Andrew Yang is a politician, an entrepreneur, an author.
We've had him on the show a few times, most recently to talk about voting reform in an episode called Why Don't We Have Better Candidates for President.
He is enthusiastic about voting reform, especially open primaries and ranked choice voting.
He's also enthusiastic about the idea of a universal basic income, which he brought to mainstream attention when he ran for president in 2020.
Yang is enthusiastic about a lot of interesting ideas, which is a big reason I like speaking with him.
One of these ideas is something that I'm enthusiastic about too.
This idea has been around for a while, but it's still pretty obscure.
So today, on steroids, enabled by modern technology, talk about the mechanics of it, how it would actually work.
Maybe just give one example how this human dollar, let's call it, gets spent and shared.
What are the tasks that create the value?
So I put myself out there and say, hey guys, I'm not good at a lot of things, but I am good at tutoring kids in middle school math and reading.
So if anyone needs a tutor for this, I'm going to be your person.
And you say I'm offering X number of hours a week?
Yes. You're the one I'm located.
If you take me up on this and then I show up and then you sign off and say, yes, you actually did show up and you did a good job.
And here's a picture of him with my child and it's non-creepy.
Then I will have earned, let's call it, 20 human dollars.
Then I say, well, great, what am I going to do with these?
And then I look around and say, you know what?
I could really use a home cooked meal because I'm terrible at that.
Which by the way, it's a pretty real example.
And then they say, someone, it's like, I love to cook and I am happy to make surplus food.
And I will happily take those human dollars off your hands.
You can wind up super charging everyone's communal experience.
This kind of exchange may sound old fashioned, like something we used to do all the time that didn't even need a name.
But the digital age has changed many things.
One of them being how accustomed we are to getting what we want with just a few clicks.
I think it's worth asking what may have been lost in this revolution of convenience and as the old fashioned barter system fades away.
There was the face to faceness of it, of course, but it also reminds you of a time before the financialization of everything, which we've also become accustomed to.
So maybe it's time to give this obscure old fashioned idea a real shot.
Maybe it's time we start a time bank of our own.
You know, we're going to need a catchy name ASAP.
I guess yang freak is not quite right.
Yeah, no, that'll just scare people off and have them run in the other direction.
So we could call it time banking for the time being.
Okay, for the time being, we will call it time banking.
Maybe this idea doesn't sound very promising to you.
This old fashioned doesn't have much momentum.
Doesn't even have a real name.
Maybe you can help us with the name.
If you have an idea, email it to us radioatfrekenomics.com.
As for the momentum, well, maybe you can help with that too.
At the end of this episode, I'll tell you what we're looking for.
In the meantime, we will hear from a time banking booster and a skeptic.
I just don't think of it as a scalable way to go on a significant part of the economy.
But what kind of show would we be if we let a little skepticism stop us?
We're going to freaking do it.
This is Frekenomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.
With your host, Stephen Dubner.
You could look at time banking as just another market.
And economists are good at thinking about how markets work or don't work.
Our Roth is particularly good at this.
I've done a lot of market design and a lot of market design involves going and talking to people about their problems and understanding their problems.
Roth teaches at Stanford and he has won a Nobel Prize for his work in market design.
Back in 2015, we made an episode called Make Me a Match about Roth's inventive system to match potential kidney donors with people who need a kidney transplant.
That system has saved thousands of lives and inspired a lot of Frekenomics radio listeners to get involved.
I'm hoping this episode about time banking will also get some of you involved.
I asked Al Roth what he thinks of time banking.
He suggested that before starting up some crazy new currency, we should appreciate what we've already got.
Let's take a moment to be astounded at how successful money is as a market design invention.
Someone wrote a book called The Pencil.
The thing about a pencil is it's a compound object made on different machines with resources gotten in different places and it's cheap.
All of those interactions, you know, getting the rubber for the eraser and the graphite for the pencil itself, all of those are mediated by money and that's the miracle of money.
It's quite a remarkable invention.
So now you're saying can we do the same thing with time?
So think of all the things that had to be done to make money money, right?
There was coinage originally and then you worried that people would cheat on the coinage by scraping off little bits.
Centuries went into figuring out how to organize trade in things like precious metals.
I appreciated Roth's points about money and its advantages are clear.
Money is fungible. It stores value over time.
It's simple to exchange.
But years ago, I came across a couple books written by Edgar Khan, a lawyer and social activist.
