Thought: For an individual, labor supply curve is not monotonic up and to the right, it’s a U-shape. If you have minimum living costs, you’ll sell more time to hit your minimum. But once you can make minimum with less than 100% time, leisure is substitute demand so curvecrises
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Modeling your supply curve is just as hard as modeling your demand curve. With demand, you lack data. With supply you lack self-knowledge. Would I be willing to sell all my time at $1000/hour? $2000/hour? Can’t answer without knowing what you’re asking me to actually sell.
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The higher the price, the more of your waking hours you should be willing to sell, up to biological sustainability for that type of work. But past a point you will want to sell less, because it’s deal with a devil, indecent proposal etc.
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Oh shit I’ve discovered the true human labor supply curve. It’s a demented curve. Gimme economics Nobel.
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Red = sample demand curve offering a choice between soulless grind and slightly soulful passion work at lower pay
Blue = sample demand curve offering a choice between selling your soul for a while to make fuck-you money vs sticking to high integrity passion work
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Y’all ignoring this now, but when I attach some catchy metaphor and meme and write it up, you’ll be like “much insight, wow” 😐
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Law of human labor supply: we either sell enough time to make rent, or work because we’re bored of leisure, or sell minimum fraction of soul we can to make fuck-you money
Those are the 3 regimes. I could probably even quantify this.
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Part I haven’t modeled yet is leisure value model. Annoying coupling here since surplus income increases the value of leisure, creating feedback loop. Eg. If you can make survival income in 30h/week but enough surplus for 1 kindle ebook/wk with 31h, value of 9 free hours went up
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Less confusing: there’s actually 3 supply curves for your time: subsistence work, passion work, fuck-you-money exit work
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Most of us will never see the FU$ curve because it’s past the line of how hard we’re capable of working on the right (say 100h/week)
Most middle class will never see the subsistence curve because you can always find something more meaningful on the passion curve to beat it
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