"Wealth comes in many forms, including both money and time. Consider that most of the world spends the majority of their time trying to acquire money, viewing it as the key to doing what they want to do. In reality, all they’re doing is spending wealth (in the form of time) only to earn it back in the form of money, so they can then use it to buy back time."
The author assumes that people spend the majority of their time trying to acquire money without any other motive than acquiring money to further other goals. This argument fails when you do what you do not only because it brings you money but also because you like doing it per se. You may want to do the activity and at the same time get an objective measurement of how much wealth you create for other people by getting paid money for it, in some way or another.
I would argue that the MAJORITY of the people in this world spend the majority of their time acquiring money either to survive or to provide and thought about whether or not they enjoy or love what they do is secondary. I think the demographic of HN is skewed towards people who enjoy what they do (ie hacking and coding) but most people are not hackers, they are your construction workers, waiters, factory workers, laborers, etc.
It's certainly not true that the amount of money you get paid is "an objective measurement of how much wealth you create for other people". It's quite possible to make money in lots of ways, some of which also create wealth for other people, some of which are relatively neutral for other people, and some of which take it away from other people. I'm not aware of any general formula for determining which is which, except perhaps in the extremes (obviously, various kinds of scam artists fall into the 3rd category).
I think it's actually the most objective measurement there is. How else do you get paid other than by people voluntarily assigning your services or product a certain monetary value they would like to pay you?
We had this long debate when some people claimed that the only objective measurement of the value of your work how much you get paid.
It's true that's highly objective, but that doesn't mean it's right. Compare this to objective metrics for programmers. Lines of Code? Hours at the desk? Bugs assigned to them? Whatever metric you use, somebody will find a way to game it, proving that the metric may be useful in some cases but it is not strongly correlated with anything other than the desire to score highly.
I have a theory that metrics are best when secret. If somehow we had money but nobody thought it was important, you might get very valuable information by seeing how has the most of it. But the moment people start valuing a high score, then they start gaming it and the next thing you know you've given Bernie Madoff a high score.
To respond directly to your point, people do voluntarily assign a high value to your services or product when they pay you. The trouble is, they do so with highly incomplete information in an environment where the people playing the game manipulate the information to obtain the highest valuations. In the end, money often ends up being highly correlated with an ability to manipulate who receives what information rather than any underlying service or product.
The theory I'm believing more and more (and it accounts for the million-dollar athlete salaries) is personal impact.
If you are a high school teacher, even if you are very good, you can probably have a direct impact on only about fifty students a year.
If you are a coder for a company, you should get paid based on your impact on products that your company sells. This might be why startups can be more lucrative - less employees, more ownership, more revenue per employee.
Wheras, if you are a Major League baseball player, you have a indirect impact on your team's box office revenue (direct if you are top tier like A-Rod), thousands of impressionable kids, thousands of aspiring ball players who are no longer kids, etc. The standard rule for endorsement contracts is 3x - as in the company expects to bring in 3x whatever they are paying their endorser.
Makes me wonder if a true monetizable distance learning solution would allow for teachers to be paid more based on their audience and impact. But teaching via distance technology is still an imperfect medium.
As a counter-point to your wealth = personal impact point: Gandhi, Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Dali Lama. Whether or not these people and their actions were completely real or did all the things people say they did, they've certainly had an impact on history. None of them were/are particularly rich. Was it a failure to capture that value? Can all value be captured in dollars? Should it?
I did not say that personal impact is equivalent to wealth. It was meant to respond to the parent comment ("some people claimed that the only objective measurement of the value of your work how much you get paid") and to imply that wealth is a result of personal impact, magnified through network effects (having people work for you, television/cable).
Gandhi et al. have had an impact that defies quantification (e.g. world changing)
I personally believe personal impact is answered by this koan:
An interesting question. It could be be that. Could also just be an example of what could happen in a country with a highly educated populace and highly-available broadband internet. If you have a choice of not just a few, but all teachers, why not pick "the best?" Certainly the best will be different for different people, but you can see how a few teachers could easily rise to the top. Night school might only be significant in that where to attend is completely up to the individual.
You raise interesting points. I disagree on keeping metrics secret though. Keeping the value system for evaluating people's performance and the wealth they create secret, only leads to subjective standards and gives the keeper of the secret far too much power. To the contrary, I think that only metrics as known and objective as monetary value can ever be useful, as otherwise lots of productivity would be wasted in pursuit of the wrong (secret) metrics.
It may be true that at any given point in time, there may be some wrongfully inflated monetary high scores. I think they always get detected over time, though. Are there any wrongfully inflated high scores over the course of time? I think not, as there is wealth to be created in detecting the frauds. Ultimately, I think, over time there are not as much incentives to manipulate information in order to wrongfully inflate your wealth as there are to produce sustainable wealth.
One of the best ways to improve your wealth is imperialism, i.e. taking what isn't yours, but on a grand scale. It has worked for royalty forever, and while it's out in the open, nothing was ever done about it.
What did the royalty do in Arab countries that the common person didn't? Lay claim to the land containing oil. Scarcity can create value, but it's hard to argue that the person who claims it is really "creating value," as anyone else who owned it could do the same. At least not in the same sense that an artist creates something new out of nothing.
Making the metric well known can really screw systems up. Take google, for instance. Their original idea of link reputation was clever, but once it became known people came up with ways to game it, and now a large portion of internet exists for only that reason. Perhaps the alternative is worse though... hard to say.
How much did the inventors of vaccines get paid? Probably a reasonable amount for their expertise and labor, but much less than the wealth they created in saved and enriched lives.
I don't think it should necessarily be said that a person who chases money, chases wealth. Trying to aquire an excess amount of money is a form of chasing wealth yes (which the author is mainly addressing). But to say that spending Time making money is somehow not an ideal trade off is pretty nonsensical. Surviving is pretty important. And thus having food, water, clothing, and shelter is pretty important. Should we all grow and prepare our own food? Sew our own clothes? Build our own houses? Society as we know it has made survival, in its raw sense, pretty trivial, so long as we align ourselves (more or less) within the system. I don't see how that's necessarily a detrimental or even less-effective/efficient/optimal use of ones life, regardless of whether or not how you make your money is "truly one's calling".
"If your calling in life is to be a musician, what are you doing wasting your life as a store clerk? Isn’t your life more valuable than your job? Part of walking in who you are is being bold enough to throw away the parts of your life that aren’t valuable, in order to chase after what is."
Surving is a waste of life? Survival is not valuable?
Saying that money buys time is not really true. It can buy, but it all depends on how you want to live. For example, if you are fine with living on the streets, you don't even need money: become a homeless and you will have all the time you ever needed. To live as a middle class person you need some more money, but how much money you need to live like Michael Jackson? Not even him was able to make that amount of money.
So, basically what you are buying with money is a lifestyle. You shouldn't think in terms of time you are buying, but what kind of life you want to live.
Money is fungible; time is not. Not all wealth is time. Thus it makes sense to trade time for money, and money for other forms of wealth.
But yes, ideally way you trade your time, i.e. the wealth you create with your productive time, should involve the things you want to do in life. But we are not always so lucky - and it is not always a good thing, as doing something for external reward can destroy intrinsic motivation.
The author assumes that people spend the majority of their time trying to acquire money without any other motive than acquiring money to further other goals. This argument fails when you do what you do not only because it brings you money but also because you like doing it per se. You may want to do the activity and at the same time get an objective measurement of how much wealth you create for other people by getting paid money for it, in some way or another.