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What’s the Value of an Hour? | The New Yorker

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If the world seems to waste our time, it’s partly because we view time itself as a resource to be extracted and optimized.

In Detroit, during the Great Recession of the late two-thousands, about a third of families experienced unemployment. One in three properties entered foreclosure. The State of Michigan offered financial assistance, but to get it people needed to fill out a form called the DHS-1171. This was the longest form of its kind in the country, the journalist Annie Lowrey writes, in her new book, “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It,” and its questions were often unrelated to the provision of financial assistance. “The state queried applicants on their weight and hair…

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