Time as currency A new approach to building communities (From Voluntary Action journal, Autumn 1999) "Market economics values what is scarce - not the real work of society, which is caring, loving, being a citizen, a neighbour and a human being. That work will, I hope, never be so scarce that the market value goes high, so we have to find a way of rewarding contributions to it." (Dr Edgar Cahn, Time Dollars Institute, Washington DC) Introduction This paper introduces the successful concept of time dollars and how it has been used in the USA to attract new people into volunteering, not so much by paying them credits &emdash; though that is how the system works &emdash; but by measuring and recognising people's contribution, and by changing the relationship between volunteer and 'recipient'. It looks at how the idea fits into the debate about social capital, how it is being adapted in the UK and US, and how it might be adapted further. I: Social capital A team of researchers from the Harvard University School of Public Health recently subjected Chicago's more impoverished neighbourhoods to a detailed survey about local violence and what seems to make the crucial difference. After interviewing nearly 9,000 people in 343 different neighbourhoods, they came to the conclusion that the level of violence was very different, even though the neighbourhoods had similar levels of deprivation and many of the usual social difficulties you can predict for places with high crime rates. What seemed to make the difference was what they called "informal social control and cohesion and trust". It may be hard to define, but there is a real phenomenon here. Call it what you like &emdash; 'social capital' seems to make a difference. The authors of the study agree that, just because 'collective efficacy' matters, it doesn't mean we should ignore inequality. Even so, their findings confirm the central importance that social capital can play in the success or failure of neighbourhoods. And behind this sense of trust was what they called "the willingness of local residents to intervene for the common good". There are other ways of describing the elusive concept that is increasingly important in UK politics, defined by Tony Blair as "the foundation of social solidarity on which any successful society depends". It is the same idea defined by the American economist Robert Putnam as "networks, norms and trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit". You can recognise similar concepts in Francis Fukuyama's 'trust', David Selbourne's 'duty' and Amitai Etzioni's 'communitarianism'. These networks imply a diversity of paid and unpaid activities. Yet, despite this and despite the critical importance of building social capital to support employment, welfare authorities tend to have a much more narrow view about what constitutes work. Governments do not like giving money away, so work means paid work. It does not usually include neighbourly child care, basic environmental clean-up, looking after elderly neighbours, neighbourhood watch, or all those other social capital-building jobs which desperately need doing to drag the whole community back into mainstream society - but which just don't happen to be paid in money. This is the sector described by the futurist Hazel Henderson as the 'love economy', and it's very necessary. The trouble is that this kind of work is not included in the official picture, even though it might be vital for the market economy that it is done well. The American writer Alvin Toffler asks executives what it would cost them if their employees had never been toilet-trained. The main economy depends on this community and family infrastructure: it just never measures it, nurtures it or takes much notice of it. "Building social capital will not be easy," says Putnam at the end of his book, and the problem &emdash; like Keynes' economic problem &emdash; has still not been solved. On the other hand, it has unleashed a range of initiatives ranging from decentralising local government services, as in the case of Islington, or democratic functions as in the case of South Somerset and Kingston &emdash; right through to community planning, community development trusts, neighbourhood watch, community banking and so on. It isn't that policy-makers have been doing nothing; they just haven't found the silver bullet. You can see some awareness of social capital in New Labour's 'Third Way', which emphasises rediscovering people's responsibilities, and looks at ways of providing people with state support to meet them. "An inclusive society imposes duties on individuals and parents as well as on society as a whole," wrote Tony Blair. "The politics of 'us' rather than 'me' demands an ethic of responsibility as well as rights… This is the foundation of social solidarity on which any successful society depends." As if to confirm the basic problem, Blair's pamphlet on The Third Way, from which that passage is taken, includes hopeful-sounding sections on supporting families and youth justice on the same page. But these simply beg the question: New Labour thinking on the subject tends to fall back on Singapore-style authoritarianism, in the absence of any other idea about how to change people's attitudes to their responsibilities. Things Far Eastern are out of fashion since the collapse of the markets in the region, but there is enough of a whiff of authority in Etzioni's writings on the subject to fuel more of this kind of thing. Building social capital is self-evidently about rediscovering people's responsibilities. But beyond locking them up if they fail rediscover them, there is still little consensus about how to create the conditions where people will do so. How do we build the kind of local trust that the Harvard researchers found in some Chicago neighbourhoods but not others? How do we help neighbourhoods to: Use the skills and imagination that remain in any group of human beings. Put people in touch with each other and build trust in each