I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you’re 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn’t have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you’d have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you’ve foregone is that other thing you’d prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren’t exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that “spending” time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for “giving” time, and the question is merely whether it’s similar enough that the choice of language isn’t misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with—analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank—is whatever you’d have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are “giving” or “spending” time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you’re not “giving” or “spending” in a sense that much resembles “giving” or “spending” money: you aren’t worse off afterwards than if you hadn’t done that; if you hadn’t, then you’d likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I’m in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it’s like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don’t think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.
In the world where people had exactly $30 to spend every hour and they’d either spend it or it disappeared, would you object to calling that spending money? I feel like many of my spending intuitions would still basically transfer to that world.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term “spending” (but then I also feel fine talking about “spending time”) but wouldn’t want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn’t the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn’t an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they’re going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation
Opportunity cost? Spending the money on something prevents you from being able to spend it on anything else, and this fact remains true regardless for whether it “spoils” after an hour or not.
This entire dialogue reads like you and Raemon aren’t disagreeing much on what you expect the world to be like (on the object-level) but you instead have a definitional dispute about whether you are “paying” or “spending” something when you have to deal with a substantial opportunity cost, with Raemon taking the “yes” stance (which agrees with standard economic thinking that thinks of economic profit as accounting profit minus opportunity cost) and you taking the “no” position (which seems more in line with regular, non-economic-jargon language).
This is perhaps due to the fact that the two of you have cached thoughts associated with the label of “spending” more so than with the substance of it.
Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like “spending” are misleading or helpful when we’re talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person’s mind, so it’s not like there’s even a definite answer to “is it helpful or misleading?”.
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
Oh yeah, oops. I saw Raemon made the (at-the-time) most recent comment and that someone whose name also started with R was commenting upthread, so I pattern-matched incorrectly.
I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you’re 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn’t have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you’d have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you’ve foregone is that other thing you’d prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren’t exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that “spending” time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for “giving” time, and the question is merely whether it’s similar enough that the choice of language isn’t misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with—analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank—is whatever you’d have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are “giving” or “spending” time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you’re not “giving” or “spending” in a sense that much resembles “giving” or “spending” money: you aren’t worse off afterwards than if you hadn’t done that; if you hadn’t, then you’d likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I’m in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it’s like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don’t think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.
In the world where people had exactly $30 to spend every hour and they’d either spend it or it disappeared, would you object to calling that spending money? I feel like many of my spending intuitions would still basically transfer to that world.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term “spending” (but then I also feel fine talking about “spending time”) but wouldn’t want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn’t the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn’t an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they’re going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.
Opportunity cost? Spending the money on something prevents you from being able to spend it on anything else, and this fact remains true regardless for whether it “spoils” after an hour or not.
This entire dialogue reads like you and Raemon aren’t disagreeing much on what you expect the world to be like (on the object-level) but you instead have a definitional dispute about whether you are “paying” or “spending” something when you have to deal with a substantial opportunity cost, with Raemon taking the “yes” stance (which agrees with standard economic thinking that thinks of economic profit as accounting profit minus opportunity cost) and you taking the “no” position (which seems more in line with regular, non-economic-jargon language).
This is perhaps due to the fact that the two of you have cached thoughts associated with the label of “spending” more so than with the substance of it.
Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like “spending” are misleading or helpful when we’re talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person’s mind, so it’s not like there’s even a definite answer to “is it helpful or misleading?”.
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
Oh yeah, oops. I saw Raemon made the (at-the-time) most recent comment and that someone whose name also started with R was commenting upthread, so I pattern-matched incorrectly.