The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [99]
Although there is no systematic statistical approach to using time as a measure of value, a number of government statistics offices have introduced the innovation of time use surveys as a “satellite” to their conventional “national accounts” that form the basis of GDP.27 Some of these—including Australia, the United Kingdom and United States—conduct and publish regular, albeit infrequent, surveys.28 The United States started annual surveys in 2003, the United Kingdom five-yearly surveys in 2000. Australia conducts surveys at longer periods but the surveys date back to 1992. The Australian Bureau of Statistics sums up the purpose of time use surveys very neatly:
The balance between paid work, unpaid work and leisure are important for a person’s well-being and economic welfare. Patterns of time use have assumed increasing importance as a means to measure the productive value of households as economic units. The data collected by this latest survey will be used by the ABS to derive a monetary value for all forms of unpaid work to update measures that assist analysis of the national accounts for the household sector.29
The surveys ask respondents to explain how they spend a twenty-four-hour period, looking at the division of time between paid and unpaid work, the hours spent on leisure, personal care, sleep, travel, housework, child care, and so on. Averages can be calculated for different groups—men and women, people of different ages, and the unemployed, among others.
However, even these statistics, important as they are as a part of a full assessment of the shape of the economy, don’t add up to a complete picture of the measurement of value.
THE CHASM BETWEEN PRICES AND VALUE
The blurring boundary between market and nonmarket activities goes beyond the traditional question of the contribution domestic activities make to measure of economic progress. As this chapter has set out, a rapidly growing share of the economy consists of activities that have “nonmarket” characteristics. This is partly because of the Baumol phenomenon: we are spending a rising share of income on activities with an intrinsic element of performance or experience, as our countries grow richer. These range from low-status care occupations through traditional professional occupations such as teaching and health care and law, to growing occupations such as the creative professions.
But it is also due to the changing structure of the economy, the fact that important growing industries, including the digital industries, have features that make them surprisingly like traditional public services, with upfront costs but (almost) zero marginal cost. There are many businesses complaining that they can’t get consumers to pay for digital content, although it remains to be seen how far this is due to their reluctance to change what it is they charge for and how they do it; a few businesses and nonprofits are getting users to pay by contributing their time rather than money. There has been a vigorous debate about the challenge the presumption of “free” content poses to businesses in music, movies, and publishing. Less attention has been paid to the implications for measuring the economy, and yet conventional statistics do not capture at all well the shape or growth of the new economy taking shape.
There has been real progress in improving economic statistics: in the development of dashboards to supplement GDP; in the measurement of intangible value; and in looking at time use as an indicator of what people value.