From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. Previously, laborers had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who didn’t. Indeed,
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