To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization…
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
A man… with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.
—GEORGE ORWELL
Even with the Freedom Dividend attending to people’s ability to feed themselves, the thing that still freaks everyone out about replacing jobs is this: What will people do all day? Work has been proven to be a vital part of a healthy life and society. Long-term unemployment is one of the most destructive things that can happen to a person. Getting a bit of money doesn’t necessarily change that.
Should the government guarantee work or create jobs? Many idealistic people I know advocate for universal service opportunities. The problem is that it’s very expensive to organize, train, and employ people. Teach for America spends approximately $51,000 per corps member on noncompensation costs over two years: recruitment, selection, training, programming, support, and so on. The Peace Corps’s annual budget of $410 million is $56,000 per volunteer. Venture for America, the organization I started, spends about $30,000 per young entrepreneur on recruitment, training, and the like over two years. The U.S. military spends approximately $170,000 per soldier per year on salary, maintenance, housing, infrastructure, and the like.
Setting up a structure for people is wildly expensive. Guaranteeing work would cost tens of thousands of additional dollars for recruitment, training, and infrastructure before anyone even gets paid. You would also wind up creating very large organizations and bureaucracies. The Peace Corps has over 1,000 full-time employees supporting 7,200 volunteers, for example.
Many of the populations people are most eager to see employed and kept from idleness are among the least competent and able to be employed by the private sector. The natural tendency is to spend a lot of money on people doing things that aren’t actually that valuable. Since we’re talking about millions of people on the lower end of the education and skill range, this is likely where most efforts would lead if one tried to replace any significant proportion of private employment with government service jobs.
I believe in national service and the power of investing in people—the right people with the right mission can move mountains. But an economy where most people work for the government has been tried and failed in many environments—most notably Communist China before 1978 and the Soviet Union before it broke apart. Right now, the United States is relatively low among developed countries in terms of proportion of citizens who work for the government—around 15 percent as compared to Canada’s 22.4 percent or the United Kingdom’s 23.5 percent. Still, government-financed positions need to be created very carefully and judiciously and preferably focused on high-impact roles. They certainly will not be the cure for a nation without enough jobs to go around.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government hired 40,000 recreation officers and artists at a cost of $3.3 billion—about $47 billion today—to make things more enjoyable and keep people engaged. That would be the equivalent of hiring about 100,000 people to go to towns around the country today based on how much our population has grown since then. This strikes me as something of an upper limit of what the government could do specifically for the purpose of citizen engagement. Areas of instruction during the Depression included single-sex sports and games, arts and crafts, music, dramatics, the reading of books, discussion groups, hiking parties, woodwork, metalwork, furniture making, glee clubs and orchestras, and lectures on hygiene, diet, and even social etiquette.
Reading that list probably makes one yearn for a simpler time. A better approach today would be to try to supercharge the existing interests and opportunities of businesses, people, and local organizations. A UBI would go a long way in this direction. For example, let’s imagine a local nonprofit providing after-school recreation for underprivileged kids. It has five employees making $30,000 a year right now. With a UBI, they might be able to hire seven employees at $21,000 a year instead, a 40 percent increase in staffing, because people with a level of financial security might take the job for less. The same would go for a school’s ability to utilize volunteers to provide teacher support, a church’s ability to enlist mentors, and so on. Dutch professor Robert J. van der Veen and economist Philippe van Parijs observed that a UBI will bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work. The fun things that people want to do that are socially and personally rewarding will pay less, but many more people will want to do them anyway. Jobs and purpose will in part be provided by more people teaching children, coaching others, caring for loved ones, and the like.
There will also be a dramatic expansion of painting, making music, shooting videos, playing sports, writing, and all of the creative pursuits many Americans would love to try, but can’t seem to find the time for today. Many people have some artistic passion that they would pursue if they didn’t need to worry about feeding themselves next month. A UBI would be perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen.
Perhaps most crucially, endless new businesses would form. If you are in a town of 5,000 people in Missouri and everyone is struggling to get by, starting, say, a bakery may not be that attractive. But with a UBI, there will be an additional $60 million being spent in that town next year. You personally will have an income to fall back on if the bakery doesn’t work out. Now, the bakery may strike you as a great idea. Getting your friends and family excited about it would be a lot easier, too. This would play out over and over again throughout the economy, resulting in millions of new jobs—4.7 million according to the Roosevelt Institute’s analysis. A UBI would address a significant proportion of the lack of work through increased humanity, caring, creativity, and enterprise.
That said, we are going to have to do much more.
