Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

street numbers. The air conditioning was battling away inside, but there was also another kind of frenetic bustling heat. A large woman was leaving the house, carrying on a forceful last-minute conversation about youth activities in the summer holidays. A black man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln’s was gesticulating into the telephone. Someone was carrying a large pile of papers in a cardboard box marked Pampers Stretch, and someone else was heaving the intestines of a computer in the other direction. Three more were typing away in the office to the side. Somebody was arriving with bagels in a brown paper bag.

      In the middle of all was a calm, donnish figure with wrinkled eyes, thinning grey hair and a slight beard. He was dressed immaculately, as you would expect of a professor of law, with a white polo-necked shirt as you would expect from someone who wants to change the world. This was Dr Edgar Cahn.

      His wife had died four years before, his children had long since grown up, and the whole time dollars venture seemed to have slowly taken over the house. On the ground floor, a portrait hung over the fireplace, and you could imagine it doing so over the domestic dinner parties of Washington lawyers. But now there were computers, canisters of bottled water, photocopiers, piles of press releases and legal agreements, lines of videos of Cahn’s various chat show appearances, rows of copies of his book and a big award certificate from the National Council on Aging. And somewhere amongst all that were the 5,000 requests for more information about time dollars which had completely overwhelmed the office after an article in Parade magazine.

      His own space in his own home had been reduced to the basement, but when I went down there later – with its dramatic line drawings on the whitewashed brick walls – it was also piled high with paper, broken desks and computers in an early state of repair. Sharing a home with time dollars was clearly like sharing a bed with a buffalo. Edgar Cahn’s own space seemed to have been shifted even further to a large mattress in the corner.

      I was worried that nobody would remember that I was coming. Everybody was so frenetic and nobody seemed prepared even to look me in the eye, as if I would somehow involve them in more work. I sat quietly at a large oak table and felt inconspicuous. Cahn seemed to be vaguely making his way over to talk to me, but every couple of feet someone would dash towards the large white front door and engage him in conversation, or hand him a piece of paper. And he would take off his glasses and peer at it closely, like Dr Johnson examining his dictionary.

      ‘David,’ he said, at long last sitting down at the end of the table. I was expected after all. ‘What I thought was that you could listen in to what we were doing. But if you don’t understand something, maybe you could ask me about it later rather than now.’

      Or in plain English, ‘I haven’t got much time’. Another thirty seconds, and he was giving calm, measured advice to someone whose elderly father-in-law was being given a tough time by the welfare authorities in some distant southern state. ‘This is what I feel we should do,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll talk to Amy. She has access to the welfare records on computer, and she’s a nice lady.’

      He had an air of quiet authority, and I found I was slightly in awe of him. So I was taken aback to hear him introduce me to other people in the room as ‘an oddball’. Was it the English grey socks I was wearing with my shorts? Or because my face was bright red from my walk in the heat?

      ‘You can’t describe everyone as an oddball who shows up here, Edgar,’ said Tina, who was down from Cleveland preparing to set up a project on a housing estate there. Clearly ‘oddball’ was a term of some approval.

      I was introduced to the others in the office. Clarence, with the Abe Lincoln beard, was still waving his arms warmly into the telephone. There was Lisa, who had just put herself through law school while working as an air stewardess. ‘And this is the Reverend Williams,’ said Edgar. I shook hands with a genial man in a green T-shirt and shorts, carrying the remains of yet another computer.

      ‘How long have you been involved with this kind of thing?’ I asked Clarence.

      ‘Right back to 1969,’ he said, followed by a series of loud ironic guffaws about the state of American cities. ‘And I haven’t found the silver bullet yet.’

      ‘And it’s been getting worse,’ said Lisa. They both laughed, embarrassed – as if it was somehow their fault that society seemed to be unvravelling itself, as if the sense of urgency in the office was to make sure it went on not a moment longer than it should. Most of the people dashing through the building turned out to have been involved with time dollars for only a few months. But all of them – Clarence from housing rights, ‘Reverend Williams’ from computer activism – felt that this new kind of money provided them with a lever which could make their other work more effective. It was like being in the centre of a whirlwind, which swirled around the calm figure of Edgar Cahn.

      Clarence was working on a three-way link-up between time dollars, a new food bank and a vast sprawling inner city estate in the city’s notorious south-eastern corner. If it worked, people would be able to buy food with the time dollars they earned. The computers were on their way to a time dollar base in Chicago, where they would be upgraded by unemployed youngsters, earning – naturally – time dollars. The software was going to Washington children for review, in return for time dollars.

      ‘When did we have this idea?’ asked Edgar.

      ‘Just now,’ said somebody. It was that kind of day.

      Tina 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