= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobinHanson comments on The Instrumental Value of Your Own Time - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (45)
This post fits a pattern of a lot of (bad) anti-econ posts. You raise a question, declare the "econ" answer to be something simple you've heard, then say that can't be right because of various considerations that occurred to you, and end with a sage "its all so very complex" without offering any alternative concrete estimate. But what you call the "econ" answer is just the first, simplest econ answer - most of the considerations you raise are known to economists, who use them to create more refined estimates. You are just reinventing the wheel here - if you really want to contribute to social progress on this issue, go learn some econ.
I'd love to learn more about what economists have to say about the value of time. So far, here's what I've done:
(1) Taken college courses in introductory micro, macro, game theory, and financial theory. (2) Asked all the econ majors and professors I know if they know how to value time (3) Read the Wikipedia articles on non-standard economics to see if there were any branches of economics that might deal more subtly with time (4) Browsed bookstores in several major cities to see if the social science sections had books about how to measure time.
For whatever it's worth, I'm not "anti-econ." Isn't economics just the study of how people should and do trade off values against each other, together with some of the more interesting consequences? I see this piece as an attempt to ask questions inside economics. It's not a rigorous question, but, then, I'm just starting out.
If you really do know some people who have asked these questions before, please, have mercy and send me a link.
Fair enough. Given that this community probably finds this topic pretty relevant, does anyone have any references on more refined economic thinking on this topic?