Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      ‘You’re failing,’ Professor Cahn claims he told Washington’s top judge as they discussed youth crime. ‘Why don’t you enlist kids to help you? You may wear a black robe and bang a gavel, but the kids learned how to tune that out years ago.’ Edgar has all the trappings of the establishment: he’s been to Yale and Cambridge and writes articles for the Yale Law Journal – and he uses this to be able to say this kind of thing to top judges.

      Probably he wasn’t quite as blunt as he said he was, but there is no doubt that the system is now so overloaded that first, second and even sometimes third offences tend to be ignored. The unintended message to the young offenders is that you get three freebies before you are taken seriously.

      And so it was that time dollars were used for their most ambitious test yet, to revitalize the District of Columbia’s exhausted youth courts. Washington’s courts are, of course, a small part of an exhausted urban system in the USA. By the end of the Reagan years, nearly 1.2 million Americans were in prison, and the figure was rising so fast that – if you believe these kinds of trends – half the population was due to be inside by the year 2053. The prison population was increasing at the rate of 2,000 a week, at the cost of another $100,000 a week. ‘In five years, the corrections obligation could easily double the current national debt,’ said the Governor of Maryland’s report in 1992.

      In the face of all this, Washington’s youth courts can barely keep the lid on an explosive situation. The time dollars proposal to take over some of the youth courts and bring in teenage jurors paid in time dollars was agreed at the start of the year. It went ahead officially from April 23 – Shakespeare’s birthday, I was pleased to note – with a budget of just $200,000 over two years. By the time I arrived three months later, 600 young people had already gone through training as jurors, ready to try non-violent first-time offences like shoplifting, what we Brits would call ‘taking and driving away’, criminal damage, drug possession, truancy.

      There were already some success stories, such as the boy who had initially refused to speak because he had seen his brother killed, and trusted no one. And another, accused СКАЧАТЬ