Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Time Banking Economics: From Volunteer Hours to Impact Points

Four decades of proof that humans will work for meaning—and what it teaches us about designing post-scarcity coordination

The Audacious Premise

Here’s a thought experiment that would make any economist spit out their coffee: What if a lawyer’s hour was worth exactly the same as a plumber’s hour? And both were worth the same as a teenager teaching your grandmother how to use Zoom?

Ridiculous, right? The market has spoken. Lawyers bill $500/hour. Plumbers bill $100. Teenagers work for pizza. That’s economics.

Except here’s the thing: for over four decades, in 34+ countries, across more than 1,000 communities, people have been exchanging services on exactly that premise. And it works. Not as a cute hobby for hippies—as functional economic infrastructure serving hundreds of thousands of participants.

Time banking is perhaps the most underrated economic experiment of the past half-century. It’s also the closest thing we have to a working prototype of the Impact Points system that the Unscarcity framework proposes for post-scarcity coordination. If you want to know whether humans will contribute to their communities without cash incentives, stop theorizing. We have data.

The verdict? They will. With caveats. And those caveats are where the engineering gets interesting.

The Man Who Saw Uselessness Clearly

Edgar Cahn was lying in a hospital bed in 1980, recovering from a near-fatal heart attack, when he had the kind of epiphany that changes systems. As he later told NPR: “I really realized that I didn’t like being useless. And that was 1980, and we were declaring a lot of other people useless… And I thought, well, if we’ve got all these useless people and all these problems and all these needs, why can’t we put the two together?”

Cahn wasn’t some naive idealist. He was a Yale Law School graduate, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, and co-founder of what became the David A. Clarke School of Law. He understood power structures intimately—which is precisely why he could see the absurdity of a system that simultaneously produced massive unmet needs and masses of “useless” people.

Reagan had just begun dismantling social programs. Cahn’s response wasn’t to lobby for their restoration (though he did that too). It was to design an entirely different medium of exchange—one that could coordinate exactly the kind of community work that markets consistently fail to value.

When Cahn passed away in January 2022 at age 86, he left behind something remarkable: proof of concept. Not perfect proof. Not complete proof. But proof that another way of coordinating human contribution isn’t just theoretically possible—it’s been running, in various forms, for longer than most tech companies have existed.

The Mechanics: Beautifully Simple, Deceptively Deep

The basic idea could fit on a napkin:

You do an hour of something for someone.
You earn one time credit.
You spend that credit to receive an hour of something from someone else.
A coordinator (the “time broker”) keeps track.

That’s it. One hour equals one hour. The lawyer’s contract review equals the teenager’s Zoom tutorial equals the neighbor’s yard work.

If you’re trained in economics, several objections are firing in your brain right now. That violates comparative advantage! It ignores skill differentials! No one would provide high-value services!

And yet. Japan’s Fureai Kippu system has 374 organizations with 100,000+ beneficiaries. The UK has exchanged 6.7 million hours through its network. The hOurworld platform spans 400+ time banks across 39 countries with 35,000+ members.

The economist’s model is wrong—or at least incomplete. Homo economicus doesn’t exist. Homo contribuens does.

Cahn’s Five Principles

Cahn wasn’t just building an exchange mechanism. He was articulating a philosophy:

Everyone has something to contribute — No one is merely a recipient.
Volunteering is work — Care, support, and community-building deserve recognition.
Reciprocity drives engagement — Helping and being helped creates sustainable relationships.
Community building matters — Social networks have inherent value.
Mutual accountability — Respect flows in all directions.

These aren’t just nice sentiments. They’re design principles that directly address the failure modes of both pure market systems (which devalue care work) and pure charity systems (which create dependency and burnout).

The Case Studies: Where Theory Meets Reality

Japan’s Fureai Kippu: The 50-Year Pioneer

If you want to see time banking at sophisticated scale, look east.

Japan’s Fureai Kippu (“Ticket for a Caring Relationship”) emerged from Teruko Mizushima’s Volunteer Labour Bank, established in Osaka in 1973. Tsutomu Hotta—former attorney general and minister of justice—formalized it in the mid-1990s into something remarkable.

