Time-money convertiblity

While reading Robin Hanson's recent post on why bets aren't used more often to back up people's beliefs, I was struck by one of his followup comments, the gist of which is that people shouldn't waste their time arguing because they could be using that time to earn more money. Leaving aside the argument that dialog, discourse, and argument are at the very least methods of refining ideas and beliefs and therefor have value, this argument about time and money has always struck me as a bad model.

There is a large class of people for whom time cannot generally be converted to money. For some people like me, their terms of employment forbid outside work. These salaried people are paid not by the hour but a fixed sum to do their work no matter how long it takes. For me that generally means that I'm working more than 40 hours a week as well. So not only do I not have the time and energy for more work, but I can't do it anyway.

Many (most?) hourly employees also cannot work more hours to get more pay either. Full-time workers are generally forbidden overtime without explicit approval. They are required to get their work done in the allotted time and either do not work overtime or are (illegally) forbidden to report it. Either way, without a second job, they cannot supplement their incomes by working an extra hour.

Given that, we're left with a group of people that are able to choose between a second job and an hour of fighting over ideas. The cost of finding a second job for an additional hour of pay seems to be much higher than foregoing that pay in order to have an argument. Perhaps Mechanical Turk has a lower barrier to getting started, but the pay doesn't really seem worth it for many workers.

I see this argument pretty frequently, but I don't really think it holds water. For most workers the value of an additional hour of work falls off a cliff around 40 hours per week and for most job types so does the worker's productivity. Modeling pay as a linear function of hours work just doesn't cut it.

Also, spend your out of work time how you want.