A RelativeCost Field Guide · Edition One
The True Cost of Things
What the world's items really cost — measured in time, not money.
The one currency we all share
A price tag tells you what something costs in money. It almost never tells you what it costs in you. This booklet translates prices into the only resource every human being is issued in equal daily measure: time.
The lens is simple. Divide a price by an hourly wage and you get a time-price: the hours of life a person must trade to own a thing. A $4 coffee is not $4. To a software engineer in San Francisco it is three minutes. To a farmer in Uttar Pradesh it is five hours and twenty minutes. Same coffee. Same dollars. Wildly different cost.
The dollar is a label. The hour is the truth.
Every figure here is an estimate, rounded for clarity and chosen to make the lens vivid rather than to satisfy an accountant. The ratios, not the decimals, are the point. Sources and method appear at the end.
From money to minutes
Time-price = price ÷ hourly wage. That is the whole formula. Everything in this booklet is a variation on it.
A $4 coffee for a $20/hour worker
12 minutes
4 ÷ 20 = 0.2 hours
The same coffee for a $0.75/hour worker
5 hrs 20 min
4 ÷ 0.75 = 5.33 hours
Notice what the formula refuses to do: it refuses to let money hide effort. A thing is cheap only when it costs you little of your life. By that measure, the world's poorest people pay the most for everything.