The internet has taught me many things, most of them about how to please a woman, and nearly all of them wrong. But it’s also shown me that absolutely no one values his time. Things I was sure you’d have to pay people for are being done for free, all the time. There’s a fierce competition to be Amazon’s Top Customer Reviewer. About 20% of the 31,000 volunteer Wikipedia contributors spend more than three hours a day editing entries. People answer surveys on pop-up ads, phone calls and e-mail. Someone at Airbnb bragged to me that a host spent three hours helping a guest search for a purse she’d lost in their city, something a hotel couldn’t afford to pay an employee to do. My mom constantly plays some game on her phone despite the fact that, let’s face it, she doesn’t have a lot of time left.
While I’m grateful for all their contributions, as someone who vastly prefers doing things for money I’m deeply concerned about this new economy. We might be just a few years away from people writing vaguely amusing solipsistic musings on websites for free.
To move America back to its core value that time is money, I turned to Erik Hurst, a macroeconomist at the University of Chicago who has written papers like “Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades” that prove he doesn’t have the kind of spare time to think of good titles. Hurst thought my phrase wasting time was a little judgmental, and I thought he was a little judgmental for calling me judgmental. This went on for a while. Then he said that people have always spent time in ways others have found wasteful, such as whittling, stamp collecting and gluing together smaller versions of larger things. “My grandmother fancied herself quite the card player,” he told me. “If I tried to teach my son how to play canasta, he’d say, ‘I have a video game right here. Why am I wasting my time with that?'” Hurst also said technology has improved our options. “In 1960 what could people do? Watch the sunset. Oy. Every day,” he said. I pointed out that sunsets were actually pretty nice. He responded, “Every day, though?” I was starting to see why economist is way below rock drummer on the list of occupations that get you laid.
People have about eight more hours of free time per week–a full day’s work–than just 50 years ago, when they spent much more time on paid work and housework. And until the Internet, nearly all that increased free time was spent watching TV. “Is it any less valuable to watch back-to-back Seinfeld episodes than posting a blog?” Hurst asked in a way that sounded a little judgmental about people who write Seinfeld blogs. He said if you created a market for reviewing household appliances on Amazon or filling out surveys, people would balk at the few cents they were offered. But he postulated that when the market fails to provide something, people feel fulfilled by contributing it to society. I didn’t have the heart to ask Hurst why tons of people aren’t doing economic research for free.
These new opportunities to contribute for free–often while being paid for being at work–have empowered people to enjoy a salon life previously confined to the elite. They’re pundits, reviewers, computer programmers, commentators, encyclopedists, photographers, stylists, models and wits. As Clive Thompson says in his new book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.” Those are the seventh and eighth reasons why I write, after “desperate for attention,” “desperate for attention,” “desperate for attention,” “desperate for attention,” “desperate for attention” and “only other option was lawyer.”
The Internet, it turns out, is a bad capitalist. And it’s shrinking the 1% down to the people who do things that are so awful, no one will do them for free: investment banking, consulting, petroleum engineering, using a Bloomberg terminal and being friends with Vladimir Putin.
We’ve got to stop this domino effect by getting people to go back to playing dominoes. And talking in person. And pickling, knitting, crafting, making moonshine and–basically we need to find a way to move everyone to Brooklyn. Because if we don’t make ourselves stop wasting our time, the economy is going to be in real trouble.
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