The numbers:

374 participating organizations
200-300 members per organization
Nippon Active Life Club alone: 37,500 members across 137 regional centers
~100,000 total beneficiaries

The innovation: Geographic transferability. Here’s the killer feature Western time banks mostly lack: a daughter in Tokyo can earn hours helping elderly neighbors, then transfer those credits to her aging mother in Osaka, who can “spend” them receiving care.

Think about what that solves. Most time banks are trapped in their locality. You can only help people you can physically reach, and you can only receive help from people nearby. Fureai Kippu cracked that constraint. Suddenly your contribution in one city creates value in another.

The punchline that should haunt every economist: Research found that elderly recipients actually prefer services from people paid in Fureai Kippu over those paid in yen. Why? The recipients could tell the difference in motivation. People who chose time credits over cash came because they wanted to come. That intrinsic motivation produces better care than extrinsic motivation.

The market optimizes for efficiency. Time banking optimizes for connection. Turns out the latter produces higher quality in domains where quality is hard to measure.

Madison Youth Court: Criminal Justice by Teenagers

The TimeBank Youth Court in Madison, Wisconsin demonstrates that time banking isn’t just about eldercare and yard work.

The mechanism: When teenagers commit minor offenses, police can refer them to Youth Court instead of issuing tickets. A jury of teenage peers hears the case. Sentences can include apologies, restitution, or community service—all coordinated through time bank infrastructure.

The result: Between 2009 and 2010, police tickets issued to students at one high school dropped from 126 to 26. That’s an 80% reduction. Minor offenses no longer trigger out-of-school suspensions or arrest records that shadow young people for decades.

This is community governance replacing bureaucratic punishment. It’s restorative justice with accounting attached. And it works because the time bank creates a container for reciprocity that pure volunteer programs can’t sustain.

Clapham Park: Mental Health in South London

In one of London’s most diverse and economically challenged neighborhoods (35% White British, 19% White Other, 18% Black African, 12% Black Caribbean), the South London & Maudsley Foundation Trust established a time bank in 2004.

The results over two decades:

708 resident participants
5,000+ hours exchanged
Activities expanded to community safety networks, libraries, healthy living projects, and theater programs
Two-thirds of participants who increased activity reported mental health gains

The correlation between time bank participation and mental health improvement isn’t coincidental. Being useful feels different than being helped. Reciprocity restores agency. The time bank isn’t treating mental health—it’s rebuilding the social infrastructure that prevents mental health crises in the first place.

Switzerland: The Government Gets It

St. Gallen’s Stiftung Zeitvorsorge (Foundation Time Care), founded in 2011, restricts membership to those over 50. It’s a pension plan, but the currency is hours instead of francs.

The pitch: Bank hours now for care you’ll need later. Help your neighbors today, receive help tomorrow. No cash required.

By 2020, Switzerland went further than any nation: the federal government partnered with nonprofit Pro Senectute to launch a national time banking program, backed by legislation explicitly supporting time banking as infrastructure for an aging society.

The Swiss are not known for economic radicalism. When they endorse something, it’s because the math works.

The Failure Patterns: Where Time Banks Die

Understanding why time banks fail is as important as celebrating successes. The failures reveal the engineering challenges any post-scarcity coordination system must solve.

Founder Dependency: The Ithaca HOURS Collapse

Ithaca HOURS was the poster child of alternative currency in the 1990s. Paul Glover launched it in 1991; at its peak, $100,000+ worth of HOURS circulated among 2,000 participants and 500+ accepting businesses.

Then Glover moved away.

The system didn’t collapse overnight, but it declined steadily. Glover himself diagnosed the problem: “Every local currency needs at least one full-time networker to ‘promote, facilitate and troubleshoot’ currency circulation.”

Translation: Time banks are not self-sustaining systems. They require active coordination. When the coordinator leaves and isn’t replaced, the network degrades.

This is a fundamental design flaw. Any system that depends on a charismatic founder is fragile. The Unscarcity framework’s emphasis on decentralized coordination through The MOSAIC exists precisely because centralized systems create single points of failure.

The Funding Cliff: Gorbals Time Bank

Glasgow’s Gorbals Time Bank operated in an inner-city estate marked by poverty, unemployment, and poor health. Under researcher Gill Seyfang’s study in 2004, the system worked beautifully for three years.

Then the grant funding for paid time-broker coordinators disappeared. The time banks ended entirely.

The cruel irony: systems designed to operate without money often require money to coordinate. Someone has to do the matching, the troubleshooting, the outreach. That labor has to come from somewhere.

The Unscarcity framework addresses this through The Civic Layer—AI-augmented coordination infrastructure. Time banks proved the premise; the engineering requires removing human coordinators as bottlenecks.

The Government Crowding Effect: Japan’s Insurance Lesson

Even Japan’s sophisticated Fureai Kippu system stumbled. The implementation of Japan’s Long-Term Care Insurance Act in 2000 stunted growth, as many users chose government-provided services over voluntary time bank options.

When a “good enough” government alternative exists, some participants choose the path of least friction—even if time bank services are qualitatively better (as the preference research shows).

This isn’t an argument against government services. It’s a design lesson: overlapping systems create competition for participants. The 90/10 Framework (Foundation vs. Ascent) addresses this by clearly delineating which services operate through universal provision and which operate through merit-based coordination.

The Aging Membership Problem

Here’s a pattern that shows up repeatedly: time banks fail to rejuvenate their member base. Founding members age. Younger participants don’t join at replacement rates. Eventually you have a group of elderly volunteers helping each other—sustainable for a while, but not indefinitely.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review put it bluntly: “At its current scale, time banking cannot solve major social and environmental problems.”

That’s fair. Time banking, as currently implemented, is a niche movement. But the question isn’t whether current time banks are sufficient. It’s whether the principles they demonstrate can be engineered into something that scales.

What Time Banks Prove for Unscarcity

Time banking is empirical evidence for four claims that critics often dismiss as naive:

1. People Will Contribute Without Money

4+ million documented hours across 30+ countries. Millions more undocumented (research suggests at least 50% of exchanges aren’t logged). The “homo economicus” model—humans as purely self-interested rational actors—doesn’t explain this behavior.

Impact Points (IMP) don’t need to provide cash-equivalent value. They need to provide recognition, reciprocity, and community standing. Time banks prove that’s enough to motivate sustained contribution.

2. Equal Valuation Can Work (For Most Things)

Economists predicted that no one would provide high-skill services for the same “payment” as low-skill work. Lawyers helped neighbors anyway. Doctors volunteered. The intrinsic satisfaction of contribution plus community recognition proved sufficient.

This works because most time bank services are Foundation activities: errands, transportation, companionship, basic repairs, tutoring. Equal valuation makes sense for broadly accessible, learnable skills.

It works less well for Ascent activities—the highly specialized work that the 10% of truly scarce opportunities requires. The 90/10 Framework addresses this distinction explicitly.

3. Reciprocity Outperforms Charity

Time banks consistently beat traditional volunteer programs in sustained engagement. The difference is subtle but profound: you’re not just giving. You’re building a balance that entitles you to receive. That transforms charity into exchange, dependency into interdependence.

The Civic Service in the Unscarcity framework operates on the same principle. It’s not about extracting free labor. It’s about creating the reciprocal relationship that makes ongoing contribution feel sustainable rather than depleting.

4. Care Work Can Be Coordinated

Markets systematically undervalue care work—childcare, eldercare, community support, companionship. Time banks flourish precisely where markets fail. The most successful time banks center on exactly the services that GDP ignores.

This matters enormously for post-scarcity design. If we’re automating production, we’re not automating care. The coordination mechanisms for care work must operate differently than market mechanisms for manufactured goods. Time banks prove that’s possible.

The Engineering Gap: From Hours to Impact

Time banks are prototypes, not finished products. The gap between current time banks and the Impact Points system the Unscarcity framework envisions looks like this:

Time Bank Limitation	Impact System Solution
Local networks	Global infrastructure via The MOSAIC
Paper or basic digital tracking	Distributed ledger (DPIF) with AI validation
Volunteer coordination	Civic Layer AI-assisted matching
Hour-based credits	Multidimensional contribution recognition
Informal reputation	Proof-of-Diversity Verified Value (PoD-VV)
Isolated experiments	Integrated civilization-scale coordination

The Specific Upgrades Required

Digitization at Scale
Time banks mostly run on software that would look dated in 2010. The hOurworld platform is functional but primitive compared to modern coordination systems. A functional Impact system requires infrastructure that can handle billions of transactions with millisecond latency.

