The price of your own hour

Researchers asked 98 working adults what they would do with an unexpected $40. Two percent named something that would save them time.¹ The same team surveyed 818 Dutch millionaires about paying others to do tasks they disliked. The millionaires did this far more often than ordinary samples in four countries, but somewhere between four in ten and just under half of them, by the paper's own table and text, spent nothing on it at all.¹ Money was no obstacle. Something else was.

The usual advice, buy time rather than things, treats that obstacle as an oversight. It is closer to a mechanism. Whatever makes your hour valuable also makes it hard to stop selling.

Money cannot add hours to a day. What it buys is control over the hours you already have, in three forms. You can pay to change which things fill them: a cleaner, a delivery, a ride. You can pay to change when: the flight at a sane hour, the job that pays less and lets you set your schedule. And you can pay for whether: savings that let you decline to sell your hours at all, for a while.

The third is the deepest, and it does not look like spending. When Raj Chetty studied unemployment insurance, he found that 60 percent of the extra time people stayed out of work when benefits rose came from a liquidity effect rather than blunted incentives, and that lump-sum severance lengthened job searches among households without savings.² Cash bought the right to refuse the first offer. Whether the longer wait led to better jobs is a question that study leaves open. An hour you are not forced to sell is an hour you own.

Every purchase of time is a trade. You sell your hours at your wage and buy someone else's at theirs, and the trade looks better the more your hour earns. It also has another side: each hour bought from a person is an hour that person sold, usually for less than the buyer makes. The freedom on one side of the trade is a wage on the other, and it exists because of the gap.

By the arithmetic, people with valuable hours should buy time eagerly. Many do not, and the reason is in how the value of an hour is felt. When Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer led people to think about the economic value of their time, they reported more time pressure and behaved less patiently.³ In surveys from five countries, Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee found that adults in higher-income households report more time stress for the same hours of paid and household work.⁴

Scarcity here is partly a price. The more an hour could earn, the more every hour that is not earning seems to cost. Money raises the price of your own time, and that makes an hour harder to give away, including to yourself. To buy one back you have to accept, for that hour, a worse rate than you could get. Buying time is less a purchase than a decision about which of your hours you will refuse to sell.

For people who make the decision, it seems to work. Across surveys in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, those who paid others to take over disliked tasks reported modestly higher life satisfaction at every income level. In a small experiment, working adults reported better moods on a weekend when they spent $40 saving time than on one when they spent it on a thing.¹ That evidence covers delegation only; nothing comparable tests flexibility or savings.

Then the bought hour has to survive. The twentieth century ran a long experiment with time-saving machines. By Valerie Ramey's reconstruction of American time diaries, prime-age women's time in home production fell about six hours a week from 1900 to 1965 and twelve more by 2005, while men's rose by thirteen; across the whole population it rose slightly.⁵ The historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued that household technology "shifted the burden of domestic labor from adult men and children to mothers and wives".⁶ The machines saved work, and the hours went to other people and to higher standards of what a clean house required.

A purchased hour is exposed to the same forces. If the cleaner frees Saturday afternoon, whether it becomes an afternoon or two more hours of email is a second decision, and the money does not make it.

Some purchases do not return an hour at all. A delegated task often comes back as management: explaining, checking, rescheduling. And some work changes when someone else does it. Cooking for a family, sitting with a parent, coaching a child's team are not chores with a time cost; the time is the point.

So money's best use may well be control over time, and the purest form of it is the savings that let you say no. But money does not hand over that control. It raises the price of each of your hours and then requires you to give some of them up anyway, at a loss, on purpose.