One was called No More Throwaway People.
The other was called Time Dollars, the new currency that enables Americans to turn their hidden resource time into personal security and community renewal.
I once went to see Khan speak because I was working on my own book at the time about the psychology of money.
Back then, I was interested in learning how the standard economy works and doesn't work, who thrives in an economy like ours and who struggles.
So let's hear how Edgar Khan came up with the idea of time banking.
He was the one who brought modern time banking back during the Ronald Reagan administration when a lot of the social services were drying up and he realized that we needed to come up with a different economy where individuals can rely on one another, not just a public institution.
That is Christa Wyatt. She is the CEO of a group called TimeBanks.org, which carries on the work of Edgar Khan.
He died in 2022. We asked Wyatt to read a key passage from a speech that Khan once gave about the shortcomings of money and prices.
When we look at what price does, we see it devalues everything we define as a human being.
Yet, these capacities, the ones we all share, are what enable our species to survive, caring for each other, coming to each other's rescue, rearing infants, protecting the frail and vulnerable, standing for what's right, opposing what's wrong.
Christa Wyatt, before becoming CEO of TimeBanks.org, worked for a variety of charitable organizations.
One of them helped bring together women who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and other women who had already gone through the same experience.
I've been a nonprofit for 30 years and I didn't find out about TimeBanking until about 10 years ago and it just blew my mind.
I'm like, why is this not on every corner?
Why are people not talking about it?
So why aren't people talking about it?
We did a survey in 2002 and we found out that we had over 40,000 members out there and we have at least 500 TimeBanks in the US and there are TimeBanks in other countries.
We have 22 TimeBanks in China.
There is a huge TimeBank in the UK.
We cover at least 42 countries and we're working on one in Saudi Arabia.
On a planet of nearly 8 billion people, 40,000 members is pretty small, especially for an idea that's been around for a while.
TimeBank started an early industrial revolution with an anarchist, Joshua Warren.
He opened a TimeBank in 1827 called TimeStory in Cincinnati.
In the 20th century during World War II, a Japanese woman named Terrico Mizzoushima gave the idea a try.
She traded her sewing skills for fresh vegetables during the Pacific War in early 1940s and she started her TimeBank in 1973 called Volunteer Labor Bank.
She had over 1,000 members.
Most of her members were women, usually housewives.
That TimeBank still exists, run out of Osaka.
But despite a few successes, TimeBanking just didn't catch on.
You might think the COVID pandemic would have revived interest, but it didn't.
There are TimeBanks that had closed because of the lack of member engagement and the funding wasn't there.
I'll be perfectly honest.
We are not great in funding.
We have a private donor that really believes in the TimeBank community and he's the one who has really supported me through the last four years, but we need to do better.
We are struggling. You said that you'd been in the nonprofit world for a long time before you heard about it.
Yes. I mean, that sounds kind of like bad news.
Like it should be more prominent.
Why is it not, do you think?
There's many reasons I didn't see enough marketing material out there.
I don't see it on the web.
I don't hear it from public speakers.
Then also the concept is so easy to some and so complicated to others.
This happened on a bigger scale or stage.
And granted, there have been a lot of people who've been doing exactly this on a small scale in many places over time.
Can you just talk about what you see as the most fruitful way to set this up in terms of whether it should be a private public partnership with government involved to some degree?
Is it primarily a software platform or is it more of an in real life thing?
Does it have a local focus or should it be national or even international?
What do you see as the best structure?
I think that it needs to be somewhat localized so that you encourage more in-person interaction.
People out of the house talking to each other and helping each other.
Traditionally, this sort of thing would be led with philanthropy and then you would bring in various corporates and then the last dominoe is government.
But if you were to choose a particular location, let's call it New York City for the sake of this, then there'd be public officials cheerleading for it right and left because it solves a lot of the problems that they're most animated about.
You once wrote to me in an email, I'm convinced that the monetary economy is going to grind us up and you've argued that it really already has ground up a majority of people in this country and that a multi-variant economy, caring and nurturing arts and creativity, fitness and wellness, etc.
is the only way out and will require multiple currencies to get right.
In addition to what we're talking about today, what do you see as other currencies that do exist that we might want to draft off of or even borrow from?
The best example I can use is that punch card at your local deli where you get 10 sandwiches and then you get the 11th for free.
That has a place of honor in your wallet and you get really excited when you get close to the free sandwich.
If you can imagine a version of the deli punch card or showing up to all sorts of things, like that's the vision.
Those love points, Americans love rewards, Americans love stuff.
I have these reward points on my amics and it's mesmerizing even though right now it doesn't cost them anything because I'm not going to redeem it because I'm hoarding for what I'm hoarding for.
That's really the core idea is that if you give Americans cumulative rewards for doing awesome stuff, you'll see more awesome stuff.
Okay, so who could possibly be against a scheme that rewards people for doing awesome stuff?
Well, there is a certain Nobel Prize winning economist.
Some people's time might be more valuable than other people's.
That's coming up after the break.
I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Frekenham McTradio.
As appealing as the idea of time banking is to me and to Andrew Yang, most economists think that money is a much better measure of value than time.
Here again is Al Roth. Time is an interesting commodity and we buy and sell it all the time.
When you hire a lawyer, he builds you by the hour, you give him money for his against swapping time for time.
I just don't think of it as a scalable way to run a significant part of the economy.
The reason the idea appeals to me is because I've spent a lot of time with people like you, economists.
When you get a little bit off the beaten path, you start thinking about things like shadow time, the hours I have when I'm not on the clock and what they're worth to me and how I could spend them.
I also just think about human capital, which economists are always going on and on about.
It feels like that's the purpose of a lot of economic research these days is to show how important it is for people to build human capital through education and social networks and so on because human capital is indeed really valuable.
But then when I look around the world, I see so much surplus, dare I say, wasted human capital, people who are able to do things that may not be that valuable in a regular market circumstance and may not even be that valuable to them, but might be very valuable to other people.
It might be wonderful to find a way to give value to that surplus human capital.
If you add it all up, that could be the biggest natural resource in the world worth more than all the petroleum and other mineral products combined.
Then I thought, well, who out there in the world would appreciate that more than Al Roth, who recognized that there is surplus sitting around in people's bodies, for instance, in the form of a second kidney and found a way to set up a system to make those extra kidneys available.
So does that make time banking a tad more viable in your view?
Well, I already said that I am in favor of looking for ways to increase valuable exchanges.
So when time for time works, that's great.
But when you talk about human capital, you already suggesting that on some tasks, some people's time might be more valuable than other people's because they have more human capital.
And that's what makes time clunky if all we're doing is swapping time.
I live on a college campus.
So we trade time all the time by inviting people to dinner and then they invite us back to dinner.
Dinner is sort of time you expect you're going to spend two and a half hours with people and create connections that can't be monetized.
And it's part of what makes life worth living.
And if they had to eat and run, it would be a less successful dinner.
Maybe sometimes have the feeling we've now been invited to your house three times and we haven't invited you back yet, we'd better do that.
You could consider just saying, hey, here's a couple hundred dollars for those three dinners.
Have you ever tried that?
That would end a friendship pretty quickly, wouldn't it?
Well, it could be advantageous if it's a friendship that's in a condition where they've had you over three times and you haven't wanted them to come to your house once.
Well, sure. Supporters of time banking think it can be useful for more than just dinner parties among college professors.
Andrew Yang spends a lot of time talking about the so-called invisible economy.
The work some of us do that the regular economy simply doesn't count.
My wife who's at home with our son who's autistic, that has immense value.
The market right now does not give that appropriate value.
If someone is painting a mural in their neighborhood and beautifying it, that has value that maybe doesn't show up in our current system, if someone shows up to a nursing home and volunteers, if someone is tutoring children, if someone is making people around them healthier and more active, all of these things have positive values that right now would not get properly
recognized or rewarded in our current monetary economy.
What if I were to say, Andrew, you're also a political player and the reason that so much money is drawn into politics is because there's so much leverage in the political system.
Wouldn't it be better to focus on that, to remake the political system so that all the benefits that you want from this human dollar system were just there already.
You wouldn't have to recreate this whole second system to take care of it.
In other words, set up the political system to make the economy more human-centered in the first place.
Why isn't that the best solution?
Oh, I love that solution too, Stephen.
We should definitely pursue that.
I'm working on that every day, but there's no reason why we can't demonstrate what's possible given current technologies and what resources we have.
I could imagine countless religious organizations and food banks and volunteer programs hearing us talk about this and say, hey, what do you think we're doing?
What do you think we've been doing forever?
