Читать книгу Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash - David Boyle - Страница 11

‘Remember.’ said Benjamin Franklin in one of his irritating homilies to tradespeople. ‘Time is money.’ He meant, of course, that sitting around chatting or watching The X-Files tends to waste time which could have been used earning. But imagine for a second that he meant it literally – that time really is a kind of currency.

If that were true, we would all be born with a regular basic income of twenty-four hours a day, eight of which we have to spend asleep – a kind of tax which keeps us relatively fresh and healthy the next day. Nobody would have any more than twenty-four hours a day, and every morning we wake up with twenty-four more. Everybody would earn the same, and it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘spend a few hours down the pub’. But maybe this is a theoretical universe we can learn something from, because anyone without pounds or dollars does at least have time – too much of it. If you are earning, and you do have access to money, the chances are that you are pretty poverty-stricken as far as time is concerned.

It may have been no coincidence that the time dollar idea should emerge in one of the world’s most problematic, budget-stretched and exhausted cities – Washington DC – because Washington is going through both the best of times and the worst of times. It is the capital of the richest nation on earth at the height of its powers. It is the bankrupt, poverty-stricken city, crumbling like a small town in eastern Europe, administered by a mayor straight out of prison for drug offences. It used to be a relatively healthy-sized city of 700,000 people just twenty years ago, about the size of Sheffield. Now it has just 550,000 and the number is falling fast. The moment people can afford to move out, they go – and they take their taxes with them.

Add to this heady mix all of the following: a public-works budget that has been slashed by more than half in the past few years, leaving streets overgrown and bridges collapsing. A murder rate growing at anything up to 25 per cent a year. A third of the city’s fire engines are kept out of service every day to save money. Officials have been pumping extra chlorine into the drinking water to counteract the bacteria from corroding pipes. AIDS clinics have to shut down periodically because they run out of drugs. It is terrifying, and the city is still running out of money. ‘Everything has broken,’ the city’s chief financial officer, Anthony A. Williams, told the Washington Post. This isn’t just a car which has run out of gas. There is something fundamentally wrong with the car. The gas pedal doesn’t work and neither do the brakes.’

Over this huge disaster strides the figure of Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr, large, mustachioed and mayor for fourteen of the past eighteen years. Barry’s term of office was interrupted briefly by a six-month spell inside for drug possession, after he was videotaped in a downtown hotel smoking crack. His re-election was one of the most astonishing political comebacks of all time. ‘Mr Barry is a tremendous politician,’ said the fearless Mr Williams. ‘But he’s a lot like nuclear power. On a good day, he can light up the city. On a bad day, he can blow it up.’

When I took the Amtrak train south to Washington it was swelteringly hot, as only Washington can be with its humidity and bogland – one of its metro stations is even called Foggy Bottom. I was visiting the Washington law professor Edgar Cahn, author of the book Time Dollars, which had such a long sub-title that I barely needed to read it: The New Currency That Enables Americans to Turn Their Hidden Resource – Time – into Personal Security and Community Renewal.

His book – co-written with Jonathan Rowe from the Christian Science Monitor – is a little hazy about where the idea came from. The authors imply it was the brainchild of the first person mentioned in the book – a disabled lady called Dolores Galloway, living alone in the notorious Washington district of Anacostia and running a time dollar bank in her apartment complex. ‘We don’t want charity,’ she is quoted as saying. ‘It’s one hand washing the other. I wash your clothing. Maybe you can wash my dishes.’

But actually if you probe a little bit further into the history of time dollars, it emerges that the idea for a new kind of money came from Professor Cahn himself, lying flat on his back after a serious heart attack at the early age of forty-four. ‘It became an obsession of mine,’ he told me later, his eyes lighting up with excitement. ‘I was lying in hospital being waited on hand and foot by the equivalent of a retinue of servants which, in normal circumstances, I could never afford. And I was wondering why I didn’t like it. I realized I didn’t like being useless. It was a very personal thing, and – this was 1980 – I also realized society was busy labelling all sorts of other people as useless too.’

During a visit to London, he had been haunted by the un-American words used by the B B C to describe the unemployed: ‘redundant’. It scared him. Margaret Thatcher was then doing her bit to encourage more of this kind of redundancy and Ronald Reagan was doing something similar. ‘So I started struggling with the question of how to put people to work and fulfil all those growing needs when society has no money to pay for them,’ said Cahn. ‘And I thought: why not create another kind of money?’

Cahn was also struggling in his mind with the problem of demographic change. By 2040, one in five Americans will be retired. Many of these will be the sprightly kind of elderly Americans we see on tourist buses all over the world, but many will be increasingly old and infirm – needing a range of services, from medical care through to simple companionship, which the present economic system doesn’t seem able to afford. His money was not intended to work like ordinary money. It was supposed to fund the way families and communities used to behave: to be paid to people for helping each other out, minding each other’s children, running errands, or just phoning each other up for a chat. It was supposed to encourage people to be good neighbours in a way that ordinary money doesn’t any more – a way of paying for what you need using time. Cahn called it time dollars.