Geographic Liberation
Japan’s Fureai Kippu showed that transferable credits solve the locality problem. A global Impact system requires full geographic portability—contribution in Lagos creates value accessible in Detroit.

Trust Infrastructure
Small time banks work because members know each other. The Clapham Park time bank had 708 members over two decades—small enough that reputation could travel by word of mouth. A global system requires formal trust mechanisms: verification, reputation algorithms, accountability structures. That’s what Civic Standing and the PNPS system are designed to provide.

Specialization Accommodation
Equal valuation works for general services but fails for specialized expertise. Why spend 10 years becoming an expert if your hour counts the same as a novice’s? The 90/10 Framework handles this by distinguishing Foundation services (where equal recognition works) from Ascent opportunities (where differential recognition incentivizes expertise development).

Decay Mechanisms
Time bank credits don’t decay. That’s fine for small systems, but it creates problems at scale: hoarding, obsolete balances, inactive members clogging the ledger. Impact Points decay (~10% annually per Five Laws Axiom IV) precisely to prevent accumulation and force ongoing contribution.

Starting Your Own: The Practical Path

If you want hands-on experience with post-market coordination before the infrastructure arrives, starting a time bank is the closest thing to a laboratory available today.

Phase 1: Foundation (3 months)

Gather 5-10 committed founders with diverse skills and networks
Study existing time banks (hOurworld.org, Timebanking UK, TimeBanks.org)
Contact successful time banks for advice—most are generous with guidance
Define your geographic scope and identify partner organizations

Phase 2: Infrastructure (2 months)

Select a platform (hOurworld’s Time and Talents is free and widely used)
Identify a physical meeting location—visibility builds trust
Create documentation and outreach materials

Phase 3: Launch

Start with 15-30 founding members minimum
Actively facilitate early exchanges—don’t wait for organic discovery
Document success stories obsessively
Address problems quickly before they become patterns

The Sustainability Keys

Distributed leadership from day one (no founder dependency)
Multiple funding pathways (member dues, grants, partnerships)
Technology-first infrastructure
Active recruitment to counter aging membership
Cultural work normalizing help-seeking as dignified

The Connection to Larger Vision
Each successful exchange proves that humans can coordinate contribution outside market mechanisms. Each challenge reveals design problems that the Impact system must solve. Time banks are training grounds—for participants and for system designers.

The Proof We Needed

Time banking hasn’t changed the world yet. But it’s changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of participants while demonstrating that alternatives to market coordination exist and function.

Edgar Cahn saw something from his hospital bed in 1980 that most economists still can’t see: that “uselessness” is a social construction, not a natural fact. That communities contain abundant capacity to meet their own needs—if we design systems that recognize and coordinate that capacity.

The hour you spend helping your neighbor has value. Time banking proved that. The Impact Points system aims to make that recognition universal, scalable, and infrastructure-native.

We’re not building from theory. We’re building from forty years of evidence. The premise works. The engineering is what’s next.

Time Banking Economics: From Volunteer Hours to Impact Points

Time Banking Economics: From Volunteer Hours to Impact Points

The Audacious Premise

The Man Who Saw Uselessness Clearly

The Mechanics: Beautifully Simple, Deceptively Deep

Cahn’s Five Principles

The Case Studies: Where Theory Meets Reality

Japan’s Fureai Kippu: The 50-Year Pioneer

Madison Youth Court: Criminal Justice by Teenagers

Clapham Park: Mental Health in South London

Switzerland: The Government Gets It

The Failure Patterns: Where Time Banks Die

Founder Dependency: The Ithaca HOURS Collapse

The Funding Cliff: Gorbals Time Bank

The Government Crowding Effect: Japan’s Insurance Lesson

The Aging Membership Problem

What Time Banks Prove for Unscarcity

1. People Will Contribute Without Money

2. Equal Valuation Can Work (For Most Things)

3. Reciprocity Outperforms Charity

4. Care Work Can Be Coordinated

The Engineering Gap: From Hours to Impact

The Specific Upgrades Required

Starting Your Own: The Practical Path

The Proof We Needed

Sources

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