Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ about them carried the cover headline: ‘The brilliant angry careers of Jean and Edgar Cahn’. Jean was black; Edgar was Jewish – they were the perfect ‘liberal’ couple. Edgar had worked with Bobby Kennedy, writing his speeches when he was US Attorney-General in the early 1960s, and went on to advise Lyndon Johnson when he was president. He and Jean together had founded the Antioch School of Law, now the District of Columbia Law School, where Washingtonians can get legal qualifications without having to pay vast sums of money, and where students are sent out to learn on the job by taking on cases for people who can’t normally afford lawyers. Both also set up the national legal advice service for people on low incomes. His sudden foray into alternative economics was characteristic, but a little confusing for the economists.

      As Mrs Thatcher gathered the reins of the UK, he took up the offer of a spell at the London School of Economics, honing the idea against the cynicism of British academia. The trouble is that once academics get hold of an idea, they can worry it to death. The evaluations of his ideas at the time were full of fearsome possibilities. Would time dollars discourage governments from spending money? Would there be so many old people one day that the whole thing might break down? We need to be a little bit cautious here, academics say.

      Back in the USA it was also difficult getting organizations to find out whether the idea would work, but by 1985 a number of pilot projects were running – all of them linked to caring for old people. The Miami project ran into immediate trouble with local bureaucrats in the divided and highly-charged world of Florida politics. Florida’s officials finally emerged with a damning indictment of the whole idea in 1987: ‘Volunteers are least suited to the types of services required for time dollar programmes, specifically personal care, homemaker, health support, and inhouse services in general,’ they wrote.

      This followed a concerted campaign by officials at the Florida Office on Aging to stymie time dollars. First they came up with an estimate of the cost to set up a mammoth computer network across the state. It was $250,000. Then there were the bureaucratic requirements. Everyone taking part would have to undergo a full criminal reference check. Everyone who wanted a lift to the doctor’s would have to fill in a ten-page form and read over thirty pages of detailed instructions. ‘Had the department been assigned to invent the family, the procedures would have exceeded the entire Code of Federal Regulations,’ wrote Cahn and Rowe bitterly. ‘With further studies pending.’

      But there were reasonable worries for the politicians. What would happen, for instance, if there was a run on the time dollar bank? If every time dollar earned is a potential demand on a hospital or government department, does that mean the state would be legally liable? The questions hung in the air. Then there was the problem of volunteers, the people earning the time dollars – or ‘service credits’ to use the official term – by helping old people. Should they be trained? What happens if they get sued? Or worse, what happens if they abuse or defraud the system? There were some organizations that were implacably opposed to the whole concept. ‘We feel that one of the basic tenets of volunteer service is NOT receiving a quid pro quo,’ the American Red Cross told congressional hearings on the subject.

      But as Carolee DeVito from the University of Miami School of Medicine said: ‘Service credits legitimize the worth of time.’ And it was because of this that the Miami project was rescued suddenly by Florida’s Senator Carrie Meek. She was enraged by the cuts to black elderly programmes in Miami being sponsored by the Florida Office on Aging. ‘We missed out on urban renewal. We missed out on the War on Poverty. We missed out on the money to rebuild Liberty City after the riots. And we are NOT going to miss out on this opportunity.’

      Senator Meek’s ‘volunteers’ managed to attract old-fashioned dollars from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the biggest health trust in the USA, which was just then looking for pilot time dollar projects. They arranged for twelve government-sponsored volunteers from the massive VISTA programme, and they divided the whole project equally between the blacks, the Hispanics, the Jewish community and the blue-collar Anglos.

      Two years later, it was Miami’s time dollar project which received the first nationwide TV coverage. The report covered a low-income block of housing for old people, 85 per cent black and 10 per cent Hispanic. They filmed one resident, a grandmother called Daisy with an artificial leg, tutoring in the local primary school in return for time dollars – and spending them on lifts from the store from Pepe. Pepe spoke almost no English, but somehow the two of them managed to get along on their weekly shopping trips. ‘I don’t know what I would do without Pepe,’ she told the cameras.

      Nearly a decade later, the Miami project was administering more than 8,000 hours of time dollar earnings every month, across thirty-two offices in the city. It had long since burst out of just helping old people, and the system had been taken over by the community as a whole. You could spend time dollars there on anything from plumbers to baby-sitting.

      Miami was lucky. Just when they needed heavyweight backing, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was looking for them. Miami, Boston, New York City, Washington DC, St Louis and San Francisco were given enough money to fund time dollar banks for three years, paying wages to organizers, setting up computer systems, renting offices, and funding all those other mundane things you need in offices, like paper clips, plastic cups and lavatory paper.

      The St Louis project also attracted media attention. They were based at Grace Hill, an energetic programme to help old people carry on living at home, backed by generous federal grants – which suddenly disappeared with a wave from a magic wand by the Reagan administration. Organizers were left with 750 frail old people on their books, 500 of whom would have to go into nursing homes if they received no support. What could be done? Board members locked themselves away for a day with a management consultant to come up with a solution. ‘We told them we had to find a way to make less more,’ said Grace Marver, later director of the local time dollar programme.

      And that’s just what they did. MORE – the Member Organized Resource Exchange – used time dollars to fund the services they needed. Now up to 10,000 volunteers help 1,500 old people stay out of old people’s homes. Only a third of the volunteers told researchers that they had been motivated by earning time dollars, but then a third of them had never volunteered for anything before.

      By 1990, three years later, the six projects in the six cities were already organizing more than 143,000 hours of time dollars every year and had attracted 4,500 participants to earn them. Edgar Cahn’s idea was beginning to work, and some solutions to the potential pitfalls were also beginning to emerge.

      The state of Missouri decided it would underwrite the value of time dollars themselves, like central bankers. They had been the first state to pass time dollars legislation, and had the good sense to realize that bureaucracy would kill the idea stone dead. They even managed to resist the temptation to draft regulations until a whole year after time dollars began there. Missouri still backs people’s time dollar earnings: if the system collapses, the state will provide the services which honour the earnings. They ‘promise to pay the bearer on demand’.

      Most of the big time dollar banks decided to solve the ‘volunteer problem’ by taking out volunteer insurance. Most check out the people when they join. Many will refuse to fix young people up with tasks which would take them into old people’s homes. ‘It’s not that I was afraid for the seniors,’ said one organizer I met later. ‘I was worried about the safety of the young people.’

      In fact, according to Cahn and Rowe, in all the millions of time dollar transactions around the US A in over a decade, nobody has ever sued. ‘People don’t mess with their local support systems,’ he said. No volunteer has ever been sued in writ-happy America, which is why you can still get a million dollars’ worth of volunteer insurance for $3.

      Then there was the big daddy of problems: were time dollars taxable? It would be a terrible waste if all those frail elderly people had earned their time dollar hoards СКАЧАТЬ