Time Dollar

[rumpel]

Time Banks Weave Community One Hour at a Time

For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It's that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. Time Banks change neighborhoods and whole communities. Time Banking is a social change movement in 22 countries and six continents.

http://www.timebanks.org/

more on this concept

Bernard Lietaer is an economist and author who was one of the designers of the Euro. He has been active in the domain of money systems for over 25 years in a wide variety of functions. While at the Central Bank in Belgium he co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium's Electronic Payment System.

His academic history includes a Professorship of International Finance at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley, and is co-founder of ACCESS Foundation, (www.accessfoundation.org ), an educational non-profit whose objective is to communicate best practices in the domain of complementary currencies.

http://www.transaction.net/money/

[Faux pas]

1. This is a great idea! K & R and hope it gets more exposure. n/t

[Selatius]

2. This sounds like Labor Notes concept experimented with by Josiah Warren

He was some kind of individualist anarchist of the 1800s.

The Cincinnati Time Store was a successful retail store that was created by American individualist anarchist Josiah Warren to test his theories that were based on his strict interpretation of the labor theory of value. The experimental store operated from May 18, 1827 until May 1830. It is considered to be the first use of notes for labor and as such, the first experiment in mutualism.

Warren embraced the labor theory of value, which says that the value of a commodity is the amount of labor that goes into producing or acquiring it. From this he concluded that it was therefore unethical to charge more labor for a product than the labor required to produce it. Warren summed up this policy in the phrase "Cost the limit of price," with "cost" referring the amount of labor one exerted in producing a good. Believing the labor is the foundational cost of things, he held that equal amounts of labor should, naturally, receive equal material compensation. He set out to examine if his theories could be put to practice by establishing his "labor for labor store." If his experiment proved to be successful, his plan was to establish various colonies whose participants all agreed to use "cost the limit of price" in all economic transactions, hoping that all of society would eventually adopt the tenet in all economic affairs.

In the store, customers could purchase goods with "labor notes" which represented an agreement to perform labor. The items in the store were initially marked up 7% to account for the labor required to bring them to market with the price increasing the longer the time that a customer spent with the shopkeeper, as measured by a timer dial; later this markup was reduced to 4%. Corn was used as a standard, with 12 pounds of corn being exchangeable with one hour of labor. The result of the system was that no one was able to profit from the labor of another --every individual ostensibly received the "full produce" of his labor. Adjustments were made for the difficulty and disagreeableness of the work performed, so that time was not the only factor taken into consideration. Warren also set up boards on the wall where individuals could post what kind of services they were seeking or had to sell so that others could respond, and trade among each other using labor notes.

After a rough initial period, the store proved to be very successful. Warren's goods were much cheaper than competitors', though he maintained that he was not trying to put other stores out of business. Another store in the neighborhood converted to Warren's methods. The fact that prices for goods rose the more time a customer spent with Warren resulted in very efficient transactions. Warren said that he was doing more business in one hour than normal businesses do in one day, leading him to close shop part of the day to rest. Though the store was successful, the problem of equal labor times for different difficulties of work was a concern for Warren and he was never able to reconcile the subjective method of determining value with his theories other than crediting it with being a matter of individual judgement. Warren closed the store in May 1830 in order to depart to set up a colonies based upon the labor-cost principle (the most successful of these being "Utopia"), convinced that the store was a successful experiment in "Cost the limit of price."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_notes

[Greyhound]

3. This is one positive possibility of the fiat currency system we have been

backed into, though I'm sure that the Central banks would try to stop it if it catches on. For the first time in history it is possible to completely level the playing field on a world-wide basis.
ETA; :kick: & R

[Eurobabe]

4. K & R

[SoCalDem]

5. Sounds like my babysitting co-op i started back in 1977

works like a charm and it's free:)

[Selatius]

6. This picture really helps explain the concept.

http://www.timebanks.org/documents/timebanks_cycle-1.pdf

From what I can tell, 1 Time Dollar is equal to 1 hour of labor invested doing something for somebody. If you do something for somebody for 4 hours, you get 4 Time Dollars. You can use the money you earned to purchase labor from somebody else. For example, if it were I who earned that 4 Time Dollars, I could pay somebody 1 Time Dollar to wash my car and detail it for the length of 1 hour and use the other 3 for something else.

