Time's Up: A Semi-Economic Analysis of In Time

Prior to law school, my background was in economics. And I just watched a movie that made my inner economist scream. The movie in question? In Time starring recent DUI arrestee Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried (who, to my knowledge, has never been arrested). FYI, I'm not bothering with character names and just going to call the main dude JT.

In case you aren't familiar, the premise of the movie is that "Time is money." People are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25 but have a built in clock of time that, when it depletes, the person dies (wherever they happen to be). This clock is used as a kind of personal bank account that is used to pay for everything in society.

Pictured: A very expensive movie that's a solid 4/10. It's much worse on the rewatch.

Overall, I'd call the movie "fun" but not "good". It is an interesting concept, but the way it is explored is predictable, lacks any kind of nuance, and is divorced so much from reality that its attempts at societal critique fall flat. Still fun though. If you want to speed up your own death, just take a drink whenever a stupid time pun is made; the scriptwriters couldn't help themselves (for example, the various districts in this country are called "Time Zones". Get it? Eh? Eh?).

Plenty of people have reviewed this movie. But that's not what we are talking about today. Today, we are going to do an analysis of the relative pricing within the universe of the movie, which has not been done before (The only kind of economic analysis I could find was here which is also worth a read since you're down this rabbit hole anyway, but this is more on how the movie got the mechanics of inflation wrong).

Pictured: How money works in this universe.

Before we start on this path, slight tangent. One of the central premises of the system laid out in the movie is that "For a few to be immortal, many must die." One of the characters lays out that "Everyone can't live forever. Where would we put them?" This has to be one of the dumbest things I've heard. You're telling me that an immoral system with the ability to have an immortal workforce of individuals in prime working age would choose to kill that workforce? The scriptwriters clearly do not understand how productivity works. It would be far more likely that the underclass would be enslaved and not permitted to die while the wealthy were allowed to once they have had their fill of life. Honestly, I think that could (emphasis on could) make a really interesting dystopia (particularly with navigating how the wealthy manage to hand down the system while they pass away even though their workforce is generations older than them). Okay. Tangent over. Back to the pricing bullshit.

Step 1: Surveying the Prices Given

To start, I will be tallying all price quotes within the movie (so I had to watch it again, this time stopping and starting a lot; the sacrifices I make for the blog). This includes posters in the universe and offside comments. Also, I'll be recording both the pre-inflation and post-inflation prices to the degree they are available.

After roughly an hour and a half of my life I won't get back (ironic), I tallied all of the quoted prices throughout the movie. Here they are, laid out in categories for ease of reference.

Groceries/Sundries

• 3 minutes for Coffee (pre-inflation)

• 4 minutes for Coffee (post-inflation)

• 5 minutes for Coffee Plus (pre-inflation)

• 6 minutes for Coffee Plus (post-inflation)

• 7 minutes for Coffee X (pre-inflation)

• 8 minutes for Coffee X (post-inflation)

• 2 minutes and 45 seconds for black tea (pre-inflation)

• 3 minutes and 45 seconds for black tea (post-inflation)

Pictured: What the heck is coffee plus? Or Coffee X?

• 4 minutes for a double tea (pre-inflation)

• 5 minutes for a double tea (post-inflation)

• 5 minutes and 30 seconds for 16oz of energy drink (pre-inflation)

• 6 minutes and 30 seconds for 16oz of energy drink (post-inflation)

• 8 minutes for 32 oz of energy drink (pre-inflation)

• 9 minutes for 32 oz of energy drink (post-inflation)

• 3 minutes for water (pre-inflation)

• 4 minutes for water (post-inflation)

• 5 minutes for bread (pre-inflation)

• 6 minutes for bread (post-inflation)

• 7 minutes for milk (pre-inflation)

• 8 minutes for milk (post-inflation)

• 2 minutes and 45 seconds for beer (pre-inflation)

• 3 minutes and 45 seconds for beer (post-inflation)

• 1 hour for a six pack of a specific brand of Beer

Pictured: I don't care if it's a domestic or imported, there's no way a six pack costs over 21 times a normal beer at a supermarket.