You go along to your local time dollars project, and tell them what kind of work you are prepared to do – anything from roofing to giving people lifts – and the things you need doing in return. All these details are entered into the computer. Then one of your elderly neighbours suddenly needs a lift to the doctor at a time when you are free – or maybe they just need driving to the shops. They phone the office, who call you up. The final judgement about whether the two of you are suited is made by the time dollar organizer, who phones up first to see if you are available and willing. Result: you spend an hour helping your neighbour and you earn one time dollar. You get a statement showing your earnings at the end of the month, and you feel good about yourself.

What can you do with your new-found wealth? Well, that depends on the scheme. You could spend it on services from other people in the system. Or you could give it to an elderly relative who might need it more. Or you could keep it for a rainy day. Or you can just forget all about it: only about 15 per cent of time dollar earnings are ever actually spent.

When Edgar Cahn came up with the idea, he and his wife Jean were already well-known and successful radical lawyers. A Washington Post Magazine feature about them carried the cover headline: ‘The brilliant angry careers of Jean and Edgar Cahn’. Jean was black; Edgar was Jewish – they were the perfect ‘liberal’ couple. Edgar had worked with Bobby Kennedy, writing his speeches when he was US Attorney-General in the early 1960s, and went on to advise Lyndon Johnson when he was president. He and Jean together had founded the Antioch School of Law, now the District of Columbia Law School, where Washingtonians can get legal qualifications without having to pay vast sums of money, and where students are sent out to learn on the job by taking on cases for people who can’t normally afford lawyers. Both also set up the national legal advice service for people on low incomes. His sudden foray into alternative economics was characteristic, but a little confusing for the economists.

As Mrs Thatcher gathered the reins of the UK, he took up the offer of a spell at the London School of Economics, honing the idea against the cynicism of British academia. The trouble is that once academics get hold of an idea, they can worry it to death. The evaluations of his ideas at the time were full of fearsome possibilities. Would time dollars discourage governments from spending money? Would there be so many old people one day that the whole thing might break down? We need to be a little bit cautious here, academics say.

Back in the USA it was also difficult getting organizations to find out whether the idea would work, but by 1985 a number of pilot projects were running – all of them linked to caring for old people. The Miami project ran into immediate trouble with local bureaucrats in the divided and highly-charged world of Florida politics. Florida’s officials finally emerged with a damning indictment of the whole idea in 1987: ‘Volunteers are least suited to the types of services required for time dollar programmes, specifically personal care, homemaker, health support, and inhouse services in general,’ they wrote.

This followed a concerted campaign by officials at the Florida Office on Aging to stymie time dollars. First they came up with an estimate of the cost to set up a mammoth computer network across the state. It was $250,000. Then there were the bureaucratic requirements. Everyone taking part would have to undergo a full criminal reference check. Everyone who wanted a lift to the doctor’s would have to fill in a ten-page form and read over thirty pages of detailed instructions. ‘Had the department been assigned to invent the family, the procedures would have exceeded the entire Code of Federal Regulations,’ wrote Cahn and Rowe bitterly. ‘With further studies pending.’

But there were reasonable worries for the politicians. What would happen, for instance, if there was a run on the time dollar bank? If every time dollar earned is a potential demand on a hospital or government department, does that mean the state would be legally liable? The questions hung in the air. Then there was the problem of volunteers, the people earning the time dollars – or ‘service credits’ to use the official term – by helping old people. Should they be trained? What happens if they get sued? Or worse, what happens if they abuse or defraud the system? There were some organizations that were implacably opposed to the whole concept. ‘We feel that one of the basic tenets of volunteer service is NOT receiving a quid pro quo,’ the American Red Cross told congressional hearings on the subject.

But as Carolee DeVito from the University of Miami School of Medicine said: ‘Service credits legitimize the worth of time.’ And it was because of this that the Miami project was rescued suddenly by Florida’s Senator Carrie Meek. She was enraged by the cuts to black elderly programmes in Miami being sponsored by the Florida Office on Aging. ‘We missed out on urban renewal. We missed out on the War on Poverty. We missed out on the money to rebuild Liberty City after the riots. And we are NOT going to miss out on this opportunity.’

Senator Meek’s ‘volunteers’ managed to attract old-fashioned dollars from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the biggest health trust in the USA, which was just then looking for pilot time dollar projects. They arranged for twelve government-sponsored volunteers from the massive VISTA programme, and they divided the whole project equally between the blacks, the Hispanics, the Jewish community and the blue-collar Anglos.

Two years later, it was Miami’s time dollar project which received the first nationwide TV coverage. The report covered a low-income block of housing for old people, 85 per cent black and 10 per cent Hispanic. They filmed one resident, a grandmother called Daisy with an artificial leg, tutoring in the local primary school in return for time dollars – and spending them on lifts from the store from Pepe. Pepe spoke almost no English, but somehow the two of them managed to get along on their weekly shopping trips. ‘I don’t know what I would do without Pepe,’ she told the cameras.