So how is this different?
Hopefully, it supercharges many of those organizations and communities.
If you do time banking at scale, you wind up having a lot of that energy flow through existing nonprofits and religious orgs because in many ways they're the best situated to be able to encourage and monitor and benefit from more people getting out and doing more things for other people.
Now I want to talk to someone who could tell us some more about volunteering generally.
Someone has to realize how important volunteering is to the large national network of nonprofit organizations that are a backbone and an under recognized asset within US society.
That is Nathan Deetz on the research director at the Duke at Institute at the University of Maryland.
And what is the Duke at Institute?
The Duke at Institute is a policy center within the school of public policy.
Our focus is on studies of nonprofits and philanthropy in general.
In his research, Deetz has found that volunteering in the US has been declining for at least a couple decades.
We can start right after September 11, 2001.
The first national data collection in a long time about volunteering was done.
Before then, data on volunteering was collected only every few decades as part of the current population survey that's run by the Census Bureau.
But researchers wanted to know how the national tragedy of 9-11 would affect volunteering.
In the early 2000s, they found that nearly 30% of Americans were doing some volunteering through formal organizations like nonprofits or religious institutions.
And then we saw a decline.
We've always bred that as the decline that's kind of the we've seen when we started digging into this, I've been suggestive.
One is that we saw declines that were greater in suburban areas and rural areas than they were in urban areas.
Maybe what we saw there was the fact that people were moving out of those areas and taking their time and their talents and their energies with them.
And when that happens, you also see an increasingly aging population in those areas.
So when people have to drop out of civic life or the volunteer workforce specifically, there aren't very many people to take their places.
Social capital is the concept that connects all the activities that we call civic engagement.
I think we're seeing declines in social capital that are reflected in the declines in volunteering rates.
One of the most important ways in which trust helps build social capital is to get people to realize that they can count on other people.
Let's say that time banking, time dollars, human dollars, whatever we want to call it, might spur at least a small uptick in volunteering and maybe a small uptick in social capital, social trust.
How would you see that benefiting society overall?
I think the key is to get people to recognize that in many cases receiving actually is as good as giving.
It's a key principle that underlies the whole time banking concept.
That's the idea that runs most counter to most people's intuition.
The Bible tells you the opposite.
It's better to give them to receive.
That's really interesting.
I feel like I'm having a little bit of a breakthrough here personally.
I'm in a therapy session, Nathan.
I mean, I kind of feel the same way.
Well, what it made me think of is this.
I mean, this is getting a little personal, I hope you don't mind, but my father died when I was about 10 or 11.
I lived in a rural area where there were quite a few people who really went out of their way to help me and my family.
I was the youngest in a big bunch of kids and I was the last one at home.
There were a couple of men who would take me on fishing trips and whatnot.
As much as I enjoyed the benefits per se, I hated being seen as and feeling like a charity case.
I'm not saying that was a good choice, a bad choice.
It was just the way my emotions worked at the time.
But I think as I outgrew that age, I compounded that response.
And it strikes me now, speaking to you, that there's something very ungenerous about being unwilling to accept other people's generosity.
It's what you said a moment ago that made me realize that there is something very powerful about not just giving plainly but receiving and about the notion of participating in reciprocity.
So anything more you have to say about that?
Just that participating in reciprocity, that's the norm that I think we ought to get people to buy into.
It doesn't have to be the case that receiving is just as good as giving.
I think the time-banking people would probably be happy to relax that statement a little bit.
But receiving is perfectly okay.
And actually, when you receive, you're making it possible for someone else to obtain the benefits of giving.
So it sounds like you might like to participate in our hair-brained idea here.
Is that the case? Are my reading into your enthusiasm?
I'd be happy to help because I think this is an important, interesting concept.
And I think that nothing but good could come of an experiment.
Would it be a better idea to have a New York City time bank than a US time bank?
Would it be an even better idea to have an upper west side of Manhattan time bank versus a New York City time bank?
Oh, I think so. I think that's the way most institutions work best.
Even the Federal Reserve has regional banks.
Anything that brings the institution closer to the members of the community is going to encourage participation.
That's probably the only way in which a time bank would work is if it were located in the community.
Moving up after the break, if we can get this idea going, we'll need someone to run it.
Is that someone you? Keep listening for details.
I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakin'omics Radio.
