Inflation is the theft of time.

Temporal Compensation Theory

“Compensation is the transfer of purchasing power through time.”

Most compensation systems declare victory on payday. But nobody experiences the value of their work on payday. They experience it decades later, when they buy a home, or retire, or find out whether thirty years of effort turned into anything durable.

That gap, between when work is paid and when it is felt, is the subject of a framework I have spent the past year building. It draws on compensation theory, pensions, actuarial science, labour economics and monetary economics. Each of those fields studies part of the journey. Almost nobody studies the journey itself.

This is not an argument about Bitcoin. It is an argument about how we think about pay in an era of mobile careers, vanishing pensions, and more of the long-term burden falling on individuals. Bitcoin appears only as one possible implementation.

Read the work

• Paper 01 Temporal Compensation: A Theory of Compensation as the Transfer of Purchasing Power Through TimeSSRN
• Paper 02 Converting Human Capital into Durable Financial Capital Across TimeSSRN
• Essays What Is an Hour Worth?whatisanhourworth.com
• Overview Is modern compensation missing a dimension?The short version of the argument

If you work in compensation, HR, actuarial science or economics, I want your criticism of this draft. The address is at the bottom of the page.