other. Provide a framework that encourages people to support each other? Etzioni's answer is a mixture of compulsory community service, an emphasis on responsibilities rather than rights - echoed in the Third Way - and a reform of the political system to give ordinary people a voice. He urges a return to a common morality, pointing out in a series of disturbing statistics about its disappearance that 25 per cent of Americans say they would be prepared to abandon their families for money. But this is just rhetoric. How do you return to this kind of socialisation without resorting to curfews, restrictions and heavy-handed authority, which has been roundly rejected by society in the past - and has been ineffective in prisons, schools and neighbourhoods? This is the question at the heart of communitarianism, just as it lies at the heart of the Third Way. Volunteering is clearly part of the answer, but how do you provide it with the kind of scale necessary to approach what is needed? The guru of the Third Way, Anthony Giddens, suggests the American time dollars idea as one method of approaching the problem. He also suggests "tax breaks for hours worked in the social economy. This is how he describes time dollars: "Volunteers who take part in charitable work are 'paid' in time donated by other volunteer workers. A computer system registers every 'time dollar' earned and spent and provides participants with regular accounts. Time dollars are tax free and can be accumulated to pay for health care as well as other health services…" The result is a parallel economy, using time as the medium of exchange, which can measure and build social capital. This paper looks more closely at the time dollars idea in more detail. It may not be the whole answer to this social capital conundrum, but it is certainly worth examining. It uses some of the principles of volunteering to put these forgotten assets to use meeting the forgotten needs, and it does so to make connections between people and rebuild a sense of trust. But it goes further than that. Time money creates a reciprocal relationship between people and institutions, as well as between people and people, which volunteering is not able to achieve. It allows almost anybody in society, including the elderly and housebound, to give something back &emdash; to make a contribution and feel needed. And the evidence is that feeling needed is a critical missing piece of the social capital jigsaw. 2: Time money The time money idea began when the US civil rights lawyer Edgar Cahn spent a sabbatical at the London School of Economics in 1986. He was there to develop an idea he had been working on with his wife which would measure the contribution people are able to make to their neighbourhood, and his outline was published there in a pamphlet called Service Credits: A New Currency for the Welfare State. It was not taken up in the UK, and time dollars - or 'service credits' to give them their generic name - were pioneered instead by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the biggest healthcare foundation in the USA, in six pilot projects starting the following year. There are now getting on for 200 service credit projects running in the USA, with more in Japan, Germany and Sweden. They have also been widely studied, notably by the University of Maryland Center on Aging, which was commissioned by the same foundation to evaluate the developing idea. Cahn describes the idea as working like a blood bank or babysitting club: "Help a neighbour and then, when you need it, a neighbour &emdash; most likely a different one &emdash; will help you. The system is based on equality: one hour of help means one time dollar, whether the task is grocery shopping or making out a tax return… Credits are kept in individual accounts in a 'bank' on a personal computer. Credits and debits are tallied regularly. Some banks provide monthly balance statements, recording the flow of good deeds." The Maryland research has shown that about a third of the people taking part in time dollars have never volunteered for anything before. They also tend to stay volunteering longer than in average volunteer schemes, many of which have serious 'burn-out' problems. Time dollars have been adapted more recently by Dr Cahn so that they can be earned by young people as well, often in the poorest neighbourhoods, where volunteering has no successful track record. Time dollars record, store and find new ways of rewarding transactions where neighbours help neighbours. Earning time money tracks this good neighbourliness and encourages it, not so much because people need to earn it - most people earning time money say the work is its own reward - but because earning it provides a kind of recognition for the contribution which they make. It recognises what people do for each other, but it can also be spent. And although members will usually say they did not necessarily join to earn time money &emdash; they can give twice, in a sense, by donating their credits to others &emdash; the credits provide a sort of reward just be recognising the contribution they have made. And when they used simply to be 'recipients', it provides them with a dignity and involvement they never got before. The point is that time money is a non-market currency which does not behave in same way as market money. Everybody's time is worth the same in the time economy: old people making supportive phone calls to their neighbours earn them at exactly the same hour-for-hour rate as a rich lawyer. Disaffected 16-year-olds tutoring 14-year-olds in school all earn at the same rate. It sounds like volunteering, but its reciprocal value makes it in some ways exactly the opposite: people who were once labelled 'recipients' or' clients' become participants. They are no longer receiving charity; they are taking part. The idea originally worked like this. Members phone up their local time dollar organiser, explain what they need, and the computer matches them with a 'volunteer'. Their