Money Wisdom #213

"Certainly, for family providers, free time was meaningless without work structuring the day; and, as the experience of the jobless in the Depression showed, men especially understood free time as a reward for labour.

Thus 'time became money' to many wage-earners. But this phrase was understood not simply in Franklin's sense of the opportunity cost of unproductive time. Rather it expressed both the equivalences of the workday and wages and of leisure and spending. Time at work became an instrument of spending while free time was expressed in those social and private acts of consumption. Money became the two-sided symbol of discipline and freedom while time alternated between compulsion and liberation."

Gary Cross Time and Money - The Making of Consumer Culture (1993) p.164