Читать книгу Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash - David Boyle - Страница 16

The battle over money has made politics pretty boring – an endless succession on the Today programme of small politicians demanding money from big politicians the world over. But maybe, just maybe, time dollars could provide a way out of our worldwide budget squeeze. We may have to carry on squeezing the budgets and resign ourselves to the fact that people suffer, but in the case of old people that would often mean they have to leave their own houses to be looked after in miserable old folks’ homes – at far greater expense to the public purse. One alternative might be accessing the wealth in people’s time and use this new ‘time money’ to pay for what they need.

One objection is that this lets the government off the hook, which really bothers earnest academics – some of whom would no doubt prefer to keep the suffering just to maintain the pressure; another is that these kinds of jobs should really be carried out by people with degrees, diplomas and years of training. Edgar Cahn answers this with a strange little essay about cleaning your teeth. The market economy works by specialization, he says. We buy the specialized services we used to provide ourselves, except – he says – for teeth-cleaning. ‘If we tried to do so, we couldn’t just ask anybody: we would have to pay an oral hygienist and the price would include taxes, malpractice insurance, administrative costs, certification, worker’s compensation licensing and overheads.

‘We can’t afford even the simplest tasks done for us at market prices,’ he writes. ‘Yet that’s our approach to most of society’s needs: we try to buy back piecemeal, at market prices, the things we used to do for ourselves and for each other.’ And then, of course, the professionals say they can’t do it without our help. The schools need the involvement of parents and the police need Neighbourhood Watch. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to keep brushing our teeth.’

When academics study these ideas in practice, things become strangely clouded. Even the people who have studied for a decade to find out whether time dollars work have come to no clear conclusion. ‘I’m not sure we’ve proved it yet,’ said Kathleen Treat from the University of Maryland’s Center on Aging, with satisfaction. I suppose proving it would bring the research programme to an abrupt end.

‘Oh,’ I said, rather nonplussed. They had been studying it for nine years, after all.

‘Well, in some places it has been fairly active and successful. In other places the programme has stayed small, and in some places the projects have not been able to sustain themselves and have gone out of business. We will admit to you that there are a number of these programmes which have folded – though it’s hard to get that out of Edgar Cahn. As for the volunteers, if you ask them, they say: “Oh no, the credits don’t mean a thing to me”. But that is not necessarily the right answer: the volunteers will say in the same breath: “Hey, there’s a mistake in my statement!”’

This was as close to a definitive answer as I was going to get. Their department had been working away at this since 1987, in a grey windowless bunker, with a basketball court above it – which meant its rooms echoed to the constant bangs and crashes of trainers, bodies and basketballs against the floor. Their reports have helped give an academic legitimacy to the time dollars idea, and have shown how time dollars can attract people into ‘volunteering’ who would never usually do any such thing, and keep them – the Miami project had a drop-out rate of just 5 per cent a year – and that old people earning time dollars stay healthier longer. I was also able to ask them how much it costs to set up a time dollar bank. This usually means a computer, an office, somebody on the end of a phone, postage, heating, administration, posters, office parties at Christmas, morning coffee, envelopes and – most of all – old-fashioned, common-or-garden money.

You can pay for the administration in time dollars to some extent, like they did in Lincoln-Westmoreland, and if you do that too much, the credibility of the system begins to teeter. You are, after all, doing the equivalent of what bad governments do in bad times – printing money and causing inflation. Or, in other words, lowering the value of the time dollars.

It costs at least $50,000, they said. You could beg, borrow and use donated space but ‘you really have to be a true believer to make that work’. Their most frequent calls these days are from established time dollar banks wondering where their next grant is going to come from. It’s a paradox, isn’t it. But as the problems increase, so does the advice. The Center on Aging now publishes a newsletter called To Your Credit, with help on where to get funding, how to deal with volunteers who want to give up – and a smattering of sentimental advice. ‘Everyone has a talent someone else needs,’ said the copy they gave me. I wasn’t sure this applied to journalists or alternative economists.

‘Do you get along with Edgar Cahn?’ I asked.

There were peals of laughter and then a slightly awkward silence. ‘Our relationship is very cordial,’ they said once they had recovered themselves. I wasn’t altogether sure I believed them, because there even seemed to be different philosophies behind the various different ‘service credit’ softwares.

‘Either you design it so that every service is paid for and accounted for, or in Edgar’s vision, which quite frankly I’m not sure I understand, it is completely open-ended and there’s no accounting of credits. I’m not sure, without that, they have any value,’ they said.

And in that apparently small difference, there is actually all the difference in the world. Are time banks like ordinary banks, where everything has to add up in the end? Or are they just a way of funnelling goodwill? Edgar Cahn describes his creation as ‘funny money’, and he means it. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t add up,’ he said to me, ‘and I don’t give a damn.’

Take Miami, for example, because this was one of the jewels of Edgar Cahn’s time dollar crown. And not surprisingly: Florida now has so many old people that by the year 2000 they will require $400 million a year in Medicaid funds. ‘By carefully watching what is happening now in Florida, we stand to learn a wealth of information about the problems and opportunities the whole nation will face in the future,’ says the futurist John Naisbitt.

The time bank there has been built up from nothing by a former international banker called Anna Miyares. She took a big pay-cut to set up in Little Havana because her daughter was at university near there. But in spite of her banking background, Anna Miyares has backed away from the whole idea of banks. ‘I used to be a happy person, but as a banker I became a different person,’ she said. ‘So basically I’m doing this because it gave me the opportunity to be myself, to do what I always wanted to do … Now I have more friends than ever before. I used to wonder if people were friends just because they wanted me to arrange a loan. To me this is not working: this is my extended family.’

You don’t get bankers talking like that, but then you don’t usually get bankers like Anna Miyares. She used to make people sign slips agreeing that their volunteers had worked the hours they claimed to earn their time dollars. Now, in an effort to cut bureaucracy, she just takes them at their word.

Time dollars made me look afresh at the whole idea of banks – and of money too. When I put my earnings into the bank, or my £1 coin into my pocket, where does it come from? Well, the Royal Mint, of course. But where does the actual ‘money’ come from in the first place? The answer is that it is produced by banks, who go into debt to create true money to lend to businesses, who use it to pay their suppliers, who sometimes even use it to pay me: the banks conjure the money into existence. It is different with time dollars, because you do the conjuring yourself. Old Mrs Plummet needs to be given a lift to the doctor, and she goes into debt in the system to organize one. By doing so, she conjures wealth into existence which can be used to power other services for old and young people alike.

The value of pounds is backed by our belief in the banks and the continuing value of what Harold Wilson used to call the pound in your pocket. The value of time dollars is backed by our belief in the system and the willingness of the local community to do the work. Or belief in each other, in other words.

Generally speaking, I prefer the idea of Mrs Plummet creating wealth which will eventually trickle up to me than NatWest creating wealth which may trickle down – but which certainly won’t trickle as far as housebound, dependent Mrs Plummet. Of course we don’t have to have one or the other, but I am thrilled by the thought that Mrs Plummet’s various needs can make us all richer.