Speculating on the concept of “time”, Time is Money intertwines financial and political matters related to capitalism with ontological issues related to ephemerality and permanence.

“The idea of deploying time in terms of monetary value is not a new one, and is central to the ideas of ‘interest’ in finance and the debates around usury. Perhaps the ‘time is money’ analogy stems from the notional scarcity of time in human life. Two different ideas of currency can emanate from our considerations of the value of time, depending on whether we think of time as scarce, or as abundant. The time as scarce gives rise to a currency of time that is similar to money as we know it. And this leads to the notions of ‘saving’, ‘hoarding’, ‘wasting’ and ‘spending’ time. This notion emphasizes the value of a unit of time as an abstract entity, regardless of what the time is spent on. On the other hand, if we think of time as abundant, our focus shifts from the quantity to the quality of time, and we can transact and exchange units of time that are not necessarily identical in quantity, even though we may bring them into relations of equivalence with each other.”