Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Chapter 18: Time as the New Money

But what will people do all day, he asks rhetorically. Won't their lives be empty and meaningless without work?

"Some people he knows," he writes, advocate a federal jobs guarantee. (NB: It would be good to hear him exchange views about this with Bernie.)

The problem, he says, is that setting up such a scheme is wildly expensive. Costs tens of thousands of extra dollars to recruit, train, build infrastructure before anyone gets paid. You create huge bureaucracies.

(It's easy to convince me that a federal jobs guarantee is an awful idea.)

Many of the people we most wish to keep employed and away from idleness, he writes, are the least competent and employable in the private sector.

The natural tendency would be to spend a lot of money to keep people doing things that aren't that valuable. If we try to replace a significant proportion of private employment with government service jobs,

we'll end up like the Soviet Union.

(Points for recognizing that this is both true and bad.)

It would be better, he writes, to "try to supercharge the existing interests and opportunities of businesses, people, and local organizations." With a UBI.

A UBI, he believes, would lead people to do things that pay less but are more personally rewarding--teaching, caring for loved ones, creative pursuits.

"A UBI would be perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen."

That seems a stretch.

"Endless new businesses would form," resulting in "millions of new jobs."

But we need to do more ...

We need ... a social credit scheme!

Unemployed truck drivers would be able to do helpful things for other people in exchange for social credit.

I might like this idea if it didn't immediately associate it with creepy totalitarianism.

"Maybe you smirked," he writes, but this system is in use in 200 communities in the US, and it's called time banking."

That sounds less creepy. But if it's already in use, why do we need the federal government to implement it?

Ah, he explains: It would be a "supercharged version of time banking where in addition to providing social value, there would be real monetary value underlying it."

A new currency -- Digital Social Credits -- would reward people for doing things that serve the community.

I'm confused. We already have a currency that rewards people for doing things that serve the community.

He envisions the government putting up significant levels of DSCs as prizes: For example, 1 billion DSCs to improve high school graduation rates in Illinois.

Why not a billion dollars? How is this different from a currency?

Ah! "Some might ask, "Why create a new digital currency instead of just using dollars?"

Answer: People will respond to points differently than they do to dollars. They'll find it strangely compelling.

(God, he could even be right about that. He's right that they spend countless hours becoming mayors on Foursquare.)

Also, people will be more open and comfortable sharing balances if it's a new currency.

Or--my thought--they might find this amazingly patronizing and annoying.

"We could create an entirely new parallel economy around social good."

"Heck, DSCs could become cooler than dollars."

(Or just the opposite. Americans really don't like being nagged by their government.)

So, the Freedom Dividend would elevate society beyond subsistence and scarcity, and the DSC would tie communities together and give people a way to generate value and feel valued, regardless of how the market regards their time.

End of chapter. I'm very skeptical about the DSC. If it's a currency, it's a currency, and it's going to reflect what the market thinks about the value of people's time. That's what a currency does.

If it's a China-style social credit system, I'll pass.

Let people organize this for themselves. Keep the feds out of it.