It is often said that an economist is a person who knows the price
of everything and the value of nothing. On the question of time, we
may all have become economists. We are keenly aware of the price
of time--the extra income earned with a second job, the wage and
a half for an hour of overtime. In the process, we may have forgot-
ten the real worth of time.

The origins of modern time consciousness lie in the development
of a capitalist economy. Precapitalist Europe was largely "time-
less"--or, in historian Jacques Le Goff's words, "free of haste and
careless of exactitude. As capitalism raised the "price" of time,
people began to think of time as a scarce resource. Indeed, the
ideology of the emerging market economy was filled with meta-
phors of time: saving time, using time wisely, admonitions against
"passing" time. The work ethic itself was in some sense a time ethic.
When Benjamin Franklin preached that time is money, he meant
that time should be used productively. Eventually capitalism did
more than make time valuable. Time and money began to substi-
tute for each other. Franklin's aphorism took on new meaning, not
only as prescription, but as an actual description. Money buys time,
and time buys money. Time itself had become a commodity. ¹

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