Kevin Hoover suggests that William Nordhaus relied on the labor theory of value in his paper on light (Letters, April 24). Yet Nordhaus actually used knowledge, not labor. He offered a method to measure innovation: the discovery and sharing of valuable new knowledge. Nordhaus measured the amount of knowledge per unit of time and observed that knowledge about light was growing exponentially, surpassing traditional measures of economic development. It is the time price over time that truly deserves our attention. Read More ›
One of the reasons we love money is that it makes trading easier. Everyone will take money in a trade. Much harder to trade for shoes or bread or economics lessons. Pricing things in dollars and cents gives us a quick way to calculate how products relate to each other. But money has a fundamental problem. Read More ›
Jordan Peterson’s Rule No. 4 says you should “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Since we each get exactly 24 hours in a day and no one can buy time (otherwise rich people would never die), isn’t it better to compare differences in how we spend our time? Read More ›
