Apparently, though, most people don’t live their lives
across the spans of eons and millions of years.
It’s good to remind myself of this every now and then, preferably before
our fridge runs out of milk. One way to do this, and to gain some perspective on
other ways of contemplating time, is by reading books of academic experts who
study human interaction, instead of billion years old rocks. One such study is The Political Value of Time, by Professor Elizabeth Cohen (Syracuse University, USA).
Geosciences have a variety of ways to measure time. Of course, the fundamental unit of scientific time is
the second- defined by atomic oscillations, from which minutes and hours are
derived. But there is also astronomical time- days, months, years, and
Milankovic cycles derived from the movement of rotating or orbiting moons and
planets. And there are the various radioactive decay schemes, which give us
238U time 40K time, and other lesser used decay schemes, which are generally
tied to one of those two systems. Comparing and cross-calibrating these various
schemes is a lot of what geochronologists have been doing over the last 20
years.
The Political Value of Time combines all of these in to
scientific time- e.g. the time measured by clocks and calendars. It discusses
this, as opposed to other qualitative types of time used by social scientists,
such as leisure time, overtime, and quiet time. Oddly, political researchers
seem to have spent less time thinking about scientific time than some of these
other fuzzy sorts, and this book tries to redress this situation.
The book shows that governments
appropriate the time of their citizens in a way that constitutes a political
economy of time. It then shows that there are several philosophical, practical,
and technical reasons for this to be so. However, it points out that, because
this area is understudied and the ramifications are not thought through, many
of the unconscious and structural biases that burden other economies also make
the economy of time less fair than it ought to be.
As it is outside my area of
expertise, I don’t have the background to critically appraise the
interpretations of French revolutionary philosophers and other cited works.
Taking their referenced statements as given, however, yields a book with a
clear, compelling, and straightforward argument. The vocabulary is specialized,
and I reached for the dictionary many times in the introduction. However, the
terms are used consistently and precisely through the entire book, so once the introduction
is finished, the vocabulary becomes less intimidating.
As someone who used to travel
extensively internationally for work, the queuing section struck all sorts of
chords on the intersection of time, money, duty, efficiency, and information
technology in the area of airport customs queues.
Over all, it is a good book,
clearly argued. It looks like there are lots of opportunities for future
research.