{"id":13065,"date":"2012-01-14T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-01-14T17:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13065"},"modified":"2012-01-14T12:01:11","modified_gmt":"2012-01-14T17:01:11","slug":"how-much-is-your-time-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/14\/how-much-is-your-time-worth\/","title":{"rendered":"How much is <em>your<\/em> time worth?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an article about the recently approved high speed train link between London and Birmingham, <a href=\"http:\/\/timharford.com\/2012\/01\/the-unlikely-boons-of-longer-train-journeys\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Harford<\/a> points out a few oddities in the calculations that supposedly show how beneficial the new railway connection will be:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>But it\u2019s not just about forecasts &mdash; it\u2019s about the value of time saved because of a faster journey, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s true. The high-speed link would save about 40 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham. How much that is worth is an interesting question.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you have a morning meeting it might mean an extra 40 minutes in bed.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It might indeed, which is priceless. HS2 Ltd told me that they use numbers from the Department for Transport. The DfT apparently values leisure time at about \u00a36 an hour &mdash; this, intriguingly, implies that the UK government\u2019s official position is that anyone under the age of 21 is wasting their time earning the young person\u2019s minimum wage and would be wise to chillax in front of the Nintendo.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What about business travel?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, business travel is valued at \u00a350 an hour. Unless the business travel in question is commuting, in which case it\u2019s \u00a37 an hour.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Doesn\u2019t make a bit of sense to me, either. Perhaps the idea is that commuting is eating into your leisure time, which is almost valueless apparently, whereas business travel is eating into your employer\u2019s time, which is precious indeed. Complain to the DfT if you don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an article about the recently approved high speed train link between London and Birmingham, Tim Harford points out a few oddities in the calculations that supposedly show how beneficial the new railway connection will be: But it\u2019s not just about forecasts &mdash; it\u2019s about the value of time saved because of a faster journey, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,237,73],"tags":[185,95,96,504,202],"class_list":["post-13065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-railways","category-randomness","tag-highspeedrail","tag-jobs","tag-minimumwage","tag-teenagers","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3oJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13065"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13067,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13065\/revisions\/13067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}