• 4 minutes for soda (pre-inflation)

• 5 minutes for soda (post-inflation)

• 5 minutes and 30 seconds for fish (pre-inflation)

• 6 minutes and 30 seconds for fish (post-inflation)

• 8 minutes for meat (pre-inflation)

• 9 minutes for meat (post-inflation)

• 12 minutes for cereal (pre-inflation, but camera cuts before we see post-inflation)

• 2 minutes for a sack of potatoes (pre-inflation)

• 3 minutes for a sack of potatoes (post-inflation)

• 1 minute for a cabbage (pre-inflation)

• 2 minutes for a cabbage (post-inflation)

• 49 seconds for a carrot (pre-inflation)

• 50 seconds for a carrot (post-inflation)

• 40 seconds for a banana (pre-inflation)

• 45 seconds for a banana (post-inflation)

• 50 seconds for an orange (pre-inflation)

• 55 seconds for an orange (post-inflation)

• 1 minute for an apple (pre-inflation)

• 2 minutes for an apple (post-inflation)

Pictured: Meat is cheaper than cereal, soda is cheaper than beer, two apples can buy you a whole sack of potatoes... I could go on.

The writers clearly don't do their own shopping.

• 9 minutes for detergent (pre-inflation)

• 10 minutes for detergent (post-inflation)

• 7 minutes and 30 seconds for bleach (pre-inflation)

• 8 minutes and 30 seconds for bleach (post-inflation)

• 5 minutes and 30 seconds for "all-purpose" (pre-inflation)

• 6 minutes and 45 seconds for "all-purpose" (post-inflation)

• 8 minutes and 45 seconds for ammonia (pre-inflation)

• 9 minutes and 45 seconds for ammonia (post-inflation)

• 2 minutes for a bar of soap (pre-inflation)

• 3 minutes for a bar of soap (post-inflation)

• 6 minutes and 30 seconds for a bottle of shampoo (pre-inflation)

• 12 minutes for a hair brush (pre-inflation, but camera cuts before we see post-inflation)

Basic Expenses

• 1.5 days for rent (slum)

• 8 days for electricity (presumably monthly)

• 1 hour for bus fare covering a two hour walk (pre-inflation)

• 2 hours for bus fare covering a two hour walk (post-inflation)

• 5 hours per night for seedy hotel

• 1 minute for long distance phone call

  
  

Pictured: In addition to paying for the room, you also still burn time sleeping.

Luxuries

• 2 months for standard room at a fancy hotel

• 8.5 weeks (9.5 weeks with tip) for breakfast and bottle of champagne at nice hotel

• 59 years for Aston Martin-esque car

• 2 days for pawning diamond earrings (which is acknowledged as a bad deal)

Pictured: A car that is so obscenely expensive it doesn't make sense in world

Miscellaneous

• 30 minutes for a "decent" lunch

• 5 minutes to help someone out on the street

• 1 hour earned in gambling debt (slum)

• 1 hour for 10 minutes of a prostitute's time (slum)

• 1 month for a toll from slum to adjacent zone

• 2 month for a toll between nicer looking areas

• 1 year for a toll between nicer area and nicest area

• 1 day and four hours for a timekeeper's (police) per diem (rough estimate; difficult to read due to angles of camerawork)

• 1 year "donation" for entry into casino

• 1000 years for proposed kidnapping ransom (which the wife of the victim says is "nothing" to the wealthy family)

• 10 years reward for the two protagonists after robbing six banks

• 100 years reward for the two protagonists at end of movie

Pictured: Where did the police get these photos? They look way too much like headshots.

There was also a scene in the casino that makes no sense based on how much money JT is supposed to have. These price points are:

• 600 years in pot at poker game before aggressive betting

• 50 year bet on pocket queens (and subsequent call)

• 200 year bet on pocket queens after speech about natural selection (and subsequent call)

This seems like an oversight because Will was supposed to only have roughly a hundred years by this point and he already spent some of it on breakfast and lodging. You might say that he went all in, but the digital pot and final winnings are calculated as if he put in the full amount (which, if you play poker, you know that's just not how that works at all). I'm clearly putting in more thought than anyone who worked on this movie did. But it's still a data point.

Pictured: If you can't match the bet, you can't win the whole pot. That's basic poker.

I will add that the addition of gambling as a factor does add chance to the system.

However, it is, at a minimum, an incredibly lucky bet after incredibly lucky hands. It is a movie though.

Another price point that is amorphous but important is how much JT was paid for the day of work that we witness. The exact figure is not given, but we can get close with the information we have. Right before his shift, JT pays for two coffees and we get a glimpse of his balance going down to roughly one day. After getting paid for his shift, JT's balance is at one day, four hours and fifty minutes. We do not know exactly how much time the shift took but we do know that he got there in the morning and that when he left it was dark, so I'm going to say he worked roughly 10 hours. So, the rough wage that JT made for a day of physical labor is fifteen hours. We also know that, on prior days, JT made more than this because he is upset about getting shorted.

