One of the best ideas I have heard of in a long time is called "Time Banking". There are many places that people can go to get involved in Time Banking options that may (or may not) be active in their communities. There is the center: TimeBanks.org, and from there people can find local efforts.
Time Banking is a lot like doing favors from friends, but making your pool of friends a little larger and easier to coerce. You can keep track of your hours and bill people for them like dollars. Apparently, I am not the only person to think this is a great idea because it is getting more popular.
There are other places people can go for an overview of Time Banking, or stories about it. I am more interested in whistful thinking right now.
I was talking to a man a few weeks ago about our economy. For not being an "official" economist (and liking the topic about as much as I like politics...), I sure have a lot of conversations about it.
My friends opinion was that there is nothing in this world that has enough value to be used as a standard for our monetary system. He said it like fact, and I didn't question it too much at the time. But he is patently wrong: if we set the value of a pound of gold (a horrible standard: I don't recommend using gold as our standard again but it would be better than Limbo, as it is now) as worth a billion dollars, then we have enough gold to back the economy. It is all a matter of standardizing it. It might be hard to go that way now, but hell we went into Limbo money.
Ah: But imagine if we set our basis on time? Every individual has the same budget: 24 hours a day. Then you company would be as valuable as the people it employees. The more employees, the higher the budget.
Every job is a job that 'needs' doing, in one sense or another. And by that logic, they are as valuable. We shouldn't have one person getting a billion dollars per hour they play golf and another person get paid five for cleaning puke off of the floor.
I hate cleaning puke off the floor.
The 'better' jobs (the ones you don't despise doing) are paid more in respect and self-worth as well as in money. It is hardly fair. I would rather do a job that I like doing for room and board than janitorial duty for 150K a year. The better jobs would, in the end, go to the better worker: everyone makes an hour for an hour of work, but some people you would rather pay that hour to. The better Geologist is going to keep his job, the quicker Computer Nerd will keep writing programs, the more skilled surgeons will operate. Those less skilled will end up in the unwanted jobs.
There would still be economic factors. And I suppose there would still be companies that charged a hundred hours for something it only took them 1 hour to make: negative reciprocity just like our current economy. And in the end, that is what Time Banking now is seeking to avoid, in part.
Time Banking is a lot like doing favors from friends, but making your pool of friends a little larger and easier to coerce. You can keep track of your hours and bill people for them like dollars. Apparently, I am not the only person to think this is a great idea because it is getting more popular.
There are other places people can go for an overview of Time Banking, or stories about it. I am more interested in whistful thinking right now.
I was talking to a man a few weeks ago about our economy. For not being an "official" economist (and liking the topic about as much as I like politics...), I sure have a lot of conversations about it.
My friends opinion was that there is nothing in this world that has enough value to be used as a standard for our monetary system. He said it like fact, and I didn't question it too much at the time. But he is patently wrong: if we set the value of a pound of gold (a horrible standard: I don't recommend using gold as our standard again but it would be better than Limbo, as it is now) as worth a billion dollars, then we have enough gold to back the economy. It is all a matter of standardizing it. It might be hard to go that way now, but hell we went into Limbo money.
Ah: But imagine if we set our basis on time? Every individual has the same budget: 24 hours a day. Then you company would be as valuable as the people it employees. The more employees, the higher the budget.
Every job is a job that 'needs' doing, in one sense or another. And by that logic, they are as valuable. We shouldn't have one person getting a billion dollars per hour they play golf and another person get paid five for cleaning puke off of the floor.
I hate cleaning puke off the floor.
The 'better' jobs (the ones you don't despise doing) are paid more in respect and self-worth as well as in money. It is hardly fair. I would rather do a job that I like doing for room and board than janitorial duty for 150K a year. The better jobs would, in the end, go to the better worker: everyone makes an hour for an hour of work, but some people you would rather pay that hour to. The better Geologist is going to keep his job, the quicker Computer Nerd will keep writing programs, the more skilled surgeons will operate. Those less skilled will end up in the unwanted jobs.
There would still be economic factors. And I suppose there would still be companies that charged a hundred hours for something it only took them 1 hour to make: negative reciprocity just like our current economy. And in the end, that is what Time Banking now is seeking to avoid, in part.
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