With an upcoming wedding and
honeymoon, I recently bought some extra annual leave from my place of work. I
valued the extra time more than the money, so I acted rationally. It would,
therefore, be foolish to look at the money I’d spent on the extra annual leave and
claim I’d wasted my money, just as it would be foolish to stop a shopper after
they’d left the checkout at Tesco and claimed they’d wasted the £75 they’d just
spent on shopping. In both cases – mine and the Tesco shopper – we valued the
thing(s) being purchased more than the money spent on those purchases. Simple
enough, right?
Alas, Emily Gosden, in this
Daily Telegraph article about how households are apparently 'wasting £120m'
a year using tumble-dryers in summer, seems to not understand this basic
principle of a voluntary beneficial allocation of resources:
“The declining
popularity of the traditional washing line is costing British families at least
£120m a year, as tumble dryers are routinely used throughout warm summer
months. More than half of all households who own a tumble dryer use it at least
once a week during the summer, according to the Energy Saving Trust. The
organisation, a charitable foundation which offers advice on cutting energy
bills, said that a typical household could save £18 from their annual
electricity bills “by line drying clothes instead of tumble drying” during
June, July and August. “
Here’s what Emily Gosden is
missing. Just like the case with me and my extra annual leave, what British
householders are losing in money by tumble-drying they are more than making up
for in gained time in not having to go outside to put their clothes on the
washing line and then bring them in after (as well as factoring in the lack of
guarantee that the period of time in which the clothes are out there will
remain dry). Unlike money, time is a precious resource that cannot be retrieved
– so those using tumble dryers are those for whom the time saved more than pays
for the £18 per year lost (which, let’s face it, at 5p per day, is hardly
much).
The Energy Saving Trust
wants to offer us advice by telling us that “A
typical household could save £18 from their annual electricity bills by line
drying clothes instead of tumble drying during June, July and August “, but
this is an absurd one-sided perspective that fails to account for the gains
distilled from that £18 annual cost. Those for whom the extra time gives value
over the cost will use the tumble dryer more than the washing line. Those for
whom the financial saving gives value over the extra time spent putting the
washing on a line, getting it in, and sometimes multiplying this task due to
inclement weather, will use the tumble dryer less than the washing line. Each
will be acting rationally according to their preference. What isn’t rational is
to tell us that as a nation we, collectively, are wasting £120m using our
tumble dryers.
Finally, take each
household’s £18 and translate that to minimum wage hours and it’s less than 3
hours. Let’s be super generous and skew the figures drastically in the Energy
Saving Trust’s favour and suppose that each household’s weekly total washing
line activity is just half an hour. Let’s then multiply that by the number of
weeks in just the warmer months of the year (May-September). That amounts to:
22 weeks x 30 minutes = 660
minutes (11 hours)
Given that even at such a
conservative estimate, using the tumble dryer from May to September saves 8
more hours than the 3 the £18 saves (or £32.48 more cash if you want to
translate it into monetary savings), it’s clear that tumble dryer users
understand the rational allocation of their time and money better than both
Emily Gosden and the spokesperson for the Energy Saving Trust. It’s not
surprising, of course – for too often we have to remind interfering busybodies
that most of us know how to run our lives better than they do.
