Time is money

The ‘why should I pay for anything virtual?’ brigade once again make the irrational argument that intangible goods and services should be free for all. Of course they do not necessarily mean free for all, but rather free for themselves, and what they are actually proposing is that they should, for some reason, be allowed to ‘free ride’ (to use an economics term) on the payments made by others. The most obvious example of this has been the ‘free’ downloads of music and films, whose proponents have conveniently forgotten that if no one was paid, the music and films would not exist in the first place. And for sure, by initiating payment for video ‘channels’ on YouTube, an industry may evolve to create content that actually has a value – or, to put it another way, the costs of creating content may be recouped.

This might all sound rather obvious but it has important implications on how we as individuals value our time or, indeed, even recognise that our time has a value. For many popular YouTube video creators, the only ‘cost’ they face is their own time in making videos. Recently I watched several interviews with such individuals on the YouTube pricing debate, and one theme came across – none of them valued their time fairly. In fact many seemed to regard the time that they spent on producing videos as having no monetary value at all. In other words, they were happy to give their time for free to create content that was clearly valued by those who consume it. They might be of this opinion because they do not value their time highly (for example, if they cannot find work elsewhere, and so have nothing better to do), or because they enjoy it and so view it as leisure time. But in reality these arguments rarely hold water. Instead the phenomenon seen here, which is common in so many areas, is that people undervalue the price of their own time.

Let me take another example. My local plumbing company charges around £100 an hour for labour. Now to me this feels like a very inflated price. I have not been comfortable paying it, except in emergencies, and so have become a self-taught plumber to avoid these costs. And I have certainly saved myself hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds in the past decade – but have, of course, cost myself time. The problem, though, is that this implies my time is worth less than £100 an hour. If it was not I would pay up for the professional, would I not? And do I really think that a marginal hour of extra work by me is worth less than £100? I am not sure, but what I do know is that we need to acknowledge that our own time has a value and then to work out what our time is really worth to us before taking these sorts of decisions.