Comment by bofadeez
7 days ago
> Time is the underlying variable of all economics
Not quite. It's scarcity, not time. Scarcity of economic inputs (land, labor, capital, and technology). So "time" you mean labor and that's just one input.
Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.
Depending on how you feel about various theories of development, an argument that all of these categories reduce to time. At the very least, the relationship between labor, capital, and time seems pretty fundamental: labor cannot be instantaneous, capital grows over time, etc.
They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.
I agree that time isn’t an input in the economic system.
Although, one can use either discrete or continuous time to simulate a complex economic system.
Only simple closed form models take time as in input, e.g. compounded interest or Black-Scholes.
Also, there are wide range of hourly rates/salaries, and not everyone compensated by time, some by cost-and-materials, others by value or performance (with or without risking their own funds/resources).
There are large scale agent-based model (ABM) simulations of the US economy, where you have an agent for every household and every firm.
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