Comment by jdietrich

But salaried jobs are not time based. They are often focused on doing a task across many months, one less productive day won't mean a significant loss financially for the company. We all have less productive days, is that a direct loss financially to the gdp? What about more productive days is that me helping the gdp? Or does it balance out?

Fixing time wasted at an airport could be useful but it's not the biggest issue ever and I certainly wouldn't frame it as a GDP issue if we could fix it. More efficient for humans to do things they want to do with their time, not to do work instead.

Even trading time for money jobs, are not as clear as that, as often you produce far more money for the business than you get in return. So a simple addition of what your pay per hour is to the overall cost sum is still not accurate.

You can get a much lower value for time by measuring how much extra time people are willing to spend to save some money on groceries and other purchases.

But this is not a new problem. There are established models for the value of time in most countries, and they are used extensively when planning traffic and infrastructure. Typically the value of working time is based on the cost to the employer, while free time is valued between 1/3 and 1/2 of the nominal wage. As most trips (including commute) are done in free time, the average value of time is ~1/2 of the wage.

That's how much someone else values the time we've already resigned to needing to earmark for "working hours."