AI transcript
0:00:08 Andrew Yang is a politician, an entrepreneur, an author.
0:00:12 We’ve had him on the show a few times, most recently to talk about voting reform in an
0:00:16 episode called Why Don’t We Have Better Candidates for President?
0:00:23 He is enthusiastic about voting reform, especially open primaries and ranked choice voting.
0:00:27 He’s also enthusiastic about the idea of a universal basic income, which he brought
0:00:32 to mainstream attention when he ran for president in 2020.
0:00:37 Yang is enthusiastic about a lot of interesting ideas, which is a big reason I like speaking
0:00:38 with him.
0:00:42 One of these ideas is something that I’m enthusiastic about too.
0:00:47 This idea has been around for a while, but it’s still pretty obscure.
0:00:53 So today, on Freakonomics Radio, we would like to give it a bit of exposure and maybe
0:00:55 it’ll catch fire.
0:01:00 This idea has a variety of names, so I asked Andrew Yang what he likes to call it.
0:01:09 I’ve been using multivariate economy, but that is sexy, yeah, multivariate economy.
0:01:13 But we can use time banking, it’s probably the most popular.
0:01:20 Time banking can also be known as time dollars or human dollars or labor certificates.
0:01:22 The idea is pretty straightforward.
0:01:29 You set up a system in which people agree to use time as a measure of value, not replacing
0:01:33 money, but creating a parallel human-centered economy.
0:01:40 You can imagine it being a time barter system on steroids enabled by modern technology.
0:01:42 Talk about the mechanics of it, how it would actually work.
0:01:49 Maybe just give one example, how this human dollar, let’s call it, gets spent and shared.
0:01:52 What are the tasks that create the value?
0:01:57 So I put myself out there and say, “Hey, guys, I’m not good at a lot of things, but
0:02:03 I am good at tutoring kids in middle school math and reading.
0:02:07 So if anyone needs a tutor for this, I’m going to be your person.”
0:02:10 And you say, “I’m offering X number of hours a week.”
0:02:14 Yes, I’m offering X number of hours a week here where I’m located.
0:02:19 If you take me up on this and then I show up and then you sign off and say, “Yes, he
0:02:22 actually did show up and he did a good job and here’s a picture of him with my child
0:02:29 and it’s non-creepy,” then I will have earned, let’s call it, 20 human dollars.
0:02:30 Then I say, “Well, great.
0:02:32 What am I going to do with these?”
0:02:33 And then I look around and say, “You know what?
0:02:38 I could really use a home-cooked meal because I’m terrible at that,” which by the way is
0:02:41 a pretty real example.
0:02:45 And then there’s someone that’s like, “I’d love to cook and I am happy to make surplus
0:02:50 food and I will happily take those human dollars off your hands.
0:02:57 You can wind up supercharging everyone’s communal experience.”
0:03:02 This kind of exchange may sound old-fashioned, like something we used to do all the time
0:03:07 that didn’t even need a name, but the digital age has changed many things.
0:03:13 One of them being how accustomed we are to getting what we want with just a few clicks.
0:03:18 I think it’s worth asking what may have been lost in this revolution of convenience and
0:03:21 as the old-fashioned barter system fades away.
0:03:27 There was the face-to-faceness of it, of course, but it also reminds you of a time before the
0:03:33 financialization of everything, which we’ve also become accustomed to.
0:03:40 So maybe it’s time to give this obscure old-fashioned idea a real shot.
0:03:43 Maybe it’s time we start a time bank of our own.
0:03:45 You know, we’re going to need a catchy name, ASAP.
0:03:48 I guess Yang Freak is not quite right.
0:03:49 Yeah, no.
0:03:52 That’ll just scare people off and have them running the other direction.
0:03:55 So we could call it time banking for the time being.
0:03:56 Okay.
0:04:00 For the time being, we will call it time banking.
0:04:03 Maybe this idea doesn’t sound very promising to you.
0:04:08 It’s old-fashioned, doesn’t have much momentum, doesn’t even have a real name.
0:04:09 Maybe you can help us with the name.
0:04:15 If you have an idea, email it to us radio@freakonomics.com.
0:04:20 As for the momentum, well, maybe you can help with that, too.
0:04:24 At the end of this episode, I’ll tell you what we’re looking for.
0:04:27 In the meantime, we will hear from a time banking booster.
0:04:30 It just blew my mind.
0:04:31 And a skeptic.
0:04:36 I just don’t think of it as a scalable way to run a significant part of the economy.
0:04:40 But what kind of show would we be if we let a little skepticism stop us?
0:05:09 They’re going to freaking do it.
0:05:14 You could look at time banking as just another market, and economists are good at thinking
0:05:17 about how markets work or don’t work.
0:05:20 Al Roth is particularly good at this.
0:05:24 I’ve done a lot of market design, and a lot of market design involves going and talking
0:05:28 to people about their problems and understanding their problems.
0:05:34 Roth teaches at Stanford, and he has won a Nobel Prize for his work in market design.
0:05:39 Back in 2015, we made an episode called “Make Me a Match” about Roth’s inventive system
0:05:45 to match potential kidney donors with people who need a kidney transplant.
0:05:50 That system has saved thousands of lives and inspired a lot of Freakonomics radio listeners
0:05:51 to get involved.
0:05:57 I’m hoping this episode about time banking will also get some of you involved.
0:06:00 I asked Al Roth what he thinks of time banking.
0:06:05 He suggested that before starting up some crazy new currency, we should appreciate
0:06:07 what we’ve already got.
0:06:14 Let’s take a moment to be astounded at how successful money is as a market design invention.
0:06:15 Someone wrote a book called “The Pencil.”
0:06:19 The thing about a pencil is it’s a compound object made on different machines with resources
0:06:22 gotten in different places, and it’s cheap.
0:06:26 All of those interactions, you know, getting the rubber for the eraser and the graphite
0:06:27 for the pencil itself.
0:06:30 All of those are mediated by money, and that’s the miracle of money.
0:06:32 It’s quite a remarkable invention.
0:06:35 So now you’re saying, can we do the same thing with time?
0:06:38 So think of all the things that had to be done to make money money, right?
0:06:42 There was coinage originally, and then you worried that people would cheat on the coinage
0:06:45 by scraping off little bits.
0:06:51 Centuries went into figuring out how to organize trade in things like precious metals.
0:06:56 I appreciated Roth’s points about money, and its advantages are clear.
0:07:02 Money is fungible, it stores value over time, it’s simple to exchange.
0:07:07 But years ago, I came across a couple books written by Edgar Kahn, a lawyer and social
0:07:08 activist.
0:07:12 One was called “No More Throwaway People.”
0:07:16 The other was called “Time Dollars,” the new currency that enables Americans to turn
0:07:22 their hidden resource, time, into personal security and community renewal.
0:07:26 I once went to see Kahn speak because I was working on my own book at the time about the
0:07:29 psychology of money.
0:07:34 Back then, I was interested in learning how the standard economy works and doesn’t work,
0:07:38 who thrives in an economy like ours and who struggles.
0:07:43 So let’s hear how Edgar Kahn came up with the idea of time banking.
0:07:47 He was the one who brought modern time banking back during the Ronald Reagan administration
0:07:50 when a lot of the social services were drying up.
0:07:55 And he realized that we needed to come up with a different economy where individuals
0:07:58 can rely on one another, not just a public institution.
0:08:00 That is Krista Wyatt.
0:08:05 She is the CEO of a group called TimeBanks.org, which carries on the work of Edgar Kahn.
0:08:08 He died in 2022.
0:08:13 We asked Wyatt to read a key passage from a speech that Kahn once gave about the shortcomings
0:08:15 of money and prices.
0:08:20 When we look at what price does, we see it devalues everything we define as a human
0:08:21 being.
0:08:27 Yet, these capacities, the ones we all share, are what enable our species to survive, caring
0:08:33 for each other, coming to each other’s rescue, rearing infants, protecting the frail and
0:08:38 vulnerable, standing for what’s right, opposing what’s wrong.
0:08:45 Krista Wyatt, before becoming CEO of TimeBanks.org, worked for a variety of charitable organizations.
0:08:49 One of them helped bring together women who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer
0:08:52 and other women who had already gone through the same experience.
0:08:57 I’ve been a nonprofit for 30 years, and I didn’t find out about time banking until
0:09:00 about 10 years ago, and it just blew my mind.
0:09:03 I’m like, why is this not on every corner?
0:09:05 Why are people not talking about it?
0:09:07 So why aren’t people talking about it?
0:09:15 We did a survey 2002, and we found out that we had over 40,000 members out there, and
0:09:22 we have at least 500 time banks in the US, and there are time banks in other countries.
0:09:25 We have 22 time banks in China.
0:09:27 There is a huge time bank in the UK.
0:09:32 We cover at least 42 countries, and we’re working on one in Saudi Arabia.
0:09:38 On a planet of nearly 8 billion people, 40,000 members is pretty small, especially for an
0:09:41 idea that’s been around for a while.
0:09:46 Time banking started in the early industrial revolution with an anarchist, Joshua Warren.
0:09:51 He opened a time bank in 1827 called Time Store in Cincinnati.
0:09:56 In the 20th century, during World War II, a Japanese woman named Teruko Mizushima gave
0:09:58 the idea a try.
0:10:04 She traded her sewing skills for fresh vegetables during the Pacific War in the early 1940s,
0:10:09 and she started her time bank in 1973 called Volunteer Labor Bank.
0:10:11 She had over 1,000 members.
0:10:14 Most of her members were women, usually housewives.
0:10:19 That time bank still exists, run out of Osaka.
0:10:24 But despite a few successes, time banking just didn’t catch on.
0:10:28 You might think the COVID pandemic would have revived interest, but it didn’t.
