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Comment by ktallett | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, this cost to the economy calculation because you aren't at your desk is not accurate. There is no way the loss is simply equivalent to your rough hourly rate for your time. There is no way to quantify whether for this or for bank holidays how much money was lost from the economy. Especially when salaried employees can still do their tasks for the week or month with or without that extra day.

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The price at which someone sells their time seems like a pretty good indicator of how much they value their time. An hour of lost leisure is still a loss, even if it doesn't affect GDP.

But salaried jobs are not time based. They are often focused on doing a task across many months, one less productive day won't mean a significant loss financially for the company. We all have less productive days, is that a direct loss financially to the gdp? What about more productive days is that me helping the gdp? Or does it balance out?

Fixing time wasted at an airport could be useful but it's not the biggest issue ever and I certainly wouldn't frame it as a GDP issue if we could fix it. More efficient for humans to do things they want to do with their time, not to do work instead.

Even trading time for money jobs, are not as clear as that, as often you produce far more money for the business than you get in return. So a simple addition of what your pay per hour is to the overall cost sum is still not accurate.

You can get a much lower value for time by measuring how much extra time people are willing to spend to save some money on groceries and other purchases.

But this is not a new problem. There are established models for the value of time in most countries, and they are used extensively when planning traffic and infrastructure. Typically the value of working time is based on the cost to the employer, while free time is valued between 1/3 and 1/2 of the nominal wage. As most trips (including commute) are done in free time, the average value of time is ~1/2 of the wage.

I don't value my commute time as free time.

Makes sense since it is part of your employment commitment.

How do you value your Saturday grocery run? The multiple hours spent at kids sports practices? Time spent doing home improvements? Those are the hours that are more difficult to accurately model.

the home improvement ones the value goes up increasingly as i get frustrated ;)

That's how much someone else values the time we've already resigned to needing to earmark for "working hours."

He calls himself a "thought leader" not a "statistics leader".

I actually think it is.

You actually become quite tired from this airport stuff, and even if you get back to the office the next day you'll be less productive.

I would agree it is tiring, but how much of an issue is one slow day at work. How do you factor in that each day is such a small part of what I assume is a bigger project or goal?

Then what are they doing at work all day??? If they spend 20% of their week slacking off then they would get paid more if they just worked the whole time and got more done

Because a salary is about doing the task you are employed to do, it's not about filling up every available moment or that you are slacking if you have free time one week. If an employee is able to find a quicker way to do the tasks they need to do that week than the norm, good for them as long as it means the work is done to the same standard and on time.

I don’t buy it. This assumes the tasks to be done are fixed, pre-determined, binary pass/fail kinds of things. Many (most? all?) salaried jobs aren’t like that: you can spend more time and do more, or so it more thoughtfully, insightfully, carefully, etc.

I would agree many aren't like that, but you can set your own deadlines and tasks and break down a big project into smaller goals. One day's difference in a big research project or when developing a piece of software is not going to change the cost or lose significant value in society or to the business. So why would that be attributed as loss in these calculations?

You still have certain work that has to be delivered by certain deadlines.

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