Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle
at 10 a.m. the next day – only to be told I had been expected to meet Ken a good hour before. The Time Dollars office was that kind of place.
By the time I had dived down into Edgar’s basement-cum-bedroom, Ken was preparing to catch the train back home to Long Island. He looked carefully-turned out, fiftyish, with a dapper moustache and a great untidy, labyrinthine mission: as he puts it, to ‘eliminate the virtual ghetto’. By which he means: give power to the American underclass by making them computer-literate.
Ken was one of the pioneers of computers in education, but found himself increasingly irritated by the pattern of educational change. He could have been one of those disaffected British teachers you meet in pubs, complaining about what Ken called ‘constant innovation but no change’. In 1994 he wrote an article in the US magazine Education Week entitled ‘The 81 per cent Solution’, urging that we restructure our schools and communities for life-long learning, instead of the brief intense period of inattention we know as ‘school’. The title came from the idea that children spend only 19 per cent of their time in class. What about the other 81 per cent?
‘You are what you learn,’ Ken told me, warming to his subject and checking his watch. ‘What you take into your mind is as important as what you take into your body. In the larger media ecology, children are an environment which is in many ways more toxic than their physical environment – in terms of the consumer mess on television, the sex and violence and the drug culture which they talk through on their way back from schools. That toxicity needs to be countered with a message that engages them.’
What is the message he wants? Well, one of them is that children can learn and earn money at their own home computer.
How could somebody like Edgar Cahn resist a challenge like that? Here was a whole new aspect of the social economy waiting to be built. The result was that Ken and Edgar set up the LINCT Coalition – or Learning and Information Networks for Community Telecomputing: Americans love these endless acronyms – so that the whole process could be driven by time dollars. Ken had already spun out his organization, a kind of Which for schools called the Educational Products Information Exchange, and was busy campaigning for people with computers to feel responsible for people who don’t. He was one of those who calculated that American business and government departments throw out an average of fifteen million perfectly good but slightly old computers every year. That’s one computer for every poor household in America.
The concept has reached as far as the White House, from where President Clinton has signed an executive order to make it easier for government departments to help. But it isn’t as simple as that, says Ken. You could just give each of the fifteen million households a computer, but he and Edgar don’t want to do it that way. ‘We don’t believe in that,’ Ken told me. ‘Computers have value and should be earned.’
Earned with time dollars, of course. And how do you earn the time dollars? In the usual way, or by what he calls ‘electronic sweat equity’. For you and me, that means you can earn them by teaching yourself to use computers. In Suffolk County, Long Island, where Ken comes from, people on Workfare can meet their twenty hours a week requirement by learning computer skills at home, rather than picking up rubbish.
‘Not that garbage doesn’t need to be picked up,’ said Ken. ‘But that’s not a highly marketable skill. When you burn the grey cells learning how to operate the sucker, you are helping yourself earn a computer and modem. And you can own this after paying for your training which is provided by “computer-haves” in the community, who are of course paid for their time in time dollars.’
Neat, isn’t it? And there’s more.
‘All of the earning of time dollars is recorded,’ he told me. ‘Not just on the time dollars software, but under a grant we got from the legislature in New York state recently, we are currently programming a cyber-banking system for time dollars – so we can extend the time dollar record-keeping software into interactive electronic banking. So when you earn your time dollars, you can go online and see your bank account.’
If people regularly earned time dollars for their voluntary activities, you could provide a snapshot of ‘economic’ activity to rival the GNP. In the UK, for example, twenty-three million people are involved in the voluntary sector and only twenty-two million are in paid employment. But the Treasury only notices the second category, because it involves ‘money’. Or as Edgar Cahn puts it: ‘Every time we put a grandmother in a nursing home, that is a contribution to GNP. Every time we enable her to continue to live at home, it’s not.’
This is all part of the notorious blindness of economics. There are a million non-profit organizations in the US,’ Ken told me, with one foot out of the car. ‘750,000 of them have an annual operating budget of under $25,000 – yet those organizations, because they are run by volunteers, have no way of documenting how much they contribute to society. Edgar and I believe that the cyber-banking system I’ve been talking about can begin to document that. Hopefully one day you can have the whole country using this alternative non-market economy to shore up the social needs of the community, and we could create a social GNP – a true balance sheet for the country.’
And he was gone, preceded by his moustache and followed closely by his bag. A time dollar GNP is revolutionary stuff, because John Kenneth Galbraith said once: ‘If you don’t measure it, you can’t change it.’ If we think the things people do for time dollars are important, we have to measure them or nobody will take a blind bit of notice.
So how to you pump-prime the time dollar economy with refurbished computers? Edgar had decided to set up a string of computer refurbishment centres, staffed by young people without jobs who are paid in time dollars. There remained the small difficulty of getting hold of the old computers. Anybody who has given the problem thirty seconds’ thought will know that there are piles of forgotten computers in nearly every cupboard in every office in the land. But somebody has to ask for them and go and pick them up.
Which is how I made the acquaintance of Rev. Fred Williams, a former US AF policeman with a disturbing resemblance to Lenny Henry. He had been a constant brisk presence in the Time Dollar H Q since I had arrived, hurrying up and down stairs with computer components, greeting me genially and offering me the chance of some heavy lifting. I had managed to avoid this until now.
Fred was part pastor, part computer consultant. He was one of those frighteningly competent men who know how to load a removal van and tie down the furniture to stop it leaping around in the back. He and I followed the van in his big grey car, with a broken radiator, with his white sun hat sitting neatly on the back seat. All cars in Washington are really just vast air conditioning systems on wheels.
And we certainly needed air conditioning. The merest thought of getting out of the car to heave computers around made me feel exhausted. ‘Even if we get a hundred computers, that’ll be good,’ he said. Fred had his feet on the ground, but was clearly one of those people who looked on the bright side.
First there was a pile of computers from the campus of the American University. Then on to the National Trust. This name conjures a calm sense of summer days, polite elderly ladies in stately homes, chandeliers and cream teas. But in Washington it means the National Trust for the Development of the African-American Man. There we found piles of prehistoric computers waiting for us at the top of the four flights of stairs. The lift was broken. It was hotter than ever.
‘Happy Wednesday,’ said Tina to everyone we passed sweating on the stairs. Looking on the bright side is a major business for time dollars people.
Well over one hundred computers later, after a short mind-numbed rest in the back of the van, I was back in the car. ‘When I was last in England, I watched a prostitute on breakfast TV and then ran into her at Heathrow Airport,’ Fred was saying.
‘Really?’ I said, perking up a little in the air conditioning. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said she should accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Saviour,’ he said with a slightly self-deprecating laugh. ‘She didn’t.’
IV