0:10:33 There are time banks that had closed because of the lack of member engagement and the funding
0:10:34 wasn’t there.
0:10:35 I’ll be perfectly honest.
0:10:38 We are not great in funding.
0:10:43 We have a private donor that really believes in the time bank community, and he’s the one
0:10:49 who has really supported me through the last four years, but we need to do better.
0:10:50 We are struggling.
0:10:54 You said that you’d been in the non-profit world for a long time before you heard about
0:10:55 it.
0:10:56 Yes.
0:10:59 I mean, that sounds kind of like bad news, like it should be more prominent.
0:11:01 Why is it not, do you think?
0:11:02 There’s many reasons.
0:11:05 I didn’t see enough marketing material out there.
0:11:06 I don’t see it on the web.
0:11:09 I don’t hear it from public speakers.
0:11:16 And then also the concept is so easy to some and so complicated to others.
0:11:21 There have been college towns and other communities that have adopted time banking.
0:11:23 That again is Andrew Yang.
0:11:26 The core of it is that we all have value.
0:11:28 We all have things we can contribute.
0:11:31 There are ways that other people can help us.
0:11:36 And one of the main things that we’re combating really is a sense of isolation and desolation
0:11:38 and loneliness.
0:11:43 And so if you want people to reach out to each other, to help each other, to connect
0:11:49 to their neighbors and folks in their community, this would be a very, very powerful way to
0:11:50 make that happen.
0:11:56 And in my opinion, there has to be some kind of mechanism that encourages us to help each
0:11:57 other.
0:12:00 So you and I have talked about this, we’re both enthusiastic about this idea and we’ve
0:12:05 talked about actually trying to make this happen on a bigger scale or stage.
0:12:09 And granted, there have been a lot of people who’ve been doing exactly this on a small
0:12:13 scale in many places over time.
0:12:20 Can you just talk about what you see as the most fruitful way to set this up in terms
0:12:25 of whether it should be a private public partnership with government involved to some degree?
0:12:30 Is it primarily a software platform or is it more of an in real life thing?
0:12:34 Does it have a local focus or should it be national or even international?
0:12:36 What do you see as the best structure?
0:12:42 I think that it needs to be somewhat localized so that you encourage more in-person interaction.
0:12:47 Having people out of the house talking to each other and helping each other, traditionally
0:12:53 this sort of thing would be led with philanthropy and then you would bring in various corporates
0:12:55 and then the last domino is government.
0:12:59 But if you were to choose a particular location, let’s call it New York City for the sake of
0:13:04 this, then there’d be public officials cheerleading for it right and left because it solves a
0:13:07 lot of the problems that they’re most animated about.
0:13:13 You once wrote to me in an email, I’m convinced that the monetary economy is going to grind
0:13:18 us up and you’ve argued that it really already has ground up a majority of people in this
0:13:23 country and that a multivariate economy, caring and nurturing arts and creativity, fitness
0:13:29 and wellness, etc., is the only way out and will require multiple currencies to get right.
0:13:33 In addition to what we’re talking about today, what do you see as other currencies that do
0:13:37 exist that we might want to draft off of or even borrow from?
0:13:43 The best example I can use is that punch card at your local deli where you get 10 sandwiches
0:13:45 and then you have the 11th for free.
0:13:49 That has a place of honor in your wallet and you get really excited when you get close
0:13:50 to the free sandwich.
0:13:57 If you can imagine a version of the deli punch card or showing up to all sorts of things,
0:13:59 that’s the vision.
0:14:04 Americans love points, Americans love rewards, Americans love stuff.
0:14:11 I have these reward points on my AmEx and it’s mesmerizing even though right now it
0:14:14 doesn’t cost them anything because I’m not going to redeem it because I’m hoarding for,
0:14:18 I don’t know what I’m hoarding for.
0:14:23 That’s really the core idea is that if you give Americans cumulative rewards for doing
0:14:25 awesome stuff, you’ll see more awesome stuff.
0:14:32 Okay, so who could possibly be against a scheme that rewards people for doing awesome stuff?
0:14:38 Well, there is a certain Nobel Prize winning economist.
0:14:41 Some people’s time might be more valuable than other people’s.
0:14:43 That’s coming up after the break.
0:14:52 I’m Stephen Dubner and this is Freakin’ AmEx Radio.
0:14:59 As appealing as the idea of time banking is to me and to Andrew Yang, most economists
0:15:03 think that money is a much better measure of value than time.
0:15:06 Here again is Al Roth.
0:15:11 Time is an interesting commodity and we buy and sell it all the time.
0:15:13 When you hire a lawyer, he bills you by the hour.
0:15:17 You give him money for his time and expertise.
0:15:22 You might hire someone to house it for you and water your plants while you’re away.
0:15:26 So we trade time a lot, but not for time.
0:15:30 And part of the reason is that time is sort of a clunky commodity.
0:15:32 It’s a lot easier to trade other things.
0:15:33 But why is it so clunky?
0:15:37 I mean, just as a dollar is a dollar, an hour is an hour.
0:15:42 Well, one of the things we worry about with monetary markets is some people have more
0:15:46 dollars than other people do and that gives them more access and maybe we don’t always
0:15:47 feel great about that.
0:15:52 And so I think some of the charm to people who are charmed by time banks is that everyone
0:15:54 has 24 hours in a day.
0:16:00 But you know, a working mother of three kids has less time than a retired banker who has
0:16:03 a cleaner come into his house and a gardener.
0:16:05 So not everyone has the same amount of time.
0:16:08 And it’s clunky because it’s also hard to transfer.
0:16:13 There’s the joke about the lawyer who goes to see a dentist and dentist fills his cavity
0:16:14 in 10 minutes.
0:16:17 But the lawyer says to him, “You make more per hour than I do.”
0:16:20 And the dentist says, “Would you prefer that I took an hour?”
0:16:27 So we solicited a few other economists to come on the show to talk about time banking.
0:16:31 One of them, who shall go unnamed, wrote back to say, “The more I think about it, the more
0:16:34 I think it is the dumbest idea in the world.
0:16:38 So do you hate the idea as much as that economist?”
0:16:41 I don’t hate it as much as that economist.
0:16:48 By and large, I think that finding more opportunities for valuable exchange, for exchange that improves
0:16:50 welfare on both sides, is a good thing.
0:16:53 So I certainly have nothing against swapping time for time.
0:16:58 I just don’t think of it as a scalable way to run a significant part of the economy.
0:17:02 The reason the idea appeals to me is because I’ve spent a lot of time with people like
0:17:07 you, economists, and when you get a little bit off the beaten path, you start thinking
0:17:12 about things like shadow time, the hours I have when I’m not on the clock and what they’re
0:17:15 worth to me and how I could spend them.
0:17:19 And then I also just think about human capital, which economists are always going on and on
0:17:20 about.
0:17:24 It feels like that’s the purpose of a lot of economic research these days is to show
0:17:29 how important it is for people to build human capital through education and social networks
0:17:33 and so on, because human capital is indeed really valuable.
0:17:42 But then when I look around the world, I see so much surplus, dare I say, wasted human capital.
0:17:47 People who are able to do things that may not be that valuable in a regular market circumstance
0:17:52 and may not even be that valuable to them, but might be very valuable to other people.
0:17:58 And wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a way to give value to that surplus human capital?
0:18:03 I mean, if you add it all up, that could be the biggest natural resource in the world,
0:18:08 worth more than all the petroleum and other mineral products combined.
0:18:13 And then I thought, well, who out there in the world would appreciate that more than Al
0:18:19 Roth, who recognized that there is surplus sitting around in people’s bodies, for instance,
0:18:25 in the form of a second kidney and found a way to set up a system to make those extra
0:18:27 kidneys available.
0:18:32 So does that make time banking a tad more viable in your view?
0:18:38 Well, I already said that I am in favor of looking for ways to increase valuable exchanges.
0:18:42 So when time for time works, that’s great.
0:18:46 But when you talk about human capital, you’re already suggesting that on some tasks, some
0:18:51 people’s time might be more valuable than other people’s because they have more human
0:18:57 capital and that’s what makes time clunky if all we’re doing is swapping time.
0:19:01 I live on a college campus, so we trade time all the time by inviting people to dinner
0:19:03 and then they invite us back to dinner.
0:19:07 Dinner is sort of time you expect you’re going to spend two, two and a half hours with people
0:19:10 and create connections that can’t be monetized.
0:19:12 And it’s part of what makes life worth living.
0:19:15 And if they had to eat and run, it would be a less successful dinner.
0:19:20 We sometimes have the feeling we’ve now been invited to your house three times and we haven’t
0:19:21 invited you back yet.
0:19:22 We’d better do that.
0:19:26 You could consider just saying, hey, here’s a couple hundred dollars for those three dinners.
0:19:27 Have you ever tried that?
0:19:29 That would end a friendship pretty quickly, wouldn’t it?
0:19:34 Well, it could be advantageous if it’s a friendship that’s in a condition where they’ve had you
0:19:37 over three times and you haven’t wanted them to come to your house once.
0:19:39 Well, sure.
0:19:45 Supporters of time banking think it can be useful for more than just dinner parties among
0:19:46 college professors.
0:19:51 Andrew Yang spends a lot of time talking about the so-called invisible economy.
0:19:55 The work some of us do that the regular economy simply doesn’t count.
0:20:00 My wife who’s at home with our son who’s autistic, that has immense value.
0:20:04 The market right now does not give that appropriate value.
0:20:10 If someone is painting a mural in their neighborhood and beautifying it, that has value that maybe
0:20:12 doesn’t show up in our current system.
0:20:18 If someone shows up to a nursing home and volunteers, if someone is tutoring children,
0:20:25 if someone is making people around them healthier and more active, all of these things have
0:20:32 positive values that right now would not get properly recognized or rewarded in our current
0:20:33 monetary economy.
