Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle
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One is formal and the other informal. Economists study the first and only partly believe in the existence of the second, but the second needs to be energetic for the first to thrive.
‘We used to have a second economy which was invisible,’ he said. ‘And it’s the economy we don’t talk about, which used to be called community. And if we’re honest, this economy ran on the subjugation of women and slave labour. Now we live in a different world, but the community has disappeared.’
How do we get it back without the subjugation? Edgar’s first battle has been to prove the existence of this other economy to doubting economists who believe that everything has to have a price. ‘I do not know any family where someone holds up the wishbone and says “What am I bid for this tonight?”’ he says aggressively. ‘Or where the market value of walking the dog versus putting out the trash is the key factor in a household decision.’
The second stage is to show that time dollars reward and reinforce those very things that money generally doesn’t: caring for family, neighbours and friends. ‘To use the economists’ phrase, this new currency appears to increase the “competitive value” of relationships of trust, in relation to monetary gain,’ he told me. No wonder the only definition of time dollars by an economist I have come across is ‘an inferior semi-money’. Well maybe it is, but as long as it works, perhaps that doesn’t matter. And it is a semi-money which drives the kind of neighbourhood life we all depend on, like steam drives a machine.
II
So the scene was set for stage three. Edgar was preparing himself for a new phase in his economy-building. The problem of services for old people was dealt with; time dollars were well-established for that, but maybe they could do other things as well. In Chicago schools, for example, where time dollars are being paid to children to tutor fellow-pupils two years below. They find that both tutors and tutored improve their grades. They even stop bullying each other: you don’t beat up your pupil after all, and you don’t let anybody else do so either.
‘These are kids who have already been told by the school system that they are “dumb”,’ said Edgar. ‘But they know the alphabet and they know that one plus two equals three, so if they’re dumb it is inconceivable that these younger kids won’t learn it. They don’t do the kids’ homework for them because they know the kids can do it, because they understand the problem – and all of a sudden they are starting to get As and Bs for the first time.’
But for all these things to be achieved, time dollars need to be under-pinned, and this is beginning to happen. In El Paso, you can now buy children’s clothes with time dollars. In Pittsburgh, a shop run by Aid to Families with Dependent Children provides toys, nappies and secondhand clothes in return for time dollars. An organization in New England provides a $40 bag of groceries for $14 plus two hours of time dollars. The point about pump-priming this social economy with children’s clothes or food is that you can get hold of surplus or waste – things that were actually going for nothing – and then make them available for time dollars.
Habitat for Humanity, the US low-cost homes charity, already lets people make their mortgage down-payment in 500 hours of time dollar work building homes for other people. By charging for their expertise in time dollars, or by letting people into their health centre for time dollars, lawyers and local councils can create this time dollar debt – a debt which has to be paid off by people improving their neighbourhood. If you charge in pounds or dollars, neighbourhoods would not be able to afford it, but by charging for services in time dollars, you can involve neighbourhoods in their own salvation.
Edgar Cahn calls this ‘co-production’: ‘Without co-production, nothing that professionals, organizations or programmes do can succeed,’ he says. ‘With co-production, the impossible comes within reach. As a lawyer, I get to make sure someone isn’t evicted from their home, but I can’t make that home somewhere I would want to live. For that I need that person’s involvement.’ Because the economy is half-blind, it takes no notice of these assets – people’s time, skills, energy and willingness to give back. It leaves them lying around while we all believe we are running out of money. Time dollars are a way of recycling the assets and getting them to work.
GMB general secretary John Edmonds – one of Britain’s top trade unionists – tells a story of the secretary of a big social club in north-west England who is actually employed by a big chemical company, ‘As the club secretary, he demonstrates considerable skills as a communicator, organizer and manager; the chemical company employs him as a semi-skilled packer,’ he said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts. He went on: ‘The extent of John’s talent came to the attention of management when the company carried out a staff aptitude and experience survey. Showing me the results, the managing director delivered a bleak verdict: “We are wasting the ability of about half the people who work here”.’
Multiply this by every office, neighbourhood and street and you realize just how much hidden skill and human energy there is in society. And we thought we were running out of resources.
But there is something rather old-fashioned and moralistic about the time dollars idea, which I wasn’t sure would go down very well in cynical old Britain, where the slightest whiff of the ‘deserving poor’ gets a broadside from the people who watch out for these things. On the other hand, Edgar does some of this asset-recycling himself. He charges for his work in the legal advice centre in time dollars. He linked the major law firm Holland & Knight with a community group which wanted to clear out the drug-dealers and corrupt policemen from their neighbourhood in Washington and lobby to release funds for local improvement – in return for a retainer paid in time dollars. In 1996, the firm billed the equivalent of $234,979 to the community in time dollars, paid back in clearing up rubbish, planting flowers, school tutoring or taking down the car numbers of local drug-dealers.
Of course you can give this kind of stuff out for free, but shouldn’t it be paid for somehow? And if you are a law firm with the expertise and the local community has the energy, you need some kind of money system to bring the two together. ‘Lawyers have a lot of guilt,’ Edgar said later. ‘They know that the time they give is unleashing community development, but only if they charge in time dollars.’
Meanwhile, Edgar Cahn’s imagination was doing overtime. How about paying tax in time dollars? What about parking? What if city-centre parking spaces were reserved for people with time dollars? Imagine what an injection of credibility that would give to the idea of helping out in your neighbourhood. How about student loan payments in time dollars? ‘That’s next,’ he said as he took me to the front door the following evening, a little glint in his eye.
We were distributing ourselves into various cars, me with a video screen and a presentation stand on my lap. It was time for the time dollars bandwagon to descend on one of Washington’s more notorious estates. We were going to a housing block called Arthur M. Capper to discuss setting up a food bank with the residents. US cities are dotted with subsidized food banks, providing surplus food and groceries to poorer people at extremely low prices. Anyone with backing from a reputable organization can use these centres to supply their own local food banks.
Our job was to persuade the people who lived there to link this new food bank to time dollars, and use it to fuel a new kind of self-help. It was tricky: the residents had asked the Time Dollar Institute to be their official sponsors for the food bank. They might not take kindly to the morality bank which they were going to get. We drove past the Capitol, a kind of mental boundary between Washington’s safe and dangerous states of mind, past the trendy Irish pubs, underneath the urban motorways and down towards Anacostia. I hoped some of Edgar’s ‘smell of respect’ might rub off on me.
If you use the phrase ‘housing estate’ to Americans, they look at you blankly. To them, an estate is somewhere you grow cotton in the deep South. ‘Housing complex’ is equally bewildering: something your analyst might diagnose. Nor can you say ‘public housing’, because many of the apartment blocks where Washington’s poor live are actually private, though funded by subsidies from the city or one of the federal agencies.
The Arthur M. Capper block was one of these – a vast