| Economics Meet Time-Prices It all began with my encounter with William Nordhaus of Yale. Specifically, his thinking in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (2006) by economic philosopher and blogger David Warsh. In 2013, Nordhaus received the Nobel Prize in Economics for some routinely overwrought political correctitude on climate change. As usual, the Nobel committee grants its awards to economists for their greatest mistakes (such as Milton Friedman's erroneous theories on money rather than his celebrations of freedom). But two decades before Norhaus's Nobel, in a 1993 essay on "Do Real Income and/Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not," the Yale economist introduced time-prices as a way of calculating innovation. Nordhaus showed that by concentrating on monetary prices, rather than on "real labor costs" measured in time, economic historians hugely underestimated the improvement of living standards forged by the industrial revolution. Measured by labor hours to buy lighting, Nordhaus showed that while historians wrote about "dark satanic mills," the world was exponentially expanding the hours of the day. Epitomized by the move from whale oil to kerosene, by 1900, the cost of light plummeted to merely one-tenth of 1% of its level in 1800. Although, the most important work in the economics of time came earlier this year from Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy. They showed that time-prices — measuring the value of commodities by the hours of work entailed to purchase them — disproved most prevailing economic data. For example, population growth does not consume resources so much as increase their abundance. While the population was growing 71% since 1980, the time-prices of the 50 key commodities for human life were dropping 72%. Human beings are not chiefly mouths; they are minds. Today, you can get all the movies you can eat, or even imagine, let alone watch, for mere minutes of work. This is the true price of anything: the amount of time you have to work to buy it. Pooley writes: "A blue-collar production worker in the U.S. earns around $32.06 per hour in compensation. The average streaming bill costs around 16.4 minutes of work each month with Hulu at the low end at 11.2 [minutes] and Amazon Prime at the high end at 24.3 [minutes]. Content has almost a zero-marginal cost. As content producers recover their fixed costs, prices are approaching their marginal costs. On a title-per-minute of work basis, Amazon Prime is the best deal at over a thousand titles. You'll only get 47 with Disney, but the quality may be significantly different. On average, you will have access to 515 titles for a minute of your work today. Go back to June of 1980 when CNN first aired and compare your costs. So how do government economists account for this abundance in their GDP estimates? Good question." They don't. Pooley concludes: "Why all this abundance? Human innovation and creativity thrives when people are free to pursue their ideas. It's no surprise that this creativity is the product of the US where artists and musicians and storytellers and engineers and entrepreneurs all cooperate to create this fantastic wealth for the rest of the planet. For all their problems, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have made our lives exponentially more abundant." Today's Prophecy As I have long predicted, the next likely surge of video abundance will come from three-dimensional holographic images rendered ubiquitously over an upgraded internet of things (IoT) interconnected by Wi-Fi6 and 5G wireless with security from the blockchain. But perhaps the Rolling Stones said it best. "You can't always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you can get what you need." So I wait around for Jules Urbach at Otoy to render the future in cheap ubiquitous 3D like Doug Trumbull's macro-analog did expensively in his ride film breakthrough, Back to the Future: The Ride. It happened in 1993, the same year that Nordhaus was shocking economists with his time-prices for lighting. We had to wait until 2019 for Pooley and Tupy to demonstrate the vast importance of time-price calculations. But outside flight training simulators and games, 3D remains a niche phenomenon. For now, I should recognize that maybe my iTunes streaming and Amazon Prime already have delivered most of the video any of us need for "over-the-top" time travel. Regards, 
George Gilder
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