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down the pub’. But maybe this is a theoretical universe we can learn something from, because anyone without pounds or dollars does at least have time – too much of it. If you are earning, and you do have access to money, the chances are that you are pretty poverty-stricken as far as time is concerned.

      It may have been no coincidence that the time dollar idea should emerge in one of the world’s most problematic, budget-stretched and exhausted cities – Washington DC – because Washington is going through both the best of times and the worst of times. It is the capital of the richest nation on earth at the height of its powers. It is the bankrupt, poverty-stricken city, crumbling like a small town in eastern Europe, administered by a mayor straight out of prison for drug offences. It used to be a relatively healthy-sized city of 700,000 people just twenty years ago, about the size of Sheffield. Now it has just 550,000 and the number is falling fast. The moment people can afford to move out, they go – and they take their taxes with them.

      Add to this heady mix all of the following: a public-works budget that has been slashed by more than half in the past few years, leaving streets overgrown and bridges collapsing. A murder rate growing at anything up to 25 per cent a year. A third of the city’s fire engines are kept out of service every day to save money. Officials have been pumping extra chlorine into the drinking water to counteract the bacteria from corroding pipes. AIDS clinics have to shut down periodically because they run out of drugs. It is terrifying, and the city is still running out of money. ‘Everything has broken,’ the city’s chief financial officer, Anthony A. Williams, told the Washington Post. This isn’t just a car which has run out of gas. There is something fundamentally wrong with the car. The gas pedal doesn’t work and neither do the brakes.’

      Over this huge disaster strides the figure of Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr, large, mustachioed and mayor for fourteen of the past eighteen years. Barry’s term of office was interrupted briefly by a six-month spell inside for drug possession, after he was videotaped in a downtown hotel smoking crack. His re-election was one of the most astonishing political comebacks of all time. ‘Mr Barry is a tremendous politician,’ said the fearless Mr Williams. ‘But he’s a lot like nuclear power. On a good day, he can light up the city. On a bad day, he can blow it up.’

      When I took the Amtrak train south to Washington it was swelteringly hot, as only Washington can be with its humidity and bogland – one of its metro stations is even called Foggy Bottom. I was visiting the Washington law professor Edgar Cahn, author of the book Time Dollars, which had such a long sub-title that I barely needed to read it: The New Currency That Enables Americans to Turn Their Hidden Resource – Time – into Personal Security and Community Renewal.

      His book – co-written with Jonathan Rowe from the Christian Science Monitor – is a little hazy about where the idea came from. The authors imply it was the brainchild of the first person mentioned in the book – a disabled lady called Dolores Galloway, living alone in the notorious Washington district of Anacostia and running a time dollar bank in her apartment complex. ‘We don’t want charity,’ she is quoted as saying. ‘It’s one hand washing the other. I wash your clothing. Maybe you can wash my dishes.’

      But actually if you probe a little bit further into the history of time dollars, it emerges that the idea for a new kind of money came from Professor Cahn himself, lying flat on his back after a serious heart attack at the early age of forty-four. ‘It became an obsession of mine,’ he told me later, his eyes lighting up with excitement. ‘I was lying in hospital being waited on hand and foot by the equivalent of a retinue of servants which, in normal circumstances, I could never afford. And I was wondering why I didn’t like it. I realized I didn’t like being useless. It was a very personal thing, and – this was 1980 – I also realized society was busy labelling all sorts of other people as useless too.’

      During a visit to London, he had been haunted by the un-American words used by the B B C to describe the unemployed: ‘redundant’. It scared him. Margaret Thatcher was then doing her bit to encourage more of this kind of redundancy and Ronald Reagan was doing something similar. ‘So I started struggling with the question of how to put people to work and fulfil all those growing needs when society has no money to pay for them,’ said Cahn. ‘And I thought: why not create another kind of money?’

      Cahn was also struggling in his mind with the problem of demographic change. By 2040, one in five Americans will be retired. Many of these will be the sprightly kind of elderly Americans we see on tourist buses all over the world, but many will be increasingly old and infirm – needing a range of services, from medical care through to simple companionship, which the present economic system doesn’t seem able to afford. His money was not intended to work like ordinary money. It was supposed to fund the way families and communities used to behave: to be paid to people for helping each other out, minding each other’s children, running errands, or just phoning each other up for a chat. It was supposed to encourage people to be good neighbours in a way that ordinary money doesn’t any more – a way of paying for what you need using time. Cahn called it time dollars.

      You go along to your local time dollars project, and tell them what kind of work you are prepared to do – anything from roofing to giving people lifts – and the things you need doing in return. All these details are entered into the computer. Then one of your elderly neighbours suddenly needs a lift to the doctor at a time when you are free – or maybe they just need driving to the shops. They phone the office, who call you up. The final judgement about whether the two of you are suited is made by the time dollar organizer, who phones up first to see if you are available and willing. Result: you spend an hour helping your neighbour and you earn one time dollar. You get a statement showing your earnings at the end of the month, and you feel good about yourself.

      What can you do with your new-found wealth? Well, that depends on the scheme. You could spend it on services from other people in the system. Or you could give it to an elderly relative who might need it more. Or you could keep it for a rainy day. Or you can just forget all about it: only about 15 per cent of time dollar earnings are ever actually spent.

      When Edgar Cahn came up with the idea, he and his wife Jean were already well-known and successful radical lawyers. A Washington Post Magazine feature 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.

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