---
title: "Time price"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Time price"
aliases: ["time prices"]
first_seen: "2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Simon-Ehrlich wager","Gale L. Pooley","Marian L. Tupy","CPI-deflated real prices","Superabundance (book)"]
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
---


An alternative to inflation-adjusted ("real") price metrics: a good's nominal
price divided by nominal hourly wage compensation, expressing cost in hours
of labor required to buy it rather than in CPI-deflated dollars. The metric
was developed and is used throughout the work of economists Gale L. Pooley
and Marian L. Tupy — including their book *Superabundance* — on the premise
that wage-denominated prices track lived material abundance more directly
than a price index does.

Matters to this vault as the load-bearing methodological fork behind
[[claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals]]:
Pooley & Tupy's finding that "Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time"
is not a rival estimate of the same quantity as Kiel, Matheson &
Golembiewski's CPI-deflated 61.2% Ehrlich win rate on the
[[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|Simon-Ehrlich wager]] — it is a different
metric answering a different question over a different date range.
Conflating the two, treating 61.2% and 54.2% as points on one scale, was
exactly the error a 2026-09-15 cross-model audit corrected in that note.

## References

- [[claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals]]