The only problem is difficulty and disagreeableness of the work. I am sure quite a few people would think that cleaning up a septic tank for 1 Time Dollar/hour is not equivalent to washing dishes for 1 Time Dollar/hour or walking Bob's dog for 1 hour. Josiah Warren, not able to answer this problem, concluded that in these situations the amount of Time Dollars exchanged was a matter of individual judgment.

Does 1 Time Dollar cleaning up a septic tank = 2.5 Time Dollars walking Bob's dog? Warren said that was up to the two individuals involved to decide.

[SoCalDem]

7. Yep you have to assign values.. In the babysitting co-op

a nighttime hour earned an hour & a half..and weekend hours earned 2 hours.

There would have to be a "grunge" factor, or everyone would want to earn hours babysitting a sleeping infant and USING the hours getting an oven cleaned :)

[petgoat]

9. Grunge factor introduces the possibility that a big strong man who

was very busy could pay back his wife's babysitting obligation
by cleaning ovens. Heavy cleaning is very strenuous and men's
general disinclination to do it is economically inefficient.

[druidity33]

8. No More Throw-Away People!

Is a book by Edgar Cahn (the inventor of TimeDollars). A life changing book.

I've posted the title of that book and the concept of TimeDollars/TimeBanks at least 3 times here on DU. I'm glad you got enough people to listen and R to get this on the greatest page for visibility. We've all got to work together...

[rumpel]

11. Great picture...

I also posted the subject before...:)

Can you imagine - the solution to homelessness -

First we create a housing/retail community for the homeless - instead of missions everyone chips in....

Everyone has something to give.

:)

[petgoat]

10. Here's from a pre-publication review of Bernard Lietaer's book, "The Future of Money"

"Bernard Lietaer, who is writing a book called The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, says that our official monetary system has almost nothing to do with the real economy. The volume of currency exchanged on the global level is $1.3 trillion per day. This is 30 times more than the daily GDP of all of the developed countries together. Of that, only 2 or 3 % has to do with real trade or investment; the remainder takes place in the speculative global cyber-casino. He sees the possibility of a crash as about 50/50 over the next 5 or 10 years. Many people, including me, say it's 100 percent. George Soros, who has made a fortune speculating in currencies says, "Instability is cumulative, so the eventual breakdown of freely floating exchanges is virtually assured." Joel Kurtzman, ex-editor of the Harvard Business Review, entitles his latest book: The Death of Money and forecasts an imminent collapse. Bernard elaborates that if there were a crisis, and if all the Central Banks were to agree to work together (which they never do) and if they were to use all their reserves (which is another thing that never happens) they have the funds to control only half the volume of a normal day of trading. In a crisis day, that volume could easily double or triple, and the total Central Bank reserves would last two or three hours. In 1929, the stock market crashed, but the gold standard held. The monetary system held. Here, we are dealing with something that's more fundamental. Bernard adds, "The only precedent I know of is the Roman Empire collapse, which ended Roman currency. That was, of course, at a time when it took about a century and a half for the breakdown to spread through the empire; now it would take a few hours."

"What is holding the system together? And when it does collapse, what will replace it? Each of us, consciously or unconsciously is playing a role in this. What we believe, what we do with our money, our time, either strengthens the dominant belief systems and institutions or weakens them and draws strength to the creation of new belief systems and alternative institutions."

http://www.communitycurrency.org/feministP.html

That's from an essay entitled "The Feminist Perspective" written for the '97 "Other Economic Summit"

Another brilliant and accessible essay from the same author is on local currencies: "Reinventing Money, Restoring the Earth, Reweaving the Web of Life"

http://www.communitycurrency.org/reweaveWeb.html


Elizabeth Kucinich is also interested in monetary policies. After hearing Stephen Zarlenga
speak, she went to work as his assistant at the American Monetary Institute. This outfit
believes monetary control must be taken out of private hands, money should be issued by
governments interest free and spent into circulation, preferably through expenditures on
infrastructure, education and health care.

http://www.monetary.org/

[rumpel]

12. great links

thanks




:hi:

[SnowGoose]

13. Thanks rumpel (and responders)!

I'm bookmarking this one, because I just know that I'll want to come back and refer to it again.

'goose

[rumpel]

14. pleasure

this concept gives me hope for change

Currently we are all slaves to the illusionary money system, as well as the crooked view of placing value on people, based on who can horde more, wrest more, of this illusionary power. Those that don't, are labeled worthless, (credit score system) or worse, a burden or even bad - that is not where society should be.

on edit: Come to think of it: people kill for money - would people kill for someone's pooper scooper hours?
:crazy: