Person-Hours as a currency

[markm]

Hours are something well all get only the same amount of, barring moving very close to the speed of light.

But how can we have things like "interest rates" if the total number of hours produced per hours is always no more (nor less) than the number of people that exist?

Population? We would have to increase the population in order to increase the hours (per hour)  supply?

Maybe time prefference can help with this? Instead of only counting currently-happening hours, suppose we also counted hours that have already happened?

That would give us an hours supply that would always grow, with only the rate of growth being dependent upon the population.

Some might argue that some hours are worth more or less than others, so let us go further into detail, allowing hours to be differentiated.

For example, some people might value sleep hours more or less than they value work hours or leisure hours.

So we could have markets, with hour-pairs sleep/work, sleep/leisure, and work/leisure.

Some people though might arge that not all sleep hours as equally valuable. A doctor sleeping might be a huge negative value, depriving a community of essential services, whereas an unskilled labourer's sleep might be far less of a liability.

Or, who knows, maybe someone might value a doctor's sleep; an administrator, for example, might refuse to permit a doctor to man a post in a hospital for any less than X number of hours of sleep, paid in advance.

Would it matter whether the doctor paid that up front fee in doctor-sleep hours, nurse-sleep hours, or unskilled-labourer-sleep hours?

Would it have to be a "personal check", such as videotape proving precisely what that doctor was doing during eight distinct hours, each of those hours having been assayed for their doctor-sleep-content to ensure they are not counterfeit-sleep or counterfeit-doctor hours?

Maybe "missing hours" could be a whole new flavour of hours, being in fact precisely those hours for which no video footage exists? Who knows, some people might value "missing hours" more than they value authenticated, genuine hours?

This maybe could spin off derivatives:

DVD doctor and nurse sleep hours; DVD doctor and nurse counterfeit-sleep hours (what *are* they up to in there?!) and so on...

There could even be "indeterminate missing hours", such as all the person-hours accumulated by early homo sapiens prior to the development of video. How many person hours did humanity actually accumulate up to that point in time?

The point of the video is partly to make a tangible "hour" one can trade, to make "hours" easy to pass back and forth as trade items.

-MarkM-

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[nostrum]

Very interesting.

When we colonize other planets the conversion-rates would be static due to longer or shorter days. Of course assuming that value of time depends on the length of a day.

You would have to consider the age, as one hour for a child is experienced as faster than an old mans.
And not to mention as the social cultures and technology is so rapidly changing, old hours would be less valuable compared to new. The new hours would be more efficient due to better tools.

[Thanak]

How would you account individual productivity ?

Not all doctors are created equal, same is true for every proffession.

In IT you have differences of 100* more between individual workers with given technology... you basicly end up with on currency per person.

Also, all my hours are not equally productive...  Do you want a monday morning hour or a wednesday afternoon ?

[MoonShadow]

Search for the Ithica Hour.

[jtimon]

I don't know where the value is coming from here. Who issues money for every hour I sleep and who give it to?
 
What you're proposing sounds like time banking, a concrete case of LETS in which the unit is denominated in hours.
But in these systems, in a transaction the payer owes "the community" and the central node credits the seller for the same amount.
Try to peg all wages to the same unit has proved to not work in LETS projects, that are more ambitious than time banking in the variety of services and goods that can be traded for the currency. When the unit of credit is the hour, they use to define value of the hour as "an hour of work of unskilled labour" and let people negotiate their wages.

The Ithaca hours are valued this way too, but they're not based on mutual credit: there's nothing backing them, not even laws or taxes, yet they're used for commerce. Like bitcoin, they're fiat without a state. People accept ithaca hours voluntarily because the issued bills are given to non profits or by 0% loans. An ithaca hour is supposed to be worth 10 USD.

LETS is only a concrete form of a ripple network in which the community runs a central node that the rest of nodes are connected to, by a credit account. More generally, Ripple allows every user to establish a connection with any other user (in any unit they agree), and payments are possible through paths in a network that doesn't need a central node to operate.
This makes ripple far more resilient, scalable and flexible than LETS.

The interest rates disappear because the money is no longer scarce, anyone can trade without it, and the wares can flow to where they are demanded and can be afforded without capital-money staying in the middle to rise its tax for crossing the river.
Specialized professionals need different things from what they produce, and their wares cannot wait to cross, that's why they pay.
Robinsons didn't pay interest for lended fish, there's no interest without scarce and everlasting money.
Ripple destroys the scarcity interest needs (but you can charge interest on ripple debts if both parties agree).