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If measuring intangibles has a long way to go, one alternative way to think about the value being created in advanced economies now is to build statistics around the spending of time, as well as money. The use of time to capture value has long been appreciated—from the labor theory of value in classical economics to the old saying that “time is money.” But one result of the impact of information technology has been that time has become quite explicitly a parallel currency. Time and attention are for many people a scarce resource, more in some cases than money and things (although these certainly remain the scarce resource for people on low incomes). For some of us, lack of time, not lack of money, is the constraint limiting what we do.

There are plenty of ways to describe the shortage of time and attention. One is the exponential growth of information.22 Statisticians from the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems found that worldwide production of original information stored digitally increased from around 3.2 million terabytes in 1999 to around 5.4 million terabytes by 2002, an increase of 69 percent in just over two years. Another is the constant innovation in labor-saving devices and methods, dating as far back as household electronics for busy housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, and now bringing us domestic robots and time management systems. Mobile communications and computers at home have brought the pressures of work into free time. The Blackberry is mocked—and resented—as the “Crackberry.” Everybody, or at least everybody who works, is busy all the time. The pressure on our time has become one of the most familiar aspects of modern life. It’s one of the motives behind the emergence of the Slow Movement, described in chapter 1.

An interesting aspect of the trend is the emergence of a gift economy online, with the gift consisting of the time spent contributing to online activities for no pay, a kind of digital volunteering. Much has been written about the prevalence of “free” content.23 While traditional businesses such as record companies and newspaper publishers see their profitability under threat from the resistance of consumers to pay for digital content whose marginal cost is zero, a few novel online models depend entirely on the contribution of users’ time for free so that other users in turn can access it for free. These are the open source activities such as Wikipedia and Linux.24 The gift economy was prevalent before money; anthropologists have documented the cultural importance of giving gifts of food or pots or decorative items as a signal of social ties and status.25 The gift economy is reemerging, at least in the online sector of society, as a postmoney measure of value. People now give time, and time contributed is a sign of status and social connection in online communities.

There is a telling contrast, however, between the high status of this kind of unpaid activity, and the traditional area of “non-market” activity such as domestic work and caring. Spending hours caring for children or disabled or older people is certainly a gift too. What’s more, these activities overlap with the growing paid-for care sector, also low-status work that is often carried out by immigrants and typically characterized by low pay and poor conditions. With an aging population and shrinking public spending, the extent of paid-for care is bound to continue growing. For the reasons given by Will Baumol in his classic papers, it will grow as a share of the economy as well as in absolute terms. And there will be a shifting and blurred boundary between paid-for caring and other similar activities in the market economy and unpaid care in the domestic economy, with the time devoted to these activities the common standard of value.

In the world of Enough, in countries where the majority have ample food, clothing, and shelter, the choices people have to make about the allocation of scarce resources