Joshua Rothman’s “Open Questions” column reviews Annie Lowrey’s The Time Tax — a book about how government bureaucracies systematically waste poor people’s time — and expands into a meditation on time valuation under capitalism. The essay opens with the DHS-1171 form: Michigan’s 40-page, ~1,000-question welfare application during the Great Recession, complete with questions about applicants’ weight and hair color. A quarter of applicants failed to complete it.
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The state designed the form to prevent fraud, treating “Michiganders in distress” as “potential criminals.” In 2018, Louisiana “disenrolled 15,689 children” from public health insurance for paperwork non-compliance.
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Government is only part of a wider “conspiracy”: co-workers, HR training, insurance claims, loyalty-program pestering, traffic, housing scarcity. Convenience has hidden costs — subscriptions to manage, software updates to wait through, 25 minutes of previews before a movie.
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Staffan Burenstam Linder’s The Harried Leisure Class (1970): productivity gains don’t free up time; they raise the opportunity cost of every hour, forcing an “acceleration of consumption.”
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Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks inverts this: the real challenge is “how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.”
The linking thread, Rothman suggests, is a shared horror of waste — institutional and personal. Real efficiency prizes momentum over perfection. Acceptance is the price of progress.