Collective Responsibility

My previous post, Local Timebanking, introduced The Five Core Values of TimeBanking by Edgar Cahn. These organizing principles define the role timebanking plays, both as a platform and set of processes, to account for one’s time invested in “forms of work that money will not easily pay for, like building strong families, revitalizing neighborhoods, making democracy work, advancing social justice.”

In the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy, timebanking helps community members take collective responsibility to assure the basic needs of all members are met. Then, with basic needs in place for all, each member is better positioned to take individual responsibility for personal needs related to quality of life.

The rendition of Maslow’s Hierarchy below illustrates more specifically what community members take responsibility for, individually and collectively:

Key takeaway: the more a community provides all its members with their basic needs, the higher likelihood that individual members will enjoy a higher quality of life by whatever subjective factors each chooses.

In effect, communities that honor this commitment decrease the amount of time its members must dedicate to meeting their basic needs which results in them having more time available for quality of life endeavors.

The post, Time Beyond Basic Needs Builds Human Capital, makes the point that more time consumed above the line in the “quality of life” zone has the social benefit of increasing human capital. In other words, it turns Maslow’s Hierarchy upside down so that more time could be dedicated to pursuits beyond basic needs. The diagram below — a variation on “The Human Enigma” graphic in the post referenced above — highlights how the dynamics between the two hierarchies impact a community and its members:

The community takes collective responsibility to manage the accessibility, availability, and affordability of basic needs for all community members. To be successful, communities develop strategies and underwrite projects along a localization — globalization continuum to assure needs can be met and minimize risk to member for failure to deliver.

In addition, the community applies advances in technology to the flows of basic needs in order to reduce costs, increase control, and relieve community members from onerous tasks. Effectively, this shifts what community members do with their time from activities below the line to those above the line — time for time — which increases their creativity and expands their horizons. The subsequent uptick in human capital benefits the community, internally, as well as individuals and organizations in regional and global interrelationships.

Key takeaways: Timebanking provides the opportunity for community members to account for the time they invest in projects related to management of basic needs and application of technology. It also enables members to exchange time credits they receive for participating in these projects so they can shift their attention from below the line to above the line endeavors. Furthermore, documentation of the cumulative time invested, exchanged, and consumed by community members establishes a demonstrated value of time and skills that incentivizes other individuals and organizations to become timebanking members and offers collateral in proposals to funding agencies.

In upcoming posts I will explore these in more detail with examples from local timebanks. Stay tuned…

Conjoined Economies

In my previous posting, Organizing Principles for a Time-Based Economy, I describe a money-based economy and a time-based economy, each based on very different organizing principles, yet functioning concurrently within the same social system. On the surface their unique principles and purposes may appear to render them mutually exclusive. However, the behaviors each elicits from members can form a healthy dialectic that benefits the shared social system. The resulting symbiosis (perhaps agonism) acts as a mitigating force to keep the social system between gross economic disparity on the one hand and profound personal discontent on the other.

The diagram below builds on diametrically opposed views of Maslow’s Hierarchy introduced in the post, Time Beyond Basic Needs Builds Human Capital, and adds the organizing principles for both economies:

In more evolved forms, each of the conjoined economies would wield comparable power within the same society, hence, same-sized circles of organizing principles on oppositional figures of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Despite the importance of each economy and the necessity of robust interactions between them, those activities in the time-based economy (pale colored organizing principles), are not as explicit nor recognized for their value like those in the money-based economy (dark-colored organizing principles). Furthermore, the sphere of operation for both has room to expand well-beyond the perimeter of the gray oval representing current reality.

These dynamics set in place twin goals moving forward:

Legitimize time-based economy behaviors
Expand symbiotic / synergistic coverage by both the time-based and money-based economies.

And it opens the door for localized, community-based structures to emerge that advance these goals.

Organizing Principles for a Time-Based Economy

My previous post, Time Beyond Basic Needs Builds Human Capital, proposes that advances in technology, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, genetics, networks, etc., redefine human capital and how we build it. This trend will impact how we use the limited time we have as living, physical beings on the planet.

Regardless of how long that is for each of us, the minutes we have will be distributed into the five levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. ¹ For many, the bulk of their time will fall into the bottom levels where they struggle to meet basic needs and survive. However, if society partners with technology rather than contends with it, the majority of our time could play in the upper levels of the pyramid where human creativity, inventiveness, and innovation thrive. Our time and where on Maslow’s Hierarchy we consume it become major metrics by which we measure the effectiveness and efficiency of economic systems in their capability to build and sustain human capital at its most optimal.

The diagram below from Time Beyond Basic Needs Builds Human Capital, superimposes the base-down orientation of Maslow’s Hierarchy onto a top-down version.

These can be expressed as two economies that play out along a continuum. On one end a money-based economy of dystopian design keeps the majority occupied in the lower levels of a base-down Maslow’s Hierarchy. On the other end a time-based economy of utopian design shifts participation by the majority to the upper levels of a point-down Maslow’s Hierarchy. Regardless, the two economies not only coexist, they have a clear symbiotic relationship between them.