I also realize in hindsight (also ironic) that I left out what happened to the initial balances: JT's was basically used up immediately and Amanda Siegfried's character got a gift of 10 years. It brings up an interesting point on how this state of affairs could have been reached.

Lastly, we have the below screen that we see very briefly in the timekeeper's (police's) office.

This also gives us an interesting data point of how much the average individual (what per capita means) carries on their person. JT is from Zone 12 while the richest area is Zone 8.

I think that covers all of the prices that are cited in the movie. Though, if I missed one, I'm not watching that again, so you can deal. I think I got enough data to make my point. And, before someone corrects me, I'm also not including the two day loan payment on purpose because we have no idea what kind of principal there was, so there's nothing really concrete we can tie that to. Also not including the final million years because it's just a stash and not tied to any kind of good or service.

Step 2: Conversion to USD

You can already probably see what I'm getting at here with some of the relative pricing not making sense (even on its own terms). But another way to illustrate this is to convert this "currency" into something that we know and deal with regularly. Converting the time into dollars is also really helpful because its decimal places are just by 10. On the other hand, time is weird with a year being 12 months, a month being 30 or 31 days, 1 day being 24 hours, an hour being 60 minutes and a minute being 60 seconds, making scaling a bit counter-intuitive (due to this odd structure, it is not as apparent how much more one year is versus one day).

To perform this conversion, we need to find a commodity that has a real life analogue with a relatively easy to determine price. Thankfully, the grocery store gives us several commodities that fit this bill. I've decided to go with bananas in honor of Lucille Bluth.

Pictured: How much can a banana cost? 10 minutes?

In my experience, a single banana typically costs $1 from a bodega or similar shop, which makes math pretty easy. Running with $1 equaling 0.75 minutes (45 seconds), that makes a second worth roughly $0.02, a minute worth $1.33, an hour worth $79.80, a day worth $4788, a month worth $143,640, and, finally, a year worth $1,747,620.

Even if you don't buy these exact prices, this should show you exactly how much more one year is versus a minute. Because we are so used to the terminology and don't use it in a monetary context, it's easy to miss. Using this as a way of equalizing relative prices across the various quotes we have, you can illustrate some absolutely crazy differentials.

Let's take the differential between the hotel rooms with a seedy hotel room costing five hours/night and the standard room at a fancy hotel costing two months as an example. The converted rate would be $398.50/night while the fancy hotel would be $287,280.00/night. In other words, the fancy hotel costs 720 times what the cheap hotel costs.

Pictured: One of the fanciest hotels in the world.

To see how crazy this is, let's compare a real life no-tell motel (lets say $39/night) with the Plaza in New York City (I was quoted $1445/night from their website for a weekend stay). Here, the fancy hotel only costs 37 times the price of the cheap one.

As another example, let's look at the average per capita holdings for individuals living in JT's zone and the fancy zone: 1 day, 7 hour, 17 minutes and 33 seconds for JT's zone and 9 years, 5 months, 18 weeks, 0 days, 17 hours, 30 minutes, and 14 seconds. Using our dollar analogues, that translates to a median net worth of $17,051,464.78 for the wealthiest and $5369.87 for the poorest. In other words, the average citizen of the fancy zone have a net worth 3175 times that of JT's zone.

Now, our world is hardly equitable when it comes wealth distribution (and that is a real problem). However, if you compare ownership of the top 1% (including the top 0.1%, who, on their own, have an embarrassing amount of ownership) to the bottom 50%, you get a ratio of 10.3:1. Increasing the sample size further to make the ratio larger still doesn't get close to the ratio In Time presents. Taking the top 50% versus the bottom 50% results in a ratio of 32.6:1.

There's plenty more absurdity there but I've done way more math than I'd care to. You have the conversion amounts from time to USD. Have at it!

Step 3: Profit?

I hope that this has shown how ridiculous the economy of In Time is; the prices don't make sense in relation to each other or the real world. Again, our economy is hardly equitable but the wealth gap displayed here is so cartoonishly out there it undercuts the messaging.

Pictured: If you have to watch this movie, I recommend you do not do so at full capacity.

Think about how much more seriously you could take this movie if it had done the work in this area instead of coming up with bad puns. For a movie with a central premise focused on money and economics, you can tell no one talked to an economist. Unless I'm missing something and they did, in which case, it begs the question of why this direction was taken. Probably something something its a movie, don't take it too seriously because fiction distorts.

Were the time puns worth it? We will know... in time!

(I saw way too many time puns not to do a few myself. Sue me.).