The Washington Post - 19 January 1996

What is wrong with a society whose still vibrant economy spawns new billionaires at a record pace but whose principal political debate involves deciding how much to cut income and health benefits for children and the elderly poor?

The question, in some form, keeps intruding into our consciousness. Sometimes it is the all purpose litany whose motif is: If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they...? Sometimes it achieves academic status, as when Jeremy Rifkins ("The End of the Work") highlights the dilemma of increasing productivity and the diminishing need for everybody to work - flip sides of the same coin.

Edgar Cahn raises it in the context of the Time Dollars Network (of which he is founder and director). I'll get to the Time Dollar concept in a minute. First listen to Cahn:

"The presence of the homeless people on city streets proclaims that a nation that consumes more capita than any other country in the world cannot even feed and house its own. Crime-ridden neighbourhoods, an enormous increase in the number of nursing homes and prisons, millions of children growing up in poverty, more children born out of wedlock - all pronounce that the nation's social infrastructure, the one built on trust and reciprocity, is in far greater disrepair than the physical infrastructure."

Of course. But what happened to the "social infrastructure"? Why are relationships involving "trust and reciprocity" so little valued? Cahn's intriguing answer: Because they are (at least prospectively) a glut on the market.

"The pricing mechanism built into the monetary system is based upon scarcity," he said the other day. "Winner-take-all markets simply intensify the undervaluing of activities like caring, which, however unique to the recipient are not monetarily distinguishable. Abundance poses a dilemma for such a system; it devalues assets no matter how much they are needed - be it clean air, pure water or caring."

You see, the things that contribute to Cahn's "social infrastructure" tend to be the things that could be done at least adequately by nearly any one of us, given only the desire to do them. But the market rewards scarcity, which is to say specialization. Thus, as Cahn argues:

"The jobs that most people could do go to those who are the least skilled. People's time is too valuable to expend on being merely human. So children are left to be raised, and the elderly to be cared for, by those for whom the market economy has the lowest regard. Human values are marginalised to maximise monetary return.

"Economic policymakers preach productivity and marketable skills. Yet Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are not celebrated for their scarce marketable skills; they are honoured because they quintessentially embody universal human values."

Cahn, a professor at the D.C. School of Law, invented Time Dollars nearly 10 years ago as a way of compensating - and thereby freeing up those values.

The idea is to allow volunteers to earn credits - Time Dollars - for services to others. These tax-exempt credits can then be used either to purchase other services needed by the volunteers or as gifts to people or organisations that need volunteers. A volunteer tutor might earn Time Dollars with which to pay someone to look after a bedridden parent - or an ailing neighbour.

"Time Dollars are more than simply an inexpensive way to expand specialised social services programs for volunteers," Cahn says. "They do something else. The Time Dollar currency enable human beings to redefine themselves as assets, each and every one with something special to contribute...

"They strengthen community of place and counter the centrifugal tendency of money to uproot community in pursuit of maximum return. They create and reinforce an ethos of reciprocity, because each hour spent creates both an expectation and an indebtedness; life ceases to be a series of one-time encounters and instead becomes a non-linear cycle epitomized by the saying, "What goes around comes around."

And what comes around, finally, is the chance for each of us to become a bit more human and to assign value to the things that are truly valuable - no matter what the market economy says.

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