account is debited, and the volunteer gets credited for the time. The system brings local people together to provide services like lifts to the doctors or shops, 'grandparenting', baby-sitting, house repairs and much more. The first projects received widespread publicity in the USA and were aimed mainly at providing non-medical services for old people, but time dollars are now being brought to bear on a range of other social problems, from local economic collapse through to under-achievement in inner city schools. Their development has been helped along by a series of rulings from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that they are not taxable. Time dollar earnings are not money, according to the IRS: they fall into the same category of social exchange as local baby-sitting or giving a cup of sugar to your next door neighbour. The way these service credits are used differs from place to place. In most places, less than ten per cent are actually spent. Otherwise the time money earners use them: On services for themselves from people on the system. As a kind of insurance for when they are too old to get around: time money can't be spent until you are 50 in some systems. To give to elderly relatives so they can spend them. To donate back to the system for people who are too ill to earn them themselves. When they are spent, they are simply deleted - like Air Miles or Sainsbury's Reward Points. They do not sit in bank accounts earning or incurring interest. For health managers making sure their older patients keep their appointments, or for welfare officials trying to keep clients self-sufficient for longer, or for planners who need to involve local people designing new neighbourhoods, time money is a practical motivator and problem-solver. They are also an explicit attempt to reward altruism. 'Real' market economy dollars have a 'toxic effect' on families, neighbourhoods and communities, and we need systems which can protect them, says Cahn. Time dollar projects now range from MORE in St Louis and Member-to-Member in New York City, both involving thousands of members, to local 'time banks' in cities from Honolulu to Maine. Time dollars fuel security patrols in Ohio and food banks in Washington. In Missouri, time dollar earnings are guaranteed by the state. In Miami, the system has been taken over successfully by the whole community, who trade services with each other without real dollars across Florida's deep cultural divisions. In Brooklyn, time dollars fuel a whole alternative economy for old people, including telephone bingo and bereavement counselling. Each system can cost anything up to $50,000 a year to administer, but this can be outweighed by the savings in public money &emdash; though it is often difficult to prove this directly. Research also showed that old people involved in such schemes stay healthier longer, which is why the Brooklyn Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO) Elderplan was able to offer 25 per cent discounts to health insurance in return for time dollars. By then, Miami's successful system, known as Friend to Friend, were administering as much as 12,000 hours of local volunteering a month, in 64 centres across deep racial boundaries, and paid for in time dollars. The Little Havana Activities and Nutrition Centre, for example, used to deliver 200 meals a day to housebound elderly people: four years after time dollars arrived in 1986, they were able to deliver 1,600, and the number of volunteers on their books had doubled. Why do these projects work? That remains unclear, but anecdotal evidence at least suggests that people want to give, they want to be needed, and they are uncomfortable with the idea of simply receiving from state or charitable bodies. Time money values their contribution just by measuring it, and it encourages people who are never asked to give anything back - young and old people especially - to make some kind of contribution. The idea can be developed in other areas apart from health &emdash; anywhere, in fact, where we need to transform neighbourhoods or set up a new kind of relationship between institutions and clients. Some of these new systems in the US are extremely creative in the way they link time money with problems and wasted assets: In one particularly notorious public housing complex in Washington DC, 300 residents logged 79,000 hours of volunteer work in the first 11 months of operation, for which they earned time dollars. And they used these to buy four tons of food per month at the local food bank. The whole project was co-ordinated by two staff and three federal government-sponsored 'volunteers'. In 17 Chicago elementary schools, well over 1,000 pupils have been earning time dollars by taking part in a peer tutoring programme. After the first year, half of those earned the 100 time dollars necessary to buy a recycled computer - and their parents also had to chip in four time dollars for their children to make the purchase. The schools found that attendance went up when the tutoring was happening, and the bullying of younger students all but stopped. In El Paso, Texas, a Coalition for the Homeless has set up a programme which allows homeless people to buy shelter, food and clothing with time dollars. A local health clinic also lets patients pay bills partly in time dollars, earned helping in a nutrition education project, a programme for pregnant teenagers and a transport pool getting people to and from the clinic. One college in upstate New York has redesigned its loan programme so that student loans can be paid off partly in time dollars - partly, in other words, by their volunteer involvement with the local community. Cahn has himself taken over part of the youth court from the District of Columbia, which - like the Chicago public school system - has been groaning under a surfeit of violence and a shortage of money and ideas. Defendants are tried for minor offences by other teenagers, who are paid for doing so in time dollars, and