Resource tradeoffs are exchanges between resources, such as money, time, and energy.
Most people trade significant amounts of their time for money on a daily basis (e.g., working to earn income), and conversely money can be spent to free one’s time (e.g., paying someone else to spend their time on a task). To make effective time-money tradeoffs, it’s important to be able to estimate the value of a marginal hour of one’s time.
Further reading
Bye, Lynette (2019) How much is your time worth?, LessWrong, September 2.
Cotton-Barratt, Owen (2015) Neutral hours: a tool for valuing time and energy, Global Priorities Project, March.
One option would be to generalise it into “resource tradeoffs” or something like that, since there are other kinds of resources besides time and money. One tagged article is about “time-time tradeoffs”, which doesn’t quite with with the title.
A related concept one may want to use is “resource neutrality” (or some other term for the same concept)- that we should be neutral regarding what resources to spend (e.g. time vs money), just like we should be neutral regarding what cause to choose. Caroline Ellison effectively discusses such neutrality (without explicitly mentioning it) in her recent post. Such a concept could also be discussed in the cause neutrality entry.
Yeah, I think renaming it Resource tradeoffs makes sense. I will go ahead and make the change in a couple of days if no one objects.
Done. I think the entry needs to be revised and expanded a bit, and I may do that eventually, but feel free to improve it.
Here are things relevant to this topic which might be worth adding to the Bibliography:
https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/
“Katja Grace’s How to trade money and time
Sam Bowman’s Things I Recommend You Buy and Use
Rob Wiblin channeling Sam
Arden Koehler channeling Rob
Arden Koehler channeling herself
Sam Bowman channeling himself
Estimated hourly costs of buying free time (see comments)”
(The quoted bit is quoting from the first link’s list of other links.)