Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 which make us rich and bring us the material things we need. The other drives families, neighbourhoods and communities, the networks which educate, bring up and nurture. 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 СКАЧАТЬ