Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ was there to discuss using time dollars to pay for security patrols in crime-ridden downtown estates. ‘Maybe we should have fines in time dollars,’ said Edgar, thinking aloud. ‘Maybe we need childcare for the people involved in the patrols, which we can power with time dollars.’

      ‘We’ve never done this before,’ Edgar told me. ‘You are watching a body of received wisdom emerge before your eyes.’ They were all ambitious ideas, and seemed to have been dreamed up only a couple of days before. No wonder there seemed to be such manic activity. Why did it all have to be done so fast when the time dollar idea had been around for well over a decade, I asked?

      A small flash of disapproval crossed Edgar Cahn’s face. ‘All these projects are based on relationships which have taken years to build up,’ he said defensively. ‘And anyway, time dollars are very much more than just bartering. The real issue is how you build a community,’ he told me. ‘We need to rebuild the “social capital” that we have all been living off – call it trust, reciprocity or just engagement if you like – and we need to find a beachhead wherever we can. Ultimately it is that social capital which is in severest need of repair.

      ‘As I see it, this is the real function of time dollars. It is to provide value in a world where the market economy defines the work which the majority of people do – looking after old people, bringing up children – as useless. All those tasks are work which will never be adequately valued in a market system which must devalue what is common or universal. To give adequate value you just have to step outside the system.’

      That is the issue which time dollars have been struggling with: how do we give value to all those aspects of life which old-fashioned dollars or pounds don’t care about – love, neighbourliness, community, altruism, charity? ‘Dollars value what is scarce,’ he said. ‘I hope these things are never in such short supply that they become valuable in the market economy.’ And he’s right. Time dollars are giving a value to our wealth, but it is the kind of wealth we forget about when we talk about money.

      Upstairs, the campaign to change money-as-we-know-it had taken root in what must have once been bedrooms and walk-in wardrobes. In one small wood-panelled room, the cupboard was still full of the kind of detritus you expect in a family home – games and black plastic bags of old clothes. Copies of The Legal Position of Native Americans rubbed covers with broken and faded editions of Volume One of the collected poems of Robert Browning. One of the computers included a demonstration of the Timedollar programme which allows anybody to set up a time dollar bank. Written by a computer enthusiast in Maine, it very cleverly matches people’s needs with what people have to offer. It then has a built-in fraudbuster. You can’t delete or transfer anybody’s savings from one person to another. If you cock it up, you have to leave the error there and label it ‘mistake’.

      Tina input my details, with my address in Crystal Palace, my almost non-existent availability, and my offer to do what the computer called ‘advocacy work’ – which sounded important and congenial. I also expressed the need for hot meals. I could also have opted for any of the following services: telephone assurance, yardwork – American for ‘gardening’ – companionship and religion. ‘Religion’ turned out to mean preaching. Somehow I don’t think the machine will be able to match me, and nobody has yet appeared in London with a hot meal. Still, I live in hope of spending my first time dollar.

      III

      It was time to seek out my lodgings in a bed and breakfast in Dupont Circle, a bright area of bars, minor embassies and inquisitive dogs on very long leads. Walking from the Dupont Circle metro station, past the usual array of Scientologists and bizarre newspapers, the first thing you notice is the vast potholes in the streets – almost enough to engulf a British Mini. Then there are the real estate notices outside the houses for sale, many with photos of the smiling estate agent you would be dealing with. Could these people really believe their hairstyles would help sell houses? It hardly seemed possible. Dupont Circle is also a city centre outpost of Irish bars –‘give us your thirsty, your famished …’ says one of them; a neighbourhood of ice cream vendors in shiny basements and strangely unkempt photocopy centres.

      Every Washingtonian has a detailed inventory of exactly how safe each street can be. The subject seems to obsess them. Dupont Circle was described to me as ‘pretty safe’. But since it is near the more dangerously cosmopolitan district of Adams-Morgan, I was urged to be careful. Yet when I arrived at my bed and breakfast lodging to find everybody out, there was an envelope addressed to me sticking out of the letter box. Inside was the front door key and a note. ‘Hi,’ it said. ‘Welcome. The round key opens the front door, but please lock it when you get inside. Thanks. Irene.’

      I struggled with the door once I had got through it, trying to work out how to lock it again. I thought it was worth following the instructions. Up the stairways, there was an unexpected clutter of statuettes, Indian wall-hangings with fake precious stones, sentimental pictures of fin de siècle actresses, heroic pictures of elephants. It was a bed and breakfast tour de force, all gathered around a worn red stair carpet and a large number of tiny faded handwritten notes of instructions for the guests. ‘Please use the shower for no more than three minutes to conserve water. Thanks. Irene’, said one. ‘Please turn off the light in the bathroom. Thanks. Irene’, said another.

      When I made it to my bedroom on the top floor, there was a similar East-meets-West collection in there, setting off the white iron bedstead to advantage, cooled by the breeze from two fans. I stared out of the window watching people in the surrounding apartments relaxing in front of the television or pottering around the kitchen. This was rather nosy of me, I admit, but Washingtonians don’t seem to favour curtains, and it was purely in the interests of research.

      My eye was drawn away by the sight of a most unusual bearded Buddha figure on the top shelf of the rattling white bookshelf in the corner. There was a note on it, and fascinated, I climbed gingerly on to a stool to find out what it was. I had hoped it would explain what was clearly an object of great antiquity, but the note said: ‘Please don’t put wet clothes over the furniture. Thanks. Irene’.

      I met Irene the following morning, as she made me breakfast. She was an ebullient character, with a mound of carefully crafted dyed black hair and an encyclopaedic knowledge of English stately homes, which she expected me to reciprocate. She was not very interested in my quest, or about new kinds of money. She urged me instead to go and see a number of local galleries, and in particular, Dumbarton Oaks, where the original agreement to set up the United Nations had been signed half a century before. And I’m afraid I never did.

      I even told her about Edgar Cahn. ‘He sounds like a commie, pinko socialist,’ she said, with a little laugh to show she was only half-serious.

      IV

      I wanted to see a time dollar bank in action, and set out after breakfast to look at one of the biggest, the Co-operative Caring Network – run by an enormous charitable monster called the United Seniors Health Co-operative (USHC).

      After a little while in the USA, you realize that politically correct language has developed in a different way from its British equivalent. In the UK, it keeps changing as the shadowy people who decide these things hit on different ways of ‘telling the truth’, but has generally settled down to words which are unambiguous. British campaigners for the rights of elderly people have now hit on the idea of calling them ‘older’, which has the benefit of being manifestly true. Not so in the USA, where the word ‘die’ is shunned, as you might expect in a delicately polite spa town like Leamington. Americans say ‘passed away’ or even ‘passed’, which conjures up lavatories. They also avoid the term ‘old’: they call old people ‘seniors’. The most evocative title of an organization for ‘seniors’ I found СКАЧАТЬ