0:20:39 What if I were to say, Andrew, you’re also a political player and the reason that so
0:20:43 much money is drawn into politics is because there’s so much leverage in the political
0:20:44 system.
0:20:50 Wouldn’t it be better to focus on that, to remake the political system so that all the
0:20:56 benefits that you want from this human dollar system were just there already?
0:21:00 You wouldn’t have to recreate this whole second system to take care of it.
0:21:04 In other words, set up the political system to make the economy more human-centered in
0:21:05 the first place.
0:21:06 Why isn’t that the best solution?
0:21:09 Oh, I love that solution too, Stephen.
0:21:11 We should definitely pursue that.
0:21:16 I’m working on that every day, but there’s no reason why we can’t demonstrate what’s
0:21:20 possible given current technologies and what resources we have.
0:21:27 I could imagine countless religious organizations and food banks and volunteer programs hearing
0:21:29 us talk about this and say, “Hey, what do you think we’re doing?
0:21:31 What do you think we’ve been doing forever?
0:21:33 How is this different?”
0:21:37 Hopefully it supercharges many of those organizations and communities.
0:21:43 If you do time banking at scale, you wind up having a lot of that energy flow through
0:21:49 existing nonprofits and religious orgs because in many ways they’re the best situated to
0:21:55 be able to encourage and monitor and benefit from more people getting out and doing more
0:21:58 things for other people.
0:22:02 Now I want to talk to someone who could tell us some more about volunteering generally.
0:22:08 One has to realize how important volunteering is to the large national network of nonprofit
0:22:16 organizations that are a backbone and an under-recognized asset within U.S. society.
0:22:17 That is Nathan Dietz.
0:22:22 I’m the research director at the Dugodd Institute at the University of Maryland.
0:22:24 And what is the Dugodd Institute?
0:22:28 The Dugodd Institute is a policy center within the School of Public Policy.
0:22:33 Our focus is on studies of nonprofits and philanthropy in general.
0:22:38 In his research, Dietz has found that volunteering in the U.S. has been declining for at least
0:22:39 a couple decades.
0:22:45 We can start right after September 11, 2001, the first national data collection in a long
0:22:47 time about volunteering was done.
0:22:52 Before then, data on volunteering was collected only every few decades as part of the current
0:22:55 population survey that’s run by the Census Bureau.
0:23:02 But researchers wanted to know how the national tragedy of 9/11 would affect volunteering.
0:23:07 In the early 2000s, they found that nearly 30% of Americans were doing some volunteering
0:23:12 through formal organizations like nonprofits or religious institutions.
0:23:14 And then we saw a decline.
0:23:19 We’ve always read that as the decline that’s kind of a result of the wearing off of whatever
0:23:24 feelings of unity and ties to community that people felt after 9/11.
0:23:28 Starting in about 2010, 2011, we started to see declines every year.
0:23:32 And I don’t think anyone really noticed the fact that that had happened because the declines
0:23:33 were so small every year.
0:23:34 It’s a classic —
0:23:36 The frog in the pot of water?
0:23:37 Right.
0:23:39 Which I think is probably not a true thing I’ve read.
0:23:40 Oh, I hope not.
0:23:42 You know, for the frog’s sake.
0:23:43 Okay.
0:23:49 So you’re saying that the current volunteering rate in the U.S. is lower than what in recorded
0:23:50 history you’re saying right now?
0:23:51 Yeah.
0:23:56 The 2021 volunteering rate is certainly lower than it ever has been in the last 50 years.
0:24:02 Why do you think there’s been such a significant downward trend in volunteering?
0:24:04 That is the $64,000 question.
0:24:08 Some trends that we’ve seen when we started digging into this have been suggestive.
0:24:14 One is that we saw declines that were greater in suburban areas and rural areas than they
0:24:16 were in urban areas.
0:24:20 Maybe what we saw there was the fact that people were moving out of those areas and
0:24:24 taking their time and their talents and their energies with them.
0:24:29 And when that happens, you also see an increasingly aging population in those areas.
0:24:34 So when people have to drop out of civic life or the volunteer workforce specifically, there
0:24:36 aren’t very many people to take their places.
0:24:41 Social capital is the concept that connects all the activities that we call civic engagement.
0:24:47 I think we’re seeing declines in social capital that are reflected in the declines in volunteering
0:24:48 rates.
0:24:52 One of the most important ways in which trust helps build social capital is to get people
0:24:55 to realize that they can count on other people.
0:25:00 Let’s say that time banking, time dollars, human dollars, whatever we want to call it,
0:25:08 makesper at least a small uptick in volunteering and maybe a small uptick in social capital,
0:25:10 social trust.
0:25:13 How would you see that benefiting society overall?
0:25:19 I think the key is to get people to recognize that in many cases, receiving actually is
0:25:20 as good as giving.
0:25:24 It’s a key principle that underlies the whole time banking concept.
0:25:28 That’s the idea that runs most counter to most people’s intuition.
0:25:32 The Bible tells you the opposite, it’s better to give than to receive.
0:25:33 That’s really interesting.
0:25:37 I feel like I’m having a little bit of a breakthrough here personally, like I’m in a therapy session,
0:25:38 Nathan.
0:25:39 I mean, I kind of feel the same way.
0:25:42 Well, what it made me think of is this, I mean, this is getting a little personal.
0:25:47 I hope you don’t mind, but my father died when I was about 10 or 11 and I lived in a
0:25:52 rural area where there were quite a few people who really went out of their way to help me
0:25:53 and my family.
0:25:57 I was the youngest in a big bunch of kids and I was the last one at home.
0:26:02 There were a couple men who would take me on fishing trips and whatnot.
0:26:09 As much as I enjoyed the benefits per se, I hated being seen as and feeling like a charity
0:26:10 case.
0:26:11 I hated it.
0:26:14 I’m not saying that was a good choice, a bad choice.
0:26:19 It was just the way my emotions worked at the time, but I think as I outgrew that age,
0:26:26 I compounded that response and it strikes me now speaking to you that there’s something
0:26:32 very ungenerous about being unwilling to accept other people’s generosity.
0:26:36 It’s what you said a moment ago that made me realize that there is something very powerful
0:26:44 about not just giving plainly, but receiving and about the notion of participating in reciprocity.
0:26:47 So anything more you have to say about that?
0:26:52 Just that participating in reciprocity, that’s the norm that I think we ought to get people
0:26:53 to buy into.
0:26:57 It doesn’t have to be the case that receiving is just as good as giving.
0:27:01 I think the time banking people would probably be happy to relax that statement a little
0:27:06 bit, but receiving is perfectly okay and actually when you receive, you’re making it possible
0:27:09 for someone else to obtain the benefits of giving.
0:27:16 So it sounds like you might like to participate in our harebrained idea here.
0:27:18 Is that the case or am I reading into your enthusiasm?
0:27:24 I’d be happy to help because I think this is an important, interesting concept.
0:27:27 And I think that nothing but good could come of an experiment.
0:27:31 Would it be a better idea to have like a New York City time bank than a US time bank?
0:27:36 Would it be an even better idea to have an Upper West side of Manhattan time bank versus
0:27:38 a New York City time bank?
0:27:39 Oh, I think so.
0:27:41 I think that’s the way most institutions work best.
0:27:47 You know, even the Federal Reserve has regional banks, anything that brings the institution
0:27:51 closer to the members of the community is going to encourage participation.
0:27:55 That’s, I think, probably the only way in which a time bank would work is if it were
0:27:58 located in the community.
0:28:04 Coming up after the break, if we can get this idea going, we’ll need someone to run it.
0:28:07 Is that someone you?
0:28:08 Keep listening for details.
0:28:09 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:28:19 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:28:24 After talking to Nathan Deets and Krista Wyatt and Andrew Yang about time banking, I was
0:28:30 getting encouraged, but then I read a new paper by researchers who followed a big experimental
0:28:34 project that gave people a guaranteed income.
0:28:38 This is similar to the universal basic income idea that Yang promoted a few years ago while
0:28:39 running for president.
0:28:42 He called it a freedom dividend.
0:28:48 In this experiment, 1,000 low-income people were given $1,000 a month for three years,
0:28:52 and the researchers wanted to see how the money changed their lives.
0:28:57 They also set up a pool of 2,000 low-income people who got only $50 a month so that they
0:29:00 would have a comparison group.
0:29:02 And what the researchers find?
0:29:10 The people getting $1,000 a free money a month worked a bit less, which you might expect.
0:29:14 They spent more time sleeping and hanging out with friends.
0:29:21 What they didn’t spend more time on was either building up their own human capital or volunteering
0:29:23 to help out other people.
0:29:30 I interpreted this as not such good news, so I went back to Al Roth, the market design
0:29:36 expert, to see if he had any ideas to make time banking a more attractive prospect, even
0:29:38 though he’s not a big fan of the idea.
0:29:41 I’d want some kind of reputational review system.
0:29:43 You need some customary contracts.
0:29:45 You need ways of keeping account, right?
0:29:47 We do that with money all the time.
0:29:50 You put money in the bank and they don’t let you take out more than you put in, whereas
0:29:54 with time, the question is, who does the reporting?
0:29:59 Let’s pretend for just a minute that time banking or time dollars are a going concern
0:30:03 where you are and you were a member of this community.
0:30:10 What would you offer as work that you could do and what kind of tasks or work would you
0:30:13 look for for other people to do for you in exchange?
0:30:19 Well, in fact, I’m a little bit of a member of that community because I’m a professor.
0:30:23 One of the things I do is teach classes and those are on a clock.
0:30:27 Another thing I do is I talk to students, typically graduate students, and a lot of scientific
0:30:30 progress has its origin in just talk.
0:30:34 You talk about problems, you hear how they’re thinking, you tell them how you’re thinking,
0:30:37 and sometimes directions emerge.
