We may assume, then, that every economic actor* in a community has been assigned a portion of contiguous land of equal value excluding the most desirable locations of all – normally coast lines, river banks, the best scenic outlooks, and the best locations for intensive energy collection, which will be retained by the community as part of the commons.  In many cases, this common land will be made available to economic enterprises owned in equal shares by their own workers according to the maxim that every worker should own his own tools – or, as stated in the ancient Hebrew rabbinical writings, a carpenter without tools is not a carpenter.  No person may control land upon which he does not live or labor.  The land upon which men and women labor is held in common by all of the workers who labor upon that simply-connected (not disjoint) piece of land.

* Dependent children are not economic actors.

Energy* is the most important fundamental economic quantity.  It should be the basis of every currency.  It is the life’s blood of every economy.  Howard T. Odum is famous for the following words:

Real wealth is food, fuel, water, wood for houses, fiber for clothes, raw minerals, electricity, information, …

·       A country is wealthy that has more of this real stuff used per person.

·       Money is only paid to people and is not proportional to real wealth.

·       Prices and costs are inverse to real wealth.

·       When resources are abundant, standard of living is high, but prices low.

·       When resources are scarce, prices are high, more money goes to bring resources, a  few people get rich, but the net contribution to prosperity is small.

·       Real wealth is mostly the work of nature and has to be evaluated with a scientific … measure, emergy.

Therefore, to place a value on an economic good or service, the first quantity to be assigned is the emergy (with an M) or embodied energy.  I have completely reworked Odum’s great concept.**

The only time a person has is the time of his life.  Clearly, every person’s life is equally valuable to himself.  Until a thousand years have passed after an individual has died, there is no valid way to evaluate his contribution to the community.  Therefore, every person’s time must be assigned the same value, namely, one hour per hour since time is fundamental and cannot be evaluated in terms of anything else, least of all money.

But, it is said, “Some people spend many years in engineering school, medical school, apprenticed to a tailor, etc. preparing to render useful services to the community.  Clearly, the time of such people’s life when they render such services to the community must be compensated at a higher rate than the time of unskilled laborers with no preparation.”  This can be finessed in the following way:  Time spent learning a skill must be compensated at the same rate as it will be compensated when they are rendering service to the community.  Thus, if a person spends 1000 hours* in classrooms being instructed in the great art of engineering with an average of nine other people, he will have earned 900 hours that he can use to support himself and others until he is able to contribute time practicing engineering.  (Each student contributes 100 hours to the time spent by the professor.)  In addition, he will spend about 2000 hours studying alone.  This too represents earned time with which he can buy books each of which carries a price tag compounded of the land, water, energy, and time that went into its construction by the author and the book binder to name only two.

* The number 1000 is chosen for convenience in writing this essay not as a reflection of the actual time needed to learn engineering.

5 Comments on "More on Land, Energy, and Time"

J-Gav on Sun, 7th Jul 2013 10:37 pm 



I would suggest reading William Pensinger instead of this dude.

Plantagenet on Sun, 7th Jul 2013 11:36 pm 



What is it about philosophers that compels them to redefine simple terms into more complex ones, and then imagine they’ve thought of something important.

BillT on Mon, 8th Jul 2013 12:53 am 



Land: Not enough!
Energy: Not enough!
Time: Not Enough!

There! I did it in 9 words.

Jerry McManus on Mon, 8th Jul 2013 5:22 pm 



I believe it was Garrett Hardin who said it first, it goes something like this:

It is not a shortage of resources, it is a “longage” of people.

elm327 on Fri, 12th Jul 2013 8:47 am 



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