Picture the average truck driver who gets sent home in 2026. Let’s call him Ted. He’s 49, has health problems, dropped out of college after a year, had a series of construction jobs, and then was a trucker for 12 years before automation eliminated his job. He lives in a modest mobile home in Oklahoma. He has a child but is no longer with the mother, who lives a couple of towns away, and sees his son once or twice per month. He has some hobbies and interests that involve the outdoors. He’s used to being on the road four days a week and talking to his fellow truckers on the radio. He likes to drink. He was brought up Christian but hasn’t been to church in years. There aren’t many job opportunities for Ted nearby, and he doesn’t want to move. Thanks to his savings, the Freedom Dividend, and the settlement he received from the Trucker Transition Act of 2022, he can get by financially if he’s frugal. Left to his own devices, Ted will likely spend a lot of time watching TV, drinking, and having his health deteriorate. The goal is for Ted to acquire a set of interests and relationships that replace the structure that work used to provide.
Now, let’s imagine Ted is in his home in Oklahoma, settling into his recliner watching videos on his TV—he doesn’t like the new VR goggles some of the kids use. He gets a message on his phone. It says, “One of your neighbors, Annie, could use some help changing her propane tank. Would you like to help her?” It includes a profile picture of Annie, who is a 60-year-old woman who lives nearby. Ted shrugs and responds “Yes” and puts in a time for later that day. At one p.m., Ted drives over to Annie’s house and swaps out her depleted propane tank for a new one from Lowe’s. His back hurts a little as he moves the tank, but it makes him feel useful. Annie profusely thanks him and they make some small talk. Annie worked as a secretary at a nearby hospital—her wrists are fragile. It turns out her children went to the same high school as Ted.
Ted returns to his house. Later, he gets a message saying, “Thanks for helping Annie! You have earned 100 Social Credits. You now have 1,600 Social Credits banked. You have earned 14,800 Social Credits over your lifetime.” He also gets a message from Annie saying, “Thank you for the help. You’re a lifesaver.” He replies, “No problem. Happy to help.” He takes on an assignment like this once or twice a day—generally moving something around or picking someone up. He’s hoping to meet someone with a dog that he can borrow for the next time his son visits. His boy likes dogs. He could post a request on the Tulsa Digital Social Credit Exchange but would prefer not to—he doesn’t really like asking for help. He prefers to help others and earn credits. He has his eye on a couple of deals for Thunder tickets or to buy a tent at Cabela’s. He used a bunch of Social Credits to pay for a fishing trip earlier in the year. His local poker game just started using Social Credits instead of dollars, too—a couple of the guys had just started volunteering at the local youth center so they were swimming in credits.
Maybe you smirked in disbelief at my concept of Social Credits, but this scenario is based on a system currently in use in about 200 communities around the United States called time banking. Time banking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks—transporting an item, walking a dog, cleaning up a yard, cooking a meal, providing a ride to the doctor, and so on. The idea was championed in the mid-1990s in the United States by Edgar Cahn, a law professor and antipoverty activist as a way to strengthen communities.
For example, in Brattleboro, Vermont, today, 315 members of the local time bank have exchanged 64,000 hours of mutual work over the past eight years. The Brattleboro time bank was started by two graduate students with 30 members in 2009 and has grown each year. Amanda Witman, a 40-year-old single mother, wrote about her experience: “Three years ago, I was in a tough spot. My husband and I had separated, and I was in a large house that needed lots of repairs. I was home-schooling my kids and working part-time from home doing website customer service. I had a huge financial challenge. My friends knew I was overwhelmed, and more than one said I should join the Brattleboro Time Trade. At first I thought, Who has time to trade? Then I learned that you can run a deficit—get help immediately and pay back the time when you’re able. So I posted requests on the website to fix up my house. I’d hoped one or two members would respond, but a bunch of people ended up offering assistance. Randy Bright fixed holes in the wall and replaced my water-pressure tank. Other people hauled a bunch of stuff to the dump, replaced ancient wiring and helped me plant a vegetable garden. Before joining the group, I never would have been comfortable requesting all that help. But you don’t feel like you’re pestering anyone, because people happily volunteer for the jobs and they always show up with a smile. And even though I’m so tight on time, I’ve always been able to find jobs that fit my schedule, like baby-sitting or making someone a meal. In fact, my whole family pitches in. I’ll tell my kids—Everest, 15, Alden, 14, Ellery, 11, and Avery, 9—that we’re stacking wood for our neighbor in order to get our light fixture fixed. It makes them feel useful. In fact, we’ve come to realize the value of some of our hobbies, like making music. Once, we earned four time-trade hours by playing together as a family at a local garden party: two fiddles, a guitar and a pennywhistle!”