We'll be right back. After talking to Nathan Deetz and Krista Wyatt and Andrew Yang about time banking, I was getting encouraged, but then I read a new paper by researchers who followed a big experimental project that gave people a guaranteed income.
This is similar to the universal basic income idea that Yang promoted a few years ago while running for president.
He called it a freedom dividend.
In this experiment, 1,000 low-income people were given $1,000 a month for three years, and the researchers wanted to see how the money changed their lives.
They also set up a pool of 2,000 low-income people who got only $50 a month so that they would have a comparison group.
And what the researchers find?
The people getting $1,000 of free money a month worked a bit less, which you might expect.
They spent more time sleeping and hanging out with friends.
What they didn't spend more time on was either building up their own human capital or volunteering to help out other people.
I interpreted this as not such good news.
So I went back to Al Roth, the market design expert, to see if he had any ideas to make time banking a more attractive prospect, even though he's not a big fan of the idea.
I'd want some kind of reputational review system.
You need some... I don't really know how to set up their business to optimize for that.
They don't know what kinds of partnerships and maybe there's some tax strategy and just setting up the business that they're not clear on.
But boy, Professor Roth, he loves to talk to people about problems like that.
He also needs a new roof.
So that sounds like a really nice, possible exchange that could happen in the time bank.
Would you be open to discussing that?
I'd be open to discussing it.
He said reluctantly. I say reluctantly because I certainly wouldn't want that to be the only way I could get my roof repaired.
OK, so it sounds like you're not particularly enthusiastic about or interested, certainly in joining our project to try to make time banking a successor to pilot it.
But assuming that you like me enough to not want to see this project fail from step one, is there any piece of advice in particular you might have, let's say, that we're going to try to do this with some kind of perhaps government cooperation, some kind of nonprofit cooperation.
Try to find, let's say, a CEO who could really organize this.
I think the simplest kind of time banking is for people who are actually prepared to be in relationships with each other and are going to repeatedly trade time with each other.
And they can evaluate the quality.
Baby sitting cooperative, for instance, are a good example because you also get some feedback from the kids if they're old enough.
But as soon as I'm earning time by babysitting for your kids and now I'm spending it on roofers, I want to know, is this a roofer who gives good value for the amount of time I'm putting into the bank?
Given that I don't have a relationship with him, what happens if the roof takes more time than any of us anticipated?
Who pays for the extra time that he actually spent doing a good job fixing my roof?
There has to be some situation where he doesn't stop with the hole in the roof and now it's worse than when he started.
He finishes the good job.
He gets a review of doing a good job, but someone has to pay him back the time.
The banking part of time banking is going to be important when there aren't personal relationships.
So you need reviews and you need a way for him to say it took me 12 hours.
Who would have thought?
But there was a dragon implanted in the roof and I had to fight the dragon.
The things that you put up within California, dragons and roofs, I don't know how you deal with it.
We deal with it by paying the roofer.
So first let me preface this by saying it is a parallel instead of a percentage of GDP, but our current economy is around $24 trillion.
And if you think about how much we could benefit in education, and nurturing, and health, and while in this meal we're spending maybe 17 or 18% of that 24 trillion on our healthcare right now.
So let's call that 4 trillion.
And we all know that we could generate immense value if we all took better care of ourselves and had preventative care and everything else.
So just in the healthcare space you can see trillions of dollars, environment, trillions of dollars, education, trillions of dollars, arts and creativity, I would argue you could also get up to that level.
So you can imagine something that gets up into the tens of trillions of dollars that mirrors the size of living better lives and a model that other people say that's totally replicable.
We can do that where we live and work.
So Andrew, if we want to get this thing going, we need someone to run it.
You'd probably be good at it, but you're busy with 18 million other things.
I'm pretty busy too, but even if I weren't, I'd be terrible at running something like this.
So I think what we really need is a CEO, someone who hears this episode and is as enthusiastic about the idea as we are and actually has the ability and the courage to get it done.
So what kind of background or characteristics would you suggest that the ideal candidate has?
I'd say that person is comfortable going into a room of people in a community in Queen was produced by Zach Lipinski.
Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaje, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Ripon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs, Julie Canfer, Lyric Baudich, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lily, and Teo Jacobs.
Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhiker's, Our Composer is Luis Guerra.
It's always fun to talk to you Al.
You too, and it'll spend your time well.
Cheers. The Freakinomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
The Hitchhiker.
