[ianleeclark]

> Opportunity cost is a property of time, not culture.

I'm aware, I have a degree in economics. I'm talking about cultural values that force constant optimization onto individuals as being deeply sick.

Regardless of if every action has some minmax strategy, it's not healthy to have individuals constantly running Bayesian analysis into if they should spend time with their family, or take a second job.

[mruts]

Do you have an alterate paradigm?

[ianleeclark]

Letting people breathe

[mruts]

As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium. For example let’s say that everyone only works one day a week. Now I can double my output by working two days. So we can look at the relative productivity gains of working one extra day as a function of how many days on average everyone else works:

1 day: 100% 2 days: 50% 3 days: 33% 4 days: 25% 5 days: 20% 6 days: 16% 7 days: 0%

As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is. I’m not saying that the equilibrium is gonna be 7 days. But it’s not gonna be less than 4, at the very least. This is also the reason why the 20 hour work week will never catch on.

[ianleeclark]

> As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium.

Wow TIL.

> As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is.

It's surprising someone like yourself subscribes to the Labor Theory of Value.

[mruts]

LTV is a fundamentally classical liberal idea, so it really shouldn't be that surprising. Even so, the supply and demand model offers a much more coherent vision of prices in the marketplace.

As such, we can view working more than anyone else in supply and demand terms. People who produce the most are always in high demand, and the less of them there are, the more value a high productivity individual provides.