Said Randy Bright, the 49-year-old handyman on the other end of the exchange, “When I joined, it was clear that handy people were in high demand. And, since I am divorced, I thought, Great, I’ll meet single women! That hasn’t panned out yet, but I have expanded my circle of friends. I’ve used some of my time-trade hours for home-cooked meals. It has aided me financially, too: I’ve developed a referral network that has helped get my own energy-efficiency business off the ground. My private business keeps me busy, but I still do time trades, and I often donate the hours I earn. The trades give me something intangible that just makes me feel good. I especially like showing my daughter, Nora (who’s 14 and often comes along to help out) that not every exchange is about money.”
Edgar Cahn, the founder of Time Banking, was the former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, who was looking for new ways to fight poverty at a time when “money for social programs [had] dried up.” He wrote, “Americans face at least three interlocking sets of problems: growing inequality in access by those at the bottom to the most basic goods and services; increasing social problems stemming from the need to rebuild family, neighborhood and community; and a growing disillusion with public programs designed to address these problems.” He proposed that time banking could “[rebuild] the infrastructure of trust and caring that can strengthen families and communities.”
Despite the success of time banks in communities like Brattleboro, they have not caught hold that widely around the United States in part because they require a certain level of administration and resources to operate.
Now imagine a supercharged version of time banking backed by the U.S. government where in addition to providing social value, there’s real monetary value underlying it. This new currency—Digital Social Credits (DSCs or Social Credits)—would reward people for doing things that serve the community. The government would seed each market with an initial investment, but administrators would be local. DSCs would be targeted toward regions and communities that demonstrate a need for increased cohesion. You would earn a number of Social Credits anytime you do something for a neighbor—babysit a child, staff a garage sale, fix an appliance, play music at a party, and so on. You would also get Social Credits anytime you volunteer at the local shelter, participate in a town fair, coach the Little League, take a new course, paint a mural, play in a local band, mentor a young person, and so on. Existing organizations could award and earn Social Credits based on how many people they assist.
The government could put up significant levels of DSCs as prizes and incentives for major initiatives. For example, “100 million DSCs to reduce obesity levels in Mississippi” or “1 billion DSCs to improve high school graduation rates in Illinois” and then let people take various actions to collect it. Companies could help meet goals and create and sponsor campaigns around various causes. Nonprofits and NGOs would generate DSCs based on how much good they do and then distribute it back to volunteers and employees. New organizations and initiatives could be crowdfunded by DSCs instead of money, as people “vote” by sending points in. Events and media that draw crowds would receive DSCs based on the number of people that attend or upvote it; the currency would become a new way to support journalism, creativity, and local events.
Some might ask, “Why create a new digital currency instead of just using dollars?” First, people will respond to points in a different way than they would if they were paid very low monetary amounts. If you tell me I’m getting $2 to do something, I may ignore it. But if it’s 200 points, I’ll find it strangely compelling. People right now spend countless hours becoming Yelp Elite, King Wazers, Mayors on Foursquare, Google Local Guides, and other online equivalents based upon points and social rewards.
Second, everyone will feel much more open and comfortable sharing balances if it’s a new social currency. You want people to advertise and reinforce their behavior. Behavior is much more likely to be reinforced if it’s social and recognized. That’s one reason why people are more likely to lose weight or achieve fitness goals when they are part of a group effort.
Third, by creating a new currency, the government could essentially induce billions of dollars of positive social activity without having to spend nearly that amount.
As individuals rack up DSCs, they would have both a permanent balance they’ve earned over their lifetime and a current balance. They could cash in the points for experiences, purchases with participating vendors, or support for causes, and transfer points to others for special occasions. As their permanent balance gets higher, they might qualify for various perks like throwing a pitch at a local ballgame, an audience with their local congressperson, or meeting their state’s most civic-minded athlete or celebrity. Maybe the community’s leading DSC earner would even get a special trip to the White House. People and companies could use cash to buy DSCs—this would help fund the system—but these DSCs would appear as a different color and be clearly purchased, not earned.
We could create an entire new parallel economy around social good.
The most socially detached would be the most likely to ignore all of this. But many people love rewards and feeling valued. I get obsessed with completing the 10-punch card for a free sandwich at my local deli. We could spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much. Heck, DSCs could become cooler than dollars, because you could advertise how much you have and it’s socially acceptable. If you wanted to spur adoption, you could target various rewards and campaigns toward particular demographics and areas; things done for people with lower levels of DSCs could count for extra.
The DSC system would be an example of harnessing market dynamics to spur social good. The federal government would help set up and fund the platform but it would be up to local governments, nonprofits, individuals, and companies to figure out the best ways to achieve various goals. The overall goal would be to improve social cohesion and maintain high levels of engagement for people in a post-work economy.
The Freedom Dividend would elevate society beyond a need for subsistence and scarcity. The Digital Social Credit would tie together communities and give people a way to both generate value and feel valued regardless of how the market regards their time.