Despite the interrelationships between a money-based economy and a time-based economy, the organizing principles that define them as well as the behaviors each produces are quite different. The diagram below illustrates key defining elements in a money-based economy, ²³namely, the central role of money and debt with ties to the organizing principles of ownership, consumption, and pacification. This configuration drives most participants to spend the majority of their time, day by day, in the bottom reaches of Maslow’s Hierarchy in a base-down orientation, which sets rather dystopian limits to upward mobility.

Time4Time Presentation.001

Conversely, the diagram below shows organizing principles for a time-based economy ⁴ in which time occupies the center with links to participation rather than pacification, exchange in lieu of consumption, and commons instead of ownership. This configuration shifts behavior toward the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy in its point-down orientation, which offers a greater degree of freedom for the majority to pursue more utopian ideals.

Time4Time Presentation.002

When these two economies operate in concert with one another, they set the stage for the emergence of a

…commons-oriented mutual-coordination economy where the concepts of ownership and “legal” do not exist. And anything like “money” is not required. But still, common resources require some people or organizational forms (often a committee) to be responsible for them.

Comment by Bob Haugen in Value Flows-Issue #270 on GitHub

Haugen goes on to recommend reading Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing A Commons by Jay Walljasper in On the Commons, October 2, 2011:

Define clear group boundaries.

Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Clearly, Ostrom emphasizes the need for defining who’s in and who’s not, how the rules for use of “common goods” are made, monitored, enforced, etc. This includes “build responsibility for governing the common resource (or “common resource in nested tiers…up to the entire interconnected system”)…” which speaks to the preference for terminology like “responsibility flow” in lieu of “legal flow.”

And that brings us back to the symbiotic nature of money-based and time-based economies within a healthy, adaptive society. Our challenge is not to save one and kill the other, but assure the legitimacy of each for whatever time it takes whereby the basic needs of all are met with enough time left over to enjoy a reasonable quality of life.

Possible steps in how to bring this about will be the topic of upcoming posts.

The Realized Value of Unpaid Time

Time matters for each of us whether unpaid or not. Reducing our individual time on the planet to a binary expression between paid and unpaid shortchanges the value we bring to our common humanity during our lifetimes. This raises a couple of questions for consideration in this post:

How to measure the value of unpaid time?
How to pay the provider for this value rendered?

In my previous post, Unpaid Time Distribution, I noted that unpaid time can be voluntary or involuntary. Examples of the former include a leave of absence from paid work, participation as a volunteer or intern within the public or private sector, or a lifestyle decision to live “off the grid.” As the wording suggests, involuntary unpaid time is not necessarily an outcome of choice, but the result of unemployment and unavailability of paid time due to termination, reduction in force, early retirement, sour reputation, etc.

Regardless of being voluntary or involuntary, unpaid time remains unaccounted for in contrast to paid time where value can be measured by productivity and profit. If unpaid time has value how does one generate and measure it? The diagram below, “Value of Unpaid Time,” gives us a way to look at it:

The left side of the diagram below lists items we use to spend our unpaid time: cell phones, computers, devices (includes Internet of Things), games, apps, and GPS to name the more obvious ones. The right side lists the data we generate by using the aforementioned items: identity, location, behaviors, connections, content, and access and myriad variations on each. Organizations in the public and private sectors use these streams of data to increase profits, pacify populations, and concentrate wealth. In other words, they capture, measure, and realize the value generated by us during our unpaid time activities.

So important is the data we generate that organizations in both the public and private sectors vie tirelessly for our attention. The diagram below, “Public and Private Sectors,” illustrates some of the resulting dynamics:

These entities combine investment in the development of information and knowledge technologies (section 1) with sophisticated interface designs and structures to incentivize our participation (section 2) so that the resulting data streams are plentiful, wide and deep. In effect, we humans become living sensors who generate data through social networks, machine learning, exchange platforms, cooperatives, and machine ethics that can be put to use by automation, algorithms, artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetics.

Ideally, all of us would be plugged in 24/7 – a kind of universal basic participation that generates a lifelong stream of data about us and for us. The incentives would go beyond gamification and dopamine rushes to payment in the currency of basic needs. In other words, we would allow data about us to be captured by the machine on a continuous basis in exchange for our universal basic needs of food, water, clothing, housing, energy, safety, security, healthcare, education, socialization, etc. (section 3).

The issue isn’t that the value of unpaid time can’t be measured, it’s that it’s not paid.

And if it is paid?

