Must-read: Tim Worstall: “Facebook Doesn’t Waste Trillions In Time: That’s The Value Facebook Adds For Us”

Must-Read: Tim Worstall: Facebook Doesn’t Waste Trillions In Time: That’s The Value Facebook Adds For Us: “CNBC… [is] saying that we all spend lots of time on Facebook…

…That’s entirely true…. They’re then saying that that time has a value: this is also true…. But then they say that the time we spend on Facebook is a waste… because we are doing Facebook rather than working to make money. And that’s entirely the wrong way around. That we are on Facbeook rather than making money shows that we value the Facebook time more than the money. Thus this financial value of this time is the value that is being added to our lives. And yes, this is an important economic point which then feeds through into public policy….

[CNBC’s] is bad economics… a fetishisation, a reification, of GDP… not something that we want to do at all: we need to remember that GDP is only a proxy for how well we’re doing, not how well we’re doing itself…. Facebook is valued in GDP at it’s profits plus its wage bill… about $10 billion [a year]…. [But] we’ve got people giving up $900 billion in hypothetical labour value…. I’m not going to insist upon that $900 billion…. But I am going to insist that the addition is very much larger than the $10 billion odd that sits in GDP…