dole out community service punishments for which they are paid in time dollars. They use these earnings to buy a refurbished computer. The youth court is now handling about half the teenagers arrested in the District of Columbia. By the end, they had billed the equivalent of $230,000 in time dollars. This was paid off by the local community by helping with the clean-up, providing a night escort service for old people, campaigning for better street lighting, taking down the car numbers of drug dealers, school tutoring and much else besides. Lawyers were motivated to organise this innovative scheme because they knew that every hour they put in would generate another hour of self-help in the community. These are all ways in which time dollars have been used to involve people in their neighbourhoods and carry out the 'real' work that badly needs doing and build the social capital that neighbourhoods depend on. Organisations can help this process along by underpinning the value of people's time dollar earnings. They can do so by providing surplus food, equipment and services - worthless in the market economy - and make them available in return for time money. In the USA, for example, as many as 15 million perfectly good computers are thrown out by American offices every year, to make way for slightly newer models; the figure for the UK is about 5m. US time dollar experiments have been able to get hold of many of these, refurbish them in a network of training centres, and sell them for time money. They use a Czech computer programme that provides a windows environment and access to the internet on a 286 computer. The same idea can apply to services that business believes are close to worthless - like restaurant meals at times when the restaurant has to stay open but customers rarely eat. Another way that organisations can underpin the value of people's time is by using local people's involvement to save them money &emdash; which they can pass on in exchange for time money credits. Elderplan's health insurance premiums (see above) is one example. But organisations like Holland & Knight are going one further. They are boosting local involvement by creating a time dollar debt that then has to be paid off. Time money works with older people because it is not charity: they are paying back for the services they receive and it gives them a sense of dignity. Conventional charity and volunteering is unable to provide that, and time money is only able to do so because it is so far removed from the market economy. Almost anybody has something to contribute, which will make them feel useful by being able to provide it: many of the people who have no other assets tend to have time &emdash; though clearly working people with families will have very little time these days. The system turns the usual balance of resources on its head. Extending that principle to a downtrodden neighbourhood, as Holland & Knight did, provided a completely different model to the usual methods of community development &emdash; the one where institutions provide grants and assume there is nothing the recipients could possibly provide in exchange which anybody could want. The time dollar debt meant both lawyers and community were working in a genuine partnership: it was not crumbs from the rich lawyer's table. And it did transform the neighbourhood in a way that simple pro bono never could. A similar idea has been tried, much more controversially, in Baltimore public housing. It means that, as well as the rent, resident families also owe up to eight hours a month in time money. This can be paid off by any member of the family, and it has the ability to revitalise an estate. This is a difficult idea to sell if it is perceived as a replacement for services that the landlords should be providing anyway. This is an idea fraught with political difficulty. There is a danger of social control about it in the wrong hands, and it is important that distant government bodies do not simply load powerless people up with a whole new kind of obligation, without safeguards and without - for example - reducing the rent in exchange. Landlords have to beware also that disputes about time money debt cannot be resolved in an old-fashioned authoritarian way, which tends to undermine the credibility of the whole idea, but by committees of the residents themselves. It is their problem, after all. But if we can find a politically acceptable way of using time debt, it could give people something they can get nowhere else. Because helping out locally also helps the people who are doing it: it tackles depression and isolation - for the people taking part as well as the recipients. It also educates and trains, and it can make all the difference between success and failure in a multi-million pound development project. By charging for grants or pro bono work, organisations are replacing noblesse oblige with a genuine exchange. Like so many other aspects of community self-help, time money is not a substitute for existing services and will fail if it becomes seen as such. Its purpose is not to replace them, but to achieve something state services never can - to build neighbourhoods, quality of life and active citizens. 