NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

In December, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with  [the authors of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University-Hawaii]. They discussed how the real prices of our most basic necessities--and most of our luxury goods--have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation make our planet infinitely bountiful. [...]

Tupy: [L]ooking at hundreds of different commodities, fuels, minerals, metals, even finished goods and some services, everything has become cheaper in terms of "time price." People simply have to work less in order to buy things which are essential goods and commodities in order to survive.

What is the concept of "time price"?

Pooley: We buy things with money, but we really pay for them with time. How much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing? So there's a money price that you can express in dollars and cents, but there's a time price that you can express in hours and minutes. The time price equation is real simple. It's just how much it cost you divided by your hourly income.

Time is this universal constant. You can't inflate it; you can't counterfeit it. Of the seven fundamental majors in science, six of them go back to time. It's this fundamental feature. So if you can move economics from thinking of money to thinking in time, I think we then allow that discipline to become more scientific.

We all get 24 hours a day. So if instead of income inequality you can think about time inequality, I think it's much more informative and revealing in terms of what kind of life we have.

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