0:30:39 Are there any other physical tasks?
0:30:41 Can you fix my car or put on a new roof?
0:30:46 I cannot fix your car or put on a new roof, so I could, of course, trade for that.
0:30:51 But I don’t know how long it takes and I don’t know how much skill and risk and things like
0:30:52 that are involved.
0:30:54 All of which are things that should get priced into it.
0:31:00 So one of the advantages of having competitive roof fixers is you can get a couple of quotes
0:31:02 and find out what it costs to fix your roof.
0:31:08 But I could imagine a scenario where let’s say there’s a person running a roofing business.
0:31:13 Maybe they’re second or third generation, even, and they’ve decided that the way forward
0:31:15 is to do solar installations.
0:31:16 You’re in California.
0:31:18 I’m sure there’s a big market for that there.
0:31:22 But they don’t really know how to set up their business to optimize for that.
0:31:26 They don’t know what kinds of partnerships and maybe there’s some tax strategy and just
0:31:28 setting up the business that they’re not clear on.
0:31:33 But boy, Professor Roth, he loves to talk to people about problems like that and he
0:31:34 also needs a new roof.
0:31:41 So that sounds like a really nice possible exchange that could happen in the time bank.
0:31:43 Would you be open to discussing that?
0:31:45 I’d be open to discussing it.
0:31:47 He said reluctantly.
0:31:51 I say reluctantly because I certainly wouldn’t want that to be the only way I could get my
0:31:52 roof repaired.
0:31:53 Okay.
0:31:58 So it sounds like you’re not particularly enthusiastic about or interested, certainly
0:32:04 in joining our project to try to make time banking a successor to pilot it.
0:32:11 But assuming that you like me enough to not want to see this project fail from step one,
0:32:14 is there any piece of advice in particular you might have?
0:32:18 Let’s say that we’re going to try to do this with some kind of perhaps government cooperation,
0:32:25 some kind of nonprofit cooperation, try to find, let’s say a CEO who could really organize
0:32:26 this.
0:32:29 I think the simplest kind of time banking is for people who are actually prepared to
0:32:33 be in relationships with each other and are going to repeatedly trade time with each other
0:32:35 and they can evaluate the quality.
0:32:39 Babysitting cooperatives, for instance, are a good example because you also get some feedback
0:32:41 from the kids if they’re old enough.
0:32:47 But as soon as I’m earning time by babysitting for your kids and now I’m spending it on roofers,
0:32:52 I want to know is this a roofer who gives good value for the amount of time I’m putting
0:32:53 into the bank?
0:32:57 Given that I don’t have a relationship with him, what happens if the roof takes more time
0:32:59 than any of us anticipated?
0:33:03 Who pays for the extra time that he actually spent doing a good job fixing my roof?
0:33:08 There has to be some situation where he doesn’t stop with the hole in the roof and now it’s
0:33:09 worse than when he started.
0:33:13 He finishes the good job, he gets a review of doing a good job, but someone has to pay
0:33:14 him back the time.
0:33:18 The banking part of time banking is going to be important when there aren’t personal
0:33:19 relationships.
0:33:23 So you need reviews and you need a way for him to say, “It took me 12 hours.”
0:33:24 Who would have thought?
0:33:30 But there was a dragon implanted in the roof and I had to fight the dragon.
0:33:34 The things that you put up with in California, dragons and roofs, I don’t know how you deal
0:33:35 with it.
0:33:40 We deal with it by paying the roofer.
0:33:44 So first let me preface this by saying I’m convinced that AI is going to change a lot
0:33:48 of things in our economy and it’s going to make it harder and harder for a lot of people
0:33:50 to compete.
0:33:51 That’s Andrew Yang again.
0:33:56 It’s getting stronger, faster, smarter, more powerful and we are not.
0:34:01 So if you play out the way this is going, we already live in maybe the most extreme winter
0:34:03 take all economy in the history of the world.
0:34:09 It’s going to become more extreme with the advent of AI and associated technologies.
0:34:15 And so the goal would be to build an economic system that rewards people pursuing activities
0:34:20 that right now would not get properly rewarded in our current monetary economy.
0:34:25 And what share of, if it could be measured, what share of let’s say GDP, would you like
0:34:30 this entire separate version of the economy to comprise?
0:34:34 I would think of it as a parallel instead of a percentage of GDP, but our current economy
0:34:37 is around $24 trillion.
0:34:43 And if you think about how much we could benefit in education and nurturing and health and
0:34:49 wellness, we’re spending maybe 17 or 18% of that $24 trillion on our healthcare right
0:34:50 now.
0:34:52 So let’s call that $4 trillion.
0:34:57 And we all know that we could generate immense value if we all took better care of ourselves
0:34:59 and had preventative care and everything else.
0:35:04 So just in the healthcare space, you can see trillions of dollars, environment, trillions
0:35:09 of dollars, education, trillions of dollars, arts and creativity, I would argue you could
0:35:11 also get up to that level.
0:35:17 So you can imagine something that gets up into the tens of trillions of dollars that
0:35:21 mirrors the size of what we consider right now, the economy.
0:35:28 If we want good things for ourselves, our families, our communities, we have to actually
0:35:32 build the mechanisms for those good things.
0:35:35 And if we don’t, then we kind of know which way things are going to head.
0:35:42 So are you willing and committed to join me/us Freakonomics Radio to try to actually make
0:35:43 this work?
0:35:44 Oh, yeah.
0:35:46 The great collab is beginning.
0:35:49 We’re going to freaking do it.
0:35:51 You can count me in 100%.
0:35:56 Let’s actually build this in real life so that people can experience it, point to it
0:35:58 and say people are good.
0:35:59 We want this in more places.
0:36:03 What would success look like to you in five years, let’s say?
0:36:11 Success would be thousands of people living better lives and a model that other people
0:36:13 say that’s totally replicable.
0:36:16 We can do that where we live and work.
0:36:20 So Andrew, if we want to get this thing going, we need someone to run it.
0:36:24 You’d probably be good at it, but you’re busy with 18 million other things.
0:36:29 I’m pretty busy too, but even if I weren’t, I’d be terrible at running something like
0:36:30 this.
0:36:37 So I think what we really need is a CEO, someone who hears this episode and is as enthusiastic
0:36:43 about the idea as we are and actually has the ability and the courage to get it done.
0:36:48 So what kind of background or characteristics would you suggest that the ideal candidate
0:36:49 has?
0:36:55 I’d say that person is comfortable going into a room of people in a community in Queens
0:36:59 or Staten Island or Brooklyn and saying to them, “Hey, this is what we’re doing and this
0:37:02 is why you should sign up and this is why it’s awesome,” and then feel equally comfortable
0:37:08 going into a room of marketing executives or foundation grant writers and say, “This
0:37:12 is what we’re doing and this is why you need to get on board as quickly as possible.”
0:37:16 So the profile that comes to mind for me is someone who has run a nonprofit, someone who
0:37:20 has had some kind of role in public service would also make sense and entrepreneur would
0:37:21 make sense.
0:37:24 Those three profiles appeal to me.
0:37:28 Does that sound like you or someone you know?
0:37:34 Andrew Yang has built a bipartisan political operation called Humanity Forward and the
0:37:39 Yang Gang still has a lot of assets that would be useful for time banking.
0:37:43 But still, this would be a big operation and we’ll need some help.
0:37:46 Let’s start with someone to run it.
0:37:51 If you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else or if you have any other ideas that might
0:37:55 help make this work, please write to us.
0:38:05 Here is an email address time@humanityforwardfoundation.org that’s time@humanityforwardfoundation.org.
0:38:08 We will keep you updated on how this project goes.
0:38:14 For now, big thanks to Andrew Yang, Krista Wyatt, Nathan Deets, and even Al Roth the
0:38:19 Skeptic for speaking with us today and thanks especially to you for listening.
0:38:21 Coming up next time on the show.
0:38:27 There is a freedom in being in a religious institution where I don’t have to be afraid
0:38:29 to talk about values in my out loud voice.
0:38:36 Tanya Tetlow used to be a federal prosecutor, which toughened her up for her current job,
0:38:37 college president.
0:38:41 What we navigate with them is, you know, you don’t point bullhorns at the library during
0:38:42 study session.
0:38:45 Tanya Tetlow is president of Fordham University in New York.
0:38:50 She’s the first female president there, as well as the first president who is not a Catholic
0:38:51 priest.
0:38:55 The Jesuits here laugh that you say all the same stuff, Tanya, but people listen to you.
0:39:00 Another conversation in our ongoing look at what college is really for.
0:39:03 That’s next time on the show.
0:39:04 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:39:07 And if you can, someone else too.
0:39:11 Pre-economics radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:17 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:39:19 transcripts and show notes.
0:39:22 This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski.
0:39:27 Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn,
0:39:32 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs,
0:39:38 Julie Canfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:39:39 and Theo Jacobs.
0:39:42 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:39:46 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:39:48 It’s always fun to talk to you, Al.
0:39:50 You too, and you know, spend your time well.
0:39:51 Cheers.
0:40:03 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:40:04 Stitcher.
0:40:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:00:12 We’ve had him on the show a few times, most recently to talk about voting reform in an
0:00:16 episode called Why Don’t We Have Better Candidates for President?
0:00:23 He is enthusiastic about voting reform, especially open primaries and ranked choice voting.
0:00:27 He’s also enthusiastic about the idea of a universal basic income, which he brought
0:00:32 to mainstream attention when he ran for president in 2020.
0:00:37 Yang is enthusiastic about a lot of interesting ideas, which is a big reason I like speaking
0:00:38 with him.
0:00:42 One of these ideas is something that I’m enthusiastic about too.
0:00:47 This idea has been around for a while, but it’s still pretty obscure.
0:00:53 So today, on Freakonomics Radio, we would like to give it a bit of exposure and maybe
0:00:55 it’ll catch fire.
0:01:00 This idea has a variety of names, so I asked Andrew Yang what he likes to call it.
0:01:09 I’ve been using multivariate economy, but that is sexy, yeah, multivariate economy.
0:01:13 But we can use time banking, it’s probably the most popular.
0:01:20 Time banking can also be known as time dollars or human dollars or labor certificates.
0:01:22 The idea is pretty straightforward.
0:01:29 You set up a system in which people agree to use time as a measure of value, not replacing
0:01:33 money, but creating a parallel human-centered economy.
0:01:40 You can imagine it being a time barter system on steroids enabled by modern technology.
0:01:42 Talk about the mechanics of it, how it would actually work.
0:01:49 Maybe just give one example, how this human dollar, let’s call it, gets spent and shared.
0:01:52 What are the tasks that create the value?
0:01:57 So I put myself out there and say, “Hey, guys, I’m not good at a lot of things, but
0:02:03 I am good at tutoring kids in middle school math and reading.
0:02:07 So if anyone needs a tutor for this, I’m going to be your person.”
0:02:10 And you say, “I’m offering X number of hours a week.”
0:02:14 Yes, I’m offering X number of hours a week here where I’m located.
0:02:19 If you take me up on this and then I show up and then you sign off and say, “Yes, he
0:02:22 actually did show up and he did a good job and here’s a picture of him with my child
0:02:29 and it’s non-creepy,” then I will have earned, let’s call it, 20 human dollars.
0:02:30 Then I say, “Well, great.
0:02:32 What am I going to do with these?”
0:02:33 And then I look around and say, “You know what?
0:02:38 I could really use a home-cooked meal because I’m terrible at that,” which by the way is
0:02:41 a pretty real example.
0:02:45 And then there’s someone that’s like, “I’d love to cook and I am happy to make surplus
0:02:50 food and I will happily take those human dollars off your hands.
0:02:57 You can wind up supercharging everyone’s communal experience.”
0:03:02 This kind of exchange may sound old-fashioned, like something we used to do all the time
0:03:07 that didn’t even need a name, but the digital age has changed many things.
0:03:13 One of them being how accustomed we are to getting what we want with just a few clicks.
0:03:18 I think it’s worth asking what may have been lost in this revolution of convenience and
0:03:21 as the old-fashioned barter system fades away.
0:03:27 There was the face-to-faceness of it, of course, but it also reminds you of a time before the
0:03:33 financialization of everything, which we’ve also become accustomed to.
0:03:40 So maybe it’s time to give this obscure old-fashioned idea a real shot.
0:03:43 Maybe it’s time we start a time bank of our own.
0:03:45 You know, we’re going to need a catchy name, ASAP.
0:03:48 I guess Yang Freak is not quite right.
0:03:49 Yeah, no.
0:03:52 That’ll just scare people off and have them running the other direction.
0:03:55 So we could call it time banking for the time being.
0:03:56 Okay.
0:04:00 For the time being, we will call it time banking.
0:04:03 Maybe this idea doesn’t sound very promising to you.
0:04:08 It’s old-fashioned, doesn’t have much momentum, doesn’t even have a real name.
0:04:09 Maybe you can help us with the name.
0:04:15 If you have an idea, email it to us radio@freakonomics.com.
0:04:20 As for the momentum, well, maybe you can help with that, too.
0:04:24 At the end of this episode, I’ll tell you what we’re looking for.
0:04:27 In the meantime, we will hear from a time banking booster.
0:04:30 It just blew my mind.
0:04:31 And a skeptic.
0:04:36 I just don’t think of it as a scalable way to run a significant part of the economy.
0:04:40 But what kind of show would we be if we let a little skepticism stop us?
0:05:09 They’re going to freaking do it.
0:05:14 You could look at time banking as just another market, and economists are good at thinking
0:05:17 about how markets work or don’t work.
0:05:20 Al Roth is particularly good at this.
0:05:24 I’ve done a lot of market design, and a lot of market design involves going and talking
0:05:28 to people about their problems and understanding their problems.
0:05:34 Roth teaches at Stanford, and he has won a Nobel Prize for his work in market design.
0:05:39 Back in 2015, we made an episode called “Make Me a Match” about Roth’s inventive system
0:05:45 to match potential kidney donors with people who need a kidney transplant.
0:05:50 That system has saved thousands of lives and inspired a lot of Freakonomics radio listeners
0:05:51 to get involved.
0:05:57 I’m hoping this episode about time banking will also get some of you involved.
0:06:00 I asked Al Roth what he thinks of time banking.
0:06:05 He suggested that before starting up some crazy new currency, we should appreciate
0:06:07 what we’ve already got.
0:06:14 Let’s take a moment to be astounded at how successful money is as a market design invention.
0:06:15 Someone wrote a book called “The Pencil.”
0:06:19 The thing about a pencil is it’s a compound object made on different machines with resources
0:06:22 gotten in different places, and it’s cheap.
0:06:26 All of those interactions, you know, getting the rubber for the eraser and the graphite
0:06:27 for the pencil itself.
0:06:30 All of those are mediated by money, and that’s the miracle of money.
0:06:32 It’s quite a remarkable invention.
0:06:35 So now you’re saying, can we do the same thing with time?
0:06:38 So think of all the things that had to be done to make money money, right?
0:06:42 There was coinage originally, and then you worried that people would cheat on the coinage
0:06:45 by scraping off little bits.
0:06:51 Centuries went into figuring out how to organize trade in things like precious metals.
0:06:56 I appreciated Roth’s points about money, and its advantages are clear.
0:07:02 Money is fungible, it stores value over time, it’s simple to exchange.
0:07:07 But years ago, I came across a couple books written by Edgar Kahn, a lawyer and social
0:07:08 activist.
0:07:12 One was called “No More Throwaway People.”
0:07:16 The other was called “Time Dollars,” the new currency that enables Americans to turn
0:07:22 their hidden resource, time, into personal security and community renewal.
0:07:26 I once went to see Kahn speak because I was working on my own book at the time about the
0:07:29 psychology of money.
0:07:34 Back then, I was interested in learning how the standard economy works and doesn’t work,
0:07:38 who thrives in an economy like ours and who struggles.
0:07:43 So let’s hear how Edgar Kahn came up with the idea of time banking.
0:07:47 He was the one who brought modern time banking back during the Ronald Reagan administration
0:07:50 when a lot of the social services were drying up.
0:07:55 And he realized that we needed to come up with a different economy where individuals
0:07:58 can rely on one another, not just a public institution.
0:08:00 That is Krista Wyatt.
0:08:05 She is the CEO of a group called TimeBanks.org, which carries on the work of Edgar Kahn.
0:08:08 He died in 2022.
0:08:13 We asked Wyatt to read a key passage from a speech that Kahn once gave about the shortcomings
0:08:15 of money and prices.
0:08:20 When we look at what price does, we see it devalues everything we define as a human
0:08:21 being.
0:08:27 Yet, these capacities, the ones we all share, are what enable our species to survive, caring
0:08:33 for each other, coming to each other’s rescue, rearing infants, protecting the frail and
0:08:38 vulnerable, standing for what’s right, opposing what’s wrong.
0:08:45 Krista Wyatt, before becoming CEO of TimeBanks.org, worked for a variety of charitable organizations.
0:08:49 One of them helped bring together women who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer
0:08:52 and other women who had already gone through the same experience.
0:08:57 I’ve been a nonprofit for 30 years, and I didn’t find out about time banking until
0:09:00 about 10 years ago, and it just blew my mind.
0:09:03 I’m like, why is this not on every corner?
0:09:05 Why are people not talking about it?
0:09:07 So why aren’t people talking about it?
0:09:15 We did a survey 2002, and we found out that we had over 40,000 members out there, and
0:09:22 we have at least 500 time banks in the US, and there are time banks in other countries.
0:09:25 We have 22 time banks in China.
0:09:27 There is a huge time bank in the UK.
0:09:32 We cover at least 42 countries, and we’re working on one in Saudi Arabia.
0:09:38 On a planet of nearly 8 billion people, 40,000 members is pretty small, especially for an
0:09:41 idea that’s been around for a while.
0:09:46 Time banking started in the early industrial revolution with an anarchist, Joshua Warren.
0:09:51 He opened a time bank in 1827 called Time Store in Cincinnati.
0:09:56 In the 20th century, during World War II, a Japanese woman named Teruko Mizushima gave
0:09:58 the idea a try.
0:10:04 She traded her sewing skills for fresh vegetables during the Pacific War in the early 1940s,
0:10:09 and she started her time bank in 1973 called Volunteer Labor Bank.
0:10:11 She had over 1,000 members.
0:10:14 Most of her members were women, usually housewives.
0:10:19 That time bank still exists, run out of Osaka.
0:10:24 But despite a few successes, time banking just didn’t catch on.
0:10:28 You might think the COVID pandemic would have revived interest, but it didn’t.
0:10:33 There are time banks that had closed because of the lack of member engagement and the funding
0:10:34 wasn’t there.
0:10:35 I’ll be perfectly honest.
0:10:38 We are not great in funding.
0:10:43 We have a private donor that really believes in the time bank community, and he’s the one
0:10:49 who has really supported me through the last four years, but we need to do better.
0:10:50 We are struggling.
0:10:54 You said that you’d been in the non-profit world for a long time before you heard about
0:10:55 it.
0:10:56 Yes.
0:10:59 I mean, that sounds kind of like bad news, like it should be more prominent.
0:11:01 Why is it not, do you think?
0:11:02 There’s many reasons.
0:11:05 I didn’t see enough marketing material out there.
0:11:06 I don’t see it on the web.
0:11:09 I don’t hear it from public speakers.
0:11:16 And then also the concept is so easy to some and so complicated to others.
0:11:21 There have been college towns and other communities that have adopted time banking.
0:11:23 That again is Andrew Yang.
0:11:26 The core of it is that we all have value.
0:11:28 We all have things we can contribute.
0:11:31 There are ways that other people can help us.
0:11:36 And one of the main things that we’re combating really is a sense of isolation and desolation
0:11:38 and loneliness.
0:11:43 And so if you want people to reach out to each other, to help each other, to connect
0:11:49 to their neighbors and folks in their community, this would be a very, very powerful way to
0:11:50 make that happen.
0:11:56 And in my opinion, there has to be some kind of mechanism that encourages us to help each
0:11:57 other.
0:12:00 So you and I have talked about this, we’re both enthusiastic about this idea and we’ve
0:12:05 talked about actually trying to make this happen on a bigger scale or stage.
0:12:09 And granted, there have been a lot of people who’ve been doing exactly this on a small
0:12:13 scale in many places over time.
0:12:20 Can you just talk about what you see as the most fruitful way to set this up in terms
0:12:25 of whether it should be a private public partnership with government involved to some degree?
0:12:30 Is it primarily a software platform or is it more of an in real life thing?
0:12:34 Does it have a local focus or should it be national or even international?
0:12:36 What do you see as the best structure?
0:12:42 I think that it needs to be somewhat localized so that you encourage more in-person interaction.
0:12:47 Having people out of the house talking to each other and helping each other, traditionally
0:12:53 this sort of thing would be led with philanthropy and then you would bring in various corporates
0:12:55 and then the last domino is government.
0:12:59 But if you were to choose a particular location, let’s call it New York City for the sake of
0:13:04 this, then there’d be public officials cheerleading for it right and left because it solves a
0:13:07 lot of the problems that they’re most animated about.
0:13:13 You once wrote to me in an email, I’m convinced that the monetary economy is going to grind
0:13:18 us up and you’ve argued that it really already has ground up a majority of people in this
0:13:23 country and that a multivariate economy, caring and nurturing arts and creativity, fitness
0:13:29 and wellness, etc., is the only way out and will require multiple currencies to get right.
0:13:33 In addition to what we’re talking about today, what do you see as other currencies that do
0:13:37 exist that we might want to draft off of or even borrow from?
0:13:43 The best example I can use is that punch card at your local deli where you get 10 sandwiches
0:13:45 and then you have the 11th for free.
0:13:49 That has a place of honor in your wallet and you get really excited when you get close
0:13:50 to the free sandwich.
0:13:57 If you can imagine a version of the deli punch card or showing up to all sorts of things,
0:13:59 that’s the vision.
0:14:04 Americans love points, Americans love rewards, Americans love stuff.
0:14:11 I have these reward points on my AmEx and it’s mesmerizing even though right now it
0:14:14 doesn’t cost them anything because I’m not going to redeem it because I’m hoarding for,
0:14:18 I don’t know what I’m hoarding for.
0:14:23 That’s really the core idea is that if you give Americans cumulative rewards for doing
0:14:25 awesome stuff, you’ll see more awesome stuff.
0:14:32 Okay, so who could possibly be against a scheme that rewards people for doing awesome stuff?
0:14:38 Well, there is a certain Nobel Prize winning economist.
0:14:41 Some people’s time might be more valuable than other people’s.
0:14:43 That’s coming up after the break.
0:14:52 I’m Stephen Dubner and this is Freakin’ AmEx Radio.
0:14:59 As appealing as the idea of time banking is to me and to Andrew Yang, most economists
0:15:03 think that money is a much better measure of value than time.
0:15:06 Here again is Al Roth.
0:15:11 Time is an interesting commodity and we buy and sell it all the time.
0:15:13 When you hire a lawyer, he bills you by the hour.
0:15:17 You give him money for his time and expertise.
0:15:22 You might hire someone to house it for you and water your plants while you’re away.
0:15:26 So we trade time a lot, but not for time.
0:15:30 And part of the reason is that time is sort of a clunky commodity.
0:15:32 It’s a lot easier to trade other things.
0:15:33 But why is it so clunky?
0:15:37 I mean, just as a dollar is a dollar, an hour is an hour.
0:15:42 Well, one of the things we worry about with monetary markets is some people have more
0:15:46 dollars than other people do and that gives them more access and maybe we don’t always
0:15:47 feel great about that.
0:15:52 And so I think some of the charm to people who are charmed by time banks is that everyone
0:15:54 has 24 hours in a day.
0:16:00 But you know, a working mother of three kids has less time than a retired banker who has
0:16:03 a cleaner come into his house and a gardener.
0:16:05 So not everyone has the same amount of time.
0:16:08 And it’s clunky because it’s also hard to transfer.
0:16:13 There’s the joke about the lawyer who goes to see a dentist and dentist fills his cavity
0:16:14 in 10 minutes.
0:16:17 But the lawyer says to him, “You make more per hour than I do.”
0:16:20 And the dentist says, “Would you prefer that I took an hour?”
0:16:27 So we solicited a few other economists to come on the show to talk about time banking.
0:16:31 One of them, who shall go unnamed, wrote back to say, “The more I think about it, the more
0:16:34 I think it is the dumbest idea in the world.
0:16:38 So do you hate the idea as much as that economist?”
0:16:41 I don’t hate it as much as that economist.
0:16:48 By and large, I think that finding more opportunities for valuable exchange, for exchange that improves
0:16:50 welfare on both sides, is a good thing.
0:16:53 So I certainly have nothing against swapping time for time.
0:16:58 I just don’t think of it as a scalable way to run a significant part of the economy.
0:17:02 The reason the idea appeals to me is because I’ve spent a lot of time with people like
0:17:07 you, economists, and when you get a little bit off the beaten path, you start thinking
0:17:12 about things like shadow time, the hours I have when I’m not on the clock and what they’re
0:17:15 worth to me and how I could spend them.
0:17:19 And then I also just think about human capital, which economists are always going on and on
0:17:20 about.
0:17:24 It feels like that’s the purpose of a lot of economic research these days is to show
0:17:29 how important it is for people to build human capital through education and social networks
0:17:33 and so on, because human capital is indeed really valuable.
0:17:42 But then when I look around the world, I see so much surplus, dare I say, wasted human capital.
0:17:47 People who are able to do things that may not be that valuable in a regular market circumstance
0:17:52 and may not even be that valuable to them, but might be very valuable to other people.
0:17:58 And wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a way to give value to that surplus human capital?
0:18:03 I mean, if you add it all up, that could be the biggest natural resource in the world,
0:18:08 worth more than all the petroleum and other mineral products combined.
0:18:13 And then I thought, well, who out there in the world would appreciate that more than Al
0:18:19 Roth, who recognized that there is surplus sitting around in people’s bodies, for instance,
0:18:25 in the form of a second kidney and found a way to set up a system to make those extra
0:18:27 kidneys available.
0:18:32 So does that make time banking a tad more viable in your view?
0:18:38 Well, I already said that I am in favor of looking for ways to increase valuable exchanges.
0:18:42 So when time for time works, that’s great.
0:18:46 But when you talk about human capital, you’re already suggesting that on some tasks, some
0:18:51 people’s time might be more valuable than other people’s because they have more human
0:18:57 capital and that’s what makes time clunky if all we’re doing is swapping time.
0:19:01 I live on a college campus, so we trade time all the time by inviting people to dinner
0:19:03 and then they invite us back to dinner.
0:19:07 Dinner is sort of time you expect you’re going to spend two, two and a half hours with people
0:19:10 and create connections that can’t be monetized.
0:19:12 And it’s part of what makes life worth living.
0:19:15 And if they had to eat and run, it would be a less successful dinner.
0:19:20 We sometimes have the feeling we’ve now been invited to your house three times and we haven’t
0:19:21 invited you back yet.
0:19:22 We’d better do that.
0:19:26 You could consider just saying, hey, here’s a couple hundred dollars for those three dinners.
0:19:27 Have you ever tried that?
0:19:29 That would end a friendship pretty quickly, wouldn’t it?
0:19:34 Well, it could be advantageous if it’s a friendship that’s in a condition where they’ve had you
0:19:37 over three times and you haven’t wanted them to come to your house once.
0:19:39 Well, sure.
0:19:45 Supporters of time banking think it can be useful for more than just dinner parties among
0:19:46 college professors.
0:19:51 Andrew Yang spends a lot of time talking about the so-called invisible economy.
0:19:55 The work some of us do that the regular economy simply doesn’t count.
0:20:00 My wife who’s at home with our son who’s autistic, that has immense value.
0:20:04 The market right now does not give that appropriate value.
0:20:10 If someone is painting a mural in their neighborhood and beautifying it, that has value that maybe
0:20:12 doesn’t show up in our current system.
0:20:18 If someone shows up to a nursing home and volunteers, if someone is tutoring children,
0:20:25 if someone is making people around them healthier and more active, all of these things have
0:20:32 positive values that right now would not get properly recognized or rewarded in our current
0:20:33 monetary economy.
0:20:39 What if I were to say, Andrew, you’re also a political player and the reason that so
0:20:43 much money is drawn into politics is because there’s so much leverage in the political
0:20:44 system.
0:20:50 Wouldn’t it be better to focus on that, to remake the political system so that all the
0:20:56 benefits that you want from this human dollar system were just there already?
0:21:00 You wouldn’t have to recreate this whole second system to take care of it.
0:21:04 In other words, set up the political system to make the economy more human-centered in
0:21:05 the first place.
0:21:06 Why isn’t that the best solution?
0:21:09 Oh, I love that solution too, Stephen.
0:21:11 We should definitely pursue that.
0:21:16 I’m working on that every day, but there’s no reason why we can’t demonstrate what’s
0:21:20 possible given current technologies and what resources we have.
0:21:27 I could imagine countless religious organizations and food banks and volunteer programs hearing
0:21:29 us talk about this and say, “Hey, what do you think we’re doing?
0:21:31 What do you think we’ve been doing forever?
0:21:33 How is this different?”
0:21:37 Hopefully it supercharges many of those organizations and communities.
0:21:43 If you do time banking at scale, you wind up having a lot of that energy flow through
0:21:49 existing nonprofits and religious orgs because in many ways they’re the best situated to
0:21:55 be able to encourage and monitor and benefit from more people getting out and doing more
0:21:58 things for other people.
0:22:02 Now I want to talk to someone who could tell us some more about volunteering generally.
0:22:08 One has to realize how important volunteering is to the large national network of nonprofit
0:22:16 organizations that are a backbone and an under-recognized asset within U.S. society.
0:22:17 That is Nathan Dietz.
0:22:22 I’m the research director at the Dugodd Institute at the University of Maryland.
0:22:24 And what is the Dugodd Institute?
0:22:28 The Dugodd Institute is a policy center within the School of Public Policy.
0:22:33 Our focus is on studies of nonprofits and philanthropy in general.
0:22:38 In his research, Dietz has found that volunteering in the U.S. has been declining for at least
0:22:39 a couple decades.
0:22:45 We can start right after September 11, 2001, the first national data collection in a long
0:22:47 time about volunteering was done.
0:22:52 Before then, data on volunteering was collected only every few decades as part of the current
0:22:55 population survey that’s run by the Census Bureau.
0:23:02 But researchers wanted to know how the national tragedy of 9/11 would affect volunteering.
0:23:07 In the early 2000s, they found that nearly 30% of Americans were doing some volunteering
0:23:12 through formal organizations like nonprofits or religious institutions.
0:23:14 And then we saw a decline.
0:23:19 We’ve always read that as the decline that’s kind of a result of the wearing off of whatever
0:23:24 feelings of unity and ties to community that people felt after 9/11.
0:23:28 Starting in about 2010, 2011, we started to see declines every year.
0:23:32 And I don’t think anyone really noticed the fact that that had happened because the declines
0:23:33 were so small every year.
0:23:34 It’s a classic —
0:23:36 The frog in the pot of water?
0:23:37 Right.
0:23:39 Which I think is probably not a true thing I’ve read.
0:23:40 Oh, I hope not.
0:23:42 You know, for the frog’s sake.
0:23:43 Okay.
0:23:49 So you’re saying that the current volunteering rate in the U.S. is lower than what in recorded
0:23:50 history you’re saying right now?
0:23:51 Yeah.
0:23:56 The 2021 volunteering rate is certainly lower than it ever has been in the last 50 years.
0:24:02 Why do you think there’s been such a significant downward trend in volunteering?
0:24:04 That is the $64,000 question.
0:24:08 Some trends that we’ve seen when we started digging into this have been suggestive.
0:24:14 One is that we saw declines that were greater in suburban areas and rural areas than they
0:24:16 were in urban areas.
0:24:20 Maybe what we saw there was the fact that people were moving out of those areas and
0:24:24 taking their time and their talents and their energies with them.
0:24:29 And when that happens, you also see an increasingly aging population in those areas.
0:24:34 So when people have to drop out of civic life or the volunteer workforce specifically, there
0:24:36 aren’t very many people to take their places.
0:24:41 Social capital is the concept that connects all the activities that we call civic engagement.
0:24:47 I think we’re seeing declines in social capital that are reflected in the declines in volunteering
0:24:48 rates.
0:24:52 One of the most important ways in which trust helps build social capital is to get people
0:24:55 to realize that they can count on other people.
0:25:00 Let’s say that time banking, time dollars, human dollars, whatever we want to call it,
0:25:08 makesper at least a small uptick in volunteering and maybe a small uptick in social capital,
0:25:10 social trust.
0:25:13 How would you see that benefiting society overall?
0:25:19 I think the key is to get people to recognize that in many cases, receiving actually is
0:25:20 as good as giving.
0:25:24 It’s a key principle that underlies the whole time banking concept.
0:25:28 That’s the idea that runs most counter to most people’s intuition.
0:25:32 The Bible tells you the opposite, it’s better to give than to receive.
0:25:33 That’s really interesting.
0:25:37 I feel like I’m having a little bit of a breakthrough here personally, like I’m in a therapy session,
0:25:38 Nathan.
0:25:39 I mean, I kind of feel the same way.
0:25:42 Well, what it made me think of is this, I mean, this is getting a little personal.
0:25:47 I hope you don’t mind, but my father died when I was about 10 or 11 and I lived in a
0:25:52 rural area where there were quite a few people who really went out of their way to help me
0:25:53 and my family.
0:25:57 I was the youngest in a big bunch of kids and I was the last one at home.
0:26:02 There were a couple men who would take me on fishing trips and whatnot.
0:26:09 As much as I enjoyed the benefits per se, I hated being seen as and feeling like a charity
0:26:10 case.
0:26:11 I hated it.
0:26:14 I’m not saying that was a good choice, a bad choice.
0:26:19 It was just the way my emotions worked at the time, but I think as I outgrew that age,
0:26:26 I compounded that response and it strikes me now speaking to you that there’s something
0:26:32 very ungenerous about being unwilling to accept other people’s generosity.
0:26:36 It’s what you said a moment ago that made me realize that there is something very powerful
0:26:44 about not just giving plainly, but receiving and about the notion of participating in reciprocity.
0:26:47 So anything more you have to say about that?
0:26:52 Just that participating in reciprocity, that’s the norm that I think we ought to get people
0:26:53 to buy into.
0:26:57 It doesn’t have to be the case that receiving is just as good as giving.
0:27:01 I think the time banking people would probably be happy to relax that statement a little
0:27:06 bit, but receiving is perfectly okay and actually when you receive, you’re making it possible
0:27:09 for someone else to obtain the benefits of giving.
0:27:16 So it sounds like you might like to participate in our harebrained idea here.
0:27:18 Is that the case or am I reading into your enthusiasm?
0:27:24 I’d be happy to help because I think this is an important, interesting concept.
0:27:27 And I think that nothing but good could come of an experiment.
0:27:31 Would it be a better idea to have like a New York City time bank than a US time bank?
0:27:36 Would it be an even better idea to have an Upper West side of Manhattan time bank versus
0:27:38 a New York City time bank?
0:27:39 Oh, I think so.
0:27:41 I think that’s the way most institutions work best.
0:27:47 You know, even the Federal Reserve has regional banks, anything that brings the institution
0:27:51 closer to the members of the community is going to encourage participation.
0:27:55 That’s, I think, probably the only way in which a time bank would work is if it were
0:27:58 located in the community.
0:28:04 Coming up after the break, if we can get this idea going, we’ll need someone to run it.
0:28:07 Is that someone you?
0:28:08 Keep listening for details.
0:28:09 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:28:19 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:28:24 After talking to Nathan Deets and Krista Wyatt and Andrew Yang about time banking, I was
0:28:30 getting encouraged, but then I read a new paper by researchers who followed a big experimental
0:28:34 project that gave people a guaranteed income.
0:28:38 This is similar to the universal basic income idea that Yang promoted a few years ago while
0:28:39 running for president.
0:28:42 He called it a freedom dividend.
0:28:48 In this experiment, 1,000 low-income people were given $1,000 a month for three years,
0:28:52 and the researchers wanted to see how the money changed their lives.
0:28:57 They also set up a pool of 2,000 low-income people who got only $50 a month so that they
0:29:00 would have a comparison group.
0:29:02 And what the researchers find?
0:29:10 The people getting $1,000 a free money a month worked a bit less, which you might expect.
0:29:14 They spent more time sleeping and hanging out with friends.
0:29:21 What they didn’t spend more time on was either building up their own human capital or volunteering
0:29:23 to help out other people.
0:29:30 I interpreted this as not such good news, so I went back to Al Roth, the market design
0:29:36 expert, to see if he had any ideas to make time banking a more attractive prospect, even
0:29:38 though he’s not a big fan of the idea.
0:29:41 I’d want some kind of reputational review system.
0:29:43 You need some customary contracts.
0:29:45 You need ways of keeping account, right?
0:29:47 We do that with money all the time.
0:29:50 You put money in the bank and they don’t let you take out more than you put in, whereas
0:29:54 with time, the question is, who does the reporting?
0:29:59 Let’s pretend for just a minute that time banking or time dollars are a going concern
0:30:03 where you are and you were a member of this community.
0:30:10 What would you offer as work that you could do and what kind of tasks or work would you
0:30:13 look for for other people to do for you in exchange?
0:30:19 Well, in fact, I’m a little bit of a member of that community because I’m a professor.
0:30:23 One of the things I do is teach classes and those are on a clock.
0:30:27 Another thing I do is I talk to students, typically graduate students, and a lot of scientific
0:30:30 progress has its origin in just talk.
0:30:34 You talk about problems, you hear how they’re thinking, you tell them how you’re thinking,
0:30:37 and sometimes directions emerge.
0:30:39 Are there any other physical tasks?
0:30:41 Can you fix my car or put on a new roof?
0:30:46 I cannot fix your car or put on a new roof, so I could, of course, trade for that.
0:30:51 But I don’t know how long it takes and I don’t know how much skill and risk and things like
0:30:52 that are involved.
0:30:54 All of which are things that should get priced into it.
0:31:00 So one of the advantages of having competitive roof fixers is you can get a couple of quotes
0:31:02 and find out what it costs to fix your roof.
0:31:08 But I could imagine a scenario where let’s say there’s a person running a roofing business.
0:31:13 Maybe they’re second or third generation, even, and they’ve decided that the way forward
0:31:15 is to do solar installations.
0:31:16 You’re in California.
