Social trade-offs

Sorting and labeling:
From a social point of view, what matters most are the benefits of sorting and labeling given things, activities, and people in society as a whole.
There can be a substantial difference in value between a sorted and an unsorted collection containing the same quantities of identical items. Among the costs of sorting and labeling is a loss of diversity.

Label can reduce uncertainty, for example, a well-known restaurant.
Most objections to sorting and labeling in general---and particularly to the sorting and labeling of people--are based on ignoring the costs of knowledge, or ignoring differences in the cost of knowledge between one decision-making process and another.

Time:
Time is never free. Its value is whatever alternative opportunities must be foregone in order to use it for a particular purpose.
Every item has both a money price and a time price, and it is the combination of the two that is its full cost.
Different people have different value of time.

Example: Job training may not be effective.
Job training programs require present efforts to increase prospective employment and earnings sometime in the future may prove relatively ineffective with age, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups with short time horizons. The attempt to use such future-oriented programs as means of luring present-oriented youngsters away from crime runs up against the fact that "most crimes are committed opportunistically by youths who want small amounts of money right away."