3: Would it work in the UK? Anthony Giddens praises the idea of time dollars in the context of 'building civil society' and as part of a growing alternative to mainstream work, which society should encourage. In fact, time money goes further than that in its implicit critique of conventional economics: it allows us to redefine 'work' &emdash; including in its definition anything which communities need doing in order to thrive. The debate about the future of work is as advanced in the UK as it is in the USA. What time money adds to this discussion is, first, a practical way of bringing some of the wasted assets to bear on all those tasks which remain undone. And second, it provides a new way of looking at global trend whereby the market economy drives out the informal jobs. It demonstrates, says Cahn, that there are also serious costs associated with failing to redefine work. If we don't broaden our definitions, we will create a world where strangers bring up our children and where poorer people living in the suburbs must commute long distances to work in menial jobs for rich people; one future is reminiscent of Soviet Russia and the other of apartheid South Africa. We can see the dangers already, of course. The challenge of time money is to set up alternative structures that can shift the emphasis, first by measuring the work in the informal economy &emdash; and then by encouraging it. There clearly is a need for a time exchange system. But would it fit into British culture in quite the same way as it does in the USA? The idea of time dollars and service credits actually began in the UK, in that Edgar Cahn developed it at the LSE, but recognising people's voluntary contribution is familiar to the British. You can see it popping out in a range of very British institutions from national insurance to the honours system. Communitarianism may have emerged from the USA and the folk memory of small town life that so dominates political thinking there, but it has also struck a chord on this side of the Atlantic. Many of us have a general fondness for the British equivalent of barn-raising, for Thomas Hardy-style rural life, close-knit working class communities facing the Blitz, 'sweat equity' and a nostalgia for Archers-style neighbourhoods gone by, whether they were real or not. British people have also shown an interest in new kinds of money, whether it is Air Miles, loyalty points or the pioneering Canadian local currency idea known as local exchange and trading systems (LETS). But although LETS uses a similar method to time dollars, it tends to aim for a different but related outcome. LETS uses a local currency, often with a distinctive local name, to help people exchange goods and services outside the main cash system. It is intended as a way of revitalising the local economy, and of building local relationships as a by-product of this. Time money is different. It is not primarily about replicating the economic system; it is about building community. LETS is about encouraging private exchanges; time money is about developing those public goods and services which charities and government agencies have traditionally been trying to create, but seem increasingly unable to do so. Time money helps build the trust and reciprocity that can rebuild neighbourhood life. The first time money scheme in the UK, Fair Shares, has opened in two sites in Gloucestershire, as a forerunner for nine linked time money projects in the county. Projects by the New Economics Foundation will be launching in Newcastle and Lewisham. Other schemes are on the stocks in Peckham and Watford, where the council has knitted the idea into their successful bid to join the government's programme to provide Better Government for Older People, announced in March 1998. Older people there will be able to earn time money by volunteering locally, by visiting, giving lifts or helping with meals on wheels and the usual neighbourhood tasks which need doing to keep other older people healthy and in their own homes. They will also be paid in time money for their work evaluating council services; in return the council will give them special privileges in council-run facilities. The scheme was picked out for an enthusiastic plug by Public Services Minister Peter Kilfoyle. Edgar Cahn visited the UK in October 1997 for the first time since his term at the LSE, invited over by the Urban Health Partnership and the New Economics Foundation for a series of seminars for local government officers and community activists. There is also political backing for the idea. Tony Blair's Social Exclusion Unit has supported the idea of schemes which can boost local volunteering, and Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown has backed time money, as a way of tackling the damage caused by unemployment. Time money will almost certainly spread in the UK without government help, and it is possible to imagine a range of organisations using the idea to help them achieve specific social objectives. They will probably also underpin the value of time money earnings by making some of their services available in return for them, as described above. Encouraging that kind of system in the UK could mean a range of new approaches to a range of social problems Affordability: financial packages which benefit the better-off, like health insurance and mortgages, are increasingly out of the reach of people who are socially excluded in one way or another. Bundling up time as part of the deal can make them more affordable. The example of Elderplan accepting time money for health insurance payments &emdash; because participants tended to stay healthier &emdash; has been outlined above. But if people can pay partly in time, it can reduce the real cost of the package as well. That is how the US housing charity Habitat is able to reduce the price of its homes for people on low incomes, because they require people to give 500 hours helping to build homes as part of the same price. The same could apply to rent, also outlined above. Education: education grants and loans are increasingly difficult for poorer people to afford, but you could imagine structuring the system so that people on low incomes &emdash; if they want to &emdash; can pay in time. AmeriCorps now have an education grants programme that allows students to pay tuition fees or student loan payments in this way. Berea College in Kentucky has in fact always required students to pay part of their fees in community service. Literacy programmes in the USA are beginning to accept time dollars in payment for more advanced courses. Taxes and fines: it's not just the Third Way which is stuck between the devil of demanding people's responsibility and the deep blue sea of prosecuting them if they fail. What can authorities do if property