0:31:18 I’m sure there’s a big market for that there.
0:31:22 But they don’t really know how to set up their business to optimize for that.
0:31:26 They don’t know what kinds of partnerships and maybe there’s some tax strategy and just
0:31:28 setting up the business that they’re not clear on.
0:31:33 But boy, Professor Roth, he loves to talk to people about problems like that and he
0:31:34 also needs a new roof.
0:31:41 So that sounds like a really nice possible exchange that could happen in the time bank.
0:31:43 Would you be open to discussing that?
0:31:45 I’d be open to discussing it.
0:31:47 He said reluctantly.
0:31:51 I say reluctantly because I certainly wouldn’t want that to be the only way I could get my
0:31:52 roof repaired.
0:31:53 Okay.
0:31:58 So it sounds like you’re not particularly enthusiastic about or interested, certainly
0:32:04 in joining our project to try to make time banking a successor to pilot it.
0:32:11 But assuming that you like me enough to not want to see this project fail from step one,
0:32:14 is there any piece of advice in particular you might have?
0:32:18 Let’s say that we’re going to try to do this with some kind of perhaps government cooperation,
0:32:25 some kind of nonprofit cooperation, try to find, let’s say a CEO who could really organize
0:32:26 this.
0:32:29 I think the simplest kind of time banking is for people who are actually prepared to
0:32:33 be in relationships with each other and are going to repeatedly trade time with each other
0:32:35 and they can evaluate the quality.
0:32:39 Babysitting cooperatives, for instance, are a good example because you also get some feedback
0:32:41 from the kids if they’re old enough.
0:32:47 But as soon as I’m earning time by babysitting for your kids and now I’m spending it on roofers,
0:32:52 I want to know is this a roofer who gives good value for the amount of time I’m putting
0:32:53 into the bank?
0:32:57 Given that I don’t have a relationship with him, what happens if the roof takes more time
0:32:59 than any of us anticipated?
0:33:03 Who pays for the extra time that he actually spent doing a good job fixing my roof?
0:33:08 There has to be some situation where he doesn’t stop with the hole in the roof and now it’s
0:33:09 worse than when he started.
0:33:13 He finishes the good job, he gets a review of doing a good job, but someone has to pay
0:33:14 him back the time.
0:33:18 The banking part of time banking is going to be important when there aren’t personal
0:33:19 relationships.
0:33:23 So you need reviews and you need a way for him to say, “It took me 12 hours.”
0:33:24 Who would have thought?
0:33:30 But there was a dragon implanted in the roof and I had to fight the dragon.
0:33:34 The things that you put up with in California, dragons and roofs, I don’t know how you deal
0:33:35 with it.
0:33:40 We deal with it by paying the roofer.
0:33:44 So first let me preface this by saying I’m convinced that AI is going to change a lot
0:33:48 of things in our economy and it’s going to make it harder and harder for a lot of people
0:33:50 to compete.
0:33:51 That’s Andrew Yang again.
0:33:56 It’s getting stronger, faster, smarter, more powerful and we are not.
0:34:01 So if you play out the way this is going, we already live in maybe the most extreme winter
0:34:03 take all economy in the history of the world.
0:34:09 It’s going to become more extreme with the advent of AI and associated technologies.
0:34:15 And so the goal would be to build an economic system that rewards people pursuing activities
0:34:20 that right now would not get properly rewarded in our current monetary economy.
0:34:25 And what share of, if it could be measured, what share of let’s say GDP, would you like
0:34:30 this entire separate version of the economy to comprise?
0:34:34 I would think of it as a parallel instead of a percentage of GDP, but our current economy
0:34:37 is around $24 trillion.
0:34:43 And if you think about how much we could benefit in education and nurturing and health and
0:34:49 wellness, we’re spending maybe 17 or 18% of that $24 trillion on our healthcare right
0:34:50 now.
0:34:52 So let’s call that $4 trillion.
0:34:57 And we all know that we could generate immense value if we all took better care of ourselves
0:34:59 and had preventative care and everything else.
0:35:04 So just in the healthcare space, you can see trillions of dollars, environment, trillions
0:35:09 of dollars, education, trillions of dollars, arts and creativity, I would argue you could
0:35:11 also get up to that level.
0:35:17 So you can imagine something that gets up into the tens of trillions of dollars that
0:35:21 mirrors the size of what we consider right now, the economy.
0:35:28 If we want good things for ourselves, our families, our communities, we have to actually
0:35:32 build the mechanisms for those good things.
0:35:35 And if we don’t, then we kind of know which way things are going to head.
0:35:42 So are you willing and committed to join me/us Freakonomics Radio to try to actually make
0:35:43 this work?
0:35:44 Oh, yeah.
0:35:46 The great collab is beginning.
0:35:49 We’re going to freaking do it.
0:35:51 You can count me in 100%.
0:35:56 Let’s actually build this in real life so that people can experience it, point to it
0:35:58 and say people are good.
0:35:59 We want this in more places.
0:36:03 What would success look like to you in five years, let’s say?
0:36:11 Success would be thousands of people living better lives and a model that other people
0:36:13 say that’s totally replicable.
0:36:16 We can do that where we live and work.
0:36:20 So Andrew, if we want to get this thing going, we need someone to run it.
0:36:24 You’d probably be good at it, but you’re busy with 18 million other things.
0:36:29 I’m pretty busy too, but even if I weren’t, I’d be terrible at running something like
0:36:30 this.
0:36:37 So I think what we really need is a CEO, someone who hears this episode and is as enthusiastic
0:36:43 about the idea as we are and actually has the ability and the courage to get it done.
0:36:48 So what kind of background or characteristics would you suggest that the ideal candidate
0:36:49 has?
0:36:55 I’d say that person is comfortable going into a room of people in a community in Queens
0:36:59 or Staten Island or Brooklyn and saying to them, “Hey, this is what we’re doing and this
0:37:02 is why you should sign up and this is why it’s awesome,” and then feel equally comfortable
0:37:08 going into a room of marketing executives or foundation grant writers and say, “This
0:37:12 is what we’re doing and this is why you need to get on board as quickly as possible.”
0:37:16 So the profile that comes to mind for me is someone who has run a nonprofit, someone who
0:37:20 has had some kind of role in public service would also make sense and entrepreneur would
0:37:21 make sense.
0:37:24 Those three profiles appeal to me.
0:37:28 Does that sound like you or someone you know?
0:37:34 Andrew Yang has built a bipartisan political operation called Humanity Forward and the
0:37:39 Yang Gang still has a lot of assets that would be useful for time banking.
0:37:43 But still, this would be a big operation and we’ll need some help.
0:37:46 Let’s start with someone to run it.
0:37:51 If you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else or if you have any other ideas that might
0:37:55 help make this work, please write to us.
0:38:05 Here is an email address time@humanityforwardfoundation.org that’s time@humanityforwardfoundation.org.
0:38:08 We will keep you updated on how this project goes.
0:38:14 For now, big thanks to Andrew Yang, Krista Wyatt, Nathan Deets, and even Al Roth the
0:38:19 Skeptic for speaking with us today and thanks especially to you for listening.
0:38:21 Coming up next time on the show.
0:38:27 There is a freedom in being in a religious institution where I don’t have to be afraid
0:38:29 to talk about values in my out loud voice.
0:38:36 Tanya Tetlow used to be a federal prosecutor, which toughened her up for her current job,
0:38:37 college president.
0:38:41 What we navigate with them is, you know, you don’t point bullhorns at the library during
0:38:42 study session.
0:38:45 Tanya Tetlow is president of Fordham University in New York.
0:38:50 She’s the first female president there, as well as the first president who is not a Catholic
0:38:51 priest.
0:38:55 The Jesuits here laugh that you say all the same stuff, Tanya, but people listen to you.
0:39:00 Another conversation in our ongoing look at what college is really for.
0:39:03 That’s next time on the show.
0:39:04 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:39:07 And if you can, someone else too.
0:39:11 Pre-economics radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:17 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:39:19 transcripts and show notes.
0:39:22 This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski.
0:39:27 Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn,
0:39:32 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs,
0:39:38 Julie Canfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:39:39 and Theo Jacobs.
0:39:42 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:39:46 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:39:48 It’s always fun to talk to you, Al.
0:39:50 You too, and you know, spend your time well.
0:39:51 Cheers.
0:40:03 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:40:04 Stitcher.
0:40:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
It’s not oil or water or plutonium — it’s human hours. We’ve got an idea for putting them to use, and for building a more human-centered economy. But we need your help.
- SOURCES:
- Nathan Dietz, research director at the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland.
- Al Roth, professor of economics at Stanford University.
- Krista Wyatt, C.E.O. of Timebanks.org.
- Andrew Yang, co-chair of the Forward Party and former U.S. presidential candidate.
- RESOURCES:
- “The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States,” by Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, and Sarah Miller (NBER Working Paper, 2024).
- “Where Are America’s Volunteers,” by Nathan Dietz and Robert T. Grimm Jr. (Do Good Institute, 2018).
- “Believe in People,” talk by Edgar Cahn at TEDxAshokaU (2010).
- The Pencil, by Allan Ahlberg (2008).
- No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative, by Edgar S. Cahn (2000).
- Time Dollars: The New Currency That Enables Americans to Turn Their Hidden Resource-Time-Into Personal Security and Community Renewal, by Edgar S. Cahn and Jonathan Rowe (1992).
- EXTRAS:
- “Why Don’t We Have Better Candidates for President?” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- “Andrew Yang Is Not Giving Up on Politics — or the U.S. — Yet,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
- “The Future of New York City Is in Question. Could Andrew Yang Be the Answer?” by Freakonomics Radio (2021).
- “Why Is This Man Running for President? (Update),” by Freakonomics Radio (2019).
- “Make Me a Match,” by Freakonomics Radio (2015).