Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle
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.
Chapter 2 Still Washington: money as moral energy
‘Actually, money does grow on trees.’
Kate Frederiksen, wealth therapist, Colorado.
I
I took the Washington metro back into town wondering what had been missing from the academic study I had just witnessed, and slipped into my guesthouse in Dupont Circle. Irene was watching an ancient episode of Are You Being Served?. ‘We’re watching one of your TV shows,’ she said, falling about laughing as I passed the door. ‘Do you want to join us?’
‘It’s very old,’ I said, trying to wriggle out of responsibility for it. I needed time to make sense of what I was learning; after a few days of watching the controlled creative chaos at what Edgar called Time Dollars Ground Zero, I realized he was being much more ambitious than I had expected. He was attempting more than just providing services for old people, and much more even than creating a new kind of money. He was trying to redress the balance of the modern world from selfishness to unselfishness – encouraging people to be nice to each other. Even if you believe, as Washington ‘liberals’ tend to, that deep down people are pretty nice really, this was an enormous task. ‘You’re trying to do more than invent a new currency, aren’t you?’ I had asked him. ‘You’re trying to create a whole new economy.’
He laughed. ‘Or maybe we’re trying to create one which used to exist but doesn’t any longer.’ And this seemed to be what had been missing from the cold academic discussion earlier in the day: a sense of the powerful brand of nostalgia wielded by Farrell Didio, Tomeka Smith and Edgar Cahn as they popularize the idea – not just as a new kind of money, but as a very old kind of wealth. As his book points out, three out of four Americans don’t know their next-door neighbours. Once upon a time, there was a kind of wealth in the way people looked after each other; grandparents had a vital role bringing up grandchildren, and so on. And somehow, it doesn’t really matter whether this is true or not – it has enormous power to sway audiences.
We have got economics wrong, says Edgar. Money isn’t like water. You don’t pour it in the top and watch it filter down: hardly anybody believes that any more. It moves around a community, invigorating it like electricity. Without being plugged into the energy source, everything just goes limp.
There are anyway two economies in the economic gospel according to Cahn. One has supermarkets, bagel shops and factories, the networks