Opening 2 min
Time as a measure of wealth
Money is a poor yardstick for comparing eras, and time is a good one. When you measure the price of things in the hours of work required to buy them, the story becomes clear.
6 h → 1 swhat one hour of light for reading at night costs200 years ago, more than 6 hours of work; today, less than 1 second
−72%drop in the time price of 50 raw materialsbetween 1980 and 2018
3.5×what the same effort buys todaywhere it once bought 1 basket of inputs
Every price drop measured in time gives back hours of life: hours a great-grandfather had to work and a grandson no longer does.