The diagram above summarizes what “everyone wins” could mean:

Organizations win because costs are reduced (Maslow’s Hierarchy upright)
Individuals win because each can be creative within the boundaries imposed by nature, not man / machine (Maslow’s Hierarchy upside down)
Humanity and the machine both win because they learn from one another, adapt to each other and the world that encompasses them both (Maslow’s Hierarchies – upright and upside down)

No doubt these are topics for many future posts…

Lifetime Hours Revisited

In a previous post Motivation to Allocate Your 700,000 Hours, I introduced the notion of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a potential framework to distribute one’s lifetime hours between meeting basic needs and having a reasonable quality of life. The diagram below shows that split more specifically:

3FCDBC35-4863-434D-B3A7-53A375475058

The distribution of these same 700,000 hours can be categorized as paid and unpaid time. Making an arbitrary allocation of one-third of a lifespan for paid time and two-thirds for unpaid time, which includes one-third for sleep, 80 years would yield 233,333 hours of paid time, 233,333 hours of unpaid time awake, and 233,334, hours of unpaid time asleep.

If placed Maslow’s Hierarchy, it looks like the diagram below:

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This distinction between paid and unpaid time in hours leads us to the topics of Economy and Currency and Money and Contracts introduced in previous posts. It also gives us the opportunity to examine the consequences unpaid time has on members of our society and how those issues might be addressed. Surely we can envision a system that acknowledges the value each of us brings to the world simply by being alive. More about this in subsequent posts!

Addendum:

Some highlights from the blog posting, This Is How To Sleep Better: 5 Secrets From Neuroscience by Eric Barker concerning the importance of sleep and the consequences of not getting enough:

You need eight hours. The National Sleep Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both recommend 7 to 9 hours — but after 10 days of 7 hours your brain is mush whether you realize it or not. So get 8.

Sleep is essential for memory and skill development. Cheat yourself on zzz’s and learning drops as much as 40%. Yeah, thats the difference between an A+ and an F.

Here’s how to sleep better:

Have a consistent sleep schedule: Yes, that includes weekends. Yes, I understand that you hate me now.

“Blue” light isn’t the only problem: Dim the lights in the evening. Set the mood. (Barry White music optional.)

Be Cool: People stick their feet out from under the covers because it’s good science.

No coffee, no booze… and no sleeping pills: And while I’m ruining everything and being a total buzzkill let me add: there is no Santa Claus.

To sleep more… sleep less: Don’t think of it as CBT; look at it as getting revenge on your brain for not letting you sleep.

Motivation to Allocate Your 700,000 Hours

The mere fact that we live means that we allocate our allotted time on the planet to various activities. Even though we may have myriad alternatives as to what we could do with our time at any given moment, most are mutually exclusive. For instance, as I’m writing this, I’m not able to do anything else at the same time. In other words, I must choose this activity and let others go by. This internal zero-sum game we’re forced to play makes time our scarcest resource.

As distasteful as playing the game may seem, we do have to take responsibility for our decisions about how we use our time or the resource slips away and we risk regret over lost opportunities or, worse yet, we find our lives imperiled. Such responsibility taking is at the heart of why we do what we do when we do it. Human motivation is the longstanding subject of ongoing research, study and analysis resulting in a number of theories to explain it. The following diagram from Psychology by Juliánna Katalin Soós and Ildikó Takács (2013), identifies several of the more prominent ones.

For the purpose of this post, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is the theory of choice because is well-known, easy to understand, and widely accepted as a framework for examining human motivation (see diagram below). It can become the basis for each of us to consider in how we spend our 700,000 hours.

Maslow’s theory suggests that under natural circumstances we would divide a 24-hour period into thirds with one-third dedicated to sleep – an essential physiological need about which we are only now beginning to understand the degree of importance it holds, (see Why Sleep Is Important), another third to the remaining basic needs we all have, and the final third to achieving an improved quality of life the characteristics of which are unique to each of us.

The diagram below positions Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in between a couple of ways to carve-up a 24-hour period in relation to it:

The left-hand time stack, entitled Work-Life Balance, shows three equal 8-hour segments in keeping with the “natural” division of a given 24-hour period described above. While an even split may seem idealized, the intent is to emphasize the importance of a balanced allocation of one’s time as the foundation for a healthy and satisfying life. Just as successful personal finance strategies emphasize the importance of investing in a diverse portfolio for better long-term results, balancing one’s daily life offers the best return on investment for one’s 700,000 hours.

The right-hand stack, entitled Koyaanisqatsi – the Hopi word for “unbalanced life” – illustrates a disproportionate allocation of time in a day to meeting basic needs. The result is that one must make trade-offs between sleeping less in order to have some modicum of quality of life or sacrificing higher aspirations altogether in exchange for longer sleep. Regardless, an unbalanced life inexorably becomes one that is unhealthy either physically or psychologically or both. And this condition is frequently a point of discussion and debate among those who study it, suffer because of it, offer relief from it, and even contribute to it as mentioned in these articles: Is the Stuff You Buy Over 20 Years Worth 40,000 Hours of Time? – The New York Times and Buying Time, Not Stuff, Might Make You Happier : Shots – Health News : NPR.

So, how does your life stack up? Does it matter in how you make your decisions about how to spend your time from one day to the next? If it does matter and you want to change it, how will you go about doing so?