Time really is worth more now

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:

Bankruptcy relief for student loans

Lawmakers want to include student loans in their overhaul of the bankruptcy system, said Aarthi Swaminathan at Yahoo. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts last week introduced the "Consumer Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2020," which would "replace the current systems of Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 personal bankruptcies with one system, Chapter 10." Student loans would become eligible for discharge as part of the overhaul. Relief from student debt is difficult to obtain in court, and many borrowers aren't aware it's possible at all; lenders have "routinely exploited that ignorance." Broader forgiveness has become a political flashpoint. ­President-­elect Joe Biden supports erasing up to $10,000 of student debt, while some Demo­cratic lawmakers are pushing for forgiveness of up to $50,000.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Time really is worth more now

A new study tested how much Americans value their time, said Greg Rosalsky at NPR​ — and the answer is $19 an hour. A team of academic economists and employees of the ride-share company Lyft, which sponsored the study, "conducted experiments on 3.7 million Lyft riders" in nine American cities. By "tweaking prices and wait times to test when users requested and didn't request rides," the authors were able to "suss out how much people are willing to pay to wait less for their rides," approximating the value of their time. A 1997 federal study determined, using other measures, that Americans tended to value their time at "half of what the typical household makes per hour." Today, that works out to $14, so time may have become more valuable (or that Lyft riders are not quite typical).

Left out of IPO riches

Airbnb's blockbuster IPO left many of its former employees wondering what might have been, said Cory Weinberg at The Information​. The home-­sharing platform canceled "about $616 million worth of unvested stock awards through the first nine months of year," easily the largest amount of potential equity wiped out among 20 recent tech listings. "The majority of the awards likely belonged to 1,800 employees Airbnb let go this spring as the ­COVID-19 pandemic pummeled business." Canceling unvested stock awards when employees leave firms is "standard practice." Airbnb's shares more than doubled in price, to $145, on their first day of trading last week.

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.