taxes, fines, or family maintenance payments are ignored &emdash; but the people concerned simply do not have the money to pay? The expense of taking them to court often goes far beyond the outstanding amount, and sending them to prison risks turning them into hardened criminals. Asking them to pay in time provides another, less authoritarian, option. The principle is already set in community service, but asking people to make some kind of contribution in time provides a more dignified way out. It may not help the estranged family or the tax authorities, but then they lose out anyway. If people would otherwise lose their homes, Boulder in Colorado already allows old people to pay their property taxes by volunteering their time. Unemployment: one of the difficulties making Workfare succeed in the USA is that the lack of social facilities and public transport in the worst unemployment blackspots make it particularly hard to wean people into jobs. The extended families of days gone by are no longer there. Single mothers are expected to commute to work when there are no child-minders and no buses. And all the informal work which unemployed people used to do is left undone. It may, in fact, be impossible to shift the required percentage of long-term unemployed into paid jobs &emdash; under Workfare or Britain's New Deal - unless we redefine productive work to include jobs which are not yet defined as such. This final idea may not be entirely applicable to the UK, because of the differences between Workfare and UK welfare policy, but it does imply that there are advantages in encouraging unemployed people to volunteer &emdash; and backing their contribution with some kind of government credit. There is an echo of this in the government's new concepts of Citizenship Pensions, floated in their green paper on welfare reform, where they propose giving carers pension credits to make up for the National Insurance they never paid because they were looking after elderly relatives. The green paper on lifelong learning carries a similar idea as Lifelong Learning Accounts. The National Centre for Volunteering is suggesting that the government should recognise the importance of volunteering, and pay top-up credits into these accounts for the volunteer work people have done. The point is that, by tracking people's time contribution, we can value it and repay it. There is a danger, when it comes to unemployed people, that this could provide a new definition of the 'deserving poor'. But if that is inevitable anyway - and present government policy seems determined to make it so - there are advantages about giving people the opportunity to make a contribution to the neighbourhood they live in, and to pay for that contribution in welfare. 4: A new approach to work? Simply by measuring the time people give, we can open up a parallel economy in time that does not necessarily exclude people in the way that the money economy does. For regeneration agencies that want to rebuild a community as well as its housing, time money could be a useful tool. And the same could be said for health centres with an interest in keeping older patients healthy, or supermarkets that want to keep their local neighbourhood thriving. There are signs that the idea will be linked in with town centre loyalty schemes to help them compete with out-of-town shopping centres &emdash; so that the value of time credits would be underpinned by local loyalty points. Local social capital would be underpinned by loyalty to local shops &emdash; or vice versa. The idea can be adapted anywhere people's involvement is vital to the success of a project. There will undoubtedly be more time money projects starting in the UK without government help, but there are things which the government and local authorities can do to encourage the phenomenon. They could, for example: End the ambiguity about tax, by ruling that time money is based on social exchanges, rather than goods and services, and is not therefore taxable. Where goods are exchanged, the Inland Revenue could reserve the right to tax, as they currently do with other local currencies like LETS. Positively encourage people on benefits to earn time money, and help them do so by accrediting a range of different agencies to issue time money for new volunteer projects. Helping government bodies undertake a 'reciprocity' survey of their current activities, finding ways of involving the ultimate clients in the delivery of the service - and rewarding that involvement with time money. Back time money earnings with 'citizenship credits' for the proposed Citizens Pension, outlined in the government's green paper on welfare reform. Time money recognises the vital importance of social capital, but it also shows a way forward - without recourse to prison or the courts - where we can help build it, because people want to be needed and need to be useful. And it recognises the size of the non-money workload that needs doing. Using time money would, as a side effect, broaden the official view of what constitutes work. It may play some role in modifying the 'work ethic' that is driving a wedge between those who want to be useful, but find it hard to get paid work, and those who work hard to increase their wealth but find themselves too poor in time to play a useful role in the lives of the people around them. It would unleash the participation which officials and professionals so desperately need to succeed. And if you need people's participation to succeed, says Cahn, why don't you just call it work? David Boyle is a Senior Associate at the New Economics Foundation and is the author of Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash (HarperCollins, £14.99 or Amazon.com). More information about time money is available at (UK) Fair Shares or (US) Time Dollars Institute or on Boyle's own website		Introduction 1: Social capital 2: Time money 3: Would it work in the UK? 4: A new approach to work?
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