Nearly a decade later, the Miami project was administering more than 8,000 hours of time dollar earnings every month, across thirty-two offices in the city. It had long since burst out of just helping old people, and the system had been taken over by the community as a whole. You could spend time dollars there on anything from plumbers to baby-sitting.

Miami was lucky. Just when they needed heavyweight backing, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was looking for them. Miami, Boston, New York City, Washington DC, St Louis and San Francisco were given enough money to fund time dollar banks for three years, paying wages to organizers, setting up computer systems, renting offices, and funding all those other mundane things you need in offices, like paper clips, plastic cups and lavatory paper.

The St Louis project also attracted media attention. They were based at Grace Hill, an energetic programme to help old people carry on living at home, backed by generous federal grants – which suddenly disappeared with a wave from a magic wand by the Reagan administration. Organizers were left with 750 frail old people on their books, 500 of whom would have to go into nursing homes if they received no support. What could be done? Board members locked themselves away for a day with a management consultant to come up with a solution. ‘We told them we had to find a way to make less more,’ said Grace Marver, later director of the local time dollar programme.

And that’s just what they did. MORE – the Member Organized Resource Exchange – used time dollars to fund the services they needed. Now up to 10,000 volunteers help 1,500 old people stay out of old people’s homes. Only a third of the volunteers told researchers that they had been motivated by earning time dollars, but then a third of them had never volunteered for anything before.

By 1990, three years later, the six projects in the six cities were already organizing more than 143,000 hours of time dollars every year and had attracted 4,500 participants to earn them. Edgar Cahn’s idea was beginning to work, and some solutions to the potential pitfalls were also beginning to emerge.

The state of Missouri decided it would underwrite the value of time dollars themselves, like central bankers. They had been the first state to pass time dollars legislation, and had the good sense to realize that bureaucracy would kill the idea stone dead. They even managed to resist the temptation to draft regulations until a whole year after time dollars began there. Missouri still backs people’s time dollar earnings: if the system collapses, the state will provide the services which honour the earnings. They ‘promise to pay the bearer on demand’.

Most of the big time dollar banks decided to solve the ‘volunteer problem’ by taking out volunteer insurance. Most check out the people when they join. Many will refuse to fix young people up with tasks which would take them into old people’s homes. ‘It’s not that I was afraid for the seniors,’ said one organizer I met later. ‘I was worried about the safety of the young people.’

In fact, according to Cahn and Rowe, in all the millions of time dollar transactions around the US A in over a decade, nobody has ever sued. ‘People don’t mess with their local support systems,’ he said. No volunteer has ever been sued in writ-happy America, which is why you can still get a million dollars’ worth of volunteer insurance for $3.

Then there was the big daddy of problems: were time dollars taxable? It would be a terrible waste if all those frail elderly people had earned their time dollar hoards by looking after their neighbours’ children or by finger-aching achievements in crochet, only to face an IRS swoop for tax evasion. Worse, the IRS would obviously expect them to pay tax in old-fashioned dollars. The same problem was faced by the local money pioneers in the UK: ‘I don’t think the Chancellor of the Exchequer really wants his lawn mowed,’ said one Inland Revenue official.

But Edgar Cahn was a law professor and this made all the difference. Time dollars can’t be taxable, he said, because they are not real money: they are just records of services. ‘In the old days, did you tax people when they looked after their neighbours’ kids? Did people get taxed on the sugar they lent?’

The IRS agreed. Service credits are not taxable, they ruled, and so it remains. But they do have to be reminded every so often. ‘When President Clinton summoned us to a “season of service”,’ said Cahn in a letter to the New York Times, ‘I do not think he meant services to the IRS.’

‘Time dollars represent a psychological and monetary reward for rebuilding the non-market economy,’ says Cahn. It is a kind of social money, and it can be given extra value if it is backed by government departments or underpinned by businesses. And it seems to work. After over a decade of time dollars, the idea is now firmly entrenched, firmly researched and funnelling a new kind of money – mainly, but not exclusively, among older people. There are now nearly 200 time dollar banks operating across the USA, from the Community Carers Service Bank in Berkeley, California to the Ohana Kokua Program in Hawaii; from the Give and Take Service Bank in Ohio to the BEST Time Bank in Laredo, Texas. There are even a few experiments in Japan.

‘When people came from Germany and Japan and Sweden and said we need to do this too, I realized this was not a Ronald Reagan problem,’ said Cahn. ‘Something was going on in every industrial society that I didn’t understand.’

What was going on? ‘Gridlock: moral, political, fiscal,’ said Ralph Nader in the introduction to Edgar Cahn’s book. Then along comes the time dollar, ‘an organized, inflation-proof currency that can provide as constant, as powerful, as reliable a reward for decency as the market does for selfishness.’ If you believe that money began as a way of building relationships, rather than as an essential aid to shopaholism, then time dollars look as though they are going back to the roots of the whole idea.