Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

just stupid.’

      So by the time I passed Gallery Place on the metro, I had begun to worry whether this trip had been entirely sensible. I changed on to the Green line, and wondered a little about my shorts, grey socks and black briefcase. Graffiti, torn posters, bits of old automobile bother me at the best of times, and especially when I looked like a refugee from the set of Jeeves and Wooster. I did feel a little silly, but if our forefathers had worried about wearing silly clothes, the empire would never have been won.

      Shaw-Howard metro station was almost empty. Even the advertising billboards in the station looked a little half-hearted – one of them was for Valujet, owners of the downmarket holiday plane which had just crashed into the Florida swamps. The first estate I walked into, with its sand-coloured bricks and desert appearance, was clearly the wrong one. A few men stared at me absent-mindedly. I wished I hadn’t brought my briefcase. ‘Where can I find Lincoln-Westmoreland?’ I asked one.

      ‘Huh?’ he said. It is a strange phenomenon that many Americans have not the slightest idea what Brits are trying to say. I moved hastily across the tree-lined street, hoping I looked like I knew where I was going, and there it was. I don’t know what I expected from a block of flats named after America’s second-greatest president and a Vietnam War general, but it was leafy with the faint whiff of oasis about it. The flats were beautifully kept and landscaped. Compared to the burnt-out shacks down the road, it was a model of imagination and pride. But there was no doubt that the neighbourhood was poor.

      But then Edgewood Management Corporation, which manages low-rent flats in twelve states, is known for its enlightened approach to housing. Lincoln-Westmoreland has 223 apartments in three blocks and one high-rise tower, and thanks to the Corporation, a concerted attempt is made to organize activities for the people who live in them. Since the average size of family is only three – there are only a handful of two-parent families, and the vast majority of offspring are looked after by single mothers or grandmothers – the focus is on activities for children.

      The ‘power house’ for these activities is in the tiny community centre, which I had been searching for. It looked like a doctor’s waiting room inside, with toys packed away – as if the patients would keep spreading them out over the floor – and a range of uplifting leaflets about body problems. One notice was headed ‘Caring and Sharing’. ‘As one of our great African-American leaders has said,’ it went on, ‘you don’t have to know Einstein’s theory to serve … you only need a heart full of grace.’ ‘No fighting or using profanity’, said another.

      And, at last, evidence that we were in the presence of a new kind of money; one notice was advertising a trip to Barnum and Bailey’s Circus which could be paid for in time dollars.

      Organizing the few children in the room was Tomeka Smith, a former biologist and nurse –’Hoping to start a family one day,’ she told me, and in the meantime looking after an alternative family: there were never fewer than twenty children in her office during the summer afternoons.

      She had worked for almost a year to get the time bank up and running, squaring the management and the residents’ council. The system had begun a year before I arrived, but after three months the project began to unravel. The volunteers floated away and the time dollars went unspent. So Tomeka stopped and thought it through again. When they re-launched it, six months later, she knew that every time a volunteer arrived, they had to find something for them to do quickly before they lost interest.

      Tomeka pump-primes the value of time dollars by donating places on their children’s six-week summer camp. Residents could buy places there with time dollars earned in about three months of regular work. They couldn’t afford to pay the price of the camp,’ Tomeka told me, sitting with her back to the gigantic toy cupboard. ‘And it was a time when we were very short-staffed in the office and we needed volunteers.’

      Here was an example of the way the real and time dollar economies interact. If Tomeka had failed to attract people to help her, she would have had to pay old-fashioned money for the extra help. As it was, by increasing the value of time dollars, she was able to attract people to help her in return. How do you increase the value of time dollars? You provide something out of your own margins – in this case, places on the summer camp. The real dollars not earned on the summer camp were offset against the money saved on administration in the office: what was a time dollar transaction was in some ways also a book-keeping shift.

      And it all seemed to be working very well. Tomeka now had more than thirty members of her time bank. The youngest were two eight-year-olds, who cleaned the office and used their time dollars to pay for tickets to the circus. After five years’ work building the community centre, Tomeka seemed to be getting things to run smoothly. ‘Any bright light, any beam of light – that’s my job. We are getting more members every day,’ Tomeka told me as she very kindly escorted me the few yards to the metro station.

      ‘They see what their neighbours are doing and want to do something themselves. They’re not even interested in what they can get now, they’re interested in what they can give. I’ve been amazed at some of the people who come in, people who have always been looking to see what they can get – but I can see the effect it’s having on them. They are realizing they can do something. Some of them have low self-esteem and don’t believe they have any worth or anything to give back to society, and they are really learning now that they have some skills.’

      VI

      The battle over money has made politics pretty boring – an endless succession on the Today programme of small politicians demanding money from big politicians the world over. But maybe, just maybe, time dollars could provide a way out of our worldwide budget squeeze. We may have to carry on squeezing the budgets and resign ourselves to the fact that people suffer, but in the case of old people that would often mean they have to leave their own houses to be looked after in miserable old folks’ homes – at far greater expense to the public purse. One alternative might be accessing the wealth in people’s time and use this new ‘time money’ to pay for what they need.

      One objection is that this lets the government off the hook, which really bothers earnest academics – some of whom would no doubt prefer to keep the suffering just to maintain the pressure; another is that these kinds of jobs should really be carried out by people with degrees, diplomas and years of training. Edgar Cahn answers this with a strange little essay about cleaning your teeth. The market economy works by specialization, he says. We buy the specialized services we used to provide ourselves, except – he says – for teeth-cleaning. ‘If we tried to do so, we couldn’t just ask anybody: we would have to pay an oral hygienist and the price would include taxes, malpractice insurance, administrative costs, certification, worker’s compensation licensing and overheads.

      ‘We can’t afford even the simplest tasks done for us at market prices,’ he writes. ‘Yet that’s our approach to most of society’s needs: we try to buy back piecemeal, at market prices, the things we used to do for ourselves and for each other.’ And then, of course, the professionals say they can’t do it without our help. The schools need the involvement of parents and the police need Neighbourhood Watch. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to keep brushing our teeth.’

      When academics study these ideas in practice, things become strangely clouded. Even the people who have studied for a decade to find out whether time dollars work have come to no clear conclusion. ‘I’m not sure we’ve proved it yet,’ said Kathleen Treat from the University of Maryland’s Center on Aging, with satisfaction. I suppose proving it would bring the research programme to an abrupt end.

      ‘Oh,’ I said, rather nonplussed. They had been studying it for nine years, after all.

      ‘Well, in some places it has been fairly active and successful. In other places the programme has stayed small, and in some places the projects have not been able to sustain themselves and have gone out of business. We will admit to you that there are a number of these programmes which have folded – though it’s hard to get that out of Edgar Cahn. As for the volunteers, if you ask them, they say: “Oh no, the credits don’t mean a thing to me”.