3 - Three problems with the treatment of time in economics: perspectives, repetitiveness, and time units

Summary

Time has usually been treated in two very different ways in economic and social analysis. An analytical high road ponders the Nature of Time and the metaphysical conundrums of St. Augustine and Einstein, whereas a low road considers the time context of human behavior and its analysis to be self-evident, uncomplicated, and not very interesting. Both of these are appealing but both, I will argue, are inadequate: the high road because of its irrelevance to social analysis, the low road because its inattention to temporality creates important obstacles to understanding social behavior. A middle road needs building – or at least widening and surfacing – a road that acknowledges the importance of the time structure of social behavior and our analysis of it while avoiding both mystification, on the one hand, and carelessness, on the other. I hope this chapter will make a contribution to that end.

The high road, the low road, and a middle road

Consideration of the Ultimate Nature of Time is mind boggling. Sympathy with Augustine's (1955:354) famous complaint has certainly increased in the past fifteen hundred years: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.” Philosophers have asked whether time has reality, whether the passage of time has reality, whether time exists apart from human observation of it, and whether statements about time can be made independent of time itself.