It sounds like you might be sincere, but who are you and why would I care?

      On that basis, I'm only going to respond to the part that caught my eye, your reference to AC on Slashdot. Certainly not a defense of your reputation or a motivation to read your long and possibly thoughtful comment. There are only two exceptions I make for ACs on Slashdot. One is AFTER a lot of other people have modded an AC comment into visibility (most often for "Funny"). The other is when an interesting comment is unclear without context that leads into an AC comment.

      However, I also feel that I should apologize for deleting what might have been some substantive thoughts without giving them the consideration they might have deserved. Oh wait. To whom could I apologize?

      I've always had a basically negative attitude towards abuse of anonymity, but it's probably exacerbated this week by Jaron Lanier. Though I disagree with him on many issues, on this topic we seem largely in agreement... However he didn't really consider the specific cases where anonymity can be justified. In my analyses, so far every justification I've found for secrecy is based on prior secrecy.

      Don't know if you're abusing anonymity. Don't care because AC is not a "real" person to me. However I know that the topic of anonymity is definitely peripheral to this topic...

      Oh wait again. Now I see a way to make the topic more relevant... Should a "couch potato" be able to contribute to the economy on an anonymous basis? Many ideas come to mind, but no clear answer. Leaning against because of the porn that paid for the Internet (as stated by an ISP founder I used to work for before he was murdered).

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  8. Basically I regard this blog as yet another dead end, but because it still comes up in some websearches, I'll include a link to the latest version. It's at https://wt.social/post/the-future-of-work/fj867ib5435373094904

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