`In Time' is a Parable Against Tight Money

I can't recommend the new Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried sci-fi action thriller In Time on the basis of its acting or plot (both are mediocre) but I can recommend the film as a parable about bad monetary policy.

Here is the premise of the film: in the future, humans are genetically modified to stop aging when they turn 25. They are capable of living forever but the catch is that they only keep living in perpetual youth if they have enough "time" on them. Every person walks around with a bioluminescent clock on their arm showing the amount of time they have, counting down.

Rich people in this society have centuries of time on their arm, while poor people live, literally, day to day. Time is also the currency of the future so a poor person feels the pinch when the price of coffee increases from "4 Minutes" to "5 minutes", while a rich person has no problem being able to pay "three months" to spend a night at a hotel.

Many has said the movie is about income inequality. This is true, but it is arguably also about a world that has embraced the tight money policies of Federal Reserve bank Presidents such as Narayana Kocherlakota, Charles Plosser, and Richard Fisher.

Time is the fiat currency of the future and Vincent Kartheiser's character (you know him as Pete Campbell from Mad Men) is essentially a banker operating in what seems to be a free banking system where he could choose to issue as much time as he wants, but chooses not to out of a desire to keep a large part of the population poor and starving.

Now the movie does point out that in a future where there is technology to keep everyone immortal, some sort of price mechanism needs to implemented to prevent rampant over-population and a dramatic decline in resources. (The movie never presents a solution to this problem, though I suspect that ideally you would need to genetically modify humans so that they are no longer part of this immoral monetary system.)

In the short term at least, the world of In Time could probably benefit from a slightly more accommodative monetary policy. Price stability could probably be maintained in a world where the poor earned enough "time" to live month to month as opposed to day to day. It would also be good to see more opportunities for the poor to invest their "time" in a way that might be profitable and earn them a return. Yet the idea of a growing economy seems absent in this film. There are moments when some characters treats their fiat currency of "time" as if it was a finite resource like gold!

While In Time does suffer from a lot of bad puns about time ("I don't have time for these puns!" I joked to the person I saw the film with) uninspired acting, plot holes, and a cartoonish depiction of some of its villains (even Kocerhlakota doesn't actually believe, as the villains in this film do, that "for some to be immortal, many must die!") it is a unexpectedly timely (ugh…) movie about the failures of the FOMC committee, even if it is fuzzy on some of the details.