If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

2/

For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.

3/

There's a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In #DavidGraeber's must-read essay "The Utopia of Rules," he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people.

4/

Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the "deserving poor" - not "mooches" who are defrauding the system:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip.

5/

But if you're even richer, you can pay for #TSAPrecheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you'll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

6/

This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it's lacked a good, detailed *quantitative* counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.

7/