It is now a week after we first addressed the idea of spending time with the Thinker's Party as the selfish choice. Much of the argument left off at urging you to run your own cost benefit analysis to determine the value of supporting the Thinker's Party for you. We aren't recovering that ground now, but will provide some sample scenarios that may simplify your decision-making process.
For purposes of these scenarios, let's assume that you are in all ways an average American. According to the Census Bureau, the average income in the United States in 2007 was $50,233. The American Time Use Survey put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that men who work full time worked an average of 8.2 hours a day and full-time women worked an average of 7.8 hours a day. Since we're averaging, we'll call that an even 8 hours a day for 2080 a year on a 5 day work week. That makes your average working hour worth $24.
The following chart pulls data on time spent in leisure activities with figures for how much those activities generally cost. The time data is pulled from the American Time Use Survey and the cost figures are linked to their source.
Socializing and communicating .73 hours per day (This includes a wide range of potential expenses, but we'll assess it at $0 since there's no inherent cost)
Watching television 2.62 hours per day ([$75/month*12 months per year]/[18.34hrs per week*52weeks per year]= $.94)
Participating in sports, exercise, and recreation .32 hours per day ([$70 per month*12 months per year]/[2.24 hours per week*52 weeks per year]=$7.21 per hour). This puts the price of your time during working hours at $24 an hour. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth it.
If working time is too valuable to you, you could give up your leisure time. The leisure activities are effectively negative earnings meaning that if you do something else instead, assuming the non-fiscal value of the activities are equivalent, you get back that money. (Note: In practice this is a fallacy i.e. if you spend one less hour watching TV you don't get $.94 back) Right out if all you're donating to the Thinker's Party is time,and you're doing it instead of your other typical leisure activities, you are making money.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Let us assume that anyone potentially interested in the Thinker's Party treats it as something that is competing for spare time with something like a half dozen other things. One could spend that time working on household projects, reading a book, playing video games, doing any one of a number of different hobbies potentially even including some volunteer or charity work. The average person is probably not deciding what to do in his or her spare time based on how much it costs financially (though it does cost money to do some leisure activities) so much as how desirable it is to do that activity as opposed to any of the others given the amount of spare time available.
As for myself, thus far I have read every post in this blog. I agree with the ideas that the Party purports to represent and I admire the goals for which it seems to be aiming. What is keeping me from being fully hooked is that I as of yet have no reason to believe that the Party has the leadership or infrastructure to create or get involved with the sorts of projects it claims (and I agree) would be beneficial to a given community.
I realize that the first and current goal of the Party is to accrue members: people who agree with the Party’s ideas and have the desire and, perhaps in some cases the know-how for getting useful and productive community projects off the ground. And I am sure there are those out there who do know how to get involved in their respective communities and through private volunteerism make a positive difference by in some way making the members of the community more productive or self-sufficient at something. What I do not see is evidence of any such person in this Party. Please do not take this as an offense, I am merely voicing the one thing for me that has been most lacking in what I have read thus far.
So, suppose I am one of these people who knows how to go get things done, or suppose some number of degrees of separation from me there is someone like this. How is such a person to be convinced that this new thing that cropped up called the Thinker’s Party is something that can help facilitate the kind of work he wants to do?
To be fair, perhaps I am jumping ahead in terms of how current Party members wish to proceed or present themselves. But I make these points from a stance of honest curiosity rather than from ridicule. And incidentally, part of why I bring these points up is because I would like to start telling people about the Thinker’s Party. I would love to be able to point to it and say, “This can be the real mechanism for positive change!” But right now, I’m just not sure what I would say. I appreciate your attention on these matters.
Regards,
Square Pegs
The average person is probably not deciding what to do in his or her spare time based on how much it costs financially (though it does cost money to do some leisure activities) so much as how desirable it is to do that activity as opposed to any of the others given the amount of spare time available.
I don't disagree with this point, which is why we included the assumption about the equivalences of the non-fiscal values. It was felt by some that the previous Friday's argument was too fluffy and that we should at least make an attempt to assign value to the time spent with the party. I sincerely doubt anybody is going to say, "Hey, I'm going to run out and save the world, and $.94 an hour doing it." The hope is that it will get people started on their own cost-benefit analysis to decide whether this is something worth their time. There are people who won't need to, but we'd like to help those who do.
Please do not take this as an offense, I am merely voicing the one thing for me that has been most lacking in what I have read thus far.
Thinker's Party members accumulated thus far are hard to offend, and the party itself is an abstract and has no feelings. We welcome criticism, suggestions, questions and proof reading, and we're grateful for if it's good.
I think some of the things we have scheduled for this week address most of your concerns. Up to this point our priority for our public space has been to develop and present an explanation of what we're trying to do, how we're trying to do it and why we think it will work. The idea was that if we get that out there first, then when we start actively looking for people to help us out it'll be easy for them to know whether they're interested in us. It's possible this was too conservative, or that we should have put all of this information up at once rather than spreading it out, but so far the experience has been great for us so we're optimistic about how it will work out.
Post a Comment