Is free time a commodity?
Accepting this result, some argue that to put a price on both is the most reasonable way to proceed to optimize and increase that value relative to other goods or services. This has led to efforts in measuring well-being, to assign a commercial “value of life”, and to the theory of Natural Capitalism – fusions of green and neoclassical approaches – which focus predictably on energy and material efficiency, i.e. using far less of any given commodity input to achieve the same service outputs as a result. Indian economist Amartya Sen, applying this thinking to human freedom itself, argued in his 1999 book “Development as Freedom” that human free time was the only real service, and that sustainable development was best defined as freeing human time. Sen won The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1999 (sometimes incorrectly called the “Nobel Prize in Economics”) and based his book on invited lectures he gave at the World Bank.
