Are Opportunity Costs Rising?
The Consequences of the Increasing Value of Time
The website Chess.com has an interesting article about the future of “classical” (or “slow”) chess. Competitive chess has traditionally been mainly played in a slow format where players generally have between one hour and a half and two hours to play their first 40 moves (sometimes with a time increment of some seconds for each move played) with additional time after that to finish the game. With these time rules, a typical chess game lasts between four and six hours. The slow format has been predominant at the professional level, but also at the amateur level. These days seem to be gone, however.
The development of online chess combined with the COVID pandemic have accelerated a tendency that was already well under its way for quite some time. Nowadays, chess players increasingly prefer to play rapid or blitz games that last at most ten minutes, or even “bullet” games where each player has one minute to play all their moves. While chess players have always played these kinds of games, what is new is that now the rapid format is also starting to displace the slow format in competitions at the top professional level. It is hard to believe that still in the 1980s the world championship match could be played over several months and more than twenty games lasting several hours, some of them having to be stopped late in the day to be finished the morning of the day after. Today, we have a world champion who openly says that he is “a little sick” of playing classical chess. Some have even suggested that the same world champion would have wanted that the next world championship match to be partially played in rapid games.[1]
The article on Chess.com provides some tentative explanations for the decline of classic chess. And they are relatively straightforward: “The benefits of online rapid and blitz to professional chess players are clear: convenience (playing from home!), more money, less time, and less preparation.” In other words, the opportunity costs of playing rapid games are lower for professional chess players than those playing classic games. This is hard to argue with. A typical top-level classical chess tournament lasts two weeks. A similar (in-person, not online) tournament but in rapid and blitz games lasts four days. Now, it could be objected that this is not new. Playing classical chess has always taken more time than playing rapid chess. But the opportunity costs of playing classical chess have increased due to the conjunction of several factors mostly related to technological innovations: the possibility to play online, the emergence of a market for online lessons, and the development of new activities with a market value (e.g., streaming). These new possibilities have increased the opportunity costs of classical chess because several new valuable available activities that can be realized in the time that was allocated to play long chess games are now available. The consequence is a classical substitution effect. Professional players that can make money out of these activities are reallocating their resources as a result of the change in the opportunity costs.
While this is happening in chess, I wonder if a similar phenomenon is not happening in society in general. When I read the Chess.com article, recent discussions I’ve had about academics who no longer read long books immediately came to my mind. Academics are less and less taking time to read others’ research, especially when they take the form of long texts because their time is more and more valuable. There is so much else to do: writing one’s own papers and doing one’s experiments, fulfilling one’s administrative and teaching duties, allocating time to non-professional activities… Again, as for chess, this is not new. Reading the work of others has always had an opportunity cost. But this cost is rising as an academic’s career (and thus income) increasingly depends on their ability to publish and because the administrative workload keeps on growing. There is a more general tendency in the academic world to push for less time-consuming format: you should write shorter output, you should make “posters” rather than write papers for conferences, and you should be able to present your PhD thesis in three minutes.
This tendency is at play in society as a whole. Rather than reading, people prefer watching visual content because it presumably takes less time. There is the practice of watching TV series in accelerated time. We use a range of decision tools (online comparators, soon AI) to make quicker decisions. We eat fast food because cooking takes time. Time has more and more value because the range of valuable alternative activities keeps on increasing, largely because of technological innovations. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. Quite the contrary actually. More opportunities mean more freedom of choice and the satisfaction of more needs and desires. But all normative standards, this is an improvement. But the chess and academic examples suggest that this is not so simple. The increasing value of time means that the opportunity costs of activities that take time are rising. But that does not mean that these activities are less valuable or bring fewer benefits than before. There is an intrinsic value in playing classic chess compared to rapid or blitz chess that remains untouched by the change in opportunity costs. There is value in writing and reading (long) academic books compared to a scientific output taking the form of a short article. As opportunity costs change, we rationally are making new tradeoffs but in doing so, we are losing something.
Of course, it could be answered that this loss of value is more than compensated by new benefits that are generated by the newly available activities. But what if the values of the different activities are partially incommensurable? Making tradeoffs and choices is the fate of life. We have no choice but to make choice. But we should not believe that what we lose is automatically (more than) compensated by what we gain. Abandoning some activities because they take too much time entails a loss than cannot be compensated by commensurable benefits. In this sense, the rise of opportunity costs should be balanced by an acute perception of the importance in modern, technologically-driven societies of what Isaiah Berlin and others have called “tragic choices.”
[1] As far as I know, Magnus Carlsen didn’t confirm this. His decision to not defend his title is probably more related to the fact that he has lost the motivation to prepare for a match against opponents who he is routinely beating for more than a decade now.