Economics at the Movies: In Time
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This weekend I saw this Justin Timberlake movie, In Time, which has quite an original concept – that time is a currency. The plot revolves around the idea that we all have a limited amount of time to live, but that same time is the currency we earn by working and then used to purchase consumption such as ‘4 minutes for a cup of coffee’.
The phrase Darwinian capitalism is used to justify the inequitable distribution of this ‘time wealth’ that exists in society. ‘JT’ tries to restore the balance by his own version of quantitative easing by stealing time from the authorities and pumping it into the system – which (as we all know) only serves to push inflation and doesn’t make the people in the movie actually better off in real terms.
Just to stress though, they take quite a cool idea and turn it into a very poor movie – the only irony being that whilst the ticket only cost me £7 in monetary terms, the opportunity cost of 2 hours of time watching it, I will never get back.
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