[jv0010]

I would really like to see a system where people pay on their ultimate currency of time - it’s something I have occasionally pondered where young fit and healthy people donate their time to help the elderly in order to gain ‘credits’ for when they are older to receive benefits or benefit in some way for when they are sick or require elderly assistance.

[bittercynic]

You can do this, but for many people it's hard to hang on to those credits until you're elderly and need to spend them on assistance. Also, the amount of care you'll need when you get to that point can vary over a large range, so it's hard to plan for.

[jv0010]

People do this is Singapore and Australia with annuities and can elect to contribute more if they want but the flaw is that annuities are subject to the market and can be wiped out. It’s the same people have to hold onto these funds until they reach retirement age or meet certain criteria

[Erlich_Bachman]

So like the pension system which is already in place in many major western countries?

[jv0010]

Yeah just tying it with time and not the financial system

[IanDrake]

Swap the word "credits" for money and you have our current system.

No need to create a tyrannical government to force people to do deeds of arbitrary value for elderly people.

[c22]

I mean to be fair the current system is "a $400T financial timebomb". I think your parent comment was trying to imagine a system for taking care of the elderly that wasn't so entwined with existing financial markets.

[jv0010]

I just don’t understand why people see this as the same thing - the value of money is always vulnerable to a myriad of factors however our moral interest towards each other seems (maybe I’m optimistic ) to be more consistent

[IanDrake]

How does one measure value and then store it? That's kind of the definition of money.

A money market account is insured and the real return is 0%, so it's not as vulnerable as you seem to think.

You can call money a credit. Then you can assign credits to actions and create a moral police to assign credits to people who do these actions and enter those credits into a leger. And now you've recreated communist China. Congrats.

[buboard]

Money is time in liquid form. Forcing people how to spend their time is slavery

[jv0010]

No one is forced but people can elect to ‘swap time’ 1 for 1. Money today can’t be swapped 1 for 1 but I guess I ask the question ? Can time ?

[buboard]

There was a movie with that premise i think [1].

All around, money is a better currency of exchange than time, or any other measure really. It measures well the actual value of time , effort, what have you. 1-to-1 time currency would be particularly bad choice, just imagine how much time you would have to pay back for someone who was born 60 years ago. Life was much much slower and unproductive. In the same amount of time today you can do multiple times the work/product that